Chapter 5: The Dream Police
Sara Randall closed the floorboard where she had concealed the equipment she usually used to spy on her parents. The fact that none of them let her hear or see anything going on downstairs with any degree of clarity was quite troubling to her. She grabbed a small wooden four-legged chair, brought it outside of her bedroom door, and sat down to await the inevitable arrival of the mysterious visitor. Slowly, she tightened her hands into fists in order to restrain her frightened trembling.
· · ·
Princess Luna slowly made her way up the human staircase, unused to the relatively short height of each step compared to pony standards. Turning a corner, the princess saw a human girl sitting cross-legged on a chair, her arms crossed and her wide eyes fixed on Luna’s. She was wearing a pair of slate-gray pajamas decorated with rattles, bibs, tiny spoons, sippy cups, and other paraphernalia of infancy. She looked far too old to be wearing it. The garment was loose on her skinny frame, except around her sharp elbows and knees. Her hair was hanging loose around her shoulders, and Luna was struck by a pair of old gray eyes that didn’t look at all like they belonged on a girl so young.
“Good evening child,” the blue pony said gently from the top of the stairs. “My name is Luna.”
The girl looked down at the floor and shouted: “Mom, aren’t you going to tuck me in?”
“I can take care of this, Mrs. Randall,” Luna quickly addressed the floor before turning back to her charge. “I am here to help you with your dreams.”
Sara fixed an angry glare at the princess. “You may have fooled them, but you don’t fool me. You work for the government, don’t you? You’ve finally figured out how to spy on dreams, and you picked me to be your first victim.”
“I do not represent your government,” Luna said calmly but firmly. “With your permission—and only with your permission—I’d like to—”
“CITIZENS OF AMERICA,” a robotic voice interrupted over the speaker of the family television set at a volume great enough to make Sara’s teeth grate, “THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF THE GREATEST NATION IN THE WORLD WOULD LIKE TO INVITE YOU TO WATCH AS HE AND THE GREATEST SINGERS OF THIS COUNTRY JOIN TOGETHER TO SING A ROUND OF PATRIOTIC SONGS, TO FURTHER IMPROVE THE MORALE OF THIS ALREADY PERFECT COUNTRY. CITIZENS HAVE THE FREEDOM TO CHOOSE TO SING ALONG.”
This was followed by the voice of President Strait singing the opening lyrics of “God Bless the USA” (aka “I’m Proud to Be an American”).
He was soon accompanied by the live voices of every living, breathing citizen in America…or at least everyone that wished to remain living and breathing citizens of America. And in the background, always heard, was the sound of the hundreds of millions of drones monitoring every human in America.
Every human…except Sara Randall.
Sara got up. “I have to go down there. Singing is serious business.”
“It is,” agreed Luna. “But do you feel the song in your heart?”
Sara looked around her desperately. “Well, no, but… Look, if you’re not with the government, then you’ll have to prove it. Say something that none of the president’s men would ever say, even if they were trying to entrap a poor innocent little girl.”
Luna looked away briefly in bewilderment. “How could I possibly convince you of that? I do not work for your government. I hold no allegiance. I’m not even an American.”
Sara’s mouth dropped open in shock. “Say that again.”
“I’m not an American?”
Sara beamed. “That’s the one. You’d have a laser through the head right now if you actually were a government agent.” She took this moment to truly examine the fantastical equine before her. “I just wish you weren’t so crazy looking.”
Luna raised an eyebrow. “I had been informed that ‘crazy’ was your goal.”
“Crazy on my terms. And speaking of which, this is how we’re going to do this: I’m going back in my room, and going to sleep. You’re going to stay outside my door. If you really are the same Princess Luna from My Little Pony, then you can enter my dreams just fine like that. Then I’ll tell you what’s going on.”
“Why can’t you tell me now?” Luna asked with a smirk. “The lack of a ‘laser through my head’ should be proof enough that this conversation is not being overheard.”
Sara shook her head. “Yeah, not in real time,” she informed the princess. “But never underestimate the government’s skill when it comes to spying. They could probably feed seismographs through a super-computer for six months and end up perfectly reconstructing everything we say.”
Luna briefly blanched. “I had not thought of that. Make note to regulate the spacing of seismograph stations once I get back to Equestria. Very well, I shall obey your strictures. May you have a productive night’s sleep.”
“And you as well,” Sara said as she pulled her chair back into her room, closing the door behind her.
“Sara’s Sanctum Sanctorum,” the sign affixed to the door read. “May instant madness descend upon any mortal foolish enough to breach this barrier.”
Luna idly levitated a pen out of her mane and changed the word “foolish” to “foalish” before settling down to sleep right in front of the door.
Sara’s dream began as a great cloudy nothingness. There was nothing, because Sara’s mind was trapped in a single thought. And that thought was of a broken calliope playing the same fragment of a theme over and over again.
Earworms were something that Luna had great practical experience with. Sitting down on a divan that materialized below her, she raised up a pipe organ from the cloud floor and began playing J.S. Bark’s Ricercar a 6 from The Musical Offering, the one surefire cure she had ever found to the problem. Within a few seconds, the calliope had faded away, and the true dream could now begin.
The ceiling of Sara’s dreamscape was a hemispherical dome, like that of a smallish planetarium, colored an appropriate pale blue. Instead of clouds, thin but puffy white lines outlined the shape of a human eye. About a hundred such designs, all identical, were spaced evenly across the inner surface of the hemisphere.
At Luna’s hooves was now a carpet, dyed green. The piles of the carpet looked extraordinarily large, as they might appear if she were a quarter of her normal size. On closer examination, this appeared to be one of those “educational” carpets, the ones that overeager parents placed in their toddler’s rooms in the vain hope that the item alone would be enough for the child to learn about the alphabet or the Periodic Table, through the osmosis of carpet burns. The subject of this particular carpet was geography, as the county outlines and filled-in cities of this state were spread out before her. With the screwy scale she was dealing with, the borders of the state were at least a hundred strides apart. There seemed to be something going on at the southeastern corner of the map, so she made her way over there.
After sitting down, she was able to see a group of mice gathered around a little bandstand. All the mice were dressed like humans, and standing on their hind legs. Atop the bandstand was another mouse, dressed in a crisp blue suit. He was lecturing them in a language made up of complex squeaking.
Luna heard a loud hum coming from above her. She looked up to see that one of the eyes near the horizon had changed from white to red. Suddenly a beam of blinding light shot down from the eye to the group of mice, incinerating them.
A temporarily-blinded Luna stood up suddenly, blinking rapidly to try and regain her vision. The after-images that flashed across her eyelids were not of mice, however, but of actual human beings, suffering in the way you would expect them to be if suddenly struck by a massive microwave laser. Their fates were far too gruesome—and anatomically correct—to be the work of imagination. This girl actually saw this happen.
“Lesson #1: Never compare the president to Hitler.”
Luna spun around to face the disembodied head of Sara Randall floating before her. Although the shock of what she had witnessed made Luna speechless, Sara by contrast looked almost bored, as if she had been subjected to the images so many times that she was able to block them out.
“Anyway, this isn’t what I wanted to show you,” said Sara. “Follow me.” The head floated towards the location on the map representing their real-life location. From Luna’s perspective, the head refused to change its apparent size as it retreated away from her, meaning that it got bigger and bigger as it got closer to its destination. Luna followed, and noticed the same thing happening to herself. As a result, when the pair arrived, they thoroughly towered over the irregular blob on the coast that represented the city.
In front of Sara’s head appeared the image of a proud middle-aged woman and her daughter, a girl of Sara’s age. The woman was wearing a traditional Mexican dress, decorated with hundreds of golden coins. Her black hair was up in a tight bun. The girl, holding her hand, was wearing a red and white school uniform. Her dark brown eyes looked into Luna’s with a look of both hatred and betrayal.
Sara’s disembodied hand pointed to the girl. “That is Dia Maria Montez, my best friend in the whole world. Her family settled here a hundred years before the Americans, in the old history. In the new history, the one where nobody lived in America before the English settlers showed up, they’re a bunch of ‘back-stabbing land grabbers’. Anyway, her mom owned this huge cookie factory, and was very rich. Because we were the two richest kids in our class, we stuck together and picked on all the other kids.” She didn’t sound the slightest bit guilty about this admission. “Our teacher had a son named Ricky who was going to the same class as us, and we fought over who would get to have him. She won, like she always did, and for once I couldn’t accept that, so I turned them in to the detention monitors as ‘filthy immigrants’.”
Sara (a complete Sara, not missing any parts) stepped through the image of the two members of the Montez family, dispersing it. “I…I just thought that Dia was going to get a lecture and made to sit inside during lunch! Instead, they disappear overnight and Teacher tells us that there are no Montez’s, and never were, and hits me with a ruler when I insist that she’s wrong. She was crying the whole time, so I’m sure that I’m right.
“Anyway, Ricky wanted Dia back as much as I did, so we started exploring: asking about other kids who disappeared, sneaking around places where the adults couldn’t go, and so on. That brings me to Lesson #2: As long as you don’t bring any grown-ups, the drones ignore you just like everybody else.”
Sara pointed down at the nondescript white warehouse building sitting on the carpet straight below them. “This is the building we found, where all the children are taken.”
“But what about—?” Luna began.
Sara looked up at Luna with a desperate stare. “Please don’t ask me where the adults went,” she pleaded. “I don’t know, and this part is awful enough.” Having said this, she reached down and pulled the roof off of the building. Girl and pony leaned down to look inside…
The interior of the building consisted of hundreds of computer terminals on desks, with a child sitting in a chair before each one wearing a pair of behind-the-neck headphones. As Sara pointed, the image zoomed towards Luna, showing a Dia Marie Montez with baby blue eyes typing monotonously at a keyboard. A grotesque pile of electronics and pulsating flesh sat on Dia’s head, with tubes pumping a noxious-looking gray liquid in and out of her brain through several holes in her skull. Similar modifications had been performed upon all of the other children. On the screens before them were displayed the visual outputs of the drones, dozens at a time.
Luna turned away, disgusted.
“Aw, you missed the part where Dia is forced by her programming to order a drone to kidnap another child, and complete the cycle,” Sara said in a dead voice.
“This is horrible!” Luna exclaimed. “Surely you told somebody what you saw?”
“Oh, yeah, sure we did. We told as many kids as we could. But we couldn’t tell any grown-ups, because the drones would always come a-running when we tried to do that. In fact, three more families disappeared over the next few days, from kids trying to tell their parents and getting caught. Somehow, my and Ricky’s names never came up, or else we would have been snatched as well.
“One day Ricky had enough. He said he was going to sneak in there and rescue everybody himself. I…tried to help him. The building itself was crazy guarded, but the area had all of these secret tunnels from Prohibition, and Rick knew there was one in an abandoned medical clinic next door. Sure enough, it led us right into this boarded-up room, and from there we broke into the boiler room, which had at least five or six other boarded up doors leading to other secret passages. To throw people off the scent, we carefully put back the boards for the way we came in and opened up another passage, one that led to a bar that was still open. Then we turned around and began our infiltration.” Sara rubbed her hands eagerly as she recalled her experience. “We snuck around and saw how everything was working and how the building was laid out. We got this close to getting into the area where they made the mind-control juice.” Her face fell as she remembered what happened next: “And then Ricky was caught—well, more like he pushed me out of the way at the last second so I could get away. I snuck around and followed the guards and as soon as I could steal a set of keys I found where he was locked up…but it was too late. They had left food for him to eat, and of course he wasn’t dumb enough to eat any of the cooked stuff or drink anything that could have been poisoned but…”—Sara’s voice started choking up—“but there was a Montez Genuine Chocolate Chip straight out of a vending machine, and…and that was a dirty trick! I would have eaten one if they had left one for me. I got kinda mad when he started yelling for the guards to catch me, and I managed to set the cell block on fire, but not before rescuing and then beating off my ex-new best friend who was trying to kill me. I only just managed to escape.”
Luna pulled Sara into a hug. She didn’t resist. “I really don’t think there’s anything more you can do,” she said softly into the girl’s hair.
Sara yanked herself out of the pony’s embrace. “Oh, I’m going back. And I know how to get away with it this time.”
“What do you think you can do differently this time?” Luna asked incredulously.
An eager look came into Sara’s eyes. “They screwed up,” she said. “When craziness became illegal, they put out a commercial telling people where to bring their crazy uncles and children, and the place they said to bring people is that same clinic we used to sneak in. All I have to do is drive Mother into taking me there, and when we arrive, I can tell her the truth! Together, I know we can break Ricky and Dia and everybody else out. Mother’s great with computers, and she’s tall enough to reach all the equipment, and I know the layout of the place by heart! Or…or you could help me! With your magic you could blow the roof off the place! Attract so much attention that no amount of lies could cover up what they did!”
“Sara!”
“Luna, please! You’re the only—”
“No, Sara. If I got involved, someone who wasn’t an American, it would only infuriate your president. Perhaps even more than comparing him to Mr. Hitler. And he still controls those heat rays.”
“Oh,” Sara said in a small voice. “I hadn’t thought of that. So…what do you think I should do?”
Luna took a very deep breath as she considered Sara’s question.