Fever Dreams

By C.M Daniels

Can life aboard a space station be easy? Will the criminal justice system be fair and compassionate in the future? How does a dream vacation go from the amazing to the almost absurd simply because of a car? Is there such a thing as being too desperate for a good night's sleep? These compelling questions and more are answered within the pages of FEVER DREAMS.

Fantastical and futuristic stories, real-life experiences, and poetry approached from a different angle, this collection was created for the Asotin County Library in Clarkston, Washington, as part of the initiation of a new library service. It is now available for all readers to enjoy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781365005985

Book preview

Fever Dreams

Fever Dreams

By

C.M. Daniels

Copyright © 2016 by C.M. Daniels

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

Some of the stories in this book originally appeared, in slightly different form: Transcendent Visions: Imagining Cape Henlopen; Kasma: Learning Curve; Ghostlight: Milking the Station; Everybody Writes: 9 May 1942, Calico, Searching for Armistice; Trail of Indiscretion: Tendril of the Mind; Abaculus II and Aoife’s Kiss: Recall the Executioner.

ISBN: 978-1-365-00598-5 ebook

ISBN: 978-1-329-96041-1 hardcopy

First Edition 2016

Grand Prismatic Books

1123 Diagonal Street

Clarkston, WA  99403

Cover Art and Design by C.M. Daniels

To my family, friends, and readers, I never could have done this without you.

Introduction

Fever Dreams is a compilation of short stories, essays, and poetry that has been put into book form as a toe-dip into the world of Biblioboard at the Asotin County Library in Clarkston, Washington. As a small town library in an isolated part of Washington State, ACL strives to offer services and products for the betterment of its patrons. Biblioboard not only offers people an expanded collection of leisure and research materials, it allows for the realization of goals and dreams that some might not otherwise accomplish. Publishing a book is, in the 21st century, a very exciting thing which thanks to the internet and advances in communications hardware is approachable and understandable.

I have worked for ACL since 2012, and when I learned of this new offering, I immediately volunteered to donate some of my work so we could not only have the experience in submitting books to Biblioboard's Self-e self-publishing, but use that run-through to make sure our patrons have the best experience with the staff and services at our library.

This book is made up of some of my previously published short stories, a handful of unpublished works, items performed at library events, and three writings that won prizes in a new-ish writing contest ACL and surrounding libraries put on each year called Everybody Writes.

As I say to my patrons at the Asotin County Library, happy reading!

C.M. Daniels

March 2016

Imagining Cape Henlopen was the very first story I ever had published. I was over the proverbial moon when the editor’s acceptance hit my email inbox. It was exhilarating to know that a story I’d written on the back sides of my sheet music during a marching band rehearsal on a blustery day my first year at university was the one that would go out to other readers in the country who weren’t friends and family members passing around copies done on my desktop printer, a machine that had been nicknamed the Xerox Coffee Maker. This story appeared in Transcendent Visions 2007.

IMAGINING CAPE HENLOPEN

They always nabbed the crazy ones but sometimes they made mistakes. My last time in the chamber, I met him and I knew they’d made a grave mistake.  We were in a medium sized white room.  It had some odd qualities with the whole place seemingly manufactured from the kind of grainy, sterile surface white movie screens used to be made out of.  I ran my fingers over the wall; it had sandpaper texture all too familiar to me.  Somewhere in my psychosis, I lay my face against it, and tried not to think of what happened years back when my mind had broken.

My new roommate woke up and gave me a classic, are you crazy? look. He knew he wasn't crazy and hoped that I wasn't either. He was trying to take in our surroundings and suss out where in all of the universe's various hells he'd wound up at.

Oh yes, I am crazy.  I thought.

I was crazy.

Crazy.

I’d never done this part before. I knew exactly what's supposed to happen. I heard the mechanical bits in the hidden door to our room fire up and then the soul-searing click that meant we were in there until they decided otherwise.

What the hell is going on! He screamed at nothing. They weren't going to dignify him with a response.  He wouldn’t talk to me.  Somebody!  Hello?

I giggled.  The wall left my face with mottled look as I departed from it.  I laughed.

Funny, you think this is funny?  Sweat shown on his forehead.  Hello!

As I neared him, he stopped moving, still.

Help!  I’m not supposed to be here!

Don’t panic.  It’s worse when you do.  I tried to comfort him.

Get your hands off me, lady. He wrenched away from me, frustrated and frightened, but he couldn't escape me entirely.

Like I said, I tried.  He jumped when I put my hand back on his face.  They’re coming.  Don’t panic.

He didn’t panic, at least not until later when they came in and he was on his back, strapped to a mobile operating table.  He wailed, screaming like a small child not wanting to get a shot.  His head rolled around until it cocked at such an angle he could see me.  Agony masked his features more than the fear did. He wanted to know how they could do this to him.

He’s a lucky one though.  It only took them two and half-hours to implant the sensors that it takes for humans to operate the gritty white room.  He lay, dazed and in shock for almost a day, or what seemed like it I guess.  He wanted his mother and an old family pet called Puck.  I watched him the entire duration he lay unconscious.  Once, I almost went to brush his face, to trace my fingers on the trails of now dried blood at the incision sites.  He was so beautiful, even in the fitfulness of REM sleep.

They always put the imaginer and the sensor together for forty-eight hours before they start a session.  It’s supposed to grant some sort of advantage or head start to those participating.  It never does.  If anything, this ‘advantage’ makes the experience even more painful as a whole.  Basically, you get to torture someone you've come to know. They’re cruel like that.

He watched as a wound he’d accidentally scraped open on his hand dripped red, absorbing into the perfect, white, floor, not leaving a stain.  His stomach betrayed him as he looked at hands that were once his, which he held out before his body. His own limbs had become alien appendages. Such abhorrence should never have fallen his way.  This sort of mutilation happened to the crazy people.  What he saw disgusted him.  Of course, it would grow worse, as he found what the implants were for.

You can’t remove them, I offered.  They’re permanent, well as close to permanent as possible, I suppose.  They release deadly toxins when exposed to oxygen and light.  Open your skin to try to claw one of those nodes out and it takes days of having your body eaten apart from the inside out before you finally die. The only way to get them out is to work your way through treatment. They will safely remove them before you're released back into society.

He stood up, a glint of hope showed in his face, as he came over to me this time.  He saw what they did to him in me.  The way the implants bulged my skin made him fear his own reflection.  And as more years passed, if the participant survived, the bulges got uglier and more distorted.  It had only been four years since I’d been implanted and as he let his thumb run over the top of my left hand, he felt how they’d calcified, having become fused as a part of my body.  He then reached up and felt the ones in my forehead.

Why are you here?  His amber colored eyes captured me, and for the first time in as far as I had ability to recall, I stood with someone who thought I was an equal, rather than one of the nut cases.  It’s a mistake for both of us.  He so badly wanted to believe that he wasn’t alone that the hope in his voice hurt me.  I hated to destroy his idea that I was simply a normal person who'd been mistaken for being ill when his wandering hands found the scars on the insides of my wrists.

He shrunk back. His disdain and almost hatred at the sight of me didn’t penetrate the shell I’d become. There was nothing left of me to offend, and certainly nothing left of me that they would consider a threat.  Whatever I’d been, they’d confiscated my soul the moment I came here for their version of recovery from mental illness.

The human governments of earth had rejoiced that it didn’t fall under their jurisdiction to take care of the crazies, disabled, or retarded anymore.  They, who or whatever they are, came to us and now that problem is gone, at the cost of people like my sensor and me.

His name was Shannon.  He told me only because he wanted to know my name, because it was something to do while we waited for them to start.  I also tried to tell him that he didn’t want this to begin, no matter how much just sitting in a room doing nothing drove him wild.  He wanted to believe me.  I honestly thought that.

Tara, what kind of a name is Tara? He so desperately wanted more information, even if it was just words to sooth his stress addled mind.

It’s Irish, I think— I started to say.

Somewhere in the places surrounding that room, a switch was flipped, a toggled tripped, a button pushed, and the world as we perceived it changed.

Cape Henlopen.

It’s a place in Delaware that I’d never been.  It’s a place, that for the sake of his sanity, I had to faithfully re-create.  It’s a location, that until that terrifying instant, I’d never heard of.  It’s the place where he grew up.  I just had to think it, imagine it, justify it, and my only frame of reference was a five-second burst of his memories of home as delivered into the sensory areas of my brain by way of the bionics networked throughout me.  He didn’t know about that.  He had to survive the uplink first.

The implants had a mild tingle once people got used to them.  Before that point, acid in the bloodstream setting off every nerve ending to fire on pain coupled with the jolt and smell of electricity is the only way that I’d ever heard it described.  I was never able to place words to it other than hurt and reeling. I’d become conditioned to the implants and I realized it didn’t matter what they did to me. Those devices wired into my body separated me from genuine reality, meaning things like torture and terror didn’t matter. I decided that was the true definition of madness, not self-harm as a reflection of inner turmoil.

For a man who’d screamed his voice raw and then away, his vocalizations of both shock and pain would have haunted any moral or sane soul to come our way.  I thought only rabbits screamed like that. An extended time spent numb to the emotional and physical discomfort of those who wound up in the grainy white rooms left me gasping when his pain coursed through my body and his total fear had me shaking.  I could no longer block out the horror, meaning my transformation from sick to static to normal function was actually happening.

They talked to us but never spoke out loud.  I felt the twinge in my bones, communicating the memory transfer was at hand.  I wasn’t going to get anything good to work with.

The five seconds he got to think about home, I got a minuscule flash of sand that may have been white, and the tangent of his now agonizing existence fell into my brain, implanting itself into a lasting sensation, picture, sand, pain.

I found that the walls of the room felt like the sand I was supposed to imagine for him. Eight compacting sides added to the impractical treatment whose workings were only tangible to those strangers who created it.

As I imagined Cape Henlopen, my training in the manipulation of the alien equipment infesting my existence, would put my version of Shannon’s world onto the desolate white, making it my own, when it needed to be his.  I had my minute to create it