Chapter 4

Lisa was exhausted and barely made it to her bed before she collapsed. Sleep came quickly, but it was far from restful as almost as soon as she was asleep Lisa began to dream. She dreamed her firm decision to commit suicide the previous evening. Then there was a time skip and she was on the path in Bluffs park getting ready to ascend to the place quietly known as suicide point. Sure the highest and most ‘dangerous’ area was fenced to exclude jumpers, but Lisa was sure she didn’t have to go that high. There were several less well fenced overlooks that she was sure would work to put an end to her miserable life.

Lisa relived all the feelings that had lead her to believe that her life was hopeless. Then she watched, somehow from both within herself and outside as she spotted the strange meteor shower and once again was certain she would be hit by a fragment of the meteor. Then she saw her body fly through the air and land with what she was sure should have been a killing blow on her back, as if the hole in her chest that was at least an inch in diameter wouldn’t be enough to have killed her.

Then suddenly she was fleeing on foot someone who was shooting to kill. No that wasn’t quite right. She was a spaceship fleeing an implacable enemy that was bent on her annihilation. She felt herself power dive then withdraw to a lifeboat. The lifeboat launched at the same instant the spaceship she’d been exploded, though she didn’t know how that was possible. How could she have been the spaceship and now was the lifeboat?

Dreams were exceedingly confusing even when they were not nightmares. Not that Lisa usually remembered her dreams or even nightmares, though given that she could feel her heart racing and her body sweating in fear she was as certain as she could be that she would at least experience echos of this nightmare.

Yet another part of Lisa’s brain was processing the nightmare. It was telling her that at least her memories of the previous evening were true events, including her intention of suicide. Indeed even now in her dream state she felt immense resentment that she somehow was being prevented from death. That the wound in her body was closing so fast it looked like the most effective healing spell that she’d ever seen portrayed in various games. She could remember somewhat as time coalesced around herself the deep burn and bruise, she even explored her body and convinced herself that she must have experienced a near miss, though the hole in her shirt and bra said otherwise.

A logical part of Lisa’s brain told her that she must have been struck by that lifeboat and that whatever sort of creature that had been aboard it was now her puppet master. Lisa barely remembered seeing trailers for that movie. At the time she had dismissed it as the worst sort of shock fiction. There was no possibility of interstellar travelers and if they were why would they consider people prey or even hosts for a parasitical sort of being. All that had seemed too far out. Yet now it was apparently her reality.

The Traveler became aware that Its various activities in trying to purge Lisa’s body of the various poisons exercise created and investigate whether or not she was prone to the ailment she’d named Alzheimer’s disease were creating other problems, including her mind trying to process what she’d experienced. The Traveler knew neither It nor It’s AI had enough data to determine that as the syndrome was poorly understood by humans. So It had instructed the AI to task some of the nanites it had scavenging blockages from Lisa’s veins and arteries to investigating her brain to look for weak connections there. Apparently that activity had set off a storm as her brain, which was also poorly understood by her people, processed recent events trying to fit them to knowledge or other experiences. From some of the memories that It was able to read, The Traveler believed most dreams to be random associations as the beings attempted to make sense of the world around them.