I woke up and was a little unsure of where I was. It was dark and I was wrapped up in blankets. I must have overslept after I came back from riding my bike around town. I had had the strangest of dreams. I smiled a sad smile as I thought of living in space somewhere in a place where my imagination could become reality. I stretched and finally felt the difference in the sheets compared to my normal sheets against my skin. How odd - I thought to myself as I sat up in my boxers, swinging my legs over the right side of my bed, and looking around.

I was still on my yacht.

“Woohooo!” I shouted as I realized that it wasn’t all just a dream.

“He is finally back!” An unfamiliar sharp voice said to the left side of my bed.

“Ahhhh!” I yelped as the voice startled me into jumping up, trying to find the light switch, and breathing hard from the scare.

“What? Who is there?” I asked as I remembered that I could will the lights up in the room. The light turned on above us and revealed quite a few people gathered in the living area of my suite bedroom. George and Tutor were standing off to the side as though they were unsure what to do.

Elaya sat on the side of my bed with her body facing towards me while Xa, Hxerdinand, Silver, and some new guy stood around the room.

No one seemed to want to say anything first which gave me a second to grab my clothes and quickly put them on. “Um, hi everyone,” I said as I quickly buckled my belt and tugged my shirt on. “Fancy seeing you all… in my bedroom,” I said once I was done. “Anyone care to fill me in on as to why you are all here?” I asked, looking at each of them in turn. They all seemed to be studying me intently for some reason. I finally noticed the faraway look that Citizens sometimes got on their faces when they were looking at something beyond me and reluctantly looked over my shoulder to find a vast array of shifting and scrolling colors behind me, spread out all across the wall, ceiling, and floor. It seemed that they were studying it and looking for something. The interesting thing was, I could make out a little bit of the colors as words this time when I looked. There was all sorts of data streaming and what I could read out of all of it was my heart rate and skin temperature. The rest didn’t translate over so I just turned back and waited for them to be done with whatever they were doing.

The new guy spoke first and said “It is gone, whatever it was.”

Silver spoke next and seemed to be sad about something. “Kevin, I hope you can forgive me. I didn’t and still don’t fully understand your species' need for sleep or what happens when you enter this state. The Tela race has nothing like what happened when you laid down and closed your eyes. You didn’t shut down, on the contrary, your mind went into overdrive and began demanding the creation of…. Everything.”

“I have never seen anything like it,” Xa said as Hxerdinand only nodded.

“I was coming by to visit and your VR home absorbed me into whatever that was,” Elaya said in a quiet tone. “The next thing I knew I was trying to guide an out-of-control metal machine with a burning object in my tentacle. I saw you for a moment and tried to shift into my human Avatar… but the VR wouldn’t let me,” she said as she stared at me. “Then I just became an observer once I was out of your sight.”

“We came by to see what the disturbance was when System notified us that something was happening with your VR home at the center. It was like a ripple that spread out from your Home, hundreds, possibly thousands of VR homes around your Home were affected and their virtual experience was… forced to become part of your dream. They got to see you stumbling down the hall and to witness their physical homes get devoured by that monster.” Hxerdinand said as he watched me. “And then your simulation reached me and yanked me in. I only had a moment to try to tell you to wake up before I fell apart.” He said with worry in his eyes. “I’ve never felt such fear like that. It was as if everything was ending. I couldn’t even change my settings to feel less emotions.”

“You are telling me that my dream did all that?” I asked, dumbfounded.

“And more, it seems as if your dream was trying to predict the future.” Silver said as screens started to pop up around him, showing everyone what he was talking about. On five of the screens, there were images of the ant as it approached me. “I had to study what this creature was and discovered a tremendous amount of data researched on your planet about it. You call it an insect, the common ant I believe.”

“Yeah, so? It came from behind the tree after I almost got ran over.” I said as I didn’t understand what he was getting at.

“Not entirely correct. It came from billions of miles away and made its way to you before coming from behind the tree.”

“What?”

“If I may, would you allow me to change the surroundings so that I can show you?” Silver asked.

“Sure, don’t you have that power already?” I asked as I shrugged. He was the System, after all, he controlled everything around here.

“Not anymore and thank you.” He said as he began by moving us all out of my yacht and to a white open place. Next, a simulation appeared in the air in front of us showing a vast expanse of stars and on one end a tiny little ant and on the other end a small little earth.

“At the very beginning of your dream, this ant spun in place and turned to start moving at an incredible speed towards you on your planet. The moment it moved however this thing came into the dream as well.” He said as a void appeared and that monster I had seen in space took form. One milky white eye, with a tiny dot as the pupil, locked on to the ant and began to chase the moment the ant moved. How it followed was clear after a short distance when the ant seemed to lose its tail when it sped around stars and planets along its path. For some reason, the ant was leaving behind a little dotted blue trail.

“What the heck is that?” I asked as I was getting upset that the ant was leaving a trail behind.

“It seems that this species of insects leave behind pheromones when they travel.” He said as I heard both Elaya and the new guy gasp.

In those moments when the monster lost vision of the ant with its creepy white eye, it switched to another eye and began to follow the trail left behind by the ant before catching up again.

“That thing is pretty fast,” I said as I saw how it switched between eyes to keep hunting the ant.

“Indeed.” Silver said as we watched it get closer and closer across the vast distance.

Another screen popped up and began displaying the very first moments of my dream, the space around me, and the wind blowing the leaves here and there. “So you are telling me that all of this was happening while I was dreaming?” I asked as I looked around the scene and found other details that I hadn’t noticed before. My neighbor lady pulling her curtains closed as she finished vacuuming off the couch of cat hair, the cars and trucks passing down on a connecting road, and even the cat that ran out the kitty door to get away from the noise of the vacuum cleaner.

“And more. While sporadic, your brain was continually creating the environment around it and making the system animate it as it deemed fit. It wasn’t from a System recording from your planet either, all of this was made up in your brain and pushed outwards.” Silver said as we all watched my dream unfold.

“There I am.” Elaya said “And there I go.” as her half car half truck sped by and nearly hit me. “For the record, I was just learning what each of those pads on the floor did by the time the reality shifted to that impossible hallway.” She said in defense of her high intellect. I smiled and imagined teaching her how to drive, then the image popped into my head of teaching her how to drive as an octo-rodent and I couldn’t help but chuckle. She gave me a dark look and I quickly raised my hands in defense. She stuck her tongue out at me before turning away to look back at the replay.

Sure enough, the ant tracked me, came around the tree, bit a chunk out, and tried to give it to me before the monster above ate it. This time around I noticed that the ball of swirling color looked suspiciously like my ball of CR that I had held before. I hadn’t been paying attention to what had happened to the ball after the monster had rushed to eat the ant. This time I got to see what had occurred. Instead of hitting the ground, the ball elongated, and thin strings of it swept towards my closest leg, the one that I thought I had sprained. Quick as a flash the strings attached themselves to my leg and started to seep inside. My leg began to change colors like the ball the more the stringy fluid spread and crept up my leg. That must have been why my leg hurt so much when I tried to run. The next scenes were of me running in the hallway, the hallway changing into the outer surface of a residential layer of the Core, and finally to the park where I had touched the bench that Hxerdinand was sitting on.

“I did not enjoy that experience.” The old man said as we all watched him turn and shout at me before falling to dust.

I hadn’t noticed it the first time in my dream but now, being able to see from the outside, showed just how fast the spread of the metallic colors spread over my body. My arm in my vision that touched the bench was the last limb left uncovered. It even covered and spread all over my head and face, only finishing with the rest of my body the moment I lay in the damp grass and read the message from the System hovering before me.