Dream Chasers (Dystopian Scifi Series Book 1) (2 page)

Mickey Mines, the famous
whoring bar, is the place to go in Tokyo, and that’s if you are over the age of
ten, of course. It’s just off Siaj St. and north of the docks, where big ships
could be heard coming in for the night, their horns screaming in the falling
rain, telling the city that they have arrived, warning the few scoundrels who
might be lurking in the dark corners to stay away.

Even though it was raining
tonight, the burning barrels flamed strongly outside the bar; it was as if the
rain fueled them, gas instead of water, making the flames dance tall. They were
now nearing the bar, walking onto wooden planks, the sound of their thumping
feet welcoming them. A man with a torn pirate hat came walking toward them,
holding the hand of a young girl. He tugged the arm of the girl and told her it
was going to be a good night. He said something about pirate style and then
howled “Parrot poacher me matey!”
at the rainy sky.
They stumbled
past and went into an unlit alleyway.

‘This place is ramming
tonight,’ Peter said, looking at five men drowning themselves in a bucket of
alcohol. ‘So this is the coffee date, huh?’

Ohko gave someone a high-five
and removed something from his jacket, a small white packet. Ohko was drenched
in rain. The glossy light on his jacket came from the bar’s entrance, which
were bulbs (most of them shattered) the shape of a woman’s body, her one eye
blinking red. Her unblinking arm pointed at a sign:
MICKEY MINES’S BAR.
The
wall next to the sign was spray-painted with vulgar anatomy.

In the distance, a ship hooted.
It’s a miracle that this place is still here, Peter thought. Then again, the
government doesn’t really care about Lower City’s residents. As long as they
clean Upper City’s asses, everything’s fine. While he waited for Ohko at the
entrance, he had a peek inside. People were screaming with the rock music, some
throwing bottles around. A woman in panties danced on stage, waving her breasts
around for everyone to see. He could see the bartender between moving crowds, a
skinhead who was busy drinking the bar’s stock.

‘Fuck this city!’ A man
stumbled from the door, nearly bumping into Peter. He fell on the ground and
laughed. ‘My head hurts.’ He laughed again. Peter found it a little funny and looked
inside again, and as luck would have it, there was a girl – the one with the
red hair – leaning against the bar and talking to an old man. They were passing
whispers, not moving much at all. Peter felt his stomach tickle. Maybe he
should go over and—

‘Found you self some pussy
yet?’ Ohko asked, whipping his arm around Peter’s neck. His eyes were scanning
his, and they appeared to be lost in something. He cocked his chin back and
burst out laughing. ‘You know, Pete. We got a talk about something really
important.’

‘Christ, Ohko. What you on?’ He
was definitely on something.

‘I’m not on anything. I’m
loving Lower City. That’s all.’ He pointed inside. ‘Let’s go inside, need a
talk about something.’

Peter didn’t hesitate going in.
He wanted to see if the girl with the red hair was still there, and she was,
still talking in whispers. A bottle flew over their heads and crashed behind. Two
men screamed over a table, which had cigarette butts falling off the edge. They
hollered at a group of women to get naked, and the women complied. The air
inside smelled of sex, bodily fluids, and smoke. It was dark and waving with
broken lights, some flickering a greenish-yellow, which made everyone’s shadow
sway left to right.

They bumped into the bar and
faced each other. Before Ohko could say anything, he was needed by a passer-by,
a young girl, maybe fifteen. She threw her dreadlocks behind and smiled,
revealing more brown than white. She lifted the palm of her hand for a
high-five. Ohko gave her one, and he gave her something else as well, a tiny
white packet. She puckered her lips at him and was gone.

‘You selling again?’ Peter
asked, looking past Ohko’s head. He wondered if the girl with the red hair knew
of him. She sure was pretty, and sober, which was a big plus.

Ohko zipped his jacket loose, opened
one side, and rummaged a hidden pocket. He pulled a handful of white packets
out. ‘Cocaine, brotha!’ He grabbed Peter’s hand and slapped five of them
inside. ‘For you, free! Just cause you ugly like my dead mother.’

Peter grinned. He looked at the
packets in his hand – Ohko’s hand still resting there as well – and then he
pushed the packets back. ‘You know I don’t.’ Ohko tried his luck again by
pushing his arm back. Peter gave him the eye.

‘Okay, okay, I get it.’ He
stashed his drugs away and zipped his jacket shut. He made sure his collar was
up, and grinned. ‘You just in love with mussels, right?’

What was a pretty girl like her
doing in a place like this? Peter thought. There were other beautiful women
here, of course, but most of them were either naked or falling about. The girl
with the red hair was not drunk and not falling around. She was a bit like him,
he thought. He wondered what her name was. ‘You said there was something
important you wanted to talk about?’

His eyes turned into slits, and
a smile disappeared. Alarm bells went off in Peter’s head. The only time Ohko got
serious was when the world was about to end. ‘Your fish dad probably told you,
right?’

‘Told me what?’ And then it
clicked. It had to be something about Dream Chasing. Bill was going to tell him
about the news.

‘You always going on and on
about being a Dream Chaser,’ Ohko said, waving back at someone. ‘Haven’t you
heard?’

‘Just fucking tell me,’ Peter
said.

‘They having an opening day.
You know. They are looking for Dream Chasers. Sexy people with strong
imagination.’

Peter stared at his hand and
thought about this. The last time they did something like this, he had been a
baby, and his father had run away, and then got himself killed for trying to
blend in with Upper City. The more Peter thought about this, the more he could
feel a dampening emotion fading into him. ‘And I suppose it’s going to be—’

‘Yes!’ he laughed. ‘It’s a only
for Upper City people, as always. Ain’t it great?’

It was law. The only people who
were allowed to be Dream Chasers were people from the Upper City, because they
say – in their own words – “Lower City people lack the imagination needed.”
Well, fuck them, Peter thought. Who are they to tell him he doesn’t have the
imagination needed. And then he sighed. The chances of him getting into
something like that is low.

The skinhead bartender slammed
his fist on the counter. Beer bottles, some of them full, clinked and crashed
onto the floor, making a young girl cover her mouth as if something horrific
had happened. ‘What can I get you boys?’ bartender asked. There was not a
single strand of hair on his skull, and the bulb swaying above colored his head
a misty brown. His eyes widened when he saw Ohko. ‘It’s you,’ he said,
stretching his arm for a handshake. ‘Jesus heaven, how you doing, my man?’

They exchanged a few words, and
two beers slid toward them, the caps falling on the ground next to them.
Bartender was needed somewhere else and disappeared. Ohko downed his beer to
half and laughed, wiping his face. ‘Where were we, Peter?’

He heard his friend’s voice far
away. The girl was now standing on her own, typing on her cell. Was this his
cue to make a move? He already had his line ready:
hey, do I look familiar
to you
? And then – hopefully – she’d be saying:
oh, now that I think
about it, yes you do
. It was a plan worth executing, he thought. He’d
rather do it here than approach her in class where things are—

Ohko punched Peter on the
shoulder, one that was going to leave a mark. ‘You nightdreaming, bro!’

His shoulder throbbed. ‘What
the hell was that for?’ He wrapped his hand over his shoulder and caressed it.
Ohko gave him a tired look and burst out grinning. Sometimes, maybe
a lot of
times
, he hated Ohko for acting so carelessly. But he could never hate him
for long. Beneath the over-the-top bravado and narcissism was a decent guy.
Peter waited for him to stop grinning, and asked, ‘What’s the big deal over the
Dream Chasing? You could’ve told me that—’

‘I know how much you love that
stuff,’ Ohko said. ‘That a why I told you.’

The girl with the red hair was
gone. She must’ve moved when Ohko hit him on the shoulder. Oh well, there goes
his luck for tonight. ‘Thanks, I guess. But it doesn’t matter anyway. We are
Lower City people. We can’t apply.’ This was true, and he felt the soreness in
his chest. Since a young age, he’d always wondered what it would be like to go
into someone else’s dream, to wonder about and to see what they saw. The technology
known as DI, Dream Infiltration, was invented by Aoi Arata in the year
twenty-thirty. He had sold the patent to government officials in Tokyo, and it
was the first patent ever to be sold for one trillion dollars. A year later,
Aoi Arata, aged sixty-three, died of a heart attack.

A group of rowdy teenagers
jumped on top of the bar, knocking a wave of cigarettes off. Ohko looked at
them and clapped his hands, a well-done clap, the show was great! ‘You right,
Peter. But there something I ain’t telling you.’

‘Yeah, and what’s that?’ Peter
asked, curiosity captured.

‘I want show you something
tomorrow.’

‘I can’t. You know I’m seeing
my mother tomorrow. We only get to see each other once a year.’

‘Cancel your plans with momma.’
He punched Peter on the shoulder again, this time not so hard.

‘You know that’s not going to
happen,’ Peter said, scanning the area for the girl, who was nowhere to be
seen. She must’ve gone home for the night.

‘That what you think,’ Ohko
said. He stopped smiling and leaned in closer. ‘I already know you coming
tomorrow. I can see the future.’

While rattling his key in the lock
– in the middle of god knows hour – his neighbor poked his head from the
window. He was fully awake with vegetables plastered around his mouth. His
window flickered white, and the voice of a TV show host cried:
Wadya call an
animal about to be eaten? Dead meat!
The audience exploded in laughter.

‘Had a good time?’ Hakari
asked, swiping carrots from his lips one by one with his chopsticks. ‘Tell me
you got lucky?’

There was a rattle and a click.
‘Sure,’ Peter said. He didn’t drink much tonight, but he sure felt like one of
those drunk people stumbling around pavements. His house, a block in the wall,
was one of many on the street. The only light came from dusty lamps that hung
sparingly along the walls. Most of them were covered in silky covers, which had
artwork scribbled over them. When Peter saw Hakari still staring at him with a hallow
expression, as if waiting for more information, he felt the urge to say
something else. ‘It was a good night.’

‘You sure it wasn’t a ladybo—’

The door clapped shut. Pitch-black
darkness welcomed Peter home. He reached for the dangling wire and pulled. An
orange light came on, chasing all the shadows under his bed and desk. This was
his humble abode, a house squeezed into one room. He went over to his fridge, a
cooler, and flapped it open. There were two bottles of milk inside, one empty.
He threw the bag of half-eaten mussels inside. He stumbled over to his mattress
and collapsed on it, the springs moaning like a woman’s fake orgasm. His sheets
smelled of old sweat. He was going to have to wash it someday. As he lay there,
enjoying one of life’s golden gems – a bed – he thought about his friend and
what he had said about tomorrow. He made it abundantly clear to Ohko that he
wasn’t going to go with him tomorrow. But good old Ohko kept giving him the patent
my-way-highway
stare. Ohko kept going on about how crazy things were
going to be tomorrow, how he had to pull a few strings to get what he wanted. There
was no way he was going to ditch his mother tomorrow. He only got to see her
once a year. She worked in the country side, as a laundry assistant, said the
city life wasn’t for her.

Sleep wanted him. He fought the
urge the best he could and turned around. He lay on his back and stared at the
roof, thinking about the girl with the red. He wanted to know what someone like
her was doing at Mickey’s. He wondered where she lived. The next time he saw
her, he’ll muster the courage needed and probe her with questions, maybe invite
her out somewhere. He pushed her away from his thoughts and slithered off the
mattress. Even though his legs felt sleepy, he was going to do some drawing.
It’s a bit of night ritual for him. He lifted his mattress and pulled his
sketchpad, a thick book with tattered leather bindings. Before opening it, he
thought about what Bill had said earlier on, about the government not really
advocating creativity in the Lower City parts. This was true. A year ago a man
was taken to prison for wanting to be full-time writer. A week later, he had
somehow escaped from prison. He went back to his house and carried on writing.
The police, apparently, found him curled in a dark corner, his face covered in
ink. He was then shot twenty times for resisting arrest. The government issued
a statement shortly after, reminding Lower City people that creativity is secondary,
that their job is to make sure the city is clean.

This should have bothered him,
but it didn’t. As long as he did what he was told, there was always some time
for drawing. His daily work routine was simple: get up at five in the morning,
get the bus that they provided, clean the city, go back to Lower City at seven,
go to the learning center to study about Upper City’s needs, and then head back
home, where he could have an hour or so for drawing. This was his life. A
simple one he didn’t dare challenge.

The first twenty pages were
black and white drawings of cartoon characters. The next dozen pages, colorful
smudges of human faces. Then came the pages of his obsession: pencil drawings
of Dream Chasing. He had found a way to channel his painful, unattainable want
into an outlet – his drawings. He would sit for hours thinking about what it
would be like to go into dreams, to walk around and see the person’s deepest
secrets. Apparently, when Dream Chasing, you only experience good dreams; there
aren’t any nightmares. It’s probably a good thing, Peter thought.

He dug his hand under the
mattress and looked for a pencil. Dream Chasers are the rock stars of their
world. The more powerful your imagination is, the more you are able to harvest
a dream’s energy, which is transferred into special vials. Dream Energy is a
special kind of energy that could be sold for use. It’s an expensive business. And
most of the vials are shipped to third-world countries, where the energy is
used for electricity.

Peter dived into his
imagination’s pool. He was whirling into someone’s dream, about to enter, about
to see what they—

His wall, next to this
mattress, knocked three times. Laughter followed, which sounded like a pack of
wild animals chasing pray. The wall knocked again – fingers scraping down the
side. Peter peered over his mattress, and sighed. How many times has he told
Hakari to shut the fuck up? Once? Twice? A dozen times? He bit his tongue and
focused on his pad. He drew a steady line, making sure not to wobble. He was
now back in his imagination, and the person he was thinking about was a random
woman. A part of him wondered if it had something to do with the red-headed
girl. He doubted it. While adding lines to the room’s interior, he found his
eyes getting sleepy, his heart slowing, and his breathing a soothing blow. He
took a slow breath through the nose and let it all out through the mouth. This
was the only time when he felt at ease with the world. When he drew, the world
around him crumbled into ash, and a wind would blow over him and wipe the ash
away. He wondered about his mother. He hadn’t seen her in a year, and was
starting to feel nervous. He pushed these thoughts away and focused on his
drawing.

A loud cackle came from behind,
people were retiring home.

Peter heard his stomach grunt.
He was starting to get hungry again. He looked at the wall next to him and saw
the clock broken, the legs pointing up and sideways, not moving. He was going
to draw for a few minutes more. Then, he was going to hit the bed and sleep his
life away. He scooped forward, bit his lips down, and continued drawing the
chair he saw in his head, a three-legged one with its missing piece far away.