The familiar stage of my unwanted past assembles around me, as if some deity’s invisible hand is dropping segments of scenery into place. To my left, a small micro-fab, busy extruding swatches of cloth my mother will assemble into something hopefully worth selling to spacers looking for local flavor. To my right, the ancient chair my father insists on keeping, distressed green cushions threatening to leak whatever strange substance inhabits them every time he settles in for another evening of browsing old cookbooks for new recipes. All around, the raw whitestone walls of our house, reflecting the heat of Kallsita’s burning primary back into space, except it’s evening, the antagonist to morning’s ephemeral chill, and the ambient warmth of the stone is like a comforting embrace to savor before desert’s true night falls.
“How’s dinner coming, sweetie?”
My mother’s voice, recreated perfectly in that strange manner memories possess, yet I can't see her face.
“Make sure you keep an eye on the greens.”
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My father, obsessed as ever with his anachronisms, using a food printer that can create entire banquets as nothing more than a raw materials supplier while proclaiming ‘it’s just not the same’ compared to applying heat and time. I’m about to call back to him, tell him of course I’m keeping an eye on the greens, but I never finish the sentence because every time it’s the same. A monstrosity of metal and mayhem bursts through the wall of our home and reduces him into a smear of red and grey splattering the ceiling and chair in chunky strands.
My mother’s mouth opens, whether in shock or something else I’ve never known, and then, she too is gone, obliterated by a flickering ray into a cloud of ashy smoke that drifts into my mouth and across the recreated vegetable matter I’m carefully sauteeing. I stare at the nightmare collection of asynchronous limbs and strangely bending joints, and for the briefest second, I feel like it’s staring back, but then it’s gone, vanished back out into the twilight air as if I’d dreamt the entire thing, and the only thing left is the smell of slowly burning food.
Screams fill the air, and it takes entirely too long, even in the dream, for me to realize I’m the only living thing left in the room.
