Welcome to the Journal of Now and Forever. This Journal is a collection of my Star Control and Star Control 2 fiction. Note: Some of this material is, by necessity, extrapolation from the slim information provided by canon sources.

New fiction is posted first at My Livejournal before it appears here. This story is in response to 15 Minute Ficlets' Picture Challenge #13.

I don't usually remember my dreams. I suppose I'm lucky in that respect. Sometimes I envy those who remember their dreams; sometimes I wish they'd stop telling me about them. And I know there are those who dream... unpleasantly.

But last night I dreamed, and it's very rare, so I thought I should make note of it.

It was the research lab at High Park, the first one I was sold to. I must have been physically eighteen then, mentally about fifteen, chronologically four, though in the dream I was my present age. Isn't it something how in the early days, we had multiple ages? But the lab... it was in an older building, on the outside. The tall gates. The spikes on the barriers, part of the warning to the outside world to keep away. There were other, more modern defenses as well.

I saw the gates only twice in my life: once when I first went to High Park, and the second when I left after being sold to SpliNet. But I remembered them, because they and the other defenses kept us in, as well as kept others out.

In the dream... the gate was open. Standing outside, looking in. I was expected to go in, willingly, and when I was that age I did go willingly. But now... now I didn't want to. I knew what was inside the building. I knew what I would be working on. I knew then, too, of course, but it was different then. I chose to go into reproductive research here on Eta Vulpeculae to get away from what I used to do, something diametrically opposed.

They were waiting for me to enter. Who were they? It's a funny thing in dreams that you know who these people are, but as soon as you awaken, the connection is gone: I have only a fuzzy image of faceless gray coats. In reality, it was Miss Dell'Aria and her guardian Mister Rook who escorted me there. That was the last I ever saw of them...

The dream: The longer I waited, the worse it was going to be when I got in. But as long as I waited, the 'worse' – whatever it was – wasn't happening. The color bled out of the world; I could see it running off my hands into puddles on the ground, puddles of color on gray cobblestones, and then the colors ran off between the stones and disappeared into blackness.

It was time to go in then. A stay of execution, somehow: the 'worse' wouldn't happen after all. But there was no more color. How was I to do my job without seeing colors? It wouldn't be necessary, one of the gray coats said. I wouldn't need to see at all. I was afraid they would blind me, but they didn't; with dream logic, of course, things don't have to make sense.

I asked when the colors would be back. No one answered. I went past the gate, waiting for it to lock behind me, but it didn't: even as I walked farther – the building never got any closer, somehow – I kept looking back, and the gate stayed open, as the gray coats receded into the mist seeping up from the ground to hide the sun.

I wonder why I dreamed of that, and what it means?

~Personal journal of CRC-16 "Grif" Reproductive Researcher

Comments? Email me: laridian at aol dot com