Fantastic Mars -14- Vision of Mars (Patreon)

I wore myself out, trying to make a decision. Did I keep exploring, hoping to find an exit? Did I take the risk of putting on the tiara headband where Yonee’s mysterious “owner” might still lurk? And what should I do about the stone egg that seemed to hold Yonee’s magic?

Nervous exhaustion struck suddenly. I barely had time to drag myself near a wall, away from all the corpses, before I passed out. Sleeping on bare rock doesn’t even sound possible but I seemed to be developing a talent for it.

I kept the egg in one hand and the tiara lay nearby. Of course I dreamed.

* * *

The long corridors made me think of a hospital. People in pastel uniforms with urgent purposes rushed by me. I tried to stay out of the way. The murmurs of speech I heard were mostly incomprehensible. I did not hear anyone paging, “Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, Dr. Howard.” It was too solemn for that, even if almost absurd enough.

Reflective surfaces showed me my red hair and hazel eyes. I was Betty again. Instead of a slave’s light brown shift, I wore a hospital patient smock, off white with blue vertical stripes and brown figured pattern, alternating. It opened in the back and a couple of strings made of the same fabric held it closed. Stylish — not.

The dream-place looked and sounded like a typical hospital and it even smelled right. Disinfectant, fear, and that faint, almost certainly imagined whiff of corrupted flesh. I wandered around for sometime, in a timeless sort of way. 

I kept looking around, seeking a clue as to why my mind had chosen this dream-place. I didn’t know what to look for but when I found it, I recognized it right away. A room number, out of sequence, 42, with the numbers on either side being 23 and 25. The name tag slipped into the door marquee clinched it.

Gannon, Arthur. 

Art Gannon had been our gamemaster years ago and he had designed and ran the Fantastic Mars campaign before he died. I checked the door tag again, the diagnosis said Congestive Heart Failure. That sounded right too, though I don’t think I had ever heard exactly what had killed Art.

I started to open the door and realized I still had the green egg in my left hand. And yes, in the dream—in the too bright, too blue, hospital light—it was definitely green. Jade perhaps, but maybe not. There seemed to be a lot of black matrix around the too-green colored part. I stopped staring at the egg, opened the door and stepped inside.

Typical hospital room with a typical hospital bed, but the windows behind the bed showed the landscape of Fantastic Mars outside.

Artie lay in the bed, tubes sticking out of his left arm and a bandage on his neck. He scribbled something on some papers on the sort of hospital table that sticks across the bed before looking up. His graying blondish hair stuck out all over his head above his receding hairline. His thin lips looked pale but his watery blue eyes had a lively animation in them. “Hey, girl,” he said. “You must be Mojo.” He grinned. “You look like one of his characters.”

“I guess so, I’m not entirely sure. Anymore,” I admitted. I came farther into the room. It had a single bed of the kind with cranks to raise and lower the head and foot. On the wall opposite the bed a flat screen television hung in a sort of cradle. It was on, an image flickering like a dream-within-a-dream but the sound was muted. From the angle where I stood, I could not see the screen well enough to guess what Artie might have been watching.

He waved around at the room. “Not exactly the afterlife they promised me back in Sunday School but it’s better than the flaming pits of hell, I guess. Ozone smells better than sulfur dioxide, I suppose.” He grinned at me, again, amusing himself like always.

I stepped closer to the bed. Artie indicated a hospital chair and I sat in it. I could see the television screen now, it appeared to be some old black-and-white adventure movie and I thought I glimpsed a very young Van Johnson chewing on a piece of scenery. “Ozone?” I asked. 

He nodded. “One of the things that make up hospital smell. All the florescent lights and their electric ballast transformers make small amounts of O3, ozone. It’s a powerful smell and flavors the whole experience.”

Definitely Art Gannon, full of acute observation and obtuse explanation. I grinned at him. “It’s good to see you again, Artie.” I giggled and then squirmed on the chair when I realized how I sounded.

He smiled fondly at me. “You always played the girl roles to the hilt, Mojo, but maybe you overdid it this time?”

“You should see my other avatar,” I said, smirking.

“I have,” he said gesturing at the television. “We don’t have cable in the Afterworld, that’s a monitor.”

I looked up at it, realizing that the blond man I had taken for Van Johnson was really Seejay, holed up behind a few rocks and firing an antique-looking long gun at some Green Martians. Transfixed with the image, I stared, wondering if it were a live feed. Was Seejay in trouble right now? For some value of now?

“We’re all dead, you know,” Artie said.

“I—” I almost got whiplash looking back at him.

“Heart failure for me, though I didn’t die in a hospital like this one. I just fell over dead when I got up in the night to go get a drink of water.” He nodded vaguely. “You and the rest of the Swampers apparently died in a head-on collision with a wrong way driver.”

“Sonuffabitch!” I said. The Swampers, Swamp Crew, Gaming Crew, or Dungeon Crew was our sometimes name for our group of gamers. Or just Crew. Not very imaginative but not super-dorky either. Swamp originally came from our devotion the the M.A.S.H. television show. We hadn’t really used the name after Artie died I suddenly realized.

The screen on the wall pulled my eyes back to it. The ugly tusked face of a Green Martian in grayscale glory filled the view. Trike, I realized. He had a worried grin and was firing the oversize pistol Seejay and Hote had found for them. Again I wondered, when was this?

“I have a theory,” said Artie. “I think the whole universe is just a gaming simulator.”

I waved a hand at him, and distracted myself by noticing that it was Betty’s hand, slender, freckled and scarred from hard work. “If it’s a simulator, are we players or just code?” I asked. Actually this was an old argument and Hote, Artie and I could go round and round, taking different sides, until Trike and Seejay were ready to scream with boredom.

“Nevermind,” we both said at the same time.

We smiled tired smiles at each other. The joke was too stale for outright laughter.

On the screen, two naked Red Martian girls lay in a heap on a stone floor. Dolly and myself? Was this the last fight in the corridor when the voice in my head made me play dead?

Artie picked at the sheet covering him then pointed at my left hand. “You’re wearing the body from your character’s backstory and you’re carrying her egg.”

I glanced at the green stone. “Betty’s egg or Yonee’s egg?” On screen, Yonee wore all the jewelry in the world and lay limply while Dolly poked and prodded at her then tried to drag her into cover. I didn’t remember this part, I realized. It must have been after I passed out from stopping my heart.

“Both. The same,” he said. “Betty arrived on Mars and used the egg to become a Red Martian.”

“She did? I did?” I looked back and forth between him and the green stone and the monitor. “How do you know this?”

He gestured at the television. “I’ve been watching you.”

I turned back to the screen. A wave of Green Martians poured over Yonee’s limp body, my body, as Dolly leaped out of the way, taking cover with Seejay who stood up with his shotgun blazing.

Green Martian bodies fell left and right, Hote fired two six guns and Trike waded into the monsters who looked like him with sword, spear and gun. His four hands all occupied with killing and his face a grimace.

But when the green tide had passed, my body, Yonee, was nowhere to be seen.

“Sonnuffabitch,” I repeated.

* * *

https://www.flickr.com/photos/94270836@N04/