Friday Fiction: A Jumping Off Point

The dream began in media res, as it were, with a lot of stuff already set up and implied. I'm going to tell it as I dreamed it, and I'm going to put what I call "festoons" in square brackets [] to tell you what I think a developed story might include.

The story opens inside a terraforming center on an alien planet. [The planet had biological possibilities before; perhaps a low level of life develpoment that went extinct.] Anyway, they've let off a mutagenic "bio-bomb," sort of like in Wrath of Khan, and now the development is spreading around their grounded spaceship, which is like their colony and station. They are supposed to have limited contact with the outside at this stage, so it is rather claustrophobic.

Who are "they"? A group of humans, not many [probably between 10 and 20], scientists and engineers all, though there is a hierarchy [from command down to what amounts to flunkies]. The two main characters of the story are the focus-character [who was my point of view], a scientist rather low on the totem-pole of command but high in the necessities of the science, analyzing and monitoring results. The real stirrer of the soup though is an officer [not the highest rank; I think of him as the Major. Possibly what happens is the actual commander is dead from some accident or other (was he an older, wiser man?) and now the Major is in charge]. And the Major is going stir-crazy.

In his boredom he is venturing out with his arsenal and shooting up stuff, like an asshole blasting cactus in a desert. [All the virtues for which he was chosen for the mission, his courage and proactivity and vitality, are turning against him. I imagine he was more on the technical side; he used the 3-D printers of the lab to make weapons, first primitive ones to exercise with, then more guns and whatnot.] The scientist [who I shall now refer to as the Minor] keeps protesting his interference and pointing out his violations of protocol, but the Major is in charge.

In fact, his authority goes to his head. He gets more and more eccentric, down to the point of wearing clown make-up and lording over and scaring and even terrorizing his fellow crew members. He comes to think of them as lower beings, stupes, stooges. He comes down even to declaring himself the de facto deity of this new planet [Mistuh Kurtz, he dead; I am the Angel of Destruction] as he blasts around on his swaths of destruction. When the Minor protests, the Major says they have a whole damn planet to play in; a little mayhem won't hurt it. [The Minor, on the whole, has as the second string of his character the Humanities: Art, Music, Literature, Philosophy, probably even Religion.] The Minor is not so sure about the effects this will have, what burgeoning pieces of the eco-system might not be destroyed or affected. The mumbo-jumbo, meanwhile is accelerating at an unprecedented rate.

It all comes to a head when they come across a species of swamp-ape that has been evolving stealthily out in the wilderness. [There have been some clues that they exist at an earlier stage, but then the signs disappeared. The Minor thought the Major had wiped them out.] I say come across: the Major kills one and brings it in, and that's how they discover it.  The Major starts tormenting them, messing with them [he calls it "testing}. And suddenly the swamp-apes [who seem rather vegetable in nature, kind of like Man-Thing; was human DNA in the mutagenic matrix? Can they regenerate under the right conditions?] attack the compound, not only in a pack, but in a concerted, planned effort, launching spears in vast clouds, diverting lumbering beasts to smash into the compound, etc. They are intelligent, and they work together, unlike the humans, who have fragmented in their aims.

But not anymore. The Major now panics, and finds he has to come out of his 'fortress of solitude' headquarters and work with his despised crewmates if he wants to survive. Everyone is scrambling and afraid, but none more so than the Major now that he faces a foe that can fight back. The other scientists are trying to find out in a hurry how to use weapons (which they have all been deploring but now resort to) from his arsenal that they are unfamiliar with; the Minor thinks he knows a way that he can use their technology in a less destructive way to pacify them [Happy gas? Holo-graph trickery? Or perhaps just fly the ship/station away to escape] and struggles to get to his lab. I didn't actually dream an ending, but I knew in the way one knows in dreams that the Major was doomed.

Themes and Memes: So my final take-away is that whatever utopia Man proposes, he always carries with him his own stain that dooms what he tries to build up.  He cannot give what he doesn't have. I see Aliens, Avatar, Southern Comfort, Planet of the Apes, Man-Thing, The Wrath of Khan, and Apocalypse Now in this strange brew, along with some rather C. S. Lewis philosophy.

Notes

I've said before, a lot of times I have some odd dreams that seem totally bizarre stories worked out of an unlikely subconcious stew. Some of the dreams I have 'translated' into tales; others just suggest ideas that tease me with possibilities. Some merely have elements that I use as narrative 'thickening'; perhaps (it's hard to tell at this distance) this dream-story had an influence on Daisy and the Swamp Ape, since published here. I can't say that I've ever written an entirely science-fictional story that I can think of; at best a sort of 'soft' sci-fi with elements of horror.