It started as a joke. The glistening machine in the night called out to them. The large red dial screamed out to the man with the tie, Martin. He grabbed it and turned it away from him. This thrust the room to the left, knocking them into unconsciousness. 

The woman with the hat, Jackie, woke in a deep dark cloud. No sound and no colour. She came to realize she was in a flavourless world of darkness. She was within the hive mind of the anti-dream machine. What had begun as a joke, was now pure darkness. She started the act of losing her mind. The lonely dark cloud drowned her in her thoughts. 

Martin gradually awoke. He could barely open his eyes to the bright and colourful world around him. It was like compensation for Jackie’s dark empty world. As with her, she wallowed in nothingness, but with him, he couldn’t move or think. Every moment in these new worlds frightened them. They both didn’t know what they could do. 

The hive mind had treated them to their nightmares but worse. This “joke” as they put it had now become an anti-dream. That which was more atrocious than a nightmare due to the nature of these anti-dreams. They would take every bad thought in a person's head and make it rough. This overcame Jackie. She floundered in her thoughts, laying on the ground, looking up. Up into the dark clouds of her anti-dream. These clouds started to make it unbearable to breathe. One small droplet rolled out of her left eye and down the side of her face. It fell onto the ground, making a soft thud. The sound echoed out into the darkness. 

Minutes turned to hours. Hours unfolded to days. Days trickled to months. The loneliness she felt broke her mind. It shattered her mental state into millions of pieces. After the first month or what she thought was the first month, she created a figure in her mind. She imagined that one day the dark prince shall come to her aid and rescue her from the terrible land she lived upon but after many months of nothing, it made her feel like she should become nothing and the creativity in her mind faded away with any hope of a saviour.

Then, Martin, lay face down, paralyzed. He was unsure if it was the bustling light and movement around him or if the fall had made him break important parts of his body. Just like Jackie, even Martin felt alone but he was unable to think of anything to calm him. Again months passed for him too. He longed for peace and quiet until the moment came, he could twitch his hand. Slowly but surely he started to move his body. He looked out into the world and realized he was in a white and empty world. Soon the noises stopped along with the movement. Martin felt happy he was at peace but then the peace turned into more loneliness. You see, it never came back and the bright white and empty world started to turn grey and then it fell into blackness. Like someone had turned off the switch. This made Martin scared and so he didn’t dare speak. 

* * *

About a year after the red dial incident, Jackie let out a sigh of grief. Martin heard it. Finally, he spoke: “H-hello?” 

Jackie sat up, it had been a year and this was the first sign of anything. She looked around but the darkness stared back. Suddenly, it spoke to her, telling her to be quiet, that it was a trick. She closed her eyes and realized that it couldn’t be true. She inhaled before yelling her first words in a long time: “W-who is this? Where are you?”

The darkness started to lighten up. Everything became grey and finally, the two could see each other. 

Ominous laughter lightly floated through the air and circled the two. It was the laughter of a man. Then emerging from the dark was a lanky figure with a hood that made it impossible to see his face. He lowered the hood off of his head to show a bone old face. 

Martin grabbed Jackie’s hand. The two shared worried looks before returning their attention to the man. The man stepped towards them slowly. “You two really don’t know what's going on?” the man sneered, giving off a little smile to show he was pleased with himself. 

He then reached out to the two, his hand so close to Jackie’s face. She was horrified, so horrified in fact, she pushed him back, or so she thought. Her hands pushed out but never touched anything. The man laughed as he disappeared into nothing. Leaving behind a note. 

The two both looked at the note, both too scared to touch it. After a moment Martin decided to be brave and crouched down to get the note. He moved so fast on the way down that he fell over. This flipped the note over and the both of them could now read what had been left behind. 

“Welcome to your Anti-Dreams.” It read.

Then millions of copies of both Martin and Jackie started forming. The two tried to stay together but both were lost to the sea of themselves. The same laughter from the man started to chortle out of every copy before they melted into a literal sea. This filled the nothingness up and hurled the two around. 

A voice yelled out upon the nothingness, a voice of a familiar person: “The hive mind must be broken! You must break free!” 

Martin had finally swum to Jackie in all the chaos. They didn’t quite understand so all they could do was hold hands. The man materialized again. He made everything stop. Jackie tried to ask what he wanted but he had taken her voice. He looked at her and then at Martin. He tried to speak but the man had also taken his voice. 

The man looked at the two. “Mortals, I grow tired of these games.” He said: “But, this is all here so I can show you my power and so you don’t think this is just ‘some joke.’ Now, what I want is one of you to pledge your souls to the hive mind and one of you to forever be trapped in this limbo world. If you do not comply I will have to kill you, the slow way.”

Jackie looked into Martin’s eyes. The two still couldn’t speak. The man let them struggle as they tried to figure out what to do, but he grew even more impatient with the two just staring at each other. 

The man finally let Jackie speak. “I-I pledge my soul to the hive… mind?” She quickly said. 

Martin disagreed with this but it was too late. She had disappeared into nothing. Still, he couldn’t speak as he lunged at the man, missing as the man vanished after Jackie.

Deeper into the hive mind of the anti-dream machine she went. The man followed. They arrived at the core of the mind. A big purple crystal ball glowed in the middle of the small room. The man looked at her. “That was so easy! I don’t need you anymore! I have what I wanted!” He shouted. She gave him a concerned look before he pushed her back out of the room and into the cloud. She fell down and down until the inevitable ground overcame her. 

The man rejoiced in the glowing of the crystal. It made him feel powerful as he could once again bask in the purple light. He reached out to touch the crystal. As his hand made contact the crystal shattered into dust along with the man. 

* * *

The machine with the red dial relayed a message. Martin awoke beside the machine. What had been a year was actually an hour. He looked beside him and saw Jackie. She wasn’t moving. He tried to wake her but alas her pulse was nothing and her breath was taken away. Martin looked up at the machine. The message was clear to him. 

“Your time was short, 

Your loss was great, 

It wasn’t a joke, 

Enjoy your fate.”

Over and over. It was toying with him. In big red letters. It glowed out. Martin closed his eyes for just a moment and the machine went blank. The silence frightened him as he stood up and stumbled out of the room. Then he saw, at the end of the hallway, another machine. It had a small purple button and had a blue note attached to it. Martin read the words on it.

“Welcome back!~”

The realization hit him and the world went back to darkness. From now on, Martin knew he was forever alone. Forever alone in a sea of black.

Out in the cold unimaginative night, a frightening glow pierced through the darkness. Death was among them. It started on the last Thursday of July. September's first death was about to arrive. The legend within the community was one shall die every Thursday, but that changed last time. 

The last time a woman who had just given birth died during labour and her child immediately followed her. She had a family, a husband and two children only 3 and 7. They both didn’t quite understand the realness of the situation at hand.

Justin Loaier was only 19 years of age and tonight he would dance with death. He left home and moved to Kingsvale village in the countryside only 8 months before. He was one of the non-believers but tonight would change that, forever. 

The people of this village couldn’t leave. It was very new, since July no one had left the village, even tourists and visitors, the only people who had left were in body bags, but no one had made any correlation with this and the mysterious deaths. These deaths were starting to become common, so common in fact that people have been questioning the reality around them. They wonder if it's all real or if it's all fake.

Justin was driving his car down a long narrow road. His skin crawled as his car slowly rolled up the road nearing the damn, then a sharp corner approached him. He turned on the brakes but somehow they didn’t work. His car shunted through the bushes and smashed into the dam. It broke open and the water flushed down towards the village.  Justin scrambled out of his car and climbed to safety. Sadly, he didn’t see the damage his car had caused. It was so bad one of the trees had become loose and was about to crush him. Then lightning crashed down and set the tree alight, this frightened him and he fell back into the water below. 

With the dam broken the water hurried down into the small village below. An old lady at the nursing home had escaped earlier that day. Her name was Bridget and she was 82. A mad old lady who used to work at the local library before her husband died at the bitter age of 54. She was left all alone without him and went slightly mad. Her presence at the nursing home was only due to her family not caring enough to visit her anymore and so she’d been in and out of the home for a year, trying every way possible to escape. 

Being near the bottom of the dam by the small stream the water gushed out and thrust her back against a tree and the branch thrash through her body. Crippled, she stood, stuck up against the tree and her blood seeped into the water around her. It was uncertain if she was going to drown or bleed out.

The continuous water flooded the area and trapped people in their own homes as the water rose. People on the second floors of their country homes were trapped. Most of them were trapped for the next couple of weeks before some drowned and others died of thirst. The unfortunate souls on the ground levels were drowned in their sleep, Justin’s family home had only a ground floor so his mother, father, sister, and pet would’ve most certainly died. 

Where was Justin in all of this? He managed to climb back to the edge and ran down the road watching his family home get overcome with water. His family died under all of it. A dark figure grabbed his arm and he was pulled into a car as it sped off down the road. Surprisingly he made it out of the small country village alive, but he never underestimated the evils of Thursday.

About a year passed and Justin’s captors had left him inside of a small padded room. He didn’t seem to mind because the outside world had nothing for him. The captors seemed to always be wearing masks every time they met him in his cell but this also never seemed to bother him. He had become friends with one of the captors and they once showed him their face but soon after that his friend ended up in a cell beside Justin and this caused his friend to kill himself.

Exactly one year after the incident with the village,  the captors moved Justin into a small dark room. A scientist by the name of Gregory Maguire. He spent an hour with Justin before placing him into a capsule. The capsule closed with Justin inside and he was put to sleep. A small logo shined out on the capsule. Anti-Dreams. 

Gregory alerted his boss to come into the laboratory and so she did. The boss, Kerry Jacobson, looked at the monitor and watched as they tested their first patient by using the Anti-Dream equipment. Kerry turned to Gregory. “Yes, I think you’ve finally sorted it, and with only 2 casualties!” 

“Listen, Kerry, I feel I must warn you this equipment is quite dangerous and--”

“I don’t care, just get me into the machine so I can become immortal.”

That was her goal. Like many humans Kerry’s fear was death. She wanted to live forever but the only problem with this immortality was the Anti-Dream machine had a mind of its own. The two casualties she mentioned were the first two test subjects of the machine. Their names were Kylie Jenson and Spencer Bell. They didn’t get their minds extracted into the machine, nor their souls, they were just murdered by the machine. Kerry sat into the next capsule and before no time she was in the machine. 

* * * 

Now she was just a dark figure of nothingness in a black cloak. She wandered a path before stumbling into a room. There in the middle sat Justin. Around him were the corpses of his family, all stabbed to death with a knife that glowed in his hand. The blood just looked like code, binary code. He stood up and turned to see Kerry, now just a dark figure. 

“They weren’t real! THEY WEREN’T REAL! I-I-- WHERE AM I?! WHO ARE YOU?” Justin started to freak out and lunged at Kerry. The knife plunged into her stomach.

“Fool! You can’t kill me! GREGORY! DELETE THIS--” She stopped. She realized Gregory couldn’t hear her, he couldn’t help her. 

Justin thought up a small house set up where he trapped Kerry.  She tried to escape but couldn’t do so. Justin was the first and therefore he was the strongest. She was immortal but the cost for her as she was trapped in her own creation, probably never to escape. 

* * *

Gregory tapped at the controls some more. He got two more prisoners added to the Machine. Martin and Jackie. Then he carried on watching his creation. Sure, he thought, Kerry may have made the plans for the machine but he was the one who executed them and now she was trapped within his creation. 

Gregory went up to Kerry’s capsule and opened it. He felt her pulse. There was nothing. He went to Justin, with no pulse. Jackie and Martin, no pulses. He checked his equipment. The readings were conclusive to the fact. They were dead in the real world but their minds still lived on. Gregory didn’t know what to do, so he gathered all the prisoners and all of the workers and put every single one into capsules so the secret couldn’t get out. Gregory had killed basically everyone but himself. He got all the bodies and dragged them out of the underground bunker and dug a decently sized hole. He burnt all the corpses until all of them were just ash. 

He sat down in his laboratory, weighing his options. Die in his own creation or live a life of fear. Then he went to the entrance of the bunker. Locked the door. Returned to his lab. Hacked into the world's leading nuclear missile centre and set them all to go off in twenty minutes with the stopping code being the name of his machine. Turned on a timer for his mind to be added to his creation. Climbed into a capsule and waited.

Martin, Kerry, and Jackie looked to Devon who was sitting next to his corpse, which was actually a pile of dust. Another man walked out from the corner. “Oh, he’s here.” He sneezed. The man held out his hand and helped Devon to his feet. 

“Who are you?” Devon asked.

“Sam, Sam Judy.”

The four then dragged Devon into the droves of worlds within the Anti-Dream machine. They explained that almost everyone that was in the machine was dead. They were unnoticeable to the people who survived within the machine. Death was the only release and now that had been taken from these souls.

They took Devon to their leader. Curtis. 

He sat in a small room with a small red ball in his right hand. Curtis saw the five standing in the doorway. “Come in. Come in,” He sneezed in a sarcastic tone: “Why are you here, don’t you know how to read signs--”

“Listen, Curtis, we have a new member to our cause.” Kerry cut him off. 

Curtis looked to Devon. “Oh yes I see that, so, Why are you bothering me over this, new members come here almost hourly. At this rate, Justin will be the only one who can’t see us.” 

“You may be right but what if we found a way to delete Justin’s memory, his code,” Jackie asked. Curtis looked intrigued at her.

“All of you are completely insane. Gregory will not delete or look back over any code meaning, we are all stuck like this. I hope like hell he gets here soon so I can beat the shit out of him for all of this pain I’ve been put through.” Kerry rambled. 

She was right though. Her maths wasn’t wrong, nor was her timing. She asked everyone what time they were put into the capsules. She was put in the capsule at 2:23 pm and the last time someone was put into a capsule was 3:59 pm. She calculated that every month in the real world that passes, a month goes by in the machine. She started to feel bored within this realm as she had been dead for 12 and a half years, meaning currently in the real world it is 5:29 pm. 

Kerry left the room with Curtis. The two constantly argued over and over about what they should do next with their lives. Curtis and Kerry only agreed on an assault on Justin’s deranged life but Curtis knew that Justin was the most powerful soul in the machine. Kerry kept on pushing saying that they needed to complete the assault when Gregory joined them but Curtis sneezed that if everyone worked together, now, they’d have a better chance.

Devon took Sam away to a secluded area. He knew how weird it was to be killed and not die. What was confusing about this act of kindness was in the real world Sam was a person who was jailed for assisting someone in suicide while Devon was his guard so why was Sam helping Devon? Well, in the Anti-Dream machine no one looked like they did in the real world. Another bonus to this was no one really knew anyone else's name so it was a pretty safe bet that not a single person would attack another person because they all had a common enemy.

* * *

Kerry and Curtis stood in front of Justin, who couldn’t see them. He was sitting and staring at the photos on the wall. He had a look of ambition on his face while doing so. “Gregory might know a way to fix this!” Kerry argued.

“Well he isn’t here now and we need to fix all of this NOW!” Curtis raised his voice. “Listen, you don’t have to help if it makes you feel better but we NEED to do this.”

“No we don’t--”

“Yes, we actually do!’

They stopped. 

Justin looked up at them. Everything that conspired from that moment forward would set the future in motion. “I-I… You’re supposed to be dead! When YOU DIE YOU STAY DEAD!” Justin growled.

“You do realize we can’t--” Kerry was cut off.

“Kerry, he can… he can see us.” Curtis pointed out. 

“This must be a trick,” Justin murmured. A knife materialized in his hand. “I’ll make quick work for you.”

He lunged at them. Curtis grabbed Kerry’s cloak and they ran through the wall. They ran until they got back to the command centre. Explaining to the others what had happened made panic descend into the rest of the souls. 

Martin helped Sam, Devon, Curtis, Kerry, and Jackie all into a hidden room and they all waited out the panic. Thankfully, no arguing happened, Kerry had seen her ways and finally agreed with Curtis. So they all devised a plan. 

Later, everyone calmed down so Curtis and Kerry addressed them all. They explained their plan to everyone and set it into action. Back to Justin they went. A couple of subjects walked past his room and that got him to go out and attack them. He slashed and slashed but his knife did nothing. Everyone surrounded Justin. He screamed and screamed but nothing happened. They couldn’t get him and he couldn’t get them. 

His messed up mind started to turn the walls into delusion crystals. This worked. It pushed them all back and locked Justin from the people. He stumbled back into his room to see a crystal version of Spencer. It reached out to him and he reached out to it. They fused and Justin turned into a living crystal creature. He started to form into another version of himself and another until there were five. 

* * *

The crystal creatures left behind by Justin lumbered into the rooms and worlds within the machine. Terrified people ran and ran as their lives were endangered. Martin and Jackie were part of the first who were killed. The creatures deleted their minds and souls that remained in the machine. Leaving nothing behind. Curtis and Kerry tried to work things out in the locked-down bunker room. 

Going over code after code, Kerry somehow broke into the makeup of the machine. The simple binary code confused her. Curtis and she stepped through the crack and into the black and green world. Strings of code trickled about as the two looked around at the stunning place, wondering what did what. “We need to alter the code,” Kerry said.

“Where do we start?” Curtis asked. Kerry closed her eyes and the code sorted out into lists. She started to shake rapidly. It was like she was having a severe epileptic attack. before falling over. Curtis checked her pulse. It was weak. He looked at the code and then to Kerry.

Sam and Devon were held up with a group of people in a small room. The loud bashing on the door from the crystal creatures grew louder. Sam held Devon’s hand and the two looked into each other's eyes. A tear rolled out of Devon’s left eye and down his cheek. “I--” Devon was cut off.

The door smashed into pieces and within seconds the creatures broke into the room. Screams broke out and people started running in all random directions even though they were inside a confined space. Sam and Devon held each other as everyone else around them were obliterated into nothing. The three creatures wandered toward the two. The closest one reached out at them. Its multi-coloured crystal arm glowed in the darkened room. They were stuck. Unable to move or do anything. In the following seconds, the creature's arm came in contact with Sam. Sam boiled and bled as his body melted into a bloodied mess and faded to nothing. This saved Devon as he was teleported to Curtis and Kerry. 

Kerry’s body started to turn a grey colour. Curtis told Devon to take her away. He bent down and touched her hand. Devon moaned as his body started to bubble into a grey. He fell beside Kerry, not moving or breathing. Curtis, now the only man conscious in the area, looked to them as they both turned to stone and then to dust. He scanned the room as noises started to grow louder on the far corner. He then put his hand out to the code and he turned into it. Suddenly everything was clear to him. Curtis understood the code and started to alter it. First bringing back Kerry. 

He then went to get rid of the crystal creatures that plagued the machine but four appeared around him. Every movement made the coding around them go crazy. Kerry stood up and joined Curtis. The two worked hard to alter the coding. The whole machine started to shake rapidly as the code changed the crystal creatures multiplied rapidly and then disappeared, over and over. Then one remained. It multiplied into thousands before absorbing all of them and turning into a giant version of itself. It fell around Curtis and Kerry, trapping them under it. 

“Well… this is great,” Curtis mumbled in a state of exhaustion: “H-how are we going to get out of this one?”

Kerry looked at him. The code turned from green to red. It started to jumble and spin around the two. The crystal creature disappeared and the room also. The two ran toward the crack in the wall they climbed in. The room disappeared behind them. Curtis shoved a bookshelf over the crack and Kerry opened the trap door to the bunker. 

She climbed out. He started to climb out as the room he was in started to disappear. She reached out but it was too late. The ladder he was climbing upturned to nothing as he fell into the deep dark abyss. Kerry couldn’t hear his screams after a couple of seconds. She had worked out that Curtis was dead. He couldn’t have survived it. She started to run down the hallway and past the cracked walls and blood-covered floors. She slipped over and looked back. The darkness gained speed after her. She tried to get to her feet but only managed to fall over face-first into the blood. 

Somehow she used the wall to help herself up. She turned to the impending doom. It caught up to her and she jumped into it. She floated down into the darkness. Was this death? She kept on thinking. Then a red glow beamed out to her in the distance. She started to move to it. It was a button. The label under it read: Reset. She pressed it. The world turned black. Then white. Then Kerry was back in the bunker. Curtis lay beside her. She helped him up and explained what happened. Surprised, he accepted the odd story and the two got out of the bunker. 

The community of people had lessened. What once was 149 ghostly people and 6 living people were turned to 77 people including Kerry and Curtis. They all gathered. The war had been won. 

For now. 

Curtis and Kerry started to help people as they settled down.