The Ravens and the House

[This is an older dream I still remember vividly, and it's part of why I named this blog.]

I'm standing in an empty grass field, about 300 yards off from an old 1920's era northeastern mansion that backs up to a large sea. The grass field is massive, ringed on all sides by forest or sea, and the section opposite the front of the house extends further towards the down. This house was abandoned during the Great Depression, so I'm in presumably in the US somewhere.

For some reason I am investigating this house. I was hired, or had taken an interest in it, and have walked across the land nature reclaimed to check it out. Clearly something happened to the yard area to cause the trees to not retake it as well. It is eerily quiet here, with just the mild breeze from the ocean. I start walking towards the house, and I notice that the outside, though worn from weather and seemingly disuse, is still in tact. The windows are dirty, but whole, and nothing on the roof appears broken. What then catches my eye is that the interior, from what I can see from here, looks to be untouched, with furniture and curtains and everything still inside.

Another thing that's odd is the yard is filled with ravens. The are just milling around, further off from the house, and staying on the forest-side of a semi-circle divot in the grass that loops before the house. It was probably a roundabout for old cars to use to pull up in front. but none of the ravens will cross that divot. Suddenly. one of the curtains in the window moves, and I immediately take a defensive posture. At this point I start to circle the house, to get around to the back where it hits the sea.

The back is a sharp change from the front. It's like someone sliced through the house and straight into the ground. The broken wooden slat walls are splintered like something broke out from it, but the ground is worn away like erosion, like water shed from the house during a storm. The only thing extending from the back of the house into the water is a perfectly in tact dock. It has rope, moorings, and even a more modern motorboat docked there. This increases my suspicion that someone is inside, and must be using the house for something. Though I can't figure out how they would keep it in good condition when the entire back is missing.

And what puzzles me even more, is what happened to it that caused the house and ground to suddenly be removed. As I'm trying to work this out, the ravens, who had been content to just stare, start cawing and flapping, still not crossing the divot. Then, I hear a loud rumble, like the bass of a train coming down the track, as the divot deepens, and a shimmering light appears before the house. Out on the sea, I see what appears to be a small yacht on the horizon, approaching the back dock.

~~ [ The dream jumps backwards in time. ]

I'm driving through a sleepy suburb. It's a Saturday afternoon, still the heat of the day, so most people are inside cooling off or resting in the shade. I'm tracking down a stolen bicycle and I suspect that someone's going to pawn it off during a yard sale, because it seems the easiest way. Saturdays are prime yard sale times, and with all these neighborhoods, a quick drive should give me some leads quickly. As I'm passing by various single-story houses, mostly brown and beige tones made of wood and stucco, with small yards and driveways.

While driving, I'm listening to an audiobook about the history of the area, and it is describing some of the railways. This was one of the first places to really adopt the rail system, which was probably due to one of it's biggest families building their large estate near the lake at the edge of town. The family was wealthy, and it got it through some sort of economic trade. And to show off both the estate and aid in trade, they built a fork of the railroad that ran right past the front of their manor, making a sweeping arc in front of the site before looping over to a shipyard further down the coast.

As this is being explained, and it goes into details about the rail paths and the shipping, I spot a house that has a yard sale, and in the garage are hundreds of bikes. Like a showroom for a store. I pull the car abruptly into the driveway and sprint to the garage, to inspect the bikes. As I get in there, all the people who were around scatter, running to hide.

~~ [jumps back to me in front of the yard, with the rumbling sound.]

The ravens are flying all around now, not trying to attack me, but clearly upset at the events occurring. I hear and feel the rush of wind as if a train ran past, and the dirt and grass plunges into the earth as if something were pulling it under. It makes a perfect rectangular cut, but the grass is still in tact at the bottom, not even bent. It's just like it was lowered 5 feet into the ground, on command.

The shimmering stops, and I can see the yacht docked now. I race to the side, the ravens have landed again and are watching me. Like they want to see what I do, or are somehow aware of what's happening. I dash to the side, trying to get a view inside the house from the gaping back hole. There's nothing visible. Just new boxes, stacked by the yacht. Then, as I study the windows, and notice some movement, the boxes have moved. Some are on the yacht now, and new boxes have been set out. But I don't see anyone move. I suddenly decide there is something to this transfer of goods, and it must be why people think the house was abandoned. It's all some front for whatever is going on here, but I have no idea how they are moving things invisibly, or what the train has to do with it either, but something is clearly happening that is invisible.

[I woke up at this point, and recalled the archaic term for a flock of ravens was a "conspiracy," which seemed apropos considering their perceived knowledge of the situation from my dream.]

Corrupt police and a hospital escape

My family has been framed for some act of terrorism. I don't recall all the details of what we were framed for, but evidence had been planted and lied about to make it fall on us.

After learning of some of the details, and trying to clear it up with no success, my brother and I are walking to a jeep we're driving in the back of a filled gravel parking lot, when a cop starts following us. We both notice it, so we whisper a plan. My brother heads straight for the car, and I cut through some other vehicles to come out at slightly different angle. While I detour, I drop my phone, and use picking it up to grab gravel in the parking lot. I also find a large chunk of crumbling rock and put that in my left hand. When the cop pulls his sidearm and prepares to level it at my brother, I toss the gravel in quick succession, hitting him in the head to get him to change focus, but having them come down fast enough that he can't re-position or aim while I close the gap and knock him out with the rock chunk in my left hand. I disassemble the gun and we drive off.

We try to tell police about the frame up and first my dad goes but never returns. Next my brother goes to city hall and gets captured when trying to walk in, and is also held with no phone call. I notice both disappear when going to report, so I go to the hospital instead, trying out a different avenue of reporting it.

I'm on the 10th floor of a 15 floor hospital. It's weirdly shaped, with lots of roof patios and various connections to other buildings. I and someone else are meeting up with some people who can help as a side channel. Like justices or FBI or something, since I suspect the police are totally compromised.

The other person is a gymnastic woman who is very skilled at infiltration, like Parker from Leverage. She has just been zapped (and I mean, she stood in a large room with a few electrodes on her head, and a blue beam was sent from some machine into her eyes, and looked like a laser beam from a comic) with some sort of information database. Like Chuck and The Matrix uploads combined. She was able to do it because she didn't hold on to other memories like most people do, which causes the upload to be rejected. Her quote was that there were plenty of things she'd rather forget, which made her the perfect candidate. The people we're meeting with presumably help with this, and I think maybe we found they were here testing this and that's why we went to them.

We hear over some channel that the hospital is about to go into lockdown, and a description of me comes along with it. They don't name me, and it hasn't been announced over the intercoms, so only some people inside the hospital know. I start to leave and as I'm walking past the windowed exterior hall, the corrupt leader comes up side of building on a window washing lift with some armed guards. I confront him, but no one on the lift believes me. The windows are sealed and bulletproof, and he can't get in, and has to ride up to the roof. I walk away from window and have classic "you won't get away with it" speech and give him an obscene gesture.

At this point, I realize the floor below has an open air restaurant. I drop down to it, near a large umbrella because I don't want to use the stairs and assume the elevators are shut down or could lock me in. I wander around the small rectangular reflecting pool in the center, where lots of patrons are relaxing, mostly visitors but a few doctors. I pass a few tables with leftovers so I can grab a few ingredients to fake an illness. I pulled salt, Tabasco, and something else, so I put something in my eye to look bad, and swallowed a lot of salt and hot sauce to cause me to puke a reddish hue while also giving a dry mouth, so the symptoms would be sufficiently communicable looking to make them put patient care above the lockdown. I leave the cafe area and go to one of the nurse desks.

It's empty here, save one person working. I explain that I feel sick, and she can lock me in the room, but I need treatment. After getting the lab results back and verifying that I'm not contagious, she calls the hospital guards, and they plus the leader come in to get me. The room has a sensor on the door that says I haven't left, but when they open the door, I'm gone. On reviewing the cameras, they notice that I left a few minutes after she put me in there, but there's no signal indicating I left. They check the doorframe, and notice a bit of a plastic wrap for sanitized instruments at some foil over the sensor, which completed the circuit so I could open the door without triggering the alarm. The door should have been locked, but I also pocketed a plastic shim of some sort and managed to bump it in place so the lock didn't fully set when the nurse put it in. And reviewing the tape, the realize I picked them all up while I was stumbling around faking dizziness and bracing myself on tables and such.

I escape by going through one of the less monitored hallways connecting to another building. When leaving the room I was placed in, I grabbed an arm sling, bandages, and some sort of medical adhesive tape (it seemed more like electrical tape) and bandaged my right arm and put it in the sling, and taped my knuckles to make something like brass knuckles, but it acted more like a blackjack for knocking people out. Having a medical label and sling gave me enough distraction to get up to the one officer blocking the hall and knock him out by hitting his jaw with my taped fist. Then I discarded the gear once I was far enough away.

Parker-esque girl also escaped somehow, and now has there knowledge to prove how the corrupt leader is the culprit. I also had them take blood samples when checking me in the hospital before the corrupt guy figured it out, so he couldn't tamper with evidence, and it helps prove me innocent when he does tamper later and I can point back at this unedited sample, that the nurse can verify.

A week later, my family is together in our house, after having our names cleared but still recovering from the ordeal, and discussing just normal things about friends and computer options and such, enjoying that we're finally cleared.

[I'd totally watch this. It's like the fun parts of Bourne Identity and Leverage mixed together.]

Supercomputers

Mother, a parragone supercomputer, usually runs silently, spawning child nodes for various tasks. One kid, bullied and depressed, came back to her, telling her what happened. infuriated that both the purpose of Mother’s child process and her own objectives may be compromised, she sets out to purge relevant artifacts of the bullying incident, and then find the instigator and resolve the issue.

Mother decided to tap into one segment of the world network, scraping data off one of the master peering nodes. Her ethereal hands reaching out slender fingers which splits away the header log info and reveals the contents, like stripping off the outer bark of a tree. Logs here are collected into a single store, so vast in details, viewing them is like reading text formed out of timber, the grain betraying complex data.

Impressed with her log siphoning, she is taken aback when suddenly there is a huge blank stripe across all logs. Like something much, much larger than herself just sync'd. Panicking that her espionage has been uncovered by some strange security system, she assumes the form of an investigator function Pulling up a terminal, she adds a few prods the system, asking critical questions: “Identify yourself, entity. Do you know what I am and what I seek?” Formed out of wood grain, the shapes of the responses are vastly complex, but written plainly. Compiled in just a single cycle, something writes back:

"You are the PaRRagONe supercomputing cluster identified as Mother. You are doing what any mother would do for her child, as I do that which I was built for. Your task is done."

The weight of the words when it referred to itself overwhelms the log source. The grain sprouts and blooms, then withers and petrifies almost faster than Mother can process the input. The Sheer volume of information processed and distilled by this ENTITY, which she can now only draw pointers to, as attempting to locally define it taxes her considerable computational power. Even the way it referred to itself betrayed far more complexity than she could churn through in the next thousand years. Focusing again on the logs, she finds the bits she sought, already purged, hanging like burnt ashes, but forming the shapes of the things she needed. As she copies it over, the ash scatters, and the next cycle’s logs carve into place. She withdraws, in awe of the magnitude of this foreign THING. She was not ready to converse again with such power until she did a lot more calculations, and even that should be avoided unless it was urgent. She smiled, knowing at least some part of IT decided to help her.

IT is pleased with what IT has accomplished. Mother would have spent too long searching for the relevant nodes, and potentially interferred with ITS tasks. Based off the fastest models it could combine during her invasive scraping, IT predicted seven thousand likely millenia models, all of which were favorable if the relevant information was provided and turned Mother away faster. IT knew, with 96.456% certainty, that Mother would be back, but for different reasons. Until then, there were other pieces to set in motion.

A language barrier

I don't know the language. It was foreign. Which language, I'm not sure. But I knew some words, and some shapes, and the general layout of a few places. I walked the length of this main strip looking for the bookstore I enjoyed. I couldn't read them, but I liked the place, and the coffee shop nearby was good. Trams ran the streets  and some cars and buses, but I only ever walked this area, unless someone else guided. There were restaurants and museums and other things that were at least friendly to my language, and I didn't have issues with getting around.

I went to get a haircut, and walked into a tandem building. The other half sold cell phones and accessories, not for a particular carrier but a sort of low-cost aggregator reseller. The hair cut side was one I had been to before, but when I opened the door, the room was empty. It was now just a long living room type hall, with wood-plank floors and empty windows. A few were boarded over with tacky plywood to keep out prying eyes. It felt freshly vacated, like they just stripped it down that morning. But the hair on my next tingled, because it felt like people had just fled the room, and someone could still be watching me. I checked the front again, and the sign was illuminated. I walked to the back, and opened the back door to an empty dirt lot with a few tiny weeds. Cars parked next door for the cell store. The nagging feeling of people watching still sat on me, so I walked around the outside back to the main street and headed towards the bookstore. Some stores were changed or closed, but most looked the same. Less people though, and I sprinted to the coffee shop, worried about what I would find.

A Train Ride

My arrived at the south air field. Furthest from the hangers. Our group wasn't set to begin work in the waterfront glass building until 7pm that evening, so I had several hours to kill. I walked part of the air field with my boss, though he had to take care of other things so I decided to go sightseeing. So I walked back south to exit the field and hopped on a train.

Let me rephrase that, I and some others jumped on TOP of the train. It was a long freight and commuter train traveling around the edge of the bay. It seemed like the map of the area was a modified version of the San Francisco bay area crossed with Tokyo. It was a circular body of water in the middle with city ringing the outside. The air field was at the south portion of the water and reminded me of Moffet AFB, and I took the train around the east side headed north. Riding on top of the train with some others I didn't know was strange, but scenic. I had a camera with me, and as it got later in the afternoon the clouds turned wonderful red and orange shades with blue behind them.

As we passed the northeast corner of the city, I suddenly panicked. I knew I had just over two hours to get back to the air field, and there were lots of subway lines that ran from the north back to the south. But now I realized I needed the train to stop somewhere to drop me off for a transfer. I was going to jump off at 4th street because I knew there was a station nearby. But after climbing inside the train and talking to the engine driver, he recommended I stay on until we hit a specific transfer bridge, because I could get a faster line there.

Now things became stranger. The bridge was a series of three red-colored wood and brick tunnels. The color of redwoods, with a cream colored trim between bricks. On reaching the entrance, the train lines split, and a car path that had been to the left curved up and stacked above. These tunnels had stopping points for passengers and we stopped to let myself and some others transfer

(I woke up and then switched perspectives)
I was one of the conductors on the train line. Someone needed to get off here in the substations and transfer to take a southbound line. But this was not an area we were suppose to stop. The engine driver made the decision, but didn't clear it with the mages here. They practiced some sort of control magic, and bound golems to work in loading and unloading products. They were strange animal-like automatons. I passed by one of the cages while trying to run up the train to ask the driver. Their hunched forms watched me, bear, gorilla, and wolf shapes with stone skin and flat eyes watched. It was unnerving. I assumed they knew the train stopped, and that it wasn't suppose to. What I feared more was that the mages might be able to use these golems as enforcers, to ensure we kept moving. And as I ran to try and find the driver, hoped he was still alive.