[03] Space Battles!

[Alexander Trafford]

Have you ever had a dream that was so real that you thought it impossible that it was not? Like one of those half-awake, half-asleep realities where you control the plot as it unfolds – almost as if you were playing as yourself in a first-person video game. Well, what if you never woke up? Or what if you finally did wake up, but your reality was not as you remembered it? What if you kept waking up in new and newer realities? Would you be able to tell which was real, and which was a dream?

These thoughts were kept internal, but they so desperately craved to be given a voice. Trafford had been trapped in two alternate realities in almost as many months; and the time between had been spent reuniting with his dead ex-girlfriend. Nothing seemed any more real than what it proceeded.

He wanted nothing more than to reach across the countertop, wrap his long, bony fingers around the barkeep’s throat and then scream into his plastered, mechanical smile until he was blue in the face and out of breath. Though, such an effort would be fruitless; this simple man could not answer his compounding series of questions. He was not real. Well, he was not real in the sense that Alexander was real. The barkeep was little more than a program – a series of code that existed in the depths of some computer that was operated by some over-manipulative bastard.

The lone, overarching question remained perched atop his mind: what is real?

The stool certainly felt real enough; it was stiff and uncomfortable against his scrawny backside. As he shifted his weight and leaned forward his body became hunched over the wooden countertop in such a way that he came to resemble an old, brooding vulture: his shoulders were rounded and his neck was craned forward. His left hand supported the weight of his extended head (his chin sat atop an opened palm), while its counterpart swirled a glass of warm bourbon.

“What is your name?” A polite yet mechanical voice questioned him. Alex lifted his gaze from his glass and set his stare upon the barkeep. The program, or robot, or . . . whatever he was looked relatively normal, and yet he was undeniably creepy. His eyes were wide-open, and he had not yet blinked, not even once. The glowing, blue orbs that rested on either side of his nose were matched in oddity only by his enormous, gaping smile.

“Hmmm,” Alexander smirked and tilted his gaze back towards his drink. If this was not reality, than he was not necessarily himself, right?

“I’m, uh, George Jetson.”

“No you are not.” The robot retorted immediately, and that damned peculiar smile never left his face. He literally talked while simultaneously maintaining the most open-toothed grin that Trafford had ever seen. It was unnerving.

“Why yes, I am.” The young psychokinetic insisted.

“No you are not.”

“What, you don’t believe me?”

“No I do not.”

Trafford paused for a moment and looked over the barkeep one more time, just to be sure that it was not actually a real person. Staring back at him was the same gaping smile as before; an otherworldly grin plastered across the face of a motionless, perfectly-postured body. Nope, he thought to himself, there was no way this mother fucker was real.

“Why?” He continued the exchange after a short pause.

“George Jetson is not real. You are real.”

“Am I now?” Alexander responded through a chuckle. He lifted his chin from his palm and leaned back into an erect position, his interest piqued. After a moment he decided to bypass the stool altogether, sliding from the four-legged seat and into a standing position as he emptied his glass of bourbon. Trafford rubbed his eyes and withdrew a single cigarette; all the while he continued to slowly shake his head and chuckle.

“I’ll leave you with this thought,” he continued as a swirling mass of purple and pink energy opened behind him, “Right now, here, at this bar, who is more real, you, me or George Jetson?”

Ace Trafford chuckled for a moment and then stepped towards the portal, looking back over his shoulder at the peculiar barkeep before being sucked into god-only-knows-where.

What is real? The thought kept coming back to him, but, he figured, there was no point in trying to discern what was reality and what was not as long as he was stuck here – this would have to serve as some sort of ‘reality.’

At that moment, as his body was broken down into nothingness only to be rebuilt in an alternate location, one of the few things that he actually remembered from private school leapt to the forefront of his thoughts. It was a quote, he recalled, a quote from Edgar Allen Poe:

“All that we see or seem, is but a dream within a dream.”

How appropriate it was.

~~~*~~~

“Pilots, make ready!” The commanding voice barely rose above the screeching alarms that shocked Alex into his new reality. As he peeled himself from the floor he eyed a line of men and women, who were all roughly the same size as he, dashing towards and then standing upon a single white line. They were all wearing the same black uniforms that were adorned with foreign symbols. He did not want to be the one to tell them, but they looked damn ridiculous. An entirely black outfit complimented by oversized gloves and boots of the same color, had they no sense of style or showmanship? And was that, no it couldn’t be . . . or could it? Trafford peered closer and confirmed that it was indeed a large metallic box that was strapped to the middle of their chests. The container was fitted with a series of buttons and switches, and from the its top came two thick, long tubes that connected to an equally ridiculous, and massive, helmet.

“Put your damned helmet on and get into line coffin jockey!” Another man, presumably a soldier, adorned in grey military attire that was similar to the commander’s shouted from behind Trafford and nudged his boot against the ‘coffin jockey’s’ lower back.

“What?” Alex muttered through a pain-induced groan, but only as his body bucked forward from the impact did he realize the significance of his new reality.

“Oh . . .” he whispered in revelation.

Ironically enough, he was adorned in the same ridiculously hideous uniform that he had just criticized. He even had the damned headpiece; it had been resting beside him the whole time.

Slowly, he pulled himself up from the ground and, after snatching his helmet, slowly moved forward and took his place on the white line. He thought he saw one, or maybe two, of the other pilots steal a glance in his direction as he pulled the helmet over his long, disheveled hair. Perhaps he would, once again, have a partner in whatever ridiculous situation this new reality bestowed upon him.

“. . . and their attack is imminent. I repeat: we are at a Stage One Alert. Prepare for battle.”

The words ‘attack’ ‘alert’ and ‘battle’ caught his attention and brought him back into focus. He shook his head for a moment in an attempt to grasp what he had just heard, but only succeeded in loosening his already far-too-large helmet.

“Whoa, wait . . . what?” Trafford questioned and was immediately taken aback by the sound of his voice. It was a combination of a digitalized computer voice and a slow wheezing. Regardless, this damned helmet was not kind to the possibility of conversation – although, if they were indeed heading for a battle, he doubted he would be conversing very much with anyone.

“Get to your ship pilot!” The same soldier who had kicked him earlier silenced Alex’s question with a loud, overbearing command. He pressed his hand against the small of Trafford’s back and shoved him towards an available vessel.

Trafford stumbled forward a bit further than he had anticipated, partially due to being pulled forward by his massive helmet, but eventually he caught his balance.

“Holy shit,” Trafford whispered, “I get to fly one of those?”

Alex continued to move towards his assigned ship, but his strut was quite slow; the young ‘pilot’ was far too busy staring at the machine that he seemed destined to control. In front of him stood a small, yet dangerous-looking fighter jet that was quite simple in its construction: it was a spherical pilot’s cabin, just large enough to fit one man, which was attached to two planar, almost-reflective wings that sat vertically on either side of the ship’s central orb.

And the best part, Trafford quickly noticed, it had fairly large cannons.

As a child he had always dreamed of being a pilot. His mother had told him that such hopes were foolish, and his father had told him that he would not be allowed to stray from ‘their plan.’ He had always wondered what ‘their plan’ for him was, because they certainly never revealed it and he had run away after they ‘volunteered’ him for the Omni Corporation’s energy experiments. Regardless of their wishes, Trafford had spent years secretly storing away his lunch money and his allowance and had slowly accrued a reasonably impressive collection of air force magazines, and posters, and books about everything from airplane models to fighter jets utilized in modern combat to biographies of pilots. One day, his father found his collection and burnt all of it.

“This is going to be a fuckin’ riot,” Alex muttered through a wide smile. This was his chance to live his childhood dream.