“I don’t remember this…” She scanned the whole dream in reverse, to the point of meeting Clay in the CogniCorp building where her mom used to work in real life. In this dream, it was their first day, and orientation was getting very dull. Though there was no audio, tiny bits of information were knowingly revealed as she watched, and yet- “I don’t remember this at all.”

“No? Memory’s funny like that, I guess.” He pressed the button again and closed his eyes, “hang on, I’ll have to channel the other last time I saw you.”

“So this isn’t our first dream together? Well, I mean with you, as Clay.”

“Gee, you’re quicker than I thought. But let’s talk about it later.” His finger released and the faint chorus of bells once again echoed throughout the small cockpit, followed by a loud thwomp. The screen now showed a moon-sized Earth at day, then zoomed all the way down to the golden peaks of the Ozark mountains, central USA, mid-autumn. 
 
Here was the house where she was raised, crowded in on a tall hill with countless other Florida implants following the great marsh floods. Seeing it brought a rush of emotions, nearly drowning Amy in waves of childhood nostalgia. A tiny picket fence surrounded a tiny house the size of a single room; from what she remembered, these houses went several floors down to make up for space lost to modern times. After her mom passed, dad sold the place and moved them further inland, where it was cooler and plenty more opportunities to grow. 

“Before we go in,” said Clay, pushing another button. “A bit of invisibility. Don’t want to freak our past selves out.” 

The cheesiest hisssss came from the round door opening at the cockpit’s rear, which could have been audibly matched, at random, to any of the worst classical sci-fi shows; she stood and faced it, wondering how the new Bobidunk turned out to be such a huge nerd. He promptly answered “Because you are,” and her eyes rolled so hard she almost woke up. 

Gravity was a bit different in the ship, so that Amy could walk straight out the door into the top-down view of her childhood home (just as zoomed-in as it was on the screen.) Clay shot out in full superman pose, not quite acing the landing unless he was aiming for the neighbor’s rose bush.   

With a more delicate approach, little clouds formed beneath her shoes as she stepped boldly into the air– Ah screw it, she thought, and leapt into a flying pose of her own. After some exhilarating acrobatic flips and twists, her feet touched delicately on the fluffy lawn near the front door as Clay scrambled over the fence, bloody and bruised. 

“I forgot to shield before crashing,” he whined, and quickly patched himself up by a hand’s healing swipe. “Ah, I remember this place. You used to dream about it a lot.”

“Yeah, I did. So, are we really here? Like are we visiting the real past, or is this just another dream?”

“Beats me, I’ve never actually done it before. But it’s possible, I was able to cross over to your physical realm before, as Bobi– as the other me, if that’s what you mean by real.”

Amy stepped up to a window and peeked in; the kitchen was always the first floor in these mountain stackhouses, hers was hauntingly empty. Her parents were wonderful cooks and at least one could be found bustling about the top floor at any given time. If this was truly the day her mom died, then they’d all be a few flights down, in her parent’s bedroom, awaiting the worst. 

They met at the door and entered directly into the kitchen. Even Clay seemed to be wrapped up in sweet nostalgia, going straight to the fridge as Bobidunk used to when he visited late at night. He slumped back with news that it was practically empty.

In stackhouses, each square room connected by way of a square staircase in the far left-hand corner that should have creaked as they descended, perhaps the invisibility button masked their mass as well. Below the kitchen was the main bathroom, then a cozy living room with three chairs and a fireplace where a young Amy used to lay and draw pictures of her wild adventures with Bobidunk. Next down was Amy’s bedroom. She kept going as quickly as possible and didn’t want to look at anything. 

In her parent’s bedroom, they were met with the scene she spent years trying to forget: a young but ragged-looking version of her dad sobbing by the bed, her mom in that bed, deathly gaunt and muttering utter nonsense, unable to lower her right hand frozen in a finger snap.  It had been that way for at least twelve hours by now, judging by the time holo-projected from the nightstand. Amy could only guess the agony this might cause, and whether or not her mom constantly felt it until she passed; the thought haunted her for years to come. Ah, and then there was a pre-pubescent Amy standing awkwardly by the faux window, so sad even her pimples were crying, though perhaps mainly from embarrassment.

“Oh Amy, you shouldn’t be so hard on yourself,” Clay whispered. “I’m sure I told you that lots of times back then.”

“Huh? I didn’t say anything. Why are we whispering?”
 
“For dramatic effect.”

No one else in the room responded to their audible presence, so Amy said aloud, “I think we arrived just before mom passed. Look, she’s starting to foam at the mouth.” 

“Oh man, I’m so sorry. What turned out to be wrong with her? I remember the doctors couldn’t say, and then… well, I never saw you again until I was Clay.”

As the guilt piled on, Amy tried her best to remember what she learned about her mom’s lethal disorder, but it was all just out of mind’s reach. Her dream-mind was always doing silly things like that, even when lucid. What she could recall is that she always felt a bit responsible, but never able to pin down why. Maybe if she hadn’t been so busy hiding her face, she could have noticed the signs early enough to help. 

“Hey, what’s she saying?” Clay asked, and crept in around Amy’s dad for a better listen. “CogniCorp… rainbow dressing… the end of tomorrow… 04..20..85…”

Amy scoffed. “CogniCorp makes sense, she worked there. Was one of the first to receive a CogniChip, actually. But the rest is utter nonsense, right?” She stepped over to her younger self by the window and touched her own shoulder, struck by a sudden memory of this very moment, having her shoulder touched that day. Back then, she thought her grandmother had done it, visiting their grieving family in spirit. “Wait, so this has to be real. I think I just proved it.”

“Oh, nice!”

But something was wrong. A few things, in fact. Like the sheets. Her parents adored the Professor Zero show, their bedroom was practically a nerd-altar to it. Here there were only a few posters on the wall, and that hideous lamp made to look like Professor Zero’s purple time machine, the VERITIS; but where were his big goofy head and delightfully corny catch phrases holo-printed all over the sheets? These covering her failing mother were just way too plain, a word that could never be used to describe either of her parents.

“We’re in a dream then,” she said, deflated. “Dang, I really hoped we could go to the real past.”

“There’s that word again. What exactly is ‘real’?”

“Well you know, like when I’m awake,” she said, “when things really matter.” Clay politely informed her of how dreamist that sounded and she figured, correctly, that he meant something like ‘sexist’, which may have set her off, just a bit. “Excuse me? Who do you think you are? You disappeared for a huge chunk of my life, ya know, right when things got hard!” The lights flickered and the house shook, the angrier she became. “I mean, what do you even do? You get to go off on all these fun, awesome adventures, and yeah I can come too, I guess… but don’t talk to ME about what’s real until you spend a day- a day!- out there, in the real world, in pain. You know, I would love to see you try and hold down a job.”

They were too far underground to hear crickets, but her mom’s incoherent babbling was enough to break the awkward silence. Clay blinked slowly and after a reflective moment said,

“Ok, I can see you are angry…” And when Amy refused to say more, he rather bravely continued, “Now, I know emotions in dreams can get real intense…”