Class began as it did every Monday, with the teacher asking everyone about their weekend, and what they thought about world events. There was only one topic that anyone really wanted to talk about, naturally. The Incursion Events were a serious matter, and the consequences of a breach from the other side into this reality was not something most of the students were aware was even a possibility, it never having happened as long as anyone of them could remember.

The teacher shared some stories from her own memory of the time post-catastrophe, when such events were much more frequent. She tried to end it on an upbeat note, stating that the Ministries had come a long way from those days, which was why there hadn’t been any loss of life in over a decade.

They then shifted into reading time, and in this Ryan really agreed with Derek. Salinger could write, but the character in this story was completely unrelatable to him. Ryan hated him. The class was taking turns reading out loud. Ryan had a bad habit of keeping a book under his desk during such sessions, so he could read something that he enjoyed. He had a system down where he would wait for his turn to read and then tune out, knowing he wouldn’t be called on again for a while.

He was suddenly regretting only grabbing the eBook versions of his book list from the library. He had a thought though and, as sneakily as he could, pulled out his device. He looked up the Sifting app in the store and was surprised to find it was already installed. He glanced up to make sure the teacher wasn’t looking at him and then opened it up. Again, he was surprised to see his eBooks waiting for him as little bouncing book icons near the bottom of the screen.

There was something about his dream that reminded him of a passage he had read the other night that he wanted to read again. He began to scroll through the book until he came across what he was looking for.

What is a dream? A random series of images, that the part of the mind that requires a narrative strings together? Is there something more to them than just the brain’s way of entertaining consciousness while it goes about its task of incorporating experiences from the previous day? There was a theory, touted by the founder of the Minerva Device, that while there are an infinite number of possible realities, based off infinitely incalculable variables of chance and choice, only the one manifests. He posited that our dreams were a way for the other possibilities to be expressed, translated through the symbolism of our collective consciousness, allowing the waveform of those realities to finally collapse.

Some say that dreams can predict the future. If the latter is true, what, then, happens if we can control our dreams? Repeat this mantra to yourself daily: “Our dreams control the future. If we control our dreams, we control the future.”

“What was that, Ryan?” he heard his teacher say. Ryan looked up to find every eye in the classroom on him.

“That is, to uh,” he glanced back down at their place in the story, “to say that if we have unrealistic expectations early on in life, we’re bound to be disappointed when we see the world as it is.”

“Hmm,” the teacher said skeptically. “Ok. For a moment there I thought you might be reading something else under your desk again.” The class let out a chuckle, Derek gave him a “way to go, dude” look. He only turned slightly red, and the teacher moved on. Feeling caught, Ryan put his phone away and did his best to pay attention for the rest of the class.

Ironically, having nothing to occupy him while the class worked its way through the classic tale, his mind began to wander further. How could there have been three Incursion events so close together. Especially ones strong enough that would lead to the death of a Traveler. He thought about his dream, and what he was growing to believe was waiting behind the door to the Janitor’s Closet. Was his dream predicting the future? He dismissed the thought. An Incursion event had not occurred in an outer district for over a decade, and even then, it had never occurred in District 7. Like the person that looked like Lisa in his dream, the door was probably a metaphor for some other part of his psyche. Yes, he told himself, that made much more sense.

***

Inner City was a massive sprawling metropolis, built atop the ruins of a once great city. Skyscrapers of old were mere foundations for the massive buildings piercing the heavens. Hovering vehicles traveled in layers of traffic patterns up into the perpetually grey sky. There were parts of the massive structures that looked newer than the others. Scars of the destructive events of the Crisss, when reality had started to tear itself apart.

Down in the shadowed bottom of the city, where old ground vehicles sat rusted into place from when they had been abandoned centuries ago, there was a rugged gash in the pavement trailing down one of the streets. At the end of the gash slumped a bloody heap of flesh, with mangled and broken fingers the size of city busses cracked and broken beneath it. Atop the mess sat a lone figure, dressed in a black suit that cling tightly to a lithe feminine form. She was wiping clean the silver blade of a katana, a fierce unwavering focus in her eyes, and her long black hair, pulled into a tight ponytail, swayed back and forth as she worked.

“That is the last of them, Mae,” came a staticky voice from inside her earpiece. “The rest of the Unit is waiting for you back at the Incursion Site.” The woman sighed, stood up, and sheathed her sword. She knew a cleanup crew would be along shortly to deal with the remains, so she hopped down and started dashing back towards the astral tear. It was several blocks away, but the suit she wore, made of smart nano-weave tech, was able to enhance her strength and speed, so it only took her a few minutes to get there.

She rounded the final corner and there it was, a large distortion in the sky above the street, sending out peals of white-blue light in erratic bursts as it emitted a screeching sound like metal grinding against concrete. It looked like a piece of glass had cracked the fabric of reality, with jagged splinters reaching out from the epicenter. There was a shift in her posture as she noticed the splinters growing longer. Underneath she saw the other two in her unit waiting, staring up at the chaotic hole in reality. One was a tall muscular man, with short brown hair. The other was a redheaded woman, with a similar stature to Mae, if a bit rounder in certain places. She, too, had her hair tied up in a ponytail. They both wore the same black nano-weave suits as Mae.

“Tristan! Sarah! What are you two waiting for?” She half shouted over the grinding and screeching sound coming from the tear. “You should already be in your suspension chambers. We need to get that tear closed before any more anomalies make it through, or worse.”

“Worse is right,” came the voice from their earpieces. “We’re estimating roughly thirty minutes until we have a full-on Astral Burst.”

“That could level this entire block,” Sarah said. “I think these are load bearing for the upper city too.”

“We can speculate later,” Tristan said. “Mae is right, we need to get in there and repair the node.” He turned towards the vehicle parked at the side of the street. It looked like a silver pill; an elongated featureless cylinder that hovered a few feet off the ground. As he approached, a section on the side of the vehicle appeared and he climbed inside. Sarah followed with Mae close behind.

The moment she was through the entrance the door phased back into existence and the cacophony outside was immediately silenced. Inside was a white, cozy space, with five reclining couches. They looked plush and comfortable. Each of them took their seats, leaning back, and the lights began to dim.

“No time to do this unassisted,” Mae said. The other two nodded, and they tapped a pad on the armrests of their chairs. A compartment opened to reveal a small bottle with a dropper cap. Mae suppressed a grimace at the thought of the bitter chemical inside, but she didn’t hesitate. Along with the others she extracted the contents of the bottle and put a drop of the liquid on her tongue. She quickly put the dropper back in the bottle and returned it to the compartment.

The world began to lose its distinctiveness, she felt a pressure on her chest along with the urge to fall into a thousand dreams. Long practice helped her suppress that urge, and she began the process of focusing on forming her Astral Body. This was essential to being able to affect anything on the other side. The more time spent over there, the more detailed a body one required. Now, floating above her unconscious form, rose a robed figure, hair loose and floating as if under water, with sporadic shimmers of electricity flowing through the follicles intermittently.

She focused on the tether between her Astral and True Body, enhancing it through a force of will. She turned to see the other two were ready and waiting. Tristan’s form glowed like a cinder, while Sarah’s emanated a warm revitalizing aura. They looked up, rose through the vehicle and, one by one, entered the astral fissure.

***

“It was only for a brief time, and I couldn’t go far, but it was one of the most amazing and strange experiences of my life.” Ryan finished his tale of the previous night. Lisa and Derek had listened with rapt attention to the story of his first out-of-body experience. The looks on his two friends’ faces clearly juxtaposed the differences in their reactions. Derek’s was the look of his usual skepticism, while Lisa’s was harder to pin down. Complicated at least. They were hanging out in the cafeteria where they were grabbing a snack for the mid-morning break. Derek held an unpeeled banana while Lisa had gorged herself on a blueberry muffin, making it halfway through before the subject of Ryan’s story got her attention.

“Are you sure it wasn’t just another lucid dream?” Derek asked.

“Pretty sure,” Ryan said, contemplating the look on Lisa’s face for another moment before turning back to Derek. “It’s hard to describe. You know how dreams have a certain feel to them. Even Lucid dreams have that same feel. Being out of my body felt like being awake but disconnected from physicality. When I was back in my body it didn’t feel like waking up. It was as if I was already awake through the whole experience. I’m not sure why I couldn’t go more than a few feet from my body though. That tugging sensation on my belly got stronger the further away I got.”

“It’s the Soul Tether,” Lisa said. “It’s what keeps your body and soul connected during projection. If it isn’t enhanced, an unconsciously formed limit will be placed to protect that connection.” She looked a little disheartened as she shared her knowledge.

“This must really grate at you, huh Lisa. You’ve been trying this for years and Ryan pulls it off in a few days?” Derek intended his words to come across as playful teasing, but the jab hit a little too close to home, and both the boys knew it immediately.

“I think I can share the eBook with you through the Sifting App, if you want Lisa?” Ryan said, trying to mediate the damage.

“Sorry Lis,” Derek said. “I didn’t mean it the way it came out.”

Lisa let out a frustrated sigh but put a smile back on her face. “Sure Ryan, I’ll take a look. And you’re a jerk Derek Peterson.” She punched him on the arm, a little harder than usual. He started rubbing at it immediately after, though without protesting his punishment.

“Even though I might not be speaking from experience,” she went on, giving Derek another seething look while directing her words towards Ryan. “I believe what you want to do next time is focus on developing your ‘Astral Body’ which will help solidify your presence on the other side.”

“I think there's a section on that in my second reading assignment,” Ryan said. “I haven’t really had a chance to delve into that one yet.”

“I could take a look at that one as well if you don’t mind,” Lisa said. “What about the third one on that list?

“As far as I can tell that one is just a bunch of gibberish,” Ryan complained. “I did notice a strange reaction between it and…” Ryan trailed off. He had an inhibition towards telling anyone about the Concentrated Firmament. The stranger’s words to tell no one reverberated in his mind. He didn’t know he came from or why he had given the strange object to Ryan, but he was certain it was important he keep it to himself. “…and the way words look in dreams,” Ryan said, attempting to recover. Lisa gave him another look that he didn’t know how to interpret. Was that suspicion on her face?

“Well,” she said, letting him off the hook for his near blunder. “I can probably help you a bit with densification, if you want.”

“Den—sifi—cation?” Ryan said, testing out the word.

“That’s what it’s called. Astral Densification. Or Stabilization. Or Embodiment. I have a few tricks I could teach you. Maybe come by after school?” Both Ryan and Derek’s eyes widened at the suggestion. A stupid grin crept at the corners of Derek’s mouth while Ryan remained somewhat flabbergasted.

“Uh, sure,” he stammered. “I mean, I can’t,” he looked a little crestfallen. “I have the afterschool thing with Derek.”

“Not a problem,” she said. “You can stop by after that.”

“Yeah, ok then,” he confirmed. “It’s not like my Mom will be waiting for me to get home anyway.”

“That’s not fair,” Lisa chided.

“I know, sorry.”

“That’s not like you,” Derek said. “You usually sound proud about how much your mother works. Everything ok?”

“Yeah, it’s fine. I don’t know where that came from. Maybe I’m feeling a little bit lonely lately. And I’ve been waking up a lot more groggily than usual as well.”

“Quit messing with your sleep cycle so much then, man. And you know you’re not alone.” Derek put a hand on Ryan’s shoulder. “You’ve got us.” Lisa nodded encouragingly. Ryan gave them both a smile, doing his best to hide the tide of emotions that had begun to fester in him recently.