I still can't believe that this was a dream! It's one of the most amazing things I've ever dreamt of. Let's start with the notion that before the scenes I'm going to describe, I dreamt of humans living with robots.
Falling from the night sky
Image taken from Pixabay
It was night and there were storm clouds all over the sky. People were falling all over from the sky. I was watching from next to a building, where an oldish woman was falling near me. She had painted her grey hairs with blond and was wearing a worn out outfit that didn't fit her age.
A fat man a bit further away started falling toward the sky. He was how you'd imagine the typical geek man with acne, glasses and black hair. He was screaming and I was a bit panicky because it's not like the sky has a ground. Would he be thrown into the outer space?
I looked up (I was looking at him from above) and saw that in the clouds, there were green holes (the colour was like radioactive green). These holes had straight borders as if they had been carved sloppily with a knife. The fat man deviated from his way to the clouds and went into a green hole.
I reasoned out that since there was a woman falling to the ground from the sky and a fat man falling to the sky from the ground, that the sky was taking normal people to other dimensions where they would train and become better, and probably get superpowers, and then they would come back to the Earth to help humanity in such hard times.
The panthers
Image taken from Pixabay
I looked down again and saw that there was no ground. Instead, there were green clouds and eyes everywhere looking up toward the Earth. They were many colossal panthers and they seemed to be interested in what was happening here. But when the fat man had crossed the hole into the other plane, the panthers started to turn and fly away.
That's when I noticed that they were detached faces. They were like 2-dimensional as if the faces had been painted on aluminium sheets. On the back part, there was nothing painted and it was a reflective surface that shone with the bright green of their surroundings.
The plane they were in was like a nebula. They were flying away from the Earth and toward their world. I looked deeper into it and saw that there were some full panthers too that were turning away and walking on an invisible surface on those green clouds. They turned and left like enormous cats. I deduced that they were superior forms of the face-only panthers, especially because for each full panther, there were many, many face-only panthers flying away too.
I immersed myself in their world and was then standing, without a presence, in a room where there were two humanoid panthers immersed in what they were doing at an operating table. They were in a lab where the walls were covered with trinkets and tools. There was a desk behind me. To my left, there was an inner door, and to my right an outer door. In the middle, there was a table with a robotic head.
Robotic is not the best way to describe it. It was robotic because it belonged to a robot, but the face was long and had some exaggerated features that reminded me of the face of Billy the Puppet in the Jigsaw movies (the classical white one with red spirally cheeks, dark lips and big black eyes).
It was slightly humanoid. Attached below the face was what I took to be a metallic vertebral column with many cables attached.
The standing panthers were carefully moving cables around, attaching some and putting others in order, some below other cables, others in certain circular shapes below the head, very calmly and professionally.
Then, the door opened and an individual came in that I cannot describe. I have the slight memory of tentacles falling from his face, but I can't remember what he looked like except that he was bipedal and was clearly more powerful than the panthers. The panthers looked at him nervously and he spoke:
"What are you doing?"
They nervously squirmed, looked at the head on the table and at him, and finally decided to answer calmly as if they were completely justified. I can't remember their words, but they basically said that they were making a robot. Then, the individual that had entered showed his disappointment and, with a grave voice, he started to scold them.
I can't remember exactly what he said, but the gist of it is that he told them that if they did build the robots, humans would be too equal. The panther-built robot would help humans rise from their lowly, mundane lives and would be equal to the panthers in standing. The panthers looked at the individual with regret, as if they had done something bad, and simply put a body bag under the robotic head and started to close the zip.
They were closing it down instead of up. When they were reaching the middle part of the spine, the bigger one of the panthers, the one who seemed to be the leader, started to do something with the cables. At first, he joined a few of them, and then he started to attach a bigger cable. Everyone looked nervous and the individual that had entered asked him with surprise "What are you doing!?".
The panther didn't pay any attention and simply continued doing what he was doing, swiftly but apparently calm, and when he finished, he did something that attached the cables to himself. Then, a screen to the bottom of the table turned on. The face of the robot on the screen started to mutate until it was that of the panther. It was not a panther-like face, maybe a mixture of human and panther, with a small nose, but without black hair over the face, having skin instead (he was not white but mestizo instead, like Hispanic people are most of the time). His eyes were yellow with black feline pupils.
The face moved and looked toward the people standing in the room and he started speaking. I cannot remember what he was saying at all, not even the essence of the message. However, it was clear that this was his last desperate effort to show the individual that they as panthers were also individuals, that they were people and that their efforts had value. This was his last act of rebellion, and one of humanisation (or individualisation since they were not humans).
Then, I looked at the panther where he was standing, but instead of eager or energetic, he was very down, his head slumped, and trembling and twitching. I saw that the problem was that he had plugged himself into an incomplete robot that still had many faults and leaks. The energy and the conscience could not be contained and it was very unstable. The man was getting weaker by the second until he had to find support in the table to keep standing. He slowly walked very weakly toward the other side of the room, away from me, and finally fell sitting on the floor with his back away from me, resting against the wall.
I looked at the screen and saw that the previously graceful face was now dirty and meagre. Horizontal lines started to appear, like scars or grill-like wounds, all parallel and close to each other. I reckoned that the tentacled individual was their master, and when the panthers were wounded, he would heal them and make them as if they were new again, but their minds had the memory of their state before and this was the "more real" them, to themselves. And in this moment of instability, he could not help but revert back to his wounded being in his mind. His presence on the screen was being distorted to his more intimate perception of himself.
He shouted, almost madly "I have cheese marks!", as if that were the name of those marks (a pretty strange name for them if you ask me). So I looked at the real him, and he had a mad expression on his face as if he had finally lost all sanity. He was smiling. His eyes started turning red slowly until they were so darkly red that they reminded me of blood, and then this blood that was his eyes started dripping down like very dark-blood tears.
I woke up soon after and can't remember anything else, but I found it tragic that these panthers wanted to be individualistic and were hampered by the tentacled individuals to live in servitude behind the argument that they were still, and because of their rules, superior and in a better state than they would be if they explored the limits of their research and technology and made robots to help other races in weaker states.
I found it funny because I had dreamt before of humans living with robots, which meant that some panthers at least succeeded in creating them. It was like a spoiler or a flashforward, or maybe this was the flashback. It was very epic nonetheless. I hope you enjoyed my crazy dream at least half as much as I did. I loved it with all my soul, and if I can, I'll try to write stories about this world.