The Lost Boys (Chapter 1) [rough draft]

 The Lost Boys 

One

HIS FATHER YANKED HIM FROM THE STERILE APARTMENT. All three of their dreamer pods were open. A small wisp of mist curling from each one — pure oxygen. They looked like three sterile eggs that were big enough for people to lay down inside. The nursemaids had done such a good job at keeping the apartment clean. The room reeked of cleaner. Had it been years since he’d been out of his dreamer pod? The pods were white, the walls were white, even the personalized hard-drive Atreyu’s father insisted on having, was stark white. 

Atreyu grasped for the white corridor, one of his fingernails snapping from his grip on the wall. “No!” He cried. The quiet hum of computers was left behind as Atreyu was shoved into the white hallway. It looked like the hall of a hospital in the Dreamscape.  

Atreyu’s father ripped his dreamgear helmet from his head and threw it against the wall, leaving a mark. His father never laid his “real” hands on him before. They didn’t spend enough time in Truth for physical contact. No Upperclassmen did. They spent all of their time in the Dreamscape — in their sterile pods. 

Atreyu’s father’s fist landed on his cheek. The pain felt similar to what a punch felt like in the Dreamscape, but the repulsion of human flesh actually touching human flesh made Atreyu hurl before he could consciously recognize the pain. He was on his hands and knees, blemishing the stark tiles with his bile. A red handprint was beginning to form on his cheek. 

“Shamasson!” Atreyu’s mother hissed. To Atreyu’s knowledge, his parents never touched either. Until that moment when Mishella grasped her husband’s wrist before he could pummel Atreyu again! Atreyu, just like his parents before him, were made in birthing pods, similar to dreaming pods, but they stood vertical. Atreyu was made from carefully selected material within his parents’ gene pools. His mother might have held him once or twice when he was released from the birthing pod, but then he would have been placed in a dreaming pod. Touch was not common practice. Shamasson, however, was too angry with rage to care about the anathema of touching. But there was a horrified hesitation that flashed over Mishella’s eyes when she realized she’d saved Atreyu from a second hit — through touch. “You’ll kill him!” Mishella cried. 

“He’s an abomination!” Shamasson thundered. Atreyu scrambled with all he had towards the elevator.

“Let go of me!” Atreyu screamed. Tears were welling in his eyes. The creature, an aye-aye, hissing from his shoulder. The creature was stuck between protecting his soulbond and adhering to his soulbond’s command to not hurt his father. Atreyu didn’t know what the lemur could do, but he’d examined the barbed quills on her tail. 

“Shamasson, he’ll die!” Atreyu’s mother cried. She grasped Shamasson’s other arm. Desperately trying to pull him back. There was a hesitation in Mishella’s strength, from connecting with Shamasson’s skin — Atreyu’s father easily shrugged her off. She fell off balance, landing hard. The Harts didn’t spend much time on their own feet. Their muscles forgot how to move with balance and swift reflexes. All symptoms of spending too much time logged in  

Shamasson was much thicker than Atreyu knew his avatar to be, and it wasn’t muscle. But, the man knew how to throw his weight around. Atreyu was thrown against the wall in the hallway. For a moment his father’s grip left his arm. Atreyu tried to escape. His scrawny body was the complete opposite of his father’s bulk — a perk of the genetics that his parents had chosen for him. The aye-aye stood her ground between Atreyu and his father. She hissed and cackled at the pudgy man, brandishing her tail threateningly. Atreyu could see that the quills, hidden in the fur of her tail, seemed to be lengthening.  

“Get back here boy!” Shamasson snapped. 

Atreyu’s soulbond sent images and influences through their minds. Atreyu noticed it was getting easier for him to understand what the creature wanted. The image of quills sticking out of Shamasson Hart’s face seared into Atreyu’s head. He shook his head. They just needed to get away. <No,> Atreyu thought. 

The hall drew to an end and Atreyu couldn’t get the window open fast enough. He hadn’t even thought about what he was actually going to do once he got the window open. They had to be fifty or more stories from the ground! They were Upperclassmen. Shamasson grabbed Atreyu, this time by the back of his neck. He thought his spine was going to snap. The aye-aye crawled across his loggingsuit like a tree and went to bite Atreyu’s father, but the man used a thick meaty arm to swipe the creature away. “You bonded that filth! Now you must live with the Wildermen. On the ground.” Atreyu could see the tiniest flicker of pain cross Shamasson’s eyes. His father closed his eyes tight as he said, “You are no son of mine.”

“No one can survive down there! The wraiths. Shamasson please!” Atreyu’s mother cried. 

Atreyu was out of breath. He’d never really moved his real body this much. He, like almost all Upperclassmen, spent almost all of their time in the Dreamscape. Their real muscles were only exercised via mechanical hookups, which thankfully Atreyu was able to buy himself. He didn’t want to spend his life in the Dreamscape. Which, judging by his situation, it didn’t appear as if he was going to have to much longer. 

Atreyu was thrown, hard, into the elevator. The suspended box shifted as Shamasson boarded. “We can call a geneticist. There has to be one that can cure this affliction. Shamasson, that’s our son!” Atreyu’s mother begged. Shamasson Hart simply slapped Mishella in the face. It snapped, reverberating in the tiny metal box. She stood in the corner silent, haunched over. Tears pouring from her eyes, staring at Atreyu. She was silently saying her goodbyes. She was not going to overpower Shamasson. There was real fear in her eyes.

Shamasson turned and pinned Atreyu to the wall and pressed the ground level button. Atreyu had never been to the ground level, though he’d dreamt of it. Thanks to his soulbond with the aye-aye, he was able to see her memories of the ground level. 

Closed inside the small space, the aye-aye, whom Atreyu instinctively knew was called Tax, began racing around the space, attempting to gouge out Shamasson’s eyes. Being locked in the small space made the lemur crazy. Even Atreyu’s bond to the creature, begging her not to hurt his father, was not enough to stop Tax. Shamasson caught the creature with a brick-sized fist. The aye-aye squealed and landed limply on the floor. Atreyu gasped in pain. He could feel what Tax felt once the pain was transferred through their bond. Shamasson’s attention momentarily diverted, Atreyu bent down and clutched the aye-aye in his arms. He meant to protect her. 

The elevator came to a stop at the ground floor. Shamasson pinned Atreyu at the wall again, this time by his throat. Atreyu could barely breathe. “Anything out there?”

“Shamasson…?” Atreyu’s mother was not eager to go out there. 

“Mishella, is there anything out there!?”

Atreyu was gasping for breath, but there was no use in struggling. He watched his mother slowly peek out the elevator. The doorway opened into the street. There was concrete on the ground in black, and it glittered in the sun from all of the other stones mixed in. Atreyu had never seen something real that was so beautiful. He didn’t know something so pretty could exist in Truth. He yearned for the explosion of color that he could see through the doorway. 

There was a building on the opposite side of the concrete pathway. This building was nothing like Atreyu’s. Where Atreyu’s building was all silver on the outside and white on the inside. The building across the path was made from bright red bricks. Tiny green plants exploded from cracks in the wall. Color oozed off of everything. Whoever told him that color was bleak in Truth was a liar. 

“There — there’s nothing there.” Mishella said. 

Shamasson wasted no time. He tossed Atreyu out into the street. He landed on the pavement, ripping a hole in the knee of his loggingsuit. The palms of his hands scraped bloody. “Nooooooooo!” Mishella wailed. Shamasson grabbed her by the arm and yanked her back into the elevator. Before the elevator door closed, Atreyu was impelled to breathe in. So he did. 

He always thought it most strange when he felt “controlled” by Tax via their link. He assumed he could do the same to her, though he hadn’t figured out how yet. But he appeased the creature and breathed in — with intent. He was suddenly aware of all the plant life around him. There were plants sitting on Underclass windowsills, there were weeds pressing through cracks in the pavement. Each plant that he breathed from, seemed to pause, motionless in time, waiting for him to do whatever it was that he was going to do with their power. Somehow, he knew that he was borrowing power from them. 

Tax encouraged him through their link. The aether he’d absorbed roiled in him like the churning of a windstorm. He had never done anything like this before. Was this the “superstition” of Wildermen that Uppers always talked about? His eyes were glowing white — and white-feathered wings sprout from his shoulder blades. He felt nothing but power.

Tax lent Atreyu an impression of the elevator door. Atreyu didn’t fully understand what she meant. She lent him a vision of someone exhaling. So Atreyu exhaled. His cheeks quickly expanded and a blast of spherical energy exploded from his throat and bust into the elevator door. He looked, wide-eyed, at the metal elevator door that was curled in on itself from the force. 

His eyes returned to normal. His wings dissipated into a cloud of feathers that quickly deteriorated into aether. 

Atreyu fell to his knees, weak, and sat there for a moment. The sky was blue and he didn’t know that the sun could be so bright in Truth. He could feel the bulge of a swollen black eye forming. He’d never received a black eye in Truth, though he’d felt the pain before. In the Dreamscape he would be able to pay for a repair to his avatar. Here, in Truth, he’d need to heal the old-fashioned way. He couldn’t even remember the last time he had to heal anything. 

His hands were flat against the ground, his knees digging into the concrete of the street where he lay. He practically had his cheek touching blacktop, when he realized that he was on the ground level. He’d made it! And then the creeping fear of wyrms and Wilderman forced him to his feet.

The ground was not a safe place. He needed to get off the street. Around him the skyscrapers of Upperclass and Underclass apartments rose into the clouds. <The sun is so bright!> The winding walkways and train tracks were a mess of chaos. Atreyu could never imagine getting anywhere by using the trams that shuttled Underclassmen around. In Dreamscape there were thousands of ways to get around, but fast travel was best — teleporting to places he’d been. Here, the poor Underclassmen had to walk or take the slow moving trams with hundreds of other people all stuffed into small spaces — touching. Most of them were nursemaids or factory workers that kept the Dreamscape running and Upperclassmen alive. 

Atreyu went to another close building and tried to gain entry, but his fingerprint didn’t hail the elevator. He tried another building with the same result. He was a sitting duck out here in the open. He noticed an ATM hanging like a nose on the side of a building. It looked just like an ATM in Dream. He walked up to the machine and placed his finger on the touchpad — and it too, denied him entry. His father had already updated the accesses. He didn’t have access to his family’s “likes”. He wasn’t even sure if likes could be used at currency in Truth.

Tears were welling in his eyes as he started to feel very alone. Tax attempted to send consoling encouragement through their bond, but Atreyu snapped the connection closed. He’d learned that he could do that, invite her in or lock her out. It mostly just took concentration. But when he did this, keeping her out — she felt so far, disconnected. And it caused him to feel even lonelier. 

Just then he heard the rumble of a car. He’d never heard a real car before. But he knew that if someone had a personal car — they had currency. The man was very pudgy with no visible neck and jowls that hung around his adam’s apple. With the window rolled down, the man tried to lean his face towards the opening, “You okay son?”