Dreamers 3

I was lead to a room, but this time there was a deep red carpet with dark wood lining deep green velvet couches. It was dimly lit rather than the fierce fluorescent light I was intimidated by when I woke up. There were a strange mix of people all sitting around with laptops. By the looks of it, they were programming, judging by the black screens and bright green writing. Some were thin and nerdy with big glasses, some were box-faced and some were more pretty than I’d ever seen before. My thoughts were interrupted by Fornax. “These people are all like you Alya! They are what we call Dreamers. You can all see into the future, and as you know, that future is grim. But it’s not your world you’re dreaming about. It is a parallel one. One just like yours, but years in the past. That parallel is yours, but before the revolution, and it’s headed for a grim end. You see, as parallel worlds are possible, so is time travel. Some unknown movement is what’s going to trigger the end. If the parallel world gets destroyed, we go down with it. Our world will collapse! If our past dies, so do we. Understood?” Fornax was explaining this like he was giving me orders, commanding me to help. Of course, however bad my world was, I didn’t want to die. But I wasn’t going to give in just yet. I didn’t have enough information. I had always been a logical person, and this wasn’t at all logical. This was madness! A parallel world! Ha! This guy must be sick in the head.
“Why should I help?” I argued. “You look like you have plenty of people here. I’d rather have nothing to do with you lot and go back to the sewer, as grim as that sounds,”
“We need you because you are strong and powerful. As you got older, your visions became more clear, yes? For the others their visions stayed the same. You are special, and the fact is, we need 13 people. And you were exactly what we needed. We have the technology to find Dreamers, and wait until they’re old enough, usually 14 to 16. We bring them here to work on the Eifell Project. Aka, saving the world.”
“So, how do we save it?” I asked, curiously. I was beginning to trust Fornax a little more than before. If these kids had made the judgement to stay, maybe it wasn’t such a bad place after all.
“Come, I’ll show you!” Fornax said, His excitement growing. I think my slight trust in him was showing through. He led me through a hallway, this time with carpet the same colour as the couches in the room that Fornax had muttered about being the common room. There were marble statues lining the walls again, as well as various portraits of people I didn’t recognize. The walls were dark wood panels. They seemed to like elegance here, wherever I was. I dared to ask, “So where are we? Are we still in Paris?”
“No, we are in Limbo between our world and the parallel one, but don’t worry, the technology here doesn’t glitch. You’re... You’re perfectly safe.” That was the way adults stammered when you asked a question and they didn’t know the answer, or didn’t want to upset you. I remember a story about a ship they said was unsinkable, and it sunk. I think it was called the Titanic, and it’s probably a similar story here. Especially now, our technology is glitchy. All the reliable technology was lost after the revolution. Even the documents about them were destroyed, so we had to do our best from the few expert’s left memories to recreate the past technology.  We reached a elaborately patterned bookcase, and Fornax took a book supposedly on history, but as he opened it, he punched some numbers into what looked like a passcode mechanism, and as he pressed a green button, the bookcase made a pneumatic noise and pulled back from the wall to reveal another bright, blinding fluorescent room. There could have been little flashing lights every colour of the rainbow, which looked like an old fashioned computer server that we had learnt about at school, one of the things that we managed to save after the revolution and build on. At the back of the room there was a silver dome, and they were all into pneumatics. The door looked pressure powered with a big red button to open it. That button was beckoning me to press it. No! I couldn’t let my childish impulses overcome me! This was serious.
“See that silver dome Alya?” How could I not? I thought “That’s the transporter. We have one in Paris, right near the feast, only you couldn’t see it because they all have invisibility filters so any old person can’t come and transport themselves into Limbo. You see, when you travel between worlds, there is an inbetween dimension you have to go to to get to other worlds, so we have one in Paris, one here in Limbo and another one in The Metropolis, the parallel world. The movement is hiding somewhere in the Metropolis.” Fornax explained. I was lost for words. Not because this was amazing, well, it was, but I had had too much information for one day. Parallel worlds, secret movements planning to destroy the world, this was blowing my mind.