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When the Troll first appeared in my mind’s eye, I thought it was a dream.
This seemed a logical conclusion because I was asleep. Of course, logic and dreams don’t necessarily mesh. A dream world has its own rules, and logic is rarely a part of it.
Typically my dreams are very dreamlike, and by that I mean not very realistic. For example, a woman will be riding an elephant, and then I’ll be naked, and she’ll start chasing me, and although I can barely move my feet, she can’t catch me – that sort of thing. But this seemed so genuine.
A Troll – what the hell?
But before the Troll appeared, there was darkness: a black hole, a door slammed on solitary confinement. I was effectively blind.
Then light. Just a little illumination, but it grew, as if someone were slowly lifting a dimmer switch. It was a warm, comforting, electrifying glow, like the end of a perfect summer day. I was inside a room: enormous, infinite. It was as vast as space itself. Like space, gravity didn’t apply, so I floated. My body was enveloped by soothing and titillating warmth.
I belong here, I thought.
In time I saw a door float past. Soon many doors materialized. They were all closed, and on the front of each one was a series of numbers, zeroes and ones: 100101, for example – binary code.
As I mulled over their meaning, the Troll appeared. He’d flown out of one of the floating doors, his face etched with a determined scowl.
My brain struggled to make sense of the strange scene when another door appeared. With one enormous hand, the Troll pushed that one open and slipped inside. The door slammed shut, and I could see that sketched just below the frame, in big black numbers, was the code 00101010. Briefly I wondered where that door led, when far in the distance I saw the Troll step through another door. He moved effortlessly out of it and toward another, opened that one and entered. Soon, all around me – near and a great distance away – more doors appeared. There were too many to count. Maybe there were thousands, or perhaps millions. With splendid alacrity, he glided from one door to the next, appeared and then disappeared again. My sense was that the Troll himself had willed them to appear.
I hovered and watched, slack-jawed.
As I watched, the doors changed. The binary code vanished and was replaced with circles, 3-D spheres. These spheres were bisected with both vertical and horizontal axis. There were numbers as well, lots of them, and complex mathematical equations. The numbers seemed to change their denomination depending on how I looked at them. I’d never seen anything like it.
It was beautiful.
The Troll kept flying through the doors, picking up speed, moving like a thought firing through brain synapses. At no point did I consider following him. I’m not even sure if I could have. My role was that of a spectator. He started to move even faster, zipped from one door to the next, became a blur, a shooting star, a flicker of light.
Then the Troll floated through the door that was nearest to me.
“Nice to meet you,” I said. The Troll rubbed his bulky and big chin. He shared a fleeting resemblance to Rodin’s Thinker, muscular, contemplative. “You’re amazingly lifelike for a dream. In fact, all of this,” I waved my hand toward the vast sea of doors, “looks very realistic.”
“This isn’t a dream.”
“What?”
“We’re inside the Internet, the cloud. We’re networked through your neural processor.”
He was right, I realized, I wasn’t dreaming, as I’ve told you. But the weird thing was that I was still asleep, and in my sleeping state, I was having an actual dream at the same time that I spoke with the Troll. With a little effort, I could jump between realities, kind of like using a TV remote controller. And while I jumped between those worlds, it felt like there was a third reality – the real me, let’s call it – perched above it all, observing. It was trippy.
We’re networked through your neural processor?
But that wasn’t possible. Or was it? “How’s that possible?” I asked.
The Troll smiled. He studied my face. One second, two seconds – time shuffled forward. Eventually he said, cryptically, “We’re going to change the world.”
Then the Troll did a backstroke away from where I hovered. He moved lightly and with surprising grace for someone so large. Watching him go was awesome and a little comical. He drifted through a door and everything vanished.
≈≈≈
What’s funny is that I didn’t wake up. Instead, I continued to sleep until the sun shone through my bay window and jolted me awake. Magnus Carlsen rubbed his head against my chin and meowed for his breakfast.
“I’ll get to you in a second, little buddy.”
I sat up in bed. With my fingertips, I rubbed the back of my head, where the neural processor had been installed.
Did that really happen? Had I really been visited by a Troll?
Yeah, I had, I decided.
My next thought was: What the fuck? More thoughts flowed in rapid succession: That was cool. Who is the Troll? How can I find him again?
My head was spinning and I hadn’t even had a first cup of coffee.
Instinctually, I grabbed my iPhone off the bedside table and checked to see if I had any new messages: email, text, voice.
Nada.
I stretched, swung my legs off the bed, slipped my feet into my slippers, found my robe, and walked the few steps to my tiny kitchen. There I brewed a pot of coffee and dished out a plate of tuna fish and a bowl of milk for Magnus. He meowed a thank you before diving in.
I polished off a cup of joe. Questions continued to percolate through my head. But I didn’t have time to fully work my way to any answers, if landing on answers was even a realistic possibility. I mean, a Troll visited me in the middle of the night.
A Troll, really?
Anyway, I’d been tipped off that a group of Orcs had conducted a massive invasion during the night. The destruction would be substantial, and I imagined that I had a full day of sweeping ahead of me.
I needed to dash off to work. There wasn’t even time to shower. |
