This one started out as watching a movie and suddenly shifted to me being the main character, which is a bit odd in that the main character was female. (Please do not psychoanalyze this fact.) It was also probably one of the most coherent dreams I've ever had, plot-wise.
It began with some imagery showing how this movie fit in with the other two movies, displaying a lineage of androids and their various jobs, which ones had gone maverick, which had been built as maverick hunters, which had more mundane jobs, each with their own image and displaying an intricate web of how each connected with the story. Then it panned in on the last one, our heroine, on her small but cozy spaceship with her boyfriend.
It's a beautiful crisp day up in the mountains, plenty of nice soft powder, and I was enjoying the day with my boyfriend, just hanging out in the ship. My ship was a bit of a junker, a standard geosphere with only the minimals - but I didn't need it to get me anywhere, just be a place to live - and it did that well enough. We needed to get to the store at the base of the mountain, and it's perfect for just sliding down the snow - so we do so. It's a blast, but moments into the slide, we kick up a small avalanche. I was worried for a moment, but my boyfriend (who is a bit of a risk-taker) points out that it's small and controlled enough that we could simply ride it down. So we do. It's even more fun than just sliding down would be.
Disaster strikes in the form of a few too many rocks right as we're about to reach the street and the store. I manage to get through just fine, but my boyfriend takes a bit of a beating. In a panic, I bring him, limping, into the store and am helped immediately by one of the workers there to bring him into the bathroom and do what we can to warm him up and check over the bruises. It seems my concern isn't quite as well-founded as I had thought - he's fine after he gets warmed up a bit. One of the customers sitting in the little store quips to another, which elicits a snippy comment from one of the workers, which strikes off a comment from another. It's too slick, too snappy and entirely too comfortable for what I thought the scene allowed for. With a furrowed brow, I ask: "Do you all know each other?"
There's about eight people in there that all share a knowing grin. "Do I get to tell her?" one pipes up.
"Don't see why not," claims another.
And then comes the thing that shakes my world: "You're an android."
Somehow I know it's true, but... that can't be right, can it?
"All of us are. So's your friend." Suddenly that too-quick repartee makes more sense.
I get the chance to ask a few questions, help out at the store a bit. It seems they were all gathering in this one location - things had gone south, and this was where they were letting things blow by for a while. I thought to myself, perhaps this is why I came here...
A small commotion outside drew my attention from the conversation at hand. Apparently the avalanche had not only brought me down the mountain, but my ship as well. In dismay, I pelted outside and took a look at it. Thankfully, the damage wasn't extensive - the geodesic sphere was only a bit scratched. The landing gear was a bit worse for the wear though, and would require some welding to fix. Of course, there was no telling whether the thing was still spaceworthy, but that had been the case for a good while. I opened up the hatch and climbed in to take a look around.
The wailing of police sirens approached the scene - I knew it wasn't for me, so I ignored it. But then one of the androids hurried into my ship, then another, then another... Something was wrong, but they weren't talking. And then a police officer was shining his flashlight into the interior of the ship, through the clear airlock door.
The next few moments were confusing, but the outcome wasn't. I was wrestling with the police officer, who himself was an android, while the others tried to help me unsuccessfully hold him off. He had a small device that extruded from his wrist that he was trying to brush against me, and naturally I was terrified as I didn't know what it did. Apparently it left some sort of chemical or small electronic on contact. My valiant efforts were seeming to pay off when he suddenly threw me off balance by reversing the direction he was pushing with his arm, and I was overbalanced. Bam, the tip brushed against my nose, and I was released. I pitched against the bulkhead. "Surrender or I'll.." was the threat, and he was ready to push some sort of button.
Nearly to the point of breaking down and sobbing, I was immediately ready to give up to the officer, even though we all knew he wasn't really acting within the bounds of police authority. I hadn't been involved in whatever it was, and for all I knew, the moment he pressed that button I'd go into a fit of agony, writhing on the floor.
"um... We have a bit of a problem..." one of the others there chimed in. Only at that point did we realize that the ship was humming the cheerful hum of flight.
It was pretty obvious now that the ship wasn't flightworthy. There was a leak somewhere, and our air wasn't holding out very well against low atmospheric pressure at our current altitude. We had to land, and fast, before we started getting too light-headed to focus. Shaken, I took the controls and did my best to bring the thing under some semblance of control. I knew if I wanted us to land in one piece, I had to set down very carefully, as the landing gear was still damaged and likely to just snap off if I did it wrong. And the ship was stuck in a spin that I couldn't seem to stop. Thankfully, the ship was only spinning on its vertical axis and wasn't tumbling. The landing gear was already down, and since it was a VTOL craft, I just had to set it down gently enough.
With a screech that set my teeth on edge, I managed to touch down amidst scattering people outside the store again, no worse for the wear. The airlock hissed open and we all went dizzy from the sudden rush of air.
Now that we were calm enough to explain ourselves, the police officer got a chance to look me over and he promptly apologized. He'd thought I was a maverick, and a danger to all those around me. This wasn't the case at all. He himself was a maverick hunter, and specifically designed with that in mind. He mentioned that I was the same design, besides the obvious gender and personality differences. I realized that the same device he had on his wrist would be on my hip, except it had broken off at one point, leaving nothing more than the armature and the recess it went in. Somehow I'd blocked it from my mind - probably in the same way I had blocked out my true nature. Everyone was much relieved and we exited the ship. Everyone but the maverick hunter left. They had thought he was the maverick, while he thought I was, and I had somehow coerced everyone into cooperation.
Sitting in the hunter's car, I thought I'd get the chance to ask more questions - but instead, he hooked me up to the car's computer. "There it is," he said. "Brace yourself."
With the flip of a switch, all of a sudden I knew what I was capable of - and it was intimidating to say the least. A vast amount of my abilities concerned piloting, single-ship space weaponry, communications. I was a hunter, and I knew how to track my prey and run it down. The device he had used on me was a neural scrambler, for disabling other androids with a touch. Once the scrambler was in place, a simple button press would knock the victim unconscious. I gave the hunter a glare, irritated that he had convinced me so easily that it was capable of far worse things. He just shrugged - he was just doing his job.
Then he gave me a quick test. "You want to get from this location -" the computer's screen showed a ship and several spheres representing a given distance - "to this one. How do you do it?"
"Tell the ship's nav system to go there." He entered that into the simulation, and the ship smoothly accelerated and decelerated to arrive at the destination.
"Alright - but you can get there faster than that. How?"
The answer was immediately apparent in my mind. "A quick burn followed by a stall and a burn in the opposite direction." He handed me the controls, and I demonstrated, with a marginal decrease in time elapsed between points.
He ran me through a more difficult scenario, and seemed satisfied with the results. "It doesn't look like you remember everything though - I suspect that will come with time."
I was looking around my ship later that day, searching for clues. The removal of whatever it was that had blocked me from recognizing myself had brought me much more at terms with who - and what - I was, but I still didn't know how I had gotten to this little backwoods planet. I'd had a lot of shocks that day already though, and I could use some time to digest it, so I wasn't looking all that hard. I found one anyways, in the form of a videolog stashed on the ship's computer.
---
A blonde woman had a laser pistol pointed directly at my head, the red beam of the sight dancing in my vision. "I'm going to carve a hole straight through your boyfriend's head," she said with malicious glee.
She was an android too, I knew - a combat type, and vastly more capable than both I and my boyfriend when it came to close combat. We were at her mercy, and she had gone insane.
Then from nowhere, he smashed into her side with his shoulder, knocking the two of them down, the pistol skittering across the ship's floor and out of sight. She wouldn't be able to retrieve it, I knew, but he didn't stand a chance anyways. He was flung to the side and then she was advancing on me with that smile that bespoke only evil intent.
"You don't have a chance, you know," she taunted. Her words didn't quite match her actions - she was carefully striking with her hands and feet, and though I was hard pressed, I managed to block each strike. As her limbs split into various longer appendages temporarily, I still somehow managed to fend her off - partly because the longer, thinner extensions, though more numerous, didn't have the same strength. They needed weapons in order to be truly dangerous.
"You know I'm too unpredictable for you to fight easily," I said to her.
"Then let's make this more interesting," she replied, and she reached behind her. Her arm split again, and she somehow had drawn some of the cutlery from the kitchen. "Why not up the stakes?" She tossed me a paring knife and a fork, which I caught - any weapon is better than none at all. She herself held onto a pair of knives and came at me with a flurry. The ensuing dance seemed almost comedic - the clash of metal against metal rang out, but instead of sword against sword, it was the tinny clink of a paring knife and a fork against a pair of steak knives.
Driven back hard, I suddenly found myself up against a wall. And she stepped back and threw the two knives she was holding, each finding their mark painfully in one of my arms. But I took advantage of the scant few moments she had without a weapon and dove in, driving my paring knife into her left arm's armpit and pulling back again. Her arm was suddenly useless, hanging limp against her side - I had severed the nerves in her arm. It didn't faze her, and she pulled another knife and threw it at me. My other arm took the strike and I dove in again, and her other arm was hanging at her side. Quickly, I pulled a neural scrambler off of the dispenser on my hip and planted the microscopic device squarely on her forehead as she fell to her knees.
"There's something wrong with me," she said in a quiet, frightened tone.
"I know," I whispered back - and she fell unconscious.
It only took a moment's searching for me to find my boyfriend, his head lying on the floor divided neatly into four pieces, the delicate electronics inside laid bare. The world broke beneath me and I fell to my knees, and I could do nothing but cry.
---
At this point, everything made sense. I had traveled here as a refuge, the same as everyone else, and my memory was blocked because I had done it... I didn't want to remember any of what had happened, at least not for a while. Not in the same heart-wrenching hell I had probably experienced. I was detached from it, an observer. And I thought perhaps it was better to keep it that way.