I am not sure if I am the real world version of me or the female version of me that often appears in my other dreams.

There are people hunting me down. I run and jump across a field of icebergs digging the spikes of my boots into the ground with every step. The ice rises and falls with the ocean, chunks of iceberg shudder and collapse into the water creating even worse turbulence. Wailing screeches of ice grating against itself fill the air as background noise for my panting breaths.

A giant beast, too big to get an accurate look at, rises out of the water ahead of me. It opens its gaping maw and everything starts to get sucked into the forming whirlpool behind its baleen teeth, uncaring of anything we could do to it.

I run around the side of it towards six holes that line its side while dodging flying debris. I pull out my blade, a sword with a serrated edge that thins in the middle and flares out at the ends, use the waves to jump up high from one tipping iceberg, and land on the edge of another stomping down.

This sends the opposite end flying up. At the apex of the tip I slice off the end with a single quick motion and hook the bottom of the ice with the edge of the blades of my sword. Pivoting I swing the ice into one of the holes in the beasts side. I continue forward blocking the other holes with more ice.

The beast is quick to anger and before I can block the last hole in this cluster it sends out little creatures that look like pieces of robots to attack me and clear the blockage. The beast stops sucking everything in while these things are outside of its body.

I did manage to clear all the attackers from its immune system that had swarmed me but unfortunately fighting them had given my pursuers enough time to catch up to me. I can barely hold my own against all of them at once and the unstable footing becomes my downfall as an unseen thrown knife pierces my spine.

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…

I wake up, immediately pulling the IV drip out from my arm. I stand up slightly unsteady on my feet, tired and feeling the bags under my eyes try to pull my eyelids closed, and exit the sterile room.

On the other side of the door is a meeting room. The middle of the room holds a wide square table with mesh holograms projected on to the faint mist it constantly releases. Around the table stand three other girls, one a scientist, and the other two my teammates.

I walk off to the side and drop back first into a purple conversation pit. I reach between the cushions and pull out a small notebook, opening it and flipping to the latest page. One of my teammates flicks open her own notebook and reads out loud that she needs to buy a sandwich for her sister's lunch tomorrow.

Every time we lay in our beds we are put into a dream of someone else's memory from the future. We change what happens in the future through these dreams and rewrite a history that has yet to happen. For every dream, successful or not, part of our memory is taken away and used as fuel to begin the next one. And so we write down important things in the diaries to safekeep our memories.

After a round of check-ups from the doctor we are instructed to retry the dream from the beginning, again, and try to get a better ending this time. I groan after hearing this and pray that the next memories taken are of hearing the doctor say that over and over again even though I know they won’t. The best memories for fuel are the ones with the most ‘weight’, the ones that hold the most importance to us.

We re-enter the dream, finding it exactly the same as before and so the hunt begins. Unfortunately this time the dream is unstable. I don’t know why and I never will know why since it’s a problem for the technicians and scientists to worry about, I just have to worry about trying my best to get through this mostly unscathed.

Luckily the instabilities show themselves very quickly; our weapons transmuting into something different with every use and the surroundings warping into other places. The ice floes turn into the asphalt of a car park then the car park turns into a classroom full of students, not a single individual aside those from the original dream acknowledge our presence in the slightest.