When I opened my eyes in shock, I was lying face down in a puddle. I jerked up into a crouching position and felt my body for any wounds. My leather jacket and helmet were damp with stale water, but I was not wounded in any way.

A moment before, I was speeding down the highway on my motorcycle, and a huge truck had suddenly merged into my lane. It was all a blur. The only thing I was certain of was that I should not have been able to escape that collision without a scratch.

I spent a few seconds steadying my breath as I slowly lifted myself to my feet. Looking around, I realized that I was standing in an alleyway lined by two tall buildings. Somehow, I had been transported to a major population center.

This evident teleportation was not the most shocking fact, however. I pulled off my helmet and shook the hair out of my eyes (it had been more than a month since my last haircut) as the bright midday sun shone down on me. It had been the middle of the night moments before.

“Well, I don’t feel dead, so this probably isn’t the afterlife,” I muttered to myself as I examined the city around me. Broadly speaking, the buildings resembled those of Chicago architecturally, though I didn’t recognize them. I was in Michigan a few seconds ago, so that seemed like the most probable reality.

Reach out. Use your mind to manipulate the world around you.

Wow, I really must have hit my head. Unbidden, a thought entered my mind that I knew originated from some other source. It felt like my mind had become an old radar dish that was picking up rogue signals that were filtering through the air.

Whatever. I decided to humor the voice. It wasn’t like I had anything better to do, after all. A small pebble laid on the ground a few feet from me, and I reached my hand out in its direction. I imagined my grip extending out beyond my hand and wrapping around the pebble.

Amazed, I watched as an invisible force grasped the pebble and lifted it a few inches into the air. I moved my hand, and the pebble moved through the air. The voice was right; I could move objects with my mind.

“Oh, I see. This must be one of those lucid dreams I’ve been hearing about,” I muttered.

The floating pebble began to glow and spark as I held it in an invisible hand. I looked at it closely and realized that the pebble had liquified and transformed into magma. It vibrated with a dangerous energy that I found very unsettling. It was like standing near a car’s rapidly spinning wheel that had been lifted off the ground. Though the pebble was currently contained, I could sense that the slightest alteration would cause a violent explosion of outward force.

Slowly, I lowered my clenched hand, and the floating pebble matched my motion. The pebble never reached the ground as a hole was dug into the asphalt, preventing the ground from touching the pebble.

Clenching my teeth, I put a warding hand between myself and the pebble as I carefully released my grip on the small orb of magma. The moment the seal was broken, splattered flecks of magma exploded outward, striking nearby buildings and flying toward my vulnerable body. Before the exploding chunks of liquid rock could strike me, they crashed against an invisible barrier of telekinetic force, solidifying instantaneously against the barrier and transforming into a steaming black obsidian rock. Blinking in shock, I stared at the floating speck of obsidian. As I went to look, I lowered my upheld hand. The obsidian fell to the ground, shattering on the ground.

“This is really detailed for a dream.”

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

I looked down at the palm of my hand and looked closely at the lines. A long time ago, someone told me that palm lines didn’t appear in dreams. When I looked at my palm, however, it looked the same as always.

“Simulation, then,” I said, deciding to abandon the dream hypothesis.

“Let’s take a moment to get our bearings,” I said, talking to myself like a crazy person. “I’m in… Chicago, I think? I can now use telekinesis, though it’s much stronger than I would expect. Mental note: don’t use that on a person. You don’t want to pick up a murder charge.”

I paused for a moment, thinking about what to do next.

“The next step is to get home. If I can’t find my bike, I’ll need to find another way back. Are there any buses from Chicago to Lansing?”

I flipped my phone out of my pocket. It turned on, evidently undamaged from the crash, though I couldn’t get a signal. That was strange. I was in the middle of a major city. I must have forgotten to pay a bill or something, and AT&T cut off my service. I would just have to borrow somebody else’s phone.

The street just outside of my alleyway was packed with foot traffic as one would expect from downtown Chicago in the middle of the day. I was surprised to find that most of the people walking down the street were dressed in cheap clothing and wore dour expressions on their faces.

Some of the people on the street struck me as laborers, since they wore the utilitarian boots and overalls one would expect of a construction worker or farmer. These laborers were the most affluent people on the street, however. The rest of the people present seemed like homeless people.

It was, frankly, shocking. I had never seen so much poverty condensed in one place. I must have ended up in a remarkably bad part of town. Typically, in downtown Chicago, you would expect to see a good number of lawyers and accountants out on the street in the middle of the day. The crowd made my simple leather jacket look like a flagrant luxury.

Before I could approach anyone to ask any of a myriad of questions, a large message appeared on a gargantuan television that had been built on the side of a nearby building.

BREAKING NEWS

A woman in a suit replaced the two large words a moment later. With a harrowed look on her face, she looked at the camera and said, “Breaking news: Doctor Lazarus has launched an attack on Pacific City. We cut now to our reporter on the ground, John Carmichael.”

The scene shifted to a male reporter hiding in cover behind a large concrete divider. His tie was askew, and his expensive suit was covered in dust and ash. In the background of the shot, a massive humanoid machine took heavy lumbering steps. The machine’s head must have been twenty stories in the air, and it was wide enough that it took up nearly all the space between the nearby buildings.

“What the Hell?” I swore as I saw the building-sized mech take a step. It was like a scene from a movie that was being passed off as a legitimate piece of news. Was this some kind of prank? Surely, nobody believed it.

As I looked around, however, the impoverished civilians on the street looked up at the giant TV in rapt attention. They all seemed to buy that the scene in front of them was completely true.

Tapping a nearby laborer on the shoulder, I asked, “Where is Doctor Lazarus attacking?”

With an annoyed look, the man said, “Weren’t you listening? Pacific City?”

“And where is that?” I asked with the friendliest smile I could muster.

“What are you, an idiot? It’s in Cascadia, of course.”

Cascadia? That definitely wasn’t a country, but I did recall that the region around northern California, Oregon, and Washington was sometimes called Cascadia. I had many more questions, but I would have to find a more patient teacher to ask.

From the side of the TV, a helicopter appeared. The helicopter looked like a miniscule gnat next to the giant mech, but it grew in size as it flew over the reporter and his cameraman. As it flew overhead, something fell out of the helicopter and crashed into the ground a few hundred feet away from the reporter.

“Unless my eyes are playing tricks on me, I believe that the government has deployed him to fight against Doctor Lazarus!” The reporter spoke with naked excitement as the camera zoomed in on the person who had fallen out of the helicopter.

A man stepped out of the smoke cloud caused by the fall. He was a large man with a mane of red hair and a long braided beard. He wore thick fur clothing, and he held a long two-handed axe at his side.

“Yes! It’s really him, Ragnar the King of Vikings!” From the reporter’s tone of voice, he was clearly a fan. Ragnar must have been a big deal, but I doubted that he would be enough against Doctor Lazarus’s mech.