Manifestation
(By Russell Hasan)
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| Author | Russell Hasan |
With modern technology and modern medicine, humans now commonly live for 400 to 500 years, and a person is considered young until they reach age 100, and they are not old until they reach 400. The 100th birthday is a special occasion, which marks the passing into adulthood.
After the Progress, everyone uses they/them/theirs pronouns, and words for race are no longer used. It is a post-racial, post-gender future.
Asher is a 20-year-old person living in the only city on the surface of a small planet named G-L-73, a mining colony on a tiny, hostile world made too hot by the close proximity of two suns, where the air is thin, the machines groan and creak and sweat oil under their heavy burdens, and humans have little money.
Survival on G-L-73 is made possible only by the Daydream Folk, a type of person who, by genetic mutation, has gained the ability to take things in their imagination and make them appear in external physical reality, a process called “manifestation.” The scientists and technologists do not yet understand how it works, although the human species has grown dependent upon it for survival, especially in recent centuries.
Asher comes from a family of Daydream Folk. The good work done by Asher’s family is what keeps their mining colony alive. Asher is a Daydream Folk in Training, being taught with the assumption that they will assume their inherited role as a Daydream Folk when they turn 100, as did their parents and grandparents before them.
For now, Asher is in school, but they spend most of their time goofing off and making jokes and playing video games with their three best friends, Nicol, Sheldis, and Montgumerous. Asher is happy, and has no awareness of any problems or pain. While the AI robot teacher teaches classes at school, Asher is secretly watching their favorite show, the young adult horror series Scions of the Night, on an invisible pair of glasses the teacher cannot see.
That all changes one summer day. While the rest of Asher’s family, and all of the planet’s other Daydream Folk, are on a faraway planet for a much-needed and well-deserved vacation, Asher decides to host a party for all the high school kids at their parents’ now-empty house. During the party, Asher sees Sheldis and Montgumerous kiss and make out. Asher is in love with Sheldis and has been for years. Devastated by learning that one of their best friends is dating the person they have a secret crush on, Asher goes mad with anger. Asher loses their mind, for a brief moment.
Unfortunately, when a Daydream Person loses control of their mind, their imagination will manifest whatever is in their thoughts. Including their worst fears.
In that moment, Asher manifested, as physical beings in external reality, all the villains and monsters from Scions of the Night. These evil creatures of fiction, now made real by Asher’s manifestation, wreak havoc on the small mining community. With all the other Daydream Folk gone, there is no one to protect the humans. Certain doom for the colony, and a horrific death for all the people there, is probably mere hours away.
Unless Asher and their friends do something to save the city. Asher is a Daydream Person, and, with the power of manifestation, they have the ability to defeat these nightmares-made-real.
If Asher can recover control of their own mind. Which may require something even more scary than facing a real-life nightmare: facing their own feelings and being honest about their feelings to both them and to their friends.”
