A brief description of an unimportant person.

HyperD · 08/10/2007 13:19:33

Richard A. Philips usually slept soundly. But as of late, he had been having strange, somehow disturbing dreams. These dreams weren't obviously disturbing, as found in horror movies and the like, but something about them set him on edge. In these dreams, He found himself standing in the bedroom of his apartment, and if he looked out the window it was raining. The rain mesmerized him, glowing an odd green colour. As he looked closer, he noticed that it was not actually rain, but characters that reminded him of japanese streaming towards the ground. As he turned to take in his room, everything had turned translucent, with the same characters streaming under them. He looked at his hand and noticed that it too was made of the code, as was the rest of him. As he stood there, realizing everything in and out of his perspective was made of the same elements, a phone rang in his head and woke him up, leaving him to wonder what it all meant.

The next day he went about his routine, doing his job, driving around the city, taking out the garbage, and the dream was unexplicably tugging at the back of his mind. Days passed, and the dream had become more frequent. There was a new addition to his most recent dream though. After he began realizing the vastness of the code, a suited man stepped through his bedroom door and said a single phrase, "Wake up, Mr. Philips". This time, though, the phone did not ring, and he regained consciouness with those words in his mind.

"Hey, Bill," Richard said the next day at work, "Do you ever feel like there's more to the world than we can see?"

"Well sure," Bill replied. "Like how I can't see the future, but I know there's something there?"

"Not really, more like a dream. How do you know you're dreaming unless you wake up?"

"You don't, I guess. Just believe. The world has a master plan for all of us."

But Richard couldn't "just believe". He had to find some kind of answer. He went to a psychaiatrist to see if someone with a Ph.D. could interpret his dream accurately. All in all, the doctor just couldn't seem to wrap his head around what Richard was feeling, a seemingly endless space devoid of life, but full of something. Where everything is somehow connected, but yet disconnected, from each other and the world itself. Richard never thought this was a good idea in the first place. He couldn't place much trust in someone who tried to tell people they weren't crazy.

The dreams persisted, and in hopes that would be able to get some answers out of people who did their job first and earned money second, he turned to the new age stuff. Meditation, Palmistry, Ouija.

Going to a fortune teller had only proved further questions. He entered the seer's domain, heavily purfumed, and lighted only by candles. Horribly cliché, he thought as he sat across from her and placed his palm face-up on the table. She sat and examined it for several minutes before coming to a conclusion and telling him that "What you are sure is real is not, and what you believe is a dream is the opposite." If this was true, what was this reality he was looking for?

Buying a Ouija board had made him feel slightly stupid, but he thought he would have fared as well as the first time if he went back to the seer. The experience that it brought with it was strange, if not enlightening. when he got home he was unsure of where to start, so he sat on the floor of his bedroom. Setting the indicator on the board, he decided that he would be his own note-taker, took a few deep breaths to clear his head before asking the first question into the beyond.

"Is this all just a dream?" He only had to wait a few seconds before an unseen force began to move the indicator to spell out the answer.

YES...AND NO. This answer seemed almost more vague than the ones he had gotten in the past, and so he began to ask more questions, probing for the truth.

"What should I call this then?" The answer was given almost immediatley after he stopped speaking.

THE MATRIX.

Now that Richard had a name for what he was searching for, what he had been feeling all along, perhaps he could get some more information about who he was talking to and what this "Matrix" was.

"Who are you?" The board was silent longer this time before providing an answer as ambiguaous as the last.

THE OPERATOR.

"How can I find out more?" The operator seemed pensive, describing large circles on the board.

187 ASHLEY AVE. 12AM.

Sitting on the corner closest to the address he was given, Richard mulled over everything he had felt and learned over the past few weeks. False realities, real dreams. The Matrix. How was it all connected? Hopefully whoever he met here would reveal the answers.

At the stroke of midnight, his watch beeped. He looked up from the curb and saw a phantom van pulling up, with only the exterior lights burning a path through the black. He stood as the van's side door openedand he heard a deep voice speak to him.

"Are you ready to find out what the Matrix is, Richard?"

He wondered how the man in the van knew his name, but Richard stepped into the van and had his eyes opened wider than ever before.

((Sorry it's so short and jumpy. But after all, It's the question that drives us.))