So, I was late for class and I was supposed to immediately get the principal to notify my instructor before I set foot in the classroom. This was a strange university, I thought–I was only 8 minutes late. I lied to the principal, telling him I was a whole 5 minutes late and I thought the instructor would put me in a box. The principal looked concerned for my well being. He was a ragged man, appearing almost as a vagrant on the steps in one of the hallways. He ushered me to sit and told me to write a page about why I was late while he went to make excuses for me. I agreed and wrote about missing the bus. While writing, I reflected on what really happened.

I was staying over at someone’s house, someone I didn’t know. We needed supplies for a full night of no sleep. We couldn’t sleep. We needed to fight off death. One of them had a special incantation for permanently warding off death but it involved never eating again for the rest of your life (which would be a long time). So we needed to go to the supermarket and buy munchies. We were going to enjoy our last meals.

At the supermarket, there were thousands of people. It was like everyone wanted to have a last meal at once. There was an old woman about to eat a cracker at a sample station and I recognized her as being a past recipient of the death-ward. I tried to warn her that a cracker was not worth her life, but death swiveled through the biomass and aged her into extinction before I could even reach shouting distance.

I was in a bank talking to an acquaintance of mine, a hacker that I had only met briefly at some convention or party. Somehow the topic of Python (the programming language) came up. I told him that I was intending to learn it since everyone I knew said it was the greatest thing since sliced perl modules. He disagreed:

“Python isn’t that great. I took 3 undergrad classes on it.”

“You never found a use for it?” I queried.

“Well, the blood key is a bit slow, you know. You should see the rendering, it’s just not that great.”

I wasn’t sure what he meant but I knew I needed to get back to class. I had a betrayal to enact and I needed to do it soon or it would be too late.

In the class room, we all sat in a circle on the floor. Everyone was either drugged up or spiritually hallucinating–unless there really was a holographic head sitting next to me. Everyone acted like zombies anyway–except for the Head, which was strangely coherent and commanding. It was the Head I was to betray.

There was a game of sorts for which I was supposed to have a correct number of chits. Part of my subversive plan was that I had a pocket full of chits. I had all of them in fact. I laid out 24 of them and the Head looked around the room as people fished for theirs. He came back to me and began counting my chits.

“You don’t have enough…”

In my frantic worry about pulling off my plan, I had forgotten how many chits I was supposed to have. I needed to add more but not too many. I couldn’t reveal that I had so many in my pocket. I pulled out one and I could hear the clicking of the chit horde mixing in my pocket. Worried that someone else would hear, I pulled out a handful of chit parts. I had halves and quarters, thirds and bits. It was chaos. The Head freaked but it was too late. I had delivered my message clear and his downfall was imminent. *that part didn’t make sense to me in the dream or in real life but it worked*