Mom, Dad, relax — no, not really. I just awoke from a particularly vivid dream after a great dinner with friends, a walk through a drunken throng of hockey fans, and having read a few chapters of Robopocalypse just before sleeping.
My husband and I found ourselves in a prison. A panopticon, but with chutes, ladders, padded tunnels, statuesque Stoßtruppen of both genders, and a complex system of rewards, punishments, and complex behavioural modification programs. The system caused you to gravitate towards pods of twelve inmates with whom you would serve out your term.
We arrived, and immediately Adolfo intervened in a conflict and saved a woman's life. For this, he was rewarded with a bag of clay, which, not understanding the significance of the gift, we left behind. Shortly we were introduced to our area where we were faced with a bewildering set of strange customs, conflicts, and rewards - a cushion which grants you the right to use a chair, a locker opened by blowing on a tube, a news room where you earned your dinner by voting on videos, and strange acquisitive and consumerist rules seemingly designed to break down social cohesion (which were enforced by the Voice of God).
After a time, we landed in a good pod, with amazing people who committed to look out for one other — carrying each other through particularly difficult terrain drills, holding each other through vomiting spells, and sharing our resources in contravention of the VOG. In the ensuing jailbreak, we took care of each other, throwing away our location- and activity-monitoring devices and helping each other identify the friendly prison guards who could help us to the tunnels leading to escape.
It all went beautifully until we encountered a slight routing bug in the padded transport tunnels, which caused us to merge into a stream of inmates who were headed for reprocessing. Reprocessing meant we were atomized and reconstituted as breakfast cereal. In the afterlife, we stood around drinking fruity breakfast cereal cocktails and agreed that it was a good life, and we looked forward to the next.
