Posts from August 20th, 2010

I had a very Robotech/Starblazers/Gundam inspired dream a few nights ago.

I was a space fighter pilot in Earth’s space military: Ensign Chris Harris.

The enemy planet had been doing crazy stuff with genetic engineering, and I somehow discovered that they’d genetically engineered the “Perfect Pilot.” Well, an enemy fighter pilot (who was himself a genetically engineered person called a “Protoform” – but nobody from Earth knew what a “Protoform” was yet) decided to defect to Earth’s side and stole the Perfect Pilot, who had just been created and therefore was a newborn baby. A couple of my teammates and I arranged to sneak the Protoform and the baby into Earth territory.

We all met in a small, white room. It looked like it a cross between an airlock, a medical bay, and a locker room. The defector handed the baby over to one of my teammates, a woman, who started checking it over to make sure it was healthy and whatnot.

The defector was completely covered from head to toe, wearing a tight black bodysuit with silver stripes on it and a helmet that looked a lot like a cross between Samus’s helmet (from the Metroid Games) and a motorcycle helmet with a tinted visor, disallowing us from seeing his face. He and I were talking about something—I don’t remember what—when suddenly he said, “Oh. Oh, geez. Whoops!” He flipped up his visor and we watched in amazement as a completely featureless face very rapidly morphed into an exact replica of my face (except without a beard, because I didn’t have a beard in the dream).

The defector explained that he was a “Protoform”: a genetic blank slate of a person. He had accidentally “imprinted” himself with me and became my exact genetic duplicate; He looked and sounded exactly like me.

I got the idea to let the Protoform take my place so that I could raise the Perfect Pilot baby. I forged a new identity for myself as an ace mechanic and forged adoption papers for the baby. But I knew I would need help, and so I got someone to co-sign the adoption papers with me: Ensign Xavia Nova Olson, Earth’s most kick-ass space fighter pilot.

We raised the baby together for five years, at which point someone in the military took a closer look at our situation due to the fact that this five-year-old kid was already a better pilot than ANYONE else. So they discovered what we’d done, but even though they were pretty angry it was too late to really do anything about it since we’d raised the kid from infancy. And the Protoform (as “Chris Harris”) had proven himself to be an invaluable member of Earth’s military. So we only got stern reprimands but no real punishment. They just kinda wagged their fingers and said, “Well, you really shouldn’t have done that.”

That’s around the time that I woke up.

It was an interesting dream, but I could tell my dream people were kinda grasping at straws at various points. A lot of the scenery was taken straight out of Star Wars and the above-mentioned animé series. The term “Protoform” is actually from a couple of different incarnations of The Transformers. It’s what a Transformer is before it has an alternate mode, so it was kinda applicable to the defector’s genetic blank-slate state. And when my dream needed someone to help me raise the baby, my dream people went, “Quick, which one of Chris’s friends has the most science-fiction-sounding name!?” and came up with Xavia Nova Olson, whose name does indeed sound like it coulda come from Gundam Wing.

When I woke up I had the feeling that I was really only maybe halfway through the dream. I had the feeling that in the second half of the dream the enemy planet would have figured out where their Perfect Pilot had disappeared to and would have attacked us to try to get him back, and there would probably have been some big action scene and it would have turned out that one of my superior officers was the traitor who tipped off the enemy planet.