While we were working, a big curtain suddenly dropped down, covering one end of the room. We all stopped working and looked over at it, wondering what was going on. All the people who had been working in that section of the room suddenly stepped out from behind the curtain... and they had all been transformed to look exactly like the higher ups. Scarier, though, was that they'd all become stoic-faced and dead-eyed. All the joking and talking was gone as they advanced towards the nearest employees, and another curtain dropped down, hiding another section of the room.
We didn't really know what to do. I think some of our little group decided it was best to try to make for the doors, but we didn't have time to escape. Eventually the last curtain dropped down, enclosing our group. Then... it was very strange. It was like a new layer got dropped over my thinking. I became suddenly aware of all the other employees, without looking at them. I had the overwhelming need to line up as the other clones inspected us, and a burning desire to make my superiors proud of me. But in an undercurrent I realize what had happened, that my thinking had been co-opted. But that part of me was lethargic and difficult. It was like thinking right after you wake up. On top of this, we had each lost our individuality physically as well. Our bodies had changed to be the same as the others, our varied clothing had disappeared in favour of the uniforms that they all wore.
We returned to our work. We worked fluidly and methodically, without any jokes or talk of any kind. Our side projects were forgotten; we knew they would be frowned upon. As I worked, I was stubbornly trying to fight against the brainwashing that had taken me over. I was trying to take back control of my body by forcing myself to mess up what I was working on. A friend of mine, from across the table, suddenly spoke up. He said, "You can fight it, if you try." I nodded slowly, and looked around at the other people at the table. None of them looked as if they were going to betray us. Heartened by the fact that someone else felt it, I seized that part of me that was still me. My friend said, "So... shall we?" Nodding, I spun to face the room.
"Everyone, stop! Look at what they've done to us! We have to fight back! We are not their tools!" My table plunged into the nearest group of uniformed overseers and began to fight against them. The act of defiance of shouting had broken the last of the brainwashing's effects on me, and many of the people near me. A fight broke out, between those of us who had remembered our true selves, and those of us who had been lost.
I don't remember the fight very well, except that it was not very pleasant. Somewhere along the line, someone discovered that the "zombies" could be returned to their original state, much as we had been, by kickstarting memories of their previous lives. We found one of the most effective methods was to get them down and forcefeed them candy or something else sweet; nearly everyone enjoyed candy as a child, I assume, so the memories that it brought back helped them wake out of their brainwashing. Where we got candy, I'm not sure, but I remember we somehow got a limited amount of M&Ms or Skittles or something similar. It became then, a fight of us trying to revive as many of them as possible. Since we'd discovered that they could be revived, we didn't really want to hurt them. Unfortunately, we had become, to their communal mind-set, something like a virus or a cancer, and they insisted on eradicating us.
Eventually, we had the last of them dead, revived, or running away, deeper into the building. As dreams do, things had been slowly and unnoticably changing. Not everyone was human anymore, including my friend who had first voiced the fact that we could resist. He had become something like a scarecrow... he seemed to be made of straw or something along those lines. In addition, the building had slowly morphed into some sort of a stone-bricked, dark castle sort of place, rather than the concrete and steel building it had been at the beginning. None of this, of course, bothered me, since I didn't even notice it. Dreams are strange that way.
In any case, I decided that we needed to put a stop to the company that had done this to us. Because of my rallying shout at the beginning of the fight, I had inadverently placed myself in a leadership position among my fellow former employees. As such, I decided that I should go scout ahead. I left my friend, who had been changing into the straw man, in charge while they cleaned up and helped peoples' injuries and so on, and scouted ahead.
I went through the doors in the back of the room that all of the zombie/clones had fled through. I'd never been back here. I found a dank, dark hallway. I heard footsteps down the hallway in one direction and, not really wishing to encounter a group of them all by myself, headed the other way. Pretty soon I came across a door, and decided to try it so I wouldn't be walking by myself through a dark hallway.
Through the door I found a somewhat smaller room. In it were a number of people who all had the glassy eyed look of becoming a zombie, all overseen by an extraordinarily fat man in a chair. The man was also very old, and apparently quite fond of candy. He had bags upon bags of it strewn around his chair and sitting in his lap. None of the people who were changing into zombies seemed particularly interested in me. They seemed to be undergoing a different process than we did. It was taking much longer, and also the zombies in general were beginning to be less clonelike and more traditionally zombie in appearance, with green tinged skin and so on. I imagine these changes went along with the dank castle appearance. In any case, what hurt the most about these particular zombies was the fact that I knew some of them. They were friends that I hadn't even known had anything to do with the company. I mused later, after I'd woken up, that these people must have been being groomed for a higher position in the hierarchy than we had been. It was really the only way I could explain the different process.
I strode across the room towards the old man, as menacingly as I could manage. I grabbed him by the front of the shirt, but stopped when he threw up his hands and started pleading with me to spare his life. He wasn't acting like one of the clones we'd fought before. I angrily demanded what he was doing and gathered up his candy. He offered no resistance, and when I began feeding the candy to the others to reverse their zombification, he spilled out his life story.
He told me that he was originally from British Columbia (though I have no idea where the dream was supposedly set). As a boy, he had been bought or kidnapped by the company, and been raised to do their bidding. They kept him clothed and alive, though not really very happy. It seems that he was the one whom had determined how to zombify people, to make them perfect employees. He had no compunctions about letting me do what I wished. He was a feeble old man, and had no loyalty to the company. He simply did what they said because he was afraid of them and could not run away.
As I finally got candy into all of the people, and had begun to see the process reverse, suddenly the door burst open. It was the people I had left behind in the other room, led by my straw man friend. They filled the room, rushing at all of the helpless, near-comatose peole that I had given the candy. They also roughly grabbed the old man out of his chair and started harassing him. I began screaming at them, trying to make them see that these people were no threat, I'd already dealt with them, and that the old man was likewise no threat and would probably help us. They didn't listen. They seemed to be consumed with a desire to destroy now that they had gotten their own minds back. One of them even attacked me, with an axe. I got away from him, but the look in his eyes was... frightening.
I desperately tried to calm them. Eventually, after the old man had been scaredc nearly to death, and a few of the people of the room had actually died from the assault of my fellows. I was begging for forgiveness from the ones I had just saved and the old man as I woke up.
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Interesting, anyway. I think I may use this idea for a game sometime.
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