I dreamed I was a space explorer. With a friend I touched down on an ocean planet in a small metal watercraft. We rowed about, testing the water, scanning for life forms, looking for land. Slowly on some level I realized that, it had been real at first, but then we had been... not quite captured, more like gathered, into a large assembly. We had been scooped up in a container that resembled a giant plastic soda bottle, upside down with the bottom cut off and the top gone, so it formed a huge clear funnel, and all the water had drained out while we had been blinded by the mirage.
The illusion that had kept us complacent, of our craft beneath us and ocean around us slowly faded, and we found ourselves in an enormous hall, a dark, post-apocalyptic amphitheater filled with sentient beings of many sorts. We had been gathered to form an army, and we were being sorted and thinned out based on our usefulness as warriors. I knew I was pretty much doomed. My friend had been a fully trained second lieutenant in some squadron and I was just a scientist and recorder. We watched as a woman in a white coat sent one fairly un-martial girl to the showers, which was an obvious euphemism. We knew I'd be next, so my friend insisted, when they chose her as an officer, that she couldn't do without me as her assistant.
I was allowed to live and conscripted into this army. Our first job was to go all over the base, patrolling and searching for some of the planet's inhabitants who had contracted an awful, disfiguring, and zombifying disease. We should be immune, as humans, along with most of the other conscripts. There was a chance, though, that weakened health could make even us vulnerable.
The base was subterranean, beneath the sea that completely covered all of the planet surface except a smattering of tiny islands. An entire layer of the planet's crust was riddled with a labyrinth of dwellings, businesses, military installations, and all sorts of other spaces. We formed into teams of a dozen or so and combed through the maze for the victims of this plague. They were pretty gruesome when we found them. They were mindless, violent. And their lower jaws had contracted to a narrow strip of sharp teeth, so their mouths never closed right and they drooled all over the place.
I saved my squad once, and killed a batch of the plague hosts, by throwing a chair up into a skylight to a higher level and burying then in an avalanche of shattered glass. But I was a panicked little jelly of fear by then, so my friend got me assigned to an elderly diplomat as his personal assistant. We were just negotiating what I would have to do for him to keep from getting sent to the showers, and I was getting the feeling it might not be very pleasant, in spite of his grandfatherly demeanor, when I woke up.
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