10. What's the best dream you ever had? What was the worst? Where do those hopes and fears come from?
Dreams, omae... That's a heavy one, and one that always brings to mind a truly ancient poem that's haunted me since I first read it for a course on the classics in my university days. It's properly an ode, by this ancient Greek slot named Pindar, and was written to celebrate the winner of some kind of wrestling championship. For a victory poem, I think it takes a particularly dark turn near the end in the passage:
"But the delight of mortals grows in a short time, and then it falls to the ground, shaken by an adverse thought. Creatures of a day. What is someone? What is no one? Man is the but the dream of shade. But when the brilliance given by Zeus comes, a shining light is on man, and a gentle lifetime."
Spooky, neh? Makes me want to reach for a stiff drink every time I read it, chummer. Looking back on the many years since college, hindsight tells me maybe that piece haunted me because it was like a foreshadowing of my life to come.
The twenty-year-old me would tell you that my best dreams were about the life yet to come: the prospect of a good career in the military and with a corp and the expectation of an affluent future with a partner of my choosing. (I do have a good track record with the ladies...) At that time, my worst dreams were about things like falling behind in school, losing my ROTC scholarship, or any one of the many things that could negatively impact my anticipated future success.
The fifty-year-old me can tell you that my worst dreams have already come to pass and that my best dreams have been reduced to the brief glimpses of imaginative fantasy allowed during the limited REM cycle enforced by implanted sleep regulator. First, the worst:
My fiancee Chloe was fatally shot right in front of me when we were bystanders to some kind of mysterious drive-by incident back in '57. During the immense grief that followed, my promising career at Ares spiraled downward and resulted in my termination. In the wake of that, I fell victim to my vices and lost myself in a haze of gambling, semi-legal "law" practice for clients from the shadows, and heartless womanizing. Mounting debts found me indentured to my friend Nikolai's "family business" and cost me a decade of my long elven life, working as an exclusive agent of the Vory. I became a ghost to my family, lost all friends except Nikolai from my previous life, and became the person you now know as Rake.
But it wasn't all bad, either: working for the Vory forced me to restore self-discipline and gave me purpose, enough that I can mostly keep myself together after being released from my "contract". Those dark years also taught me how bad things can truly become, so that I can find contentment now with the mundane. Taking on shadowruns with a crew I'm learning to know and trust can pay the bills well enough and provides me with people I can be responsible for and to - both things that motivate me to keep my head in the game.
So, that just leaves me with the best dreams I know now, as my fifty-year-old self. I think those are summed up easily: finding enough success (both in terms of finances and reputation) as a 'runner to develop a career as a fixer and perhaps eventually achieve some sort of semi-retirement status. Sounds pretty lame to all you kiddos raised on super-amped gray-market California-hot simchips, sure, but can you blame a tired old man for dreaming small (and realistically)?
-Rake