Memories drift endlessly along the stream of reality. But what are they truly? Mere electric signal running through the brain cells of a sapient being? The that all things sentient are capable of remembering? Or the abstract concept of the things we remember? Truly, why would such mystery surround something so mundane?
But perhaps it can only be as mundane as it is taken for granted. Many but not all remember after all. Many long for memories to piece together their identities, to fill a gaping hole in themselves left by their forgotten past. Indeed, memories can be many things to many people, but to those who cannot remember, they can only be intriguing.
But you do not care, do you? Staring down the scope of your rifle, tracking your target from hundreds of meters above and away, you do not care who you once were or who you used to be, only that you do your job.
You squeeze the trigger, and a huge bang echoes through the gloomy urban jungle. Your target falls dead to the floor, and the public scatters like mice under torchlight.
The sound of static scratches your ear and you press onto your earpiece.
"Good work, Rosalia. Extraction commencing."
You nod and toss your sniper rifle away as it disintegrates into dust. You walk slowly towards the edge of the building, balancing yourself on the edge as you look far down into the busy streets below.
"Police! Surrender yourself, now!" You hear from the door behind you.
You turn around and see four or five policemen burst onto the rooftop, guns pointed at you.
"Put your hands where we can see them!" The cops bark at you.
You shrug and you raise your hands over your head, still keeping yourself close to the edge, before you step back and fall off. Time moves in slow motion as they try and reach for you. It is too late though, and you fall down, your gaze skyward as you fall in unison with the drops of rain crashing from the sky.
Slowly, the city disintegrates from view, and you open your eyes again as though they had always been closed. You awaken in soft cushions and blankets, a doctor watching you dutifully with a digital clipboard in hand. They notice your awakening, enthusiastically taking notes before setting their clipboard aside and offering a hand to pull you out of your bed.
"Welcome back REM agent. I trust that you have had a successful mission?"
"Naturally." You say, rubbing your eyes. "The target has been neutralized as requested."
"Indeed, good work. You have shown good progress as always."
"I'm ready to begin the next one," you say as you lie back down again.
"Not this time, the director wants to see you. Due to your exceptional performance, he wants to assign you to a special assignment that only you can be trusted with."
"Alright," you nod as you swing your legs off the bed, your feet sliding into your shoes smoothly. "Are there any details about the assignment?"
"It is confidential. You will get everything you need to know from him." The doctor responds to you as she swivels her chair toward her computer, typing out another report like always. You feel strange about the early dismissal. Missions usually last much longer than this, but everything in the REM institute gave way to the desires of the Director. If he wants something, he gets it, and today, that something is you.
Grabbing your suit from the nearby closet, you fit it on as you step outside into a clean and cozy laboratory setting. You spot multiple congregations of labcoats and suits among those in the halls, speaking about the usual things like data and results. You are focused on only your job, so whatever they're speaking about is none of your business.
Taking your steps through the familiar path in the building you make your toward the office of the director. There, the shadowy man sits at his chair, facing the door as though he always expects a visitor. His eyes looked into yours with cold calculation. Even with a determined task, you can feel that he is constantly thinking of countless possibilities.
"You called for me director?" You ask, letting yourself in.
"Yes, good to know that your presiding physician informed you," the director smiles as he gestures for you to take a seat in front of him.
You oblige and sit on one of the two cushioned chairs facing him, crossing your legs and waiting for him to brief you on your new assignment.
"As you know, Rosalia, our institute prides itself in using the powers of the human dream to maintain temporal order. Each target you dispatch is one less person who is capable of upsetting the space-time continuum."
"Of course, it is important to maintain this order," you nod in agreement despite knowing that you care little for the sentiment. You simply act as you are told.
Not that this line of thinking is wrong. It is what makes you a particularly efficient and effective REM agent after all. Most of your colleagues need their past identities and their memories to perform, but you? You act on instinct, and you kill, no questions asked. And this behavior is what allows you to do things that the director doesn't trust with others.
"In any case, the institute conducts other operations outside of its main REM program, and your skills are needed in one of them."
"What is the situation?"
"Our teams on the ground in the wartorn city of Al-Azrad are picking up on various anomalous signatures throughout the city. The city used to be the grounds of a brutal civil war, but ground reports are noting temporal anomalies like anachronistic objects, non-euclidean spaces, and various agents of unidentified affiliations engaging in unknown operations, sometimes against each other. We need you to cooperate with the ground teams to try and stamp out the source of this unnatural phenomenon."
"Understood, shall I head off immediately to my REM dispatch room?"
"No. You will be assigned a new doctor and a new room with specialized technology. The situation is far too volatile to rely on a conventional REM dispatch. Normally, you are completely safe from the effects of the dream, but with the state of the city we cannot guarantee that it will be as comfortable or as safe, which is why we're sending you."
You nod. This was new. An actually risky endeavor and a mission beyond just killing someone. You aren't sure if it was intriguing or worrying. It was far from simple but it was something different from your run-of-the-mill assassinations. Regardless, you have no real say in the matter, so you just nod along obediently.
The director presses a button on his telephone, "Miss Secretary, please guide Agent Rosalia to her new dispatch room."
Seconds later, an old woman walks through and gestures for you to follow her. You do, following behind her mindlessly as she guides you through the endless halls of the institute. You stop at a pair of metal doors at the end of a long hallway. She presses a few numbers on the keypad and then swipes her card, opening the door for you and gesturing for you to enter.
You walk inside, seeing a setup far more grand than the usual REM Dispatcher that you are familiar with. Throughout your time in the institute, you've only ever worked with measly aluminum goggles and light comfortable brainwave sensors that you just stuck onto your head. This setup looked far more advanced and comprehensive in comparison, with the entire bed secured inside the machine. The bed had various bags of unknown liquid, as well as what looked to be various sensors wired to the machine.
It looks far more like a sleeping capsule than any sort of Dispatcher you have worked with.
You see the presiding doctor, a young woman with large glasses, working at a control station a few feet away from the massive REM Dispatcher machine. She notices you and she gestures for you to come over.
"Welcome, welcome! You're that big-shot agent the director was talking about? My name is Olha, I'll be your presiding physician for this mission." She says, taking your hand and shaking it profusely, before pulling you over to the REM Dispatcher. "Come closer and have a look at your quarters! What do you think?"
"It's… big."
"That's one way to put it. This isn't your average REM Dispatcher for sure, where you're going, you'll definitely need to keep your real body comfortable."
You run your hands across the mattress, the sheets feel softer and silkier compared to the ones you've always had. Though cramped, it clearly is intended to be far comfier than the average REM accommodation. One could even call it a REM capsule. Your eyes settle on the weird bags of liquid placed beside the cushions, connected to a single rubber tub with a needle at the end.
"What are those?" You ask, inspecting the bags of clear liquid closely.
"Oh right, it's probably your first time seeing these. They're medications, y'know, amnestics, sedatives, antipsychotics. They're inserted intravenously into the REM agent to help keep them calm in case they see anything particularly distressing during their REM cycle, accounting for basically any possible perception-induced insanity."
"I've never seen these before."
"Well duh, it's not like the average REM agent is going to see anything madness-inducing hunting down the random joe-schmoe, and as you can already tell, this machine isn't meant for hunting just any joe-schmoe." She says, patting it proudly.
Right, there are always those beyond even the incomprehensibly bizarre things that dreams conjured. The whole sordid business with them was always far beyond the paycheck of the average REM agent, but as all your colleagues have established, you weren't the average REM agent.
"Now do me a favor and hop in so I can calibrate the machine to match your brain waves." The scientist says, sitting down and pressing a few buttons on the control panel. The hatch opens before you, inviting you to come inside. You enter and lie down as the hatch closes over you.
"Alright, now I'm going to need you to close your eyes and answer a few questions, as is procedure."
You nod and close your eyes, you've done this before so it wasn't difficult. A blackness envelopes your vision as you listen carefully to Olha's questions.
"What is your name?"
"Rosalia."
"What is your agent ID number?"
"R-0151N."
"Good, think of a name."
"Edward."
"Awesome, now think of an object."
"A rifle."
"Great, the brainwave sensors are calibrated. Now I'm going to display your mission briefing on the screen, and whenever you're ready, we can start the REM cycle."
You read through it carefully, nodding along. You are going to be sent to one of the institute's ground bases, where the ground team commander Ibis will brief you further on the present situation. You will find your equipment under your bed like usual. Simple enough.
"Alright, I'm ready."
"Great, firing up the machine now, good luck on all your endeavors, agent."