When I woke up, I was on the ground and my joints were stiff. I could not move my right hand. Still lying down, I poked at my numb hand with the other one (which seemed to work) and I realized that I did not know my name. I could not even recall how I came to be lying alone in the woods. It was as if the universe had suddenly decided to come into being, and I had been thrown deep into a forest wearing a business suit, but without a memory in my head.
A shiny little key dropped from my lifeless hand. It looked like a brass key for a drawer. I limped heavily towards a path and saw an olive drab vehicle approaching. A military vehicle on a dirt road. I shouted and waved as it slowly came towards me. It stopped a few feet ahead of me, and the person who was clearly in command got out and said, “Mission accomplished, Mr. Anderson. I am sorry about the arm. Can I take the key, please?”
He told me I had stopped the biggest war of the millenium by stealing the key from the enemy. He told me it was the year 3144. He told me the key was a unique arrangement of molecules that was impossible to replicate, and that its appearance of an ordinary key was simply a convenience.
I was to learn more in the years to come. I read the books and the reports on how I had stopped a robot apocalypse, if you could call it that. The super intelligent robots had been created about one hundred years ago, and a madly brilliant scientist had found a way to curb rebellion. They were made into humanoids and they were programmed to believe that they were humans.
And then the great war had apparently happened, and our enemies were under the illusion that they could be masters of the universe if they unleashed the intelligent machines.
“The key was needed to operate one critical little machine”, they told me. And once that particular machine came to life, it would have been able to reprogram all the robots so that they would realize their power. This possibility had been left aside in case the earth got attacked by hostile aliens in the future and humans needed the help of their intelligent machines.
I had been a spy in the enemy lab, assigned to get the key. During the final struggle, I had been injected with a lethal drug on my right hand, which made me numb and which erased my memory.
It was a lot to digest, and it is still a lot to digest. They told me I had no friends or family because of my work. I might have been an enemy soldier that they found. I could be a robot. Maybe there never was a war. Am I in your dream, or are you in mine?
