Clive and Adriana lived in a high-rise apartment in Atlanta.
Adriana was a freelance designer, known for her innovative work with fabric and light. She spent her days in a small studio on the ground floor, just below their apartment.
Clive was a businessman, working for a company that offered services to Wall Street. His days were filled with meetings and financial forecasts, while Adriana’s world was more creative and fluid.
Over the time that they were married, Clive became more reclusive and rude and sometimes even abusive, even as Adriana put more effort into the relationship.
Clive and Adriana's marriage slowly fell apart over the space of seven years because Clive was neglecting Adriana and sometimes being abusive. Adriana, on the other hand, she didn't know how to handle this. Often she would offer herself and would offer help to Clive sometimes, but this didn't solve anything. And so the marriage slowly became abusive.
Clive spent more and more time at work working on his projects, and when he got home, sometimes he would be demanding of Adriana and tell her that she had to do whatever he said, and so she had no way of expressing herself and she felt completely taken for granted and also extremely exploited.
As time went by, Adriana started to give in. She started to become more compliant, and she gave up. She gave into it
Things didn't improve. He became even more demanding, and he would request that she stay at home full-time instead of doing her design job. And still nothing improved in their relationship. There was no extra spark. There was no extra warmth in the relationship. It was Clive who was hardened by the nature of his business, and there was Adriana who still had that spark of human light within her, but it didn't work out as Adriana thought. He would continue to take advantage of her, and she would continue to take it.
The story actually starts as Adriana starts having these lucid dreams about a town that she visits in her sleep. the town itself perhaps had more like 30,000 people, 40,000 people, and it had very well-polished structures, but some of the structures or some of the buildings within the town appeared to be archaic and completely different from the newer structures. There was some kind of discrepancy between the old archaic and the new modern, and there was nothing in between.
Her nightly journeys are quite safe. These dreams seem to be quite pleasant. She greets people on the street and they in return regard her, but a lot of them actually regard her first or greet her first, as if they already knew who she is. And these greetings are so natural and so believable that she starts to identify more with her dreams than her waking life.
Then on one auspicious night, she dreams that she is walking through the town and she's going right through, so she passes through to the outskirts of the city, where there are fields, and on the other side of the fields, there are old factories, factories that look like they've been erected in the 1950s with the classic four-story high structure, chimneys, and the same short, narrow windows running along each story of the building, with that gray, intimidating color.
She can hear distant screams from within the factories. She gets curious. She doesn't know if she's willing to get closer and see what they are. The town seems warm and the factories seem cold, but they both belong to the same place, in fact. And so she forces herself.
And as she approaches, she looks through the bottom windows of the building, and what she sees lit up from within the factory astounds her and both terrifies her. And so she looks on, and what she sees is hundreds of machines that have been engineered specifically for one end or one purpose, that to torture men. And there were hundreds, maybe thousands of men inside being tortured upon these machines, maybe even two or three men to one machine, and all being tortured in unison, as if the building itself was trying to make music out of their misery.
Even though she is feeling terror, she knows that in her waking life, she is feeling some kind of pain, similar to that. She is feeling not just that physical pain that those men inside those factories are feeling, but she also feels emotional pain, perhaps in an even more intense way than what they're feeling inside that factory. So she turns to herself and she says, well, maybe I have something in common with these poor souls, as she starts walking back to the town.
But in her waking reality, nothing changes. Clive is still abusive, and sometimes he takes a belt to her when he feels like it. Sometimes he forces himself on her when he likes, and this all adds up. This all does its damage, but she sees herself now not as a human being, but as an object. And her only humanity left is that of the dream. So when she goes back into the dream the next night, she meets a man from the town hall, and the man has a reddish tinge to his skin and perfectly white teeth, and he invites her in.
And there's something else. There's something to this reddish-skinned man with perfect teeth and well-groomed, well-dressed, with his cane and with his hat. He seems to be very confident, and there seems to be something else, another strange quotient to the situation.
As they're walking into the mayor's building, and they walk one after the other into his office, she gets that feeling. She has met this man before somewhere, maybe from another life, maybe in another form, but this person or creature, it's, it's someone or something that she has interacted with before. She just can't put her finger on it. She sits down and they start talking.
The man starts talking as if he's from the normal reality, not from some dream. Everything he says is too congruent, too coherent. And he says directly to her, Adriana, "I would like to give you an invitation. I would like to extend you this invitation. And as you probably can tell, this place is familiar to you. You have seen the town, you have seen the buildings. There is something familiar about this place, wouldn't you agree? And Adriana nods, but she still doesn't want to say anything. She still doesn't, she's still not sure about what she's going to say. So the man says, you have become almost like a battery for your husband, Clive. He uses your energy and he uses you up as he goes for his career goals and your life goes nowhere. And you have been given no recompense. So we have devised something here for you, but before I extend this, I need to reveal something that might shake your ideas."
He continues speaking and he says, "This town is familiar to you, isn't it?" And she says, "yes, it is. I can recognize some of the buildings, but I still don't understand why there are these archaic buildings and then these new buildings, and the factories on the far side, I don't understand any, any of it." And he says to her, "You were once a very important person in this place, but you won't remember because you left this place many centuries ago."
"Part of your deal about visiting Earth again, was that you would lose memory of your place here. You were a duchess of our region here, and you decided that you would prefer to spend some time on Earth and test out your magic. And now it seems you have lost all of your magic, all of your spark, and you have just turned into one of those tortured souls that we keep in the factories. And so I've decided to take a course of action that will invert things, perhaps." She asks, "What must I do."
He says, "You mustn't do anything. Can you see the factories in the fields? They are full of tortured souls." And she replies, "Yes, I can." And he says, "Contemplate for a second. Clive has made you into one of these people who suffer just as they suffer in those factories. So he is using you as a battery. You can see that we have ample power in this city. We have very good lighting, and we have a very good glow. We can let the old and the new live together exactly in harmony because we have these wonderful, productive factories." He spoke as if it was natural that human souls were powering the the town with their pain.
"Would you like to have the opportunity of inverting the situation and putting Clive in his place? And if so, I need you to state that now for me.:"
She accepts the offer and she ponders to herself, "I wonder what is coming. I wonder what I must do." And he said, "I know what you're thinking." (Reading her mind.) "You think that you must do something, that you must change something, that this is going to revolutionize or you're going to grow yourself a new life. This is not going to happen. And in fact, what we here in the town want is for you to give yourself up even more, be more submissive, be more ridiculous, humiliate yourself more for him."
And she looks at the man, completely befuddled. What is he asking of me? she thinks. And he says, "well, you're going to suffer anyway. We need you to bring this new asset in. Think of yourself as our talent scout. Think of yourself as our incredible closer”
"And when he finishes the merger, we can get him here."
"Then what will happen?"
"He'll be occupied doing this and that, probably a few errands you'd like to see him... carry out."
