A girl lies sleeping with electrodes attached to her body. A man and a woman are looking at her through a one-way glass window from the next room.
“Waste of time and money,” says the man. “An illiterate kid from a stone quarry? What could she possibly contribute to the project?”
“Hardly a kid. She’s at least 16,” says the woman. “Come on, we’re making history. First ever experiment in collective dreaming.”
To her right is a screen that takes up an entire wall. The 311 participants in the experiment are now all asleep. Her poised finger jabs the keyboard.
The girl’s dream. Shards of memory. She’s watching her father at work. The wooden skeleton of the great loom, the finished tapestries hanging on the wall. Clackety-clack goes the loom. The river floods, sweeping her parents away. The loom comes apart: colored threads in the water. The sound of hammer striking stone. The choking dust. The quarry at night. Young people around the fire.
She lifts a bubbling pot of rice from the flames. Someone douses the fire, and she lowers the pot into an insulator they made out of clay and straw. The rice cooks with its own heat. The taste of hot rice and spiced oil.
But look, there are strangers in her dream. So many unfamiliar, bewildered faces. And beside her, a boy, about 12, holding in his arms a large clock.
“Sync successful. Activating stage two.”
Suddenly, the 311 dreaming people are high up in the air. The Earth dawns below them swathed in green and blue, punctuated by clouds and storm formations. The most beautiful tapestry the girl has ever seen.
“Father,” she whispers, although he's been dead two years. “Father, the world itself is a weave, a living garment.”
Slowly, they fall through the air and then they see ... a vast swath of forest veined and spotted with fire, a gray wall of water crashing down on a bleak shore, drowning islands ringed with plastic refuse, beached carcasses of dead whales, ant-like figures in their millions walking away from desertified landscapes: ruined fields, destroyed forests. The grief that envelops the girl is so enormous a thing that she can only take it in through small, gasping breaths of pain.
She alights with the others on a featureless plain under a vast, brooding sky. There’s the boy with the clock in his arms. The thumping of the girl’s heart keeps time with the boy’s clock, an urgent, rapid beat. Tuck, tuck, tuck, tuck, tick-tock, tick-tock. Something’s coming.
“Warning: this is not in the program.”
Bearing down upon them is a whirlwind. A chimera of storm clouds and plastic rubbish and burning trees. A monster made of hot dust and angry water. People scream and run, but the boy with the clock is standing still, watching. Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock.
“Why aren’t you running?” asks the girl.
“I’m studying the unraveling of the world,” says the boy, earnestly. “That’s what this monster represents in our dream. I’m an engineer and a knowledge-seeker. Pleased to meet you.”
She turns away. There’s a storm inside her: grief and memory and anger. She takes a deep breath and walks toward the monster. She stands before it. A thin, dark girl in a tattered, green sari. Her hair is whipped loose from its braid, and the end of her sari unfurls like a flag.
“Stand back,” shouts the boy in alarm. “Let me figure out the control mechanism.”
Bending her head, straining against the wind, the girl walks into the monster. The monster has a middle with a quiet place. She sits on the bare ground and looks up at the towering vortex around her. A rain of debris patters down. There is a deep rumble, and she thinks she hears the monster say, “Why?”
“To learn,” says the girl. “I’ve lost everything -- lost my chance to learn at school. Teach me.”
To the boy outside with the clock in his arms, the girl has been consumed by the monster. In the lab, the man and woman look through the window at the girl’s twitching body. Alarms sound from the instruments monitoring her vital signs.
At last, the girl emerges from the monster. The monster is retreating over the horizon. The plain is littered with debris. The girl has cuts on her face and arms. She walks up to the boy and speaks to him urgently. Then they turn and face the waiting people.
“My teacher taught me,” says the girl, “that the world is a living tapestry. The wind and the waves are woven together with the forests and grasslands, threaded with the deserts and snowy regions, and all living things are knit together in mutuality. Although each place has its own pattern, the tapestry is one. As the weave of life is torn apart in one place, the threads unravel in another.”
She and the boy confer again. “See my clock,” says the boy, urgently to the crowd. “It has components with clearly defined functions so you can adjust and control. Treat each part separately. You can tinker with it from the outside. The clock was my orienting metaphor for the world. But the world is not like a clock, is it?”
He sets his clock on the ground. Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock.
“Come on,” says the girl to the watching people.
She and the boy start putting the scattered debris together, and some of the others join them. A structure starts to emerge. An enormous loom of strange design. The girl tosses her insulating pot into the loom, and it turns into a thick spool of multicolored yarn. There are levers for feet and hands, and with a creak and a groan, the loom begins to work. The fabric unfolds: a mesmerizing tapestry of shifting colors and patterns.
“What should I do with my clock?” asks the boy, picking it up.
Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock.
But now the sound of the loom is getting louder.
Dahganah, denah, dahganah, dahganah, denah, dahganah, goes the loom.
“Throw it in!”
So the boy picks up the clock and tosses it into the loom. When it hits the tapestry, it breaks up. A fountain of silver glitter scatters over the weaving. Look, each bit of glitter has turned into a tiny clock woven with the fabric. The frantic ticking is slowing down to accommodate the rhythm of the loom.
“We’re reweaving the world!” shouts the girl, and the dreamers find themselves within the tapestry -- not outside, but in it. Even the man and woman in the lab, even you and me here in this room, being woven back into the fabric of the world.
Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock.
Dahganah, denah, dahganah, dahganah, denah, dahganah.
Thank you.
(Applause and cheers)
