The Rise of Osiris

It began when Mara was seven.

Other children closed their eyes at night and their dreams would happen. Mara’s dreams, however, would happen because of her. She remembered the first time being inside a lucid dream and having a feeling of understanding and reflection as to what she was doing. Mara stood inside a room she had built that was filled to her waist in candy and with nobody telling her to stop. Another night she filled a field with a hundred puppies that climbed into her lap and licked her face until she laughed herself awake. She also loved to swim, so she swam deep into the ocean with dolphins holding pace on either side of her.

Every time, she woke up. Every time, she came back to a world where nothing was hers to decide.

When she became a teenager, her powers grew and Mara learned to fly. She was a high school student by day and something else entirely at night. Each night Mara went somewhere that she had never been. Breakfast in Paris, an afternoon on a Greek beach, evenings in Italy where the light would settle into a deep orange glow for as long as she wanted it to. She met new people and had conversations she would remember at breakfast the next morning.

As a young adult, Mara stopped visiting the world and began making it. Houses, mansions, and castles rose out of the bare ground where Mara thought they should appear. Streets filled in behind her as she walked. But not all of her dreams were in her control. On days when she was grieving, it rained in her dreams. On days she was happy, the sun would shine and nothing could go wrong.

Then in her twenties, her powers reached a new level of enlightenment when her grandmother appeared. She had never met her grandmother, who died years before Mara was born. Mara’s mother always told her stories about her amazing mother, whom Mara would never get to meet. Then one night, Mara walked into a house she had not built, and there sat her grandmother at a kitchen table as if she had been waiting a while. They quickly became best friends and talked the way best friends would talk to each other at a sleepover. Mara learned about what her mother was like as a girl. They talked about being alive, and they talked about being dead. Mara told her mother, who listened the way a parent would listen to a child describing an imaginary friend, kindly but from a distance. She had always known Mara’s dreams were special but never suspected that her own mother was inside of them. Until Mara mentioned the blue glass bowl. And how her mother had broken it when she was nine years old and was punished after their dog dug up the buried pieces from the backyard.

Mara was careful with the gift she was given. In the dream world, Mara never hurt anyone. She made herself happy, she kept her grandmother company, and for a while that was enough. Then one night she confessed that she was bored.

"If I want a pony, there's a pony," she told her grandmother.

"If I want to stand inside a volcano, I'm standing in one. Nothing is ever coming. Nothing surprises me anymore."

She noticed feeling more and more relieved every morning when she woke up. The real world had something her dreams didn’t, which was uncertainty. She had always believed that uncertainty was the price of happiness, but now she was starting to think it was the material from which happiness was made.

Her grandmother sympathized and suggested that perhaps her gift hadn’t finished growing, and maybe there were more rooms to explore. So Mara went looking. She learned French; she learned to code; she read history, which had always been her favorite—hundreds of books of it—devouring whole centuries in a night.

And that was how she found Jacques. His story filled four pages in an unreliable book and described a man in the 1600s who could shape his dreams the way she shaped hers. Accounts of his life were scarce and difficult to find. She learned from his own memoir that his power had opened a door through time, enabling him to walk through centuries the way Mara walked through cities.

But then his journey came to an abrupt end after he fell asleep one night and never woke up. His body remained in bed while he was fed, turned, and prayed over for eleven years, until he died. Mara thought either he got stuck or found somewhere he liked so much that he didn’t want to leave. Her grandmother didn’t find that funny and asked Mara to promise that she’d never attempt to travel through time. Mara promised.

She kept the promise for a long time, until her reading uncovered how Jacques was able to pass through time. It turned into a set of instructions sitting in her head that she couldn’t stop rehearsing. Of all the time periods she had ever wondered about, she knew exactly where she’d go – Egypt, 2555 B.C.E. She never believed any explanation offered for how the pyramids were built and wanted to see it happen for herself.

The first time she tried, nothing happened. She tried again, and still nothing. She tried for years, but remained stuck in the present. Eventually her grandmother’s fear abated and she offered to help Mara. They concentrated together, but nothing came. Her grandmother then told her to wait, close her eyes, focus, and then suddenly she disappeared. Mara then felt a presence inside of her, settling behind her ribs, warm and familiar, just like family. At that moment she understood the cost and that she couldn’t go back. So she performed the ritual again, and this time the dream let her go.

She found herself under a blanket of intense heat, quickly burning down the back of her neck. Then the sound. Sledges grinding over wet sand. Ropes creaking. A rhythm of voices counting, and under it, a thin and constant crack of leather.

She was standing on the western outskirts of future Cairo and beside the Great Pyramid of Giza, three-fifths built and swarming with men. Thousands of men hauled stone up ramps of packed rubble in lines that stretched endlessly back. Overseers walked the lines. She saw bodies lifeless on the ground where they had fallen in the sun. She then realized that she was likely the only person in the desert with blonde hair and who didn’t speak Egyptian and would not soon be unnoticed.

Three men approached her aggressively, speaking in a tone that demanded answers. Her silence only made it worse. One of the men snatched her arm. She pulled back, but a second man caught her other arm; she was overpowered. She shouted at them to let go, but that only made them laugh. As she attempted to twist away, a third man backhanded her face, causing her knees to give out from under her.

She braced for the next one. But it never came. Instead what followed was silence.

She looked up to see that the three men were no longer looking at her and had let go of her arms without noticing. She turned to follow their eyes and saw that every man in the desert had stopped, on the ramps, on the ropes, whips down, and all of them facing the Nile with the same blank expression. For a moment she could not see what they were seeing. Then something began to come up out of the river.

It seemed to be the head of a creature and the size of a house, hooded in black. It rose vertically without effort, as if it were being drawn up by the sky. Shoulders followed, then a chest. The figure kept rising until it stood as high as a tower, and then higher until its legs cleared the surface. It paused, standing on top of the water, as tall as a pyramid.

Nobody moved or made a sound. It then took one step forward onto the sand, causing the ground to jump. The men in its path scattered, while the others knelt with their foreheads pressed against the sand. It slowly walked toward the pyramid, unhurried. It then stopped, turned around, and faced the masses before it. The cloak dropped, exposing the giant figure.

Mara recognized it instantly. Wrapped in tight white linen that covered its green body. A tall pale crown flanked by two long feathers. And the narrow curved beard of a divine king. His arms folded across the chest, with one hand holding the crook, and the other the flail. It was the unmistakable figure etched into every wall and every tomb, standing sixty meters above the sand – the Egyptian god Osiris.

As Mara’s eyes adjusted, what she observed then meant something else entirely. The linen was plating with visible seams. Each band overlapped the one below it, the darker line of the joints. The green was neither skin nor paint; it was corrosion. The soft dead green color of copper after a long time in water. The crown was a cast shell. Its two feathers were shaped sheets of metal that did not stir in the wind coming off the river. The crook and the flail were machined, and the face above the beard had eyes that did not blink. Where the sun caught the bare places at the wrists and the jaw, it came back off polished steel, so bright it hurt to look at.

Every painting of Osiris was accurate, but the assumption that he was flesh and bone was not. Then it spoke. The enormous words meant nothing to her, and all around her men pressed their faces down into the sand and stayed there. It then turned and walked back from where it came at the pace used before. It went out onto the river, out across the surface of the water, and down, and gone.

Mara remained on her knees for a long time processing that the Egyptian god Osiris she saw was an autonomous robot. She later learned that it had said:

"I am Osiris, Phoenix of the Dark Age, scholar of the cosmos. I have no equal. Honor the gods, respect what belongs to them, keep the rituals and the offerings, and do not disturb the divine order."

She also learned that the silence on the bank was not because people were seeing something for the first time, but rather because those people’s grandparents had stood upon that same bank a hundred years ago and watched as Osiris was murdered, cut apart, and pieces of him were carried off in different directions.

Mara had observed the resurrection of Osiris.

Her head filled. She had lived a life where humans created artificially intelligent entities, but now found herself two and a half thousand years before the birth of Christ contemplating whether artificial intelligence may have created humans.

Before another thought could enter her head, Mara woke up in her bedroom. She looked at the ceiling, the window, and the pink digital alarm clock across her room, and felt overwhelming relief.

Since her trip to Egypt, dreams would come, sometimes sideways and unasked for, but never again under her control. Her grandmother never came back. And every morning she woke up with no idea what was coming, and never once called it boredom again.