Breaking into Biostorage

They keep them frozen.
All 88,000 of them, in slide-out drawers in a giant warehouse. Storage, while they're not being used for any of the various mental experiments funded by the Nightmare Company.

Thankfully, I know how to save them-- I think.
It's an experimental new technology designed by Willa, which will hopefully actually work, but we'll see. I shove the first of the patients into the "briefcase," and it immediately assimilates a proper room environment for them, with a bed and lamp and chair. I shove in the second, and the program adds a duplicate room, plus hallway connection. I twist the dial up a tiny way, and thirty people are sucked in at once, and the parameters of the tiny world expand to include a bathroom and snack bar.
It's working!
I haven't time to waste, though. The assistant who thinks I'm in the bathroom, and was taking me on a tour of the facility, will realize any minute now that he's been fooled. I crank the dial up to half power, and it starts sucking and assimilating minds by the hundreds. Laila jumps down from the ceiling. "Hurry up! We don't have much time left!"

"Hey," I say suspiciously, "Aren't you supposed to be monitoring the surveillance people to make sure they haven't caught on to us?"

"I was," she sighs in frustration. "They did."

"Oh, well, crap!" I reply. I crank the dial to maximum. Angry voices succeed some large banging sounds on the nearest door, which we barricaded on the inside. "Almost there..." I slow the dial down gently, and turn off immediately after the last person enters the virtual briefcase world. "Come on!" I yell. "Let's get these people outta here!" We burst out the skylight and into the night air, as the lab minions burst through in time to spot us from below. "Ready searchlights!"One yells into a radio. "They've stolen the specimens!" We race toward the dream-time continuity breach in the sky, to release the minds of these tortured souls out of the nightmare realm altogether and into the dreamless, deep sleep of what I like to call dream Limbo.

Before I can lob the briefcase in, however, a tidal wave of colossal windy power sucks me into the breach as well. The sky closes, and all grows dark.

I walk out onto Amanda's back porch. Her mother waves as she simultaneously stacks wood for the winter, bakes apple pie, and dances to jazz. I dive off the balcony into a sea of memories, floating among MyScene dolls and dress-up clothes and Beatles records...the tang of sweaty feet in the air. I can feel childhood closing in around me. I close my eyes and open them again to find myself sitting at a tea table with Laila and Amanda, who are leafing through pages of emotion and treasure and memory and laughing, as the tides of life, rather than allowing us to be present and enjoy the moment, sweep us ever onward to the Future. A TV screen rises form the depths and engulfs the world around us. Its electrical impulses in the space between thought and action register as comets in a starry sky. We talk of philosophy, physics, the relevancy of claims...Around our little tea table, floating in celestial space, we count the ways one can be a hero, the opportunity cost of the road less traveled, the merit of looking forward by hoping to perpetuate those things we enjoy now.

The sun sets, but we are so far above it in space that we do not notice the darkness, only the constant relationship of our little planets doggedly circling their source of light, and never straying too far from orbit, out of love. It must be love.Why else would they keep such creatures as us alive on their backs?

I leave at last, happy to have spent some life outside the confines of time in a quality way, with good friends.

You see, even in dreams, we are limited by time.

Unless we can find a way to separate ourselves.