Quincy Caesar and the Desolator

This one stuck with me for a couple of days: My family was in Portland visiting my friend Caesar Filori, in a very cool glass high-rise - he had a very swanky apartment and while it's sunny outside, there are windows tinted so it always looks like sunset. The apartment is not unlike Frasier Crane's one from the sitcom, with a conversation pit and a dining room table against a wall of windows.

Caesar has surgically altered his appearance to look like a 50-ish Quincy Jones, but it's still Caesar in there. He did it for the love of a woman, a 50+ old black woman with a shaved head and wearing a dashiki - she must be a poet or something. There are pictures throughout the apartment of the two of you - one him serenading her with a saxophone, another a close up of her smiling with him kissing the top of her bald head. Big silver hoop earrings.

After dinner he asks if we want to go on a cruise - I say "sure!" and he smiles and press a button on the dinner table: The entire apartment is jettisoned suddenly out the front glass, which retracts - and I realize the apartment is actually a vehicle - a huge vehicle.

Now, this vehicle is way too big for the roads, but fortunately there's a network of roller-coaster rails strung across the city, going over roads, sideways up buildings, looping around corners - the apartment is tearing ASS through town toward the river. I realize that there's a word for this sort of vehicle - it's a "desolator" - designed to move away from the storms and droughts that global warming is bringing - it's both a response to the crisis, and an accelerator.

The dream ends with you piloting the apartment onto a canal, deploying a hovercraft skirt, where it joins a procession of other desolators of varying sizes (Caesar's is one of the smaller ones), headed toward a futuristic silver city in the distance.

And that's where the dream ended.