From scene one of Broken Dreamscapes, paid subscribers had the ability to influence the story with a poll at the end of every scene. Those votes really mattered and, to show you they did, I thought it would be fun to tell you how the story could have gone had the popular vote gone the other way.
To get the most out of this post, it’s best to have read Broken Dreamscapes in its entirety. If you haven’t yet, here’s the first scene. Don’t read any further if you don’t want any spoilers. But if you have read the whole story, enjoy this alternative imagining of Broken Dreamscapes.
Broken Dreamscapes #01
Broken Dreamscapes #01 begins the story with Orion Caldwell, a Dream Architect working for SomniTech Industries, finding a strange device in one of his dreamscapes. He examines the device and, when he tries to move the device to another dreamscape, it refuses and almost overpowers him. At the end of the scene, readers had the choice to either:
Show the device to Elara, Orion’s wife
Show the device to SomniTech, Orion’s employer
Readers chose to show the device to Elara. This led to Elara becoming its target for a vicious process that would replace her memories of Orion with memories of another man, the creator of the device and a SomniTech employee, Victor Sinclair. Orion’s fight to stop this process became the entire story.
Had Orion shown the device to SomniTech, it would have made for a totally different story. This was intentional. Although I had some idea about the general direction of the story, I kept my options wide open because I wanted that first choice to really matter.
Had Orion shown the device to SomniTech first, it wouldn’t have been a story about him trying to save his relationship. It probably would have turned into a story about him trying to stop SomniTech from ever mass-producing the device. A story about corruption in a multinational organization. I don’t believe Orion would ever have even considered leaving the Dream Nexus.
Broken Dreamscapes #02
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