Ocean in the Sea Read online

  Following a nurse to the pharmaceutical laboratory, the dusky skinned hook-nosed body of Michael Garibaldi waited for her to unlock the psychotropics cabinet. She conveniently forgot to secure it when she left, hustling off on some important errand. At this point the camera in the room suffered a brief malfunction, resulting in a short blackout. When it came back online, the lab was empty and Michael Garibaldi was gone. Also missing were two bottles of Saiben-D and a couple of syringes, but it would be several days before routine inventory would reveal this.

  A few minutes later, Garibaldi appeared on camera again, this time moving down the hall toward one of the recovery rooms. Stopping to check the chart outside the door, he took it with him and went inside.

  Setting the chart down, Garibaldi moved his dark eyes over the room, taking in the details. A prosthetic arm lay on a nearby counter. The bed held a young woman in her early twenties. She was hooked to several IV drips and a heart monitoring station. Covered with a white powder, she was severely swollen, her breathing labored, and her face covered with dozens of bites.

  Lewis made sure to stand beneath the camera as he injected himself with the Saiben-D. He threw the empty syringe into a biohazard disposal box and took a deep breath. “Jenny,” he called. “Jenny, it’s Lewis.”

  Her swollen eyes opened into slits. “Lewis?” she croaked.

  “Yeah. Looks like you got the worst of it. Listen, I’ve talked with Arsus, and I’m not feeling a lot of trust for the Deputy Director of the fricken NSA. They’ve been experimenting with crappers, and he wants to use an experimental mind control device on me. I got issues with that. On the other hand, I suspect Valon sent me to distract you people, and I sure as Hell don’t want to do him any favors either. Seems like my best option is to hit the road and stay low until all this bullshit blows over.”

  “Mind control?” she muttered.

  “To help me remember, he says. Get the rest of Valon’s instructions out of my head without my having to suffer through them.” He shrugged. “Might work. Might not. But I’ve got no interest in sticking my head in another scanner. Had enough of that.” He held up the vial of Saiben-D. “I took enough of this to keep me awake for a month. You did me a solid back there saving my ass, so I’m gonna offer you the same. This’ll stop the pain and make you heal faster. It’ll make you psycho but that takes years, and you’ll jump out of here long before then. Don’t know why they didn’t offer it to you. You’re different from the other jumpers, aren’t you? Before you showed up, Beloris was worried I might hurt you, almost like he was being protective. Why?”

  “Not… Paradisian,” she gasped. ”I’m new… like you. Tanandor’s messenger.”

  Lewis blinked. He hadn’t expected this, but Valon had said there’d been others. There could be hundreds. Lewis folded his arms and rubbed his chin. “The stories…” he whispered to himself.

  Jenny frowned. “Huh?”

  “He’s changing the stories,” said Lewis. “The people in these simulations follow a script. Their lives are determined from beginning to end. But we’re from outside. Every time we drop in, we mess with the story. The more of us that are messing with stories, the more divergent the results get. Maybe that’s what Valon wants.”

  “Simulations… recalibrate.” Jenny swallowed and licked her lips. “When we leave.”

  “They do?” Another piece of the puzzle revealed. “I bet that takes system resources. Maybe that’s what he wants. Or maybe it’s something else” He rubbed his temples. “I don’t know. This probably ain’t the time to philosophize anyway.” He held up the syringe. “You want this or not?”

  She shook her head, then nodded. He understood. She didn’t want it, but she felt like shit and knew it would help. There was no pain on Saiben-D. The sense of damage was there, but it didn’t hurt. He put the syringe on a rolling food cart and pushed it over to her. “Sorry. I’m staying off camera for the moment. When they notice me missing, they’ll search the recordings.”

  Clawing at the syringe with her one good arm, she stuck herself in the thigh and depressed the plunger. “Oh… God…” She bit her lip. A tear trickled from the corner of her eye.

  “It works fast,” said Lewis. “Tell me about the simulation you came from. You said you’re not Paradisian. You’re… what? Human?”

  “Yes.”

  “Any other human jumpers in Arsus’s crew?”

  “No.”

  He was about to ask if her world was like his, but then realized it would be pointless. She couldn’t answer that. She didn’t know jack about his world. The current simulation was their only common reference. “Was your world like this one?”

  “No. It was… different. Divergent.”

  “No technology then?”

  “We had… a different technology. There was another type of energy. Doesn’t exist here. We channeled it through crystals. It could… change gravity and… send messages. It sang to us. In our minds.”

  Crystals? That sounded a little crazy. Maybe she was hallucinating. But then, why shouldn’t there be simulations where the physics were weird? It was all computers anyway. It made no difference. Anything was possible. That didn’t mean it was accurate according to the real world – if there were such a thing – but it could exist. “The time,” he said, “the year on this world is the same as the one I left. Was yours?”

  “No. Been travelling,” she told him between breaths. “A hundred years. Conduits aren’t always linear. Sometimes forward. Sometimes backward. Sometimes sideways. Valruun can tell when he senses them.”

  That was interesting. “What’s a sideways jump?”

  “Time stays the same, but the divergence changes.” She sat up. The swelling in her lips and face already beginning to subside. “If you go sideways, history is different, but the time you arrive is the same as you left. That must be what happened to you.”

  “Looks like it,” he agreed. “The Germans lost the war on my world, and the US never took over Central America or Canada. This place is fucking bizarre. A kind of nightmare. I thought we had it bad with global warming and the collapse of North Korea, but the Nazis and Japanese ruling half the world?” He shook his head with a repugnant grimace. “And this crapper thing, it’s like a plague. The US I know would never drug our troops with psychotropics.” Crossing his arms, he looked at the ceiling. “Actually, I could be wrong there, but we wouldn’t have done it on this scale, and they would have been volunteers. What they did to Garibaldi and his buddies is just… criminal.”

  “Can you hand me my arm?” she asked.

  It was off camera. Lewis picked it up and tossed it onto the bed. Damn thing was heavy. He wondered if it still even worked after he’d used his interface to short it out, but she wouldn’t remember that. She’d been unconscious. “You, uh… might need some new batteries in that,” he advised.

  “How did you meet him?”

  “Who? Valon?”

  She nodded. “Tanandor,” she corrected. “Valon was a host, but he’s always Tanandor, regardless of the simulation.”

  Lewis felt an intense dislike for the correction. She was right, but to him, Valon would always be Valon. “He said he ‘arranged’ it. Considering my interface, it makes sense. He changed the odds of the right person showing up at the right time to do the right job and I was the lucky winner. At the time, though, it was an employment opportunity. I needed it. Work was about the only thing keeping me from eating a bullet, and I was struggling with alcohol.”

  Jenny raised her eyebrows. “You were an alcoholic?”

  “No. I wasn’t drinking, but my genetic disposition indicated a propensity for alcoholism. It’s how my father died. I wanted to drink. Wanted it as bad as Garibaldi wants Saiben-D. I knew if I started, I wouldn’t stop, so I abstained.” He’d abstained from sex too, and social contact in general, but he wasn’t going to mention that.

  Jenny managed to sit up. Looking at Lewis, she hesitated for a second. Making her decision, she threw the covers off. Her
naked breasts weren’t quite naked. Like the rest of her body, they were covered in a layer of aloe under a snowy topping of calamine powder. “Why did you want to drink?” she asked.

  Lewis examined her breasts. She had a nice figure. Slight and thin, kind of wiry, but pert and perfect if one didn’t count the welts from all the insect bites. “That’s the question, isn’t it?” he asked distractedly. “Why would a perfectly good human want to drink himself into oblivion? To forget. And Lewis… well… he had a lot to forget. I had a lot to forget. But it’s a long miserable story with a shitty ending, so let’s just say that my wife and child were killed and go back to Valon and his goddamn job. He had this experimental brain scanner designed to detect the electrical firing of individual neurons. It could also interact with them. He hired me to write about it.”

  As her breasts move, he found himself somewhat fascinated by the contortions. Was it Lewis, Garibaldi, or all of them? Definitely Garibaldi. The Lewis part drew back like a viper, opposed to the violation of Brenda’s memory. Good God but they were screwed up. And even in that, there was an irony. Garibaldi was a Christian, and Lewis an agnostic bordering on atheism. Matter and anti-matter. Thankfully HE had control. He was mister ‘I’m the bridge between to shitty people.’ But it wasn’t a comfortable position. If she noticed the track of his eyes, she didn’t imply it. He was grateful, though he held no illusions that she wasn’t aware.

  “That’s how he transferred the probability interface?” asked Jenny. “The scanner?”

  The straps holding the fake arm in place were like a shoulder holster, thought Lewis. The ‘real’ Lewis wouldn’t have noticed. The association ran through Garibaldi’s memories. Lewis had never used a shoulder holster. “Yes. He had his assistant K.O. me when I wasn’t expecting it. Doctor Trent, along with a bunch of thugs. They stuck me in the scanner for ‘training’ and Valon must have… I don’t’ know… erased the mental associations with those memories until I went to sleep. I have to live through dreams to recall them. That’s why I’m juiced on Saiben-D. No sleep, no torment.”

  “And no information,” concluded Jenny. “My arm’s not responding.” She tried to flex the fingers but nothing happened. “It’s not the battery. There’s a short somewhere. I don’t know if I can route around it.” She sighed. “Randuu is SO much better than I am at this digital stuff. I mean, I just don’t get it. It’s all pulses, and the space between them is tiny. I don’t know how she does it. I only just learned Morse code.”

  “What are the odds that your arm will start working again?” asked Lewis. He pushed.

  “Oh! Thanks. I… forgot about that.” She held her hand up and moved the fingers. “You can do pretty much anything, can’t you?”

  “No,” he said flatly. “I can’t make my wife and son come back to life. I can’t grow your arm back, and I can’t go home. I’d love to change the world, but I don’t know what to do. Unfortunately, I can’t leave it up to anyone else. They don’t have my fricking interface. So Valon’s choice of me is perhaps the worst possible choice for everyone.”

  “I think you’re being too hard on yourself.” Getting out of bed, Jenny threw off the sheet and picked up the hospital gown lying on a chair.

  Her arm seemed to work perfectly, almost as if it were part of her. But Lewis’s eyes were drawn to her naked figure. The triangle of light between her legs and the slight curvature of her hips. He forced himself to look away. “Why are you getting up?” he asked.

  “I’m going with you.”

  “What!?” He scowled. This was not what he’d wanted. Or was it? Garibaldi might have wanted it. Lewis did not. He was riding two stallions and they were going in different directions. If he didn’t pull them together they’d rip him apart. “I don’t even know where I’m going. Why go with me?”

  She threw a robe over the gown. “Because… I want to.” As she pulled the sash tight she saw the look in his face and realized he didn’t understand. “They’re different than us. Arsus and Randuu and the others are… they’re not human. Neither is Tanandor. They might seem human, but once you get to know them, you realize that they’re really not. It’s subtle, but it makes a difference. All Paradisians have an obsession controlling them, and they’re older than we are. WAY older. It’s like travelling with your crazy great great grandparents. They don’t really trust me to do anything myself. If I’m going to live forever, I want another human to share it with.” Her nostrils flared. “I want someone closer to my age who will work with me, not order me around and keep secrets. So I don’t care where you’re going.”

  The Garibaldi in his mind protested. She’d be dead weight. What was she good for? The Herman in his mind protested as well. She was a sexual distraction, and that was something to be denied. Do not soil Brenda’s memory. But the ‘new’ Lewis sitting in the middle, had to make the choice, and he wanted Jenny with him. It was here on this issue that he would make his stand and let the horses ride. “You’ll need clothing. You can’t expect to escape in a bathrobe.”

  “Find me something then.”

  “What can you do? What interface did Valon give you?”

  “I can sense and manipulate the energy spectrum. What that spectrum is depends on the simulation, and I can’t generate energy. I can only use what’s there. I can see in ultraviolet, infrared, x-rays, you name it.”

  “So you’re a walking sensor suite. That could be useful. Stay here. I’ll get you a nurse’s uniform. And you might want to take a shower.”

  “You’ll come back?” she asked. “You promise?”

  “Yeah.” His dark eyes met hers. “You know a shitload more than I do, and I need a teacher who ain’t an alien, so we’ll trade. My brilliant and exciting company for your experience jumping and living in the ring. Deal?”

  “Deal.”

  As he closed the door and moved back toward the locker room to find her a uniform, Lewis instantly reconsidered their agreement. Garibaldi had no reservations ditching her. The selfish prick had loyalties, but they were reserved for his fellow soldiers and his country. The old Lewis had sexual issues, and to be honest, the old Lewis was a fricking mess. Taken from that perspective, the meshing of their personalities by the Attistar was probably the best thing that could have happened. Neither Garibaldi or the old Lewis were good choices for getting through this. Their decisions were both compromised by issues that didn’t matter and weren’t conducive to figuring out what was actually going on. Which brought him back to the main point – what the fuck was going on?

  On his way to the locker room he pushed his interface a couple times to ensure no one would notice or care about his presence. No one did. Once there, he asked himself the question “what were the odds of a nurse’s uniform fitting Jenny being in an unlocked locker?” Pushing, he checked the doors until one opened. The top half was fine, but the bottom was a short skirt. The bites on her legs would give her away. Sighing, he pushed again for a set of leotards and a surgical mask and searched the lockers again. Taking what he needed, he moved back down the corridor.

  One nagging doubt plagued Lewis. It had to do with the scanner. From the moment Valon had placed him in the machine, everything was suspect. The last “true” event was Nora Trent and her tranquilizer gun. After that, everything he could hear, feel, taste, see, and smell – was subject to doubt. Was it coming from the Attistar controlling the simulation, or was it coming from Valon and his scanner? There was no way to know.

  His brain could be floating in one of those plexiglass towers in Professor Sandaw’s lab right now. Right next to the monkey brains. This whole “ring” bullshit could be a virtual reality meant to ‘acclimate’ him to his new bodiless condition. Garibaldi’s personality might even be something they’d manufactured, and assimilating it could be what Valon had wanted.

  No matter what Lewis thought of Jenny or the other jumpers, or this world, they might not be real. And the worst of it was the interface itself. It was the only evidence.

  In the ‘real’
world one could not perform miracles, Attistar access or otherwise. In the ‘real’ world, there was no computer system controlling the environment. He’d first manipulated probability with his head in Valon’s scanner, and within the scanner, Valon could make him think anything he wanted. How did one identify what was real when they couldn’t trust their senses? How could one trust their own thoughts when even they could be manipulated?

  One could not, and neither could Lewis. Nor could he come up with a single point of evidence that could falsify this reality. It was no different than the religion in Garibaldi’s mind. One had faith or they did not, but there was no validation except that faith. All the excuses were in place for him to believe either way. He was in the scanner, or all of reality was a series of computer simulations, universes within a multiverse – oceans in the sea.

  Jenny was still in the shower when he returned. Cracking the bathroom door, he threw the clothes to her. “Use the stockings to cover your legs,” he called out. “Not much we can do about your face. I brought a surgical mask.”

  “It’s okay,” she called back, “a lot of the swelling has gone down. I feel better. A little weird though. Every little sound seems magnified. You notice that?”

  “I think I’m used to it. Or Garibaldi is.” Actually, that explained why he hadn’t noticed Arsus when he’d woken up. Jenny had given him the antidote. Even though the stuff was made to counter Saiben-D, it had probably weakened the LythoCAP in his system.

  “We should hurry.”

  The shower cut off. Clothing rustled for a good long time. Lewis folded his arms and tapped his foot. Just like Brenda, Jenny took forever getting ready. Did she have makeup in there? What the Hell was she doing? “AHEM!”

  When the door finally opened she stepped out wearing the face mask. Several of the bug bites were still visible. She’d covered the one on her forehead with a plastic bandage. Overall, she looked like she was suffering from some kind of disease. Maybe leprosy or something. She wore the dress well, though. The fit was about right.