Ocean in the Sea Page 40

  The screen grew black as Randuu rewound the recording, and in the operating theater next to Lewis Herman, Doctor Adalwulf Claus Eisenberg frowned and stroked his short scraggly beard. “Zees memories are puzzlink,” he muttered to himself. “Are zees dreams of dee subject, or are zay actual memories? I am not quite understandink vat it is I am supposed to make of it.”

  “I’m sorry, Doctor Eisenberg,” Randuu’s voice said from the speakers. “The material gleaned from this interrogation is highly classified. You are required for medical support, and you should endeavor to forget all you have seen and heard. That is true of everyone here,” she added. “You are under oath never to speak of it.”

  Doctor Eisenberg twitched his lips and stared at the matt of sensors over Lewis’s brain, muttering something. Then the screen lit up again showing Nora Trent. Randuu ran the image forward and stopped as Valon began speaking.

  “The integration took longer than I expected,” said Valon, “but then I’ve never done this before. Other messengers only get a single system interface. Overlapping three is dangerous. I had to make sure the configuration was stable.”

  “Is it?” asked Nora Trent.

  Valon stared at his computer and tapped his lip with a pen. “Maybe.”

  “That’s it,” said Arsus over the intercom. “Pause there. What do you make of it?”

  Randuu answered through the speakers. “If it’s not one of Tanandor’s tricks meant to throw us off, then it’s a first. Secondary interfaces aren’t that uncommon, but they’re usually related to the primary. I’ve never encountered anyone with more than a single system-level interface. And Tanandor’s concern about stability is interesting. He wouldn’t care unless it affects him personally. He doesn’t care about anyone else.”

  Arsus nodded. “My thoughts exactly. And this ‘tandem-jump’ technique may be the same he used on Temekula-8. Remember that? Valruun sensed Tanandor’s conduit, but when we followed to the next simulation, we found a messenger instead of Tanandor.”

  “Da,” grumbled Beloris. “Not easy to forget. Mrs. ‘Firehose’ with wormhole interface. Opened holes into ocean. Destroyed half of city trying to capture her, and in the end we get nothing for it.”

  “Yes.” Arsus ground his teeth. “Tanandor jumped tandem with the messenger and jumped out when we killed her. He used her as a proxy while staying in the jump-buffer. If he’s done that to Lewis, then what’s this business about three system interfaces?” He crossed his arms. “Doctor Eisenberg, I believe we’re done with the interrogation. Remove the sensor matt and replace the bone flap. How soon before we can wake him up?”

  “I can be done in thirty minutes,” said the Doctor. “After zis, zee anesthesiologist can avaken him, alzough he vill be disoriented.”

  “Another dose of Saiben-D might help,” hissed Senjiita.

  Shanzea rolled her eyes. “Why not plug some electrodes up his ass and make him dance?” She stared at Arsus. “If we’re heroes, we suck at it. Are you going to wake Jenny or not?”

  Arsus pulled a pressure injector from his pocket and threw it to Shanzea. “You’re responsible for her,” he warned. “If she tries to interfere, brick her.”

  The hatch to the observation lounge opened and Perillia stomped in wearing the dark gray uniform of an NSA operative. She looked plenty peeved at being the last to arrive.

  “Ah,” chuckled Beloris. “Now is party.”

  “What I miss?” snarled Perillia. She stared through the windows down into the operating theater. “Who that, Arsus? You probing people again?”

  “It’s Lewis. We’ve managed to obtain recordings of his last two meetings with Tanandor,” explained Arsus. “We have his memories of Tanandor teaching him host memory navigation and jumping. We might as well review them now that you’re here.” He flipped the intercom. “Randuu, please playback the full recordings on the observation room screen.” As the television in the corner came to life, Arsus gestured toward it. “Have a seat and enjoy the show.”

  Xanatos offered Perillia a tube of peanut butter and jelly, which was refused. With a distasteful expression, Perillia regarded the obese food-obsessed Xanatos and found an empty seat. Her expression didn’t change as she watched the memories extracted from Lewis Herman’s mind. When they were over, she leaned back in thought.

  “Tanandor a copy of a copy,” observed Perillia. “Ain’t never heard ‘o no Anadar. This bullshit, or he legit?”

  “A question you can ask him yourself,” said Arsus. “Once we get him out.”

  Perillia looked doubtful. “How you gonna manage that?”

  “We’ll have Lewis purge the buffer.”

  “Why you think Lewis gonna help after what you just done to him?”

  “He will desire revenge,” said Senjiita. “If given the opportunity for satisfaction against someone who had burned you alive, would you not bargain with a lesser foe?”

  “Big or small,” growled Perillia. “You know what I do ta my enemies.”

  Arsus rolled his eyes. “Yes, well, we can only hope Lewis will think more logically than passionately, Perillia. We know where that’s gotten you. No offense.”

  Perillia glared at him. “Even Tanandor think you a dumbshit, Arsus.”

  “And yet you still follow me.” Arsus looked away. “So who is the real dumbshit?”

  “Enough,” barked Beloris. “If Tanandor is simulation of Anadar, and Anadar is simulation of real Anadar, then what good is Tanandor or Anadar? We have questions about Ring. Why is Ring here? Who create Ring? You think Tanandor knows truth?”

  “He’d better!” chimed Xanatos. “I’d like to know who we were. If Paradise was a prison, then why were we sent there, and who were we before?”

  “Analogs” Senjiita mused aloud. “A world full of criminal analogs built by a race that was not Tanandor’s, but a bastardization of them. That is what Tanandor told Lewis. We are not the criminals. We are simulations of criminals. And the creators of the ring built simulations to determine the future under specific circumstances. That is our purpose. We are rats in an artificial maze granting wisdom of our actions to those observing us.”

  Shanzea whispered. “He used us as a distraction.” She raised her voice. “He awoke Paradise and gave us interfaces because he knew his enemies were following them. He knew they’d be confused with so many billions appearing all at once and jumping everywhere.”

  “We a smoke screen,” snapped Perillia. “That all we are?”

  “No,” injected Evaeros. “Anadar was trapped. Tanandor is supposed to bring back help. That’s what we are. Help.”

  Beloris shook his head and grumbled. “I need help, so I go to simulation of prison planet? Why not warrior simulation? Paradise was peaceful place. No wars. No warriors. Nyet. Does not make sense.”

  “I am afraid Beloris is right,” said Arsus. “We are not Tanandor’s soldiers, else he would not have let so many Paradisians die or go Nastarii. No, we are the chaff thrown in his wake. Unless it’s all lies.” He shrugged. “It is more information than we had before. I say we…”

  An alarm klaxon sounded and the lights flickered and went off. Emergency lighting came on instantly, dimmer but more than sufficient to see by.

  “Jenny!” shouted Arsus. “ShanZEA?!”

  “Jenny’s just waking up,” Shanzea shouted back. “It can’t be her.”

  “Warning,” an automated voice called out over the station’s intercom. “Reactor breach in progress. Coolant systems deactivated. All personnel move to emergency stations Sigma Echo Alpha.” The message continued to repeat.

  Arsus stated down at the operating table where Doctor Eisenberg was stapling Lewis’s scalp back in place. “No.” The distress on Arsus’ face gave way to sheer determination. “We’re too close.” He spun around. “Perillia, Beloris, get to the reactor. Port it out of here if necessary. Xanatos, there’s a command deck on the ring below us. Crawl into someone’s head and see what’s going on.” He clicked the intercom button but it had n
o power. “Dammit. I need to talk with Randuu. Evaeros, go find a radio and bring it back here.”

  “What about me?” asked Shanzea.

  “Stay where you are,” said Arsus. “If we have to jump, I’ll need you to unbrick Valruun.” he turned his head. “Senjiita…”

  “I am ready, if death is required.”

  “Good.” Arsus clenched his jaw. “Stay ready.”

  Rude Awakenings

  Herman awoke to an endless void of absolute darkness. Disembodied and disconnected from any sense, he felt nothing. Never having experienced sensory deprivation, the lack of input should have disturbed him – unnerved at least – but it did not. After reliving Brenda and Scotty’s deaths, and then being burned alive, the emersion into nothingness was welcome bliss. He’d have danced a jig if he had a body. He didn’t even feel the need to breathe. Nor did he care – not at first – and for a while he drifted pleasantly in the cocoon of nothingness, simply enjoying the lack of agony.

  Then time passed. He measured it by the intensity of his boredom. Time, as he recalled, was relative – something Lewis had always believed. Time was a factor of one’s perception. Einstein, Hawking, Everett, they all said so, even Valon Kang, and they’d spent a lot more time thinking about time than Lewis had ever bothered. Although he had to admit that “Lewis-time” wasn’t a very accurate measurement by anyone’s standards. His boredom was too day-dream dependent and subject to distraction. Maybe he should count the seconds passing by, but that seemed like a complete waste of Lewis-time, and likely to increase his boredom exponentially, furthering the inaccuracy.

  Eventually, his mind prompted him to do something, and his internal dialog shifted to more relevant topics, like where his body might be and where his mind was. He might be dead and stuck in the ‘jump-buffer’ mentioned by his so-called allies. His memories were still a jumbled mess, and though dying in Valon’s office was the last event he recalled, it was surely not the last to have occurred. If it had occurred at all. Even the fire could have been an illusion.

  Was he in the chair with right now? His under-stimulated visual system evoked the memory of lighter fluid splashing over his legs. He pushed the image to blackness before it continued. If he were still in Valon’s office, then he’d never jumped, which meant the Nazi war planet was a fake created by computational systems encoded in a stack of monkey brains. If that were true then Arsus and Jenny and Michael Garibaldi were fake as well. That was impossible. He had too much of Garibaldi inside him. They were fused. He was both. He could sense the difference in who he was from who he’d been.

  He remembered docking with the space station and the recalibration slowly consuming the Earth. If he was on Freedom-3, then the recalibration might be obliterating it while he lay floating unconscious in some passageway. Except he was too lucid to be unconscious.

  Perhaps he was inside the recalibration. If he’d been out long enough, it might have expanded over the station. Again, his imagination evoked a visual of his body drifting in some white padded tube. Out the windows, the fuzzy haze of the recalibration expanded from the surface of earth. It blazed through the windows, time stopped, and everything faded into oblivion.

  Maybe this is what it felt like to be trapped inside a recalibration, an eternity of nothingness held forever without a body in the darkness of a barren void. Eventually, some form of insanity would claim him, nastarii, and he’d split into alternate personalities as a defense. He’d start hallucinating, and the hallucinations would become real. They’d eventually evolve into some kind of world that he didn’t control. Maybe that’s how simulations got started. Someone poor bastards like himself dreamed them up.

  Without trying, he imagined a simulated world – his world – a place based on his own memories, and not on the simulation of matter or physical laws. Brenda and Scotty appeared, running to him across a field of flowers. An orchestrated soundtrack boomed through the clean air. His heart pound in his chest. He ran towards them, throwing his arms open. Suddenly, a little girl rose out of the flowers and blocked his way. She wore a white dress and had a blue scarf around her neck. With a scowl, she pointed at him and shook her finger in a scolding manner.

  “We aren’t real.”

  Lewis halted in surprise. “No.” he told her. “You’re not real.”

  “Do you know what I am?” she asked. “What am I?”

  Recoiling, he backed up. “You’re a dream. The hallucination of a dead simulant.”

  “Not dead,” she insisted. And as the phantasm faded back to the void it had come from, Lewis heard her shout at him in the distance. “Not dead YET.” She vanished to black along with the illusion of the flowers and Scotty and Brenda.

  Was this some aspect of his subconscious mind trying to keep him alive? Whatever the girl was, he didn’t doubt her. If he was dead, time meant nothing and he had plenty of it, but if he were still alive, then screwing around in here might kill him. The stakes could be high. He might be dying in Valon’s chair. Recalibration could be coming straight at him. He needed to know before it was too late.

  With a renewed sense of urgency, Herman struggled to sift through his memories for anything he could use, and the vision of Brenda reminded him of Valon’s training. If anything remained, if any of it had been real, then the beacons should be there. The milestones in his memories.

  A deep revulsion kicked in a millisecond after he began searching, but Valon had told the truth – at least this once. Herman did not have to re-experience his memories to sense them. The milestones glowed in the distance across the landscape of his mind: the death of Brenda and Scotty, the guilt-ridden immolation of Jacky Jacobson. And further back, the dim light of his humiliation in the restaurant. Further still, the stupid firing of nails into his leg. There was no pain in looking at these recollections; they were only markers, representations – beacons. Place-markers in a horror novel. That’s what Brenda would have called them – bookmarks from Hell.

  Thinking back to the rest of Valon’s lesson, Herman drew a mental line, placing it like a ruler through the memories and examining those more adjacent but further on. It felt simple, as if he’d always known how to do this. Like a road he’d once traveled a thousand times and then forgotten. A dream-memory of freeway overpasses, exits, a merger, another exit, a turn to home.

  Home… but not his home. Michael Garibaldi was here too. Different memories on a different path overlapping his own. Easy to differentiate and impossible to ignore, they signified events more horrifying that his own. Mass murder, rape, torture, it was difficult to consider this creature as part of him, and it was impossible to deny. Garibaldi was still there, and therefore he was still inside of Garibaldi’s body, but he couldn’t reach the physical controls and the body’s senses were denied him. He was locked out. He needed to find the key.

  Turning away from the distant past, Herman navigated to the most recent events and found the interview with Senior Tech O’Ryan. This memory preceded his last dream with Valon. It was the last thing to happen to him – the interview. The little ‘debriefing’ session.

  O’Ryan had taken his blood. He remembered the hiss when she’d placed the device against his forearm. He’d tolerated the process, knowing Arsus had just gone through the same, but when she’d started asking questions about Michal Garibaldi’s childhood and his parents, he’d become progressively drowsy. By the time his muddled brain realized the needle had been an injection and not a sample, it was too late to focus on his interface or defend himself. He remembered someone screaming – a woman, Jenny. Then the linear nature of time shattered and he was thrown backward into Valon’s dreams. The arrow of his perception looped into them and forward to the disembodied ‘now’ of nothingness.

  So O’Ryan had drugged him, but someone had given her the order. It could have been the station commander, or some security officer, but why? Arsus had gone in first, and he’d been just fine. O’Ryan had picked Lewis next. “We might as well start with you,” she’d said.

&
nbsp; Arsus… the Deputy Director of the NSA. He probably outranked everyone here. And he’d wanted Lewis to remember Valon’s last lessons – hoped to learn something from them. As the pieces fell into place, Herman felt a cold rage. It was unusual for Lewis, but not for Garibaldi. Deprived of Saiben-D, this was Garibaldi’s natural reaction – ‘don’t get mad, get even,’ and as sick as Garibaldi was, the dead man in his head was his only ally. Not that it helped them. Without control over his body, without even senses, there was no escape. As traps went, it was perfect.

  Lewis would have panicked, had a breakdown of some kind, and then accepted the hallucinations and the insanity. Herman, however, was part soldier, a warrior, just as Valon had wanted. Valon must have selected Garibaldi. It seemed Valon was capable of a great many things, but then he was a duplicate of a higher power.

  Power that he’d given Lewis.

  Herman laughed soundlessly at that thought. He didn’t need his body to take action. He couldn’t wake up, but if he were still on the station, he could force-jumped them all. They’d end up on Earth in new hosts, and the 3-day timer would reset.

  No, no, no. He couldn’t do that. Not with the recalibration in progress. Unwise. Bad move. Kill everybody. But he could mess with them, force them to face him, maybe wake him up. At the very least, remind them he wasn’t someone to fuck with.

  It was not his intent not to kill anyone, but to rattle cages. And on a space station, the cages would have to do with the station’s operation. Power was the first thing that came to mind. Next, atmosphere, they had to have air. Computers, cameras, temperature control, pressure control, radiation shielding, food stores, centrifugal rotation control, orbital velocity, attitude, docking, medical. The more he thought about it, the more he realized how he would design such a station. And then, even easier, he brought forth an image of it in his mind. There was nothing else to occupy his occipital lobe. It obeyed without question, summoning a vision, of what such a station might look like.