Or that she needed to change a light bulb.
Either way, she uncovered plenty of ways to teach herself to lucid dream, and she implemented them all. She constantly checked digital time displays to see whether she could properly read them, and during her scant breaks, she brought up pages from the net archives at random, to make sure their text was stable. Shifting, unreadable text was another sign of being inside a dream.
In the meantime, more and more colonists were dropping dead from Imagovirus. By now, it had cut short twenty-six lives, and Harriet shuddered to think of what would happen to the colony if she or Mariah were next. Every sniffle sent a jolt of fear through her body.
At last, after weeks of frustrated efforts, she gave up. She woke up after yet another night of no lucid dreams—at least, none that she could remember—and cursed as she sat up in bed.
I’m terrible at this.
She’d also begun to realize how ridiculous it was, to remain so focused on her dreams when people were dying in real life. Even though it took up very little of her time, it was demanding more and more of her cognition, and it was time for her to stop.
God isn’t trying to speak to me. I’m not special. And the only way I’m going to help the people of Imago is to focus completely on my work.
She stumbled out of bed, threw on a t-shirt, and left the bedroom to begin her morning routine, which began with drinking the coffee she’d programmed her coffee maker to start brewing for her just before she woke.
When she entered the kitchen, there was no coffee smell.
There was, however, someone sitting at her kitchen table.
It was Ensign Philip Mann.
“Philip…what are you doing here?”
His face had a haggard look, as though he’d been feeling just as frustrated as she had. Before answering, he paused for several seconds.
“I’m doing the same thing I’ve done dozens of times before,” he said, speaking with great deliberation. “If only I could manage to make it work.”
With a hand that trembled slightly, she reached toward the light switch to her left.
When she hit it, nothing happened.
I’m dreaming!
To make sure, she walked to the washroom that led off from the kitchen and tried that light as well. Still nothing.
Excitement welled up inside her, and she willed herself to calm down. Of the handful of lucid dreams she’d ever had in her life, at least half of them had been ruined by getting so excited she woke up.
“Philip,” she said, “things are different tonight.”
Again, he paused before speaking, and when he spoke, he did so rather slowly. “You’ve said similar things before,” he said. “But you never remember our conversations afterward and you take no action.”
Harriet tilted her head to the side. Action?
“You don’t understand,” she said. “I know that I’m dreaming. I’m lucid dreaming!”
“Hmm,” he said, though not before pausing once more. He narrowed his eyes a little. “Well, that is new.” He still sounded skeptical, though.
More importantly, he sounded nothing like the Philip Mann of her waking life. This Philip’s voice was resonant with emotion, hinting at an inner life so rich and deep it might be bottomless.
This was the Philip she loved.
Taking a seat across from him, she stared him right in the eyes. “This is different, Philip. Now, tell me—what did you mean when you said I haven’t taken any action? Action on what?”
He drew a ragged breath, running a rough hand over a stubbled cheek. “Escaping,” he said after a time.
“Escaping?” she repeated, shaking her head. “Escaping what? And why are you pausing before everything you say?”
After pausing again, Philip answered, with the air of someone explaining something for the hundredth time. “Our realities aren’t completely in sync, Harriet. Speaking to you through your dreams is the only way we can talk at all. The simulation runs at a fraction of the speed of reality, rendering any conversation I’d try to have with you inside it so slow as to be meaningless. But dreams are almost ideal. Since humans don’t dream in real-time, but several times faster than that, we can actually talk here.”
Harriet wondered whether her eyes were as wide as they felt. “I’m sorry, Philip, but I’m completely lost, here. Simulation? What are you talking about?”
“The farming sims. You’re still inside one of the farming sims. Still in cryo.”
Her chest clenched, and she struggled to relax, to maintain the dream. Philip’s words had caused her to experience shock and disbelief in equal measure. “So if what you’re saying is true…we haven’t really arrived at Imago?”
“Oh, we’ve arrived,” the ensign said, with a tiny, bitter smile. “We’re in orbit over Imago right now. Except the exoplanet experts got this one wrong. It’s not the verdant utopia they thought it was. It’s a barren rock with a poisonous atmosphere.”
Now it was Harriet’s turn to pause, and when she finally found her voice again, she stuttered: “H-how long ago did we arrive?”
As he answered her, even his bitter ghost of a smile fell away. “Years. The UEF only gave us enough fuel for a one-way trip, Harriet. We’ve been here for years and years.”
*
“That’s impossible,” she said, getting abruptly to her feet. The motion knocked her chair over, but in an instant later it was upright again, even though she hadn’t picked it off the floor.
Just like it would in a dream.
“This isn’t real,” she said. “It’s a dream. A nightmare. And you’re nothing more than a dream character trying to scare me.”
“I wish that were true,” Philip said. “Truly, I do. But it’s all too real. And I’m real. I’m lying in a bed on the Delphi right now, with my head inside a sim unit I managed to obtain. Just as I have dozens of times before, trying to get through to you as you dream.”
“Why me, then? Why are you contacting me?”
“Because we spoke a few times during the actual farming sims, back when I was also still inside them. When we were still in transit from Earth. We chatted enough that I learned you’re probably the most religious person of all the colonists. Being that devout, I figured I’d have the best chance approaching you through your dreams. I figured you were the most likely to attribute enough significance to them that you’d take a closer look.”
“I went on a date with you a few weeks ago. You didn’t mention any of this. In fact, you didn’t say anything that was the least bit important or relevant.”
“That’s because that wasn’t really me. The sims aren’t very good at mimicking human consciousness—you were talking to a glorified chatbot. Same goes for the crew of the Delphi and some of the FCF members. Haven’t you noticed them all acting pretty aloof since you arrived? Like they refuse to engage?”
“Yes,” she admitted.
“That’s because they can’t engage. Not like a human could. The only way to cover up their limited intellect is to give them distant, formal personalities.”
Harriet blinked, still fighting to steady her breathing. When she spoke again, her words came out almost as slowly as Philip’s: “Imagovirus…this is why Imagovirus prevents us from tasting or smelling properly, isn’t it?”
Philip nodded. “The virus is a fiction, used to cover up the fact you’re still in a sim.”
“Who else is still trapped here?”
“Almost all the civilian colonists were left in cryo. The ship automatically revived the captain and crew first, as it was programmed to do, to ensure an orderly revival of the other passengers. But the captain overrode the second part. ”
Harriet shook her head. “All this time, I thought Imagovirus was killing us. But it isn’t real.” She said it again, so softly that her voice was barely audible, even to her: “It isn’t real.”
That brought a drawn-out exhalation from Philip. “I’m afraid it is killing colonists, Harriet—in a sense. A very real
sense.”
“What do you mean?”
His lips were tight. “At first, keeping the colonists in cryo was strictly about conserving resources. Without an arable planet to exploit, there were only enough supplies to sustain the crew and a couple squads’ worth of FCF marines.”
“Wait,” Harriet said. She was still trying to poke holes in Philip’s story, because she really didn’t want to believe it. “Why didn’t the captain just send out a distress signal and have the crew go back into their cryo-tubes to wait for rescue?”
“Because we have no cryotechnician aboard. Before leaving Enceladus, there was a limited number of those to go around, and not every ship was assigned one.”
“Great,” Harriet murmured. To safely enter cryostasis, you needed a specialist. Otherwise, the most optimistic estimates put the probability of death at well over ninety percent. “You said almost all the colonists are still in cryo. Who else was revived?”
“No one…no one else was revived.”
“Yet not everyone is still in cryo?”
Philip’s facial features were strained, taut. “This is what I meant when I said Imagovirus truly is killing colonists. It’s also what made me decide to start trying to contact you. A few years after we arrived in orbit over Imago, our organ fabber broke down, and a few months after that, the first mate was diagnosed with lung cancer. By the time the ship doctor detected the cancer, it had already spread to both lungs, and the only way to save him was to replace them.”
It took only a moment for the meaning behind Philip’s words to sink in. “The captain ordered one of the colonists’ lungs to be removed,” she said.
“Yes.”
“And everyone just went along with that?”
“No, actually. The captain called a general meeting, where he asked to hear how everyone felt about what he’d done. He ordered everyone to speak their minds. By the time it was my turn, I sensed that something was going on, and I lied, saying I was fine with it. Once everyone had spoken, a squad of marines drew their sidearms and shot everyone who’d objected to the captain’s actions.”
*
Harriet and Philip had left her house to walk the streets of Imago, which were empty and eerily quiet.
Everything looked just as it did in real life—except her waking life wasn’t real either, was it? “Real life” was just as false as this dream. If Philip’s words were true, the dream was actually the realer of the two, in a sense.
“So every colonist that dies in the sim is having their organs harvested in real life.”
Philip nodded. “The captain justifies it by insisting the colonists wouldn’t survive without their captain and crew, and so this is the only way to ensure the survival of the maximum number of colonists possible—by killing some of them to keep the crew alive.”
For some reason, hearing the captain’s logic made Harriet feel even more nauseated than she already had. “Whose lungs did they take?”
“A man named Pat O’Malley. Did you know him?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “But…” Heat flashed down her back, and her vision blurred for a moment. “It’s so unfair. So cowardly.”
Philip nodded again. “They decide who dies by lottery. I’ve been so terrified that you would be chosen.”
Harriet studied his expression closely. “Why? You think there’s something I can do to fix this, don’t you? Something from inside the sim.”
“Yes. That’s the main reason I was scared…” Philip cleared his throat. “To the sim’s occupants, they made Pat O’Malley’s death look like an accident—an untimely fall down the stairs. But as more people got sick in real life, and the need for organs accelerated, they decided they needed a cause of death that looked less suspicious. Hence, Imagovirus. They’ll take more organs if they’re not stopped, Harriet. They’ll kill more people. Our medical supplies on the Delphi are limited. People are aging, and a closed-in ship is the perfect environment for disease to spread, as I’m sure you know. The demand for organs is ramping up. So more colonists will die.”
“What’s the end game for Gregory? Does he think the UEF will look kindly on what he’s done? Or the FCF, for that matter?”
Philip gave a slight shrug. “The captain’s determined to survive until someone answers our distress call, and we have to assume the crewmembers he didn’t kill are of the same mind. I expect Captain Gregory will have some sort of story cooked up to feed to whoever arrives, and he’ll delete all evidence of what he’s done. When the Delphi is rescued, any colonists who didn’t have their organs harvested will be none the wiser, because this sim is preventing them from finding out what’s really happening. Unless someone brings them back to reality.”
“I’m guessing that’s where I come in.”
Philip didn’t answer. Instead, he drew to a stop in front of Theodore Yates’s house, and Harriet stopped, too. Philip turned toward her, eyebrows raised.
“Why are we stopping here?” she said. “Does Theo have something to do with all this?”
“He’s the only civilian who’s aware that he’s still in a farming sim. The captain guaranteed him that his organs would never be taken—so long as he does what he’s told, and never reveals the truth to the other colonists.”
“But what does the captain need Theo for?” As far as Harriet knew, the man was completely useless.
Except he did have one use.
“He maintains the sim from within,” Philip said. “Makes sure everything is kept consistent and believable. But most importantly, he watches everyone—makes sure no one has figured out the truth.”
“How does he make sure of that?”
“Admin powers. Theodore Yates has the ability to spy on anyone, at any time. If someone starts acting like they know about the simulation, it’s Yates’s job to notify the captain.”
That notion sent shivers down Harriet’s spine. “Wouldn’t it be easier for him to do that if he was outside the sim?”
“Actually, no. The sims were designed to prevent external monitoring, for privacy reasons. Only an admin can do it, from inside. Sure, you could pore over the code to figure out what’s going on from outside it, but it’s much easier to just have someone on the inside reporting to you.”
“So Theo’s job is to be Big Brother for the sim.”
“Not just that. He’s also the one that kills people inside the sim, and makes sure their deaths look realistic.”
That caused a coldness to spread through Harriet. The idea that Theo had always had such power, over her and others.
To think I gave him so much flak about my sister, when he could have signed my death warrant at any time…
True, killing her in the sim wouldn’t have been her actual death, but if she’d happened to unexpectedly wake from it, she felt pretty sure that she’d become next in line for having her organs taken.
“How am I going to do this alone, Philip? How can I be expected to bring an end to the sim and retake the Delphi from the captain and his murderers?”
“You need to sneak inside Theo’s house somehow and access the terminal he uses to oversee the sim. I’m not clear on what your options will be from there, but it seems like that’s your best chance to escape.”
Harriet didn’t think the phrase “your best chance” imparted much in the way of comfort. But then, nothing about this was very comforting. “If I manage to revive my real body from cryo—what then?”
“You’ll need to immediately revive Andrew Ferdinand.”
“The man the UEF sent as governor of Imago? He hasn’t already been revived?”
“No. The Andrew Ferdinand you see governing the colony in the sim is the actual Andrew Ferdinand—not some chatbot like the thing that’s impersonating me. Captain Gregory knew that if he revived Ferdinand, the governor’s authority would challenge his own. Technically, we’re still on Gregory’s ship and not in Ferdinand’s colony, but Ferdinand has in his possession emergency codes that will shut down the colony ship and t
urn complete control over to him. If he inputs those codes, he can trap the captain and his crew wherever they are. From there, we can deal with them as we see fit—order them to disarm themselves and give themselves up for arrest, if they ever want to be let out. Threaten to turn off life support in whatever section we’ve trapped them in. We’ll have options.”
“And it starts with breaking into Theodore Yates’s house, while hoping he doesn’t use his digital superpowers to quash me.”
A smile quirked the corner of Philip’s lip. “I wouldn’t have thought to put it quite that way. But yes.”
“Hey, how hard can it be?”
“Pretty hard. But you can do it, Harriet. I…I look forward to meeting you in real life.” His hardened soldier’s veneer had softened into an expression that was much warmer.
She offered him a small smile, and she knew the mission he’d given her wasn’t the only reason for her accelerating heartbeat. “I look forward to meeting you, Philip.”
*
When Harriet woke, she remembered everything Philip had told her.
What was more, as crazy as it seemed, she believed it. All of it. Just as God had sometimes sent his angel to deliver messages of hope, she believed that God had sent her Philip, whether he knew it or not.
Unfortunately, his message did seem pretty crazy, and she knew it would sound even crazier if she tried to explain it to Mariah. It would make her assistant think that the pressure of seeking a cure for Imagovirus had finally driven her over the edge.
And yet, for the plan she had in mind to work, she needed Mariah.
So she lied.
“I think I have a lead on a cure,” she said halfway through the morning after her dream—after she’d worked out the kinks from the fib she planned to tell.
“Seriously?” Mariah said, looking up at her through eyes underscored by dark patches.
We’re both so tired. And yet, in Mariah’s eyes shone hope. I just pray that she’s right to have that.
Explorations: Colony (Explorations Volume Four) Page 11