by A. K. DuBoff
“What’s wrong?”
I massaged my temples. “It can’t be.”
Kaiden stood silently and waited for me to collect myself.
I took several deep breaths, trying to relax my racing heart. “I think I just remembered something that hasn’t happened yet.”
17
Kaiden processed my words. “That’s good, though, right? Weren’t we hoping to remember what might have happened before the reset… assuming there was one?”
I wiped my hands down my face. “Yes. Except, now I wish I didn’t know.”
“What did you see, Elle?” He took a step toward me, his eyes fill with worry.
“We were on a world—completely consumed by the Darkness. But it wasn’t the Valor world. This one has been infected long ago, and all of the terrible creatures we’ve seen were mature.” I described the tentacle monster and the fields of tendrils. The visceral element of the memories had me on edge. Only Kaiden’s presence kept me centered.
“Do you have a sense of where this planet was?” he asked me when I finished going over the scattered recollections.
“No idea. I got the impression that it was our first time there, wherever it was.”
“If the corrupted environment was mature, then it has to be one of the first Hegemony worlds to be infected by the Darkness.”
I frowned. “Assuming my memories were recent. What if we make that visit two months from now?”
He smiled coyly. “I don’t think so.”
“Why?”
“Well, we already established that we have a good thing going between us, but it hasn’t advanced too far, near as we can tell. Based on what we’re feeling now, I doubt it wouldn’t have advanced by two months from now.”
I couldn’t argue that logic. I was already craving to be closer to him; I couldn’t fathom delaying those explorations. I’d been waiting for years to find someone I could trust, and I was eager to make up for lost time. Plus, having the looming cloud of potential death being around every turn, I could really use another outlet to help me decompress.
“Okay, so we’re maybe dealing with a timeline of a few weeks?” I said.
He nodded, a smirk playing on his lips. “Assuming you can resist me for that long.”
I rolled my eyes, hating that he had a valid point. “All right, so, a week or two,” I amended.
Kaiden looked pleased with the adjustment but said nothing.
“Anyway,” I continued, “if I’ve correctly interpreted the nonsense going on in my head, at some time in the next two weeks we’re going to find ourselves on an apocalyptically terrible world to attempt to access a crystal. Then, it would seem something soon afterward makes us resort to a universal reset, which results in… this.”
“Lots of hypotheticals in that explanation.”
“Do you have anything better to offer?”
He shook his head. “Having not had a new vision—or memory burst, whatever you want to call it—of my own, I can’t comment. But I do believe something along those lines is happening. I still can’t explain it, but I feel it.”
“Why haven’t Maris or Toran been as affected by it?” I wondered.
“Maybe they haven’t had the right stimulus to jog their memories. You didn’t start to remember until we… you know.”
I took several paces, thinking. “Okay, so we might be able to spark other memories with the right experience. In that case, should we do as many things as possible to see what’s familiar, or just forget that other timeline and do our own thing now?”
He smiled. “Well, I suppose that depends on what ‘experiences’ you have in mind.”
I rolled my eyes and groaned. “Not with us. I mean, going around the ship, or—”
“I know, I’m just teasing.” Kaiden turned more serious. “I keep going back and forth about whether I really want to know what happened before.”
“And what are you thinking?”
“That we should go to bed and worry about it in the morning. Maybe a path will present itself.”
“That’s a classic non-answer if I’ve ever heard one.”
“I’ve heard it’s a necessary survival skill in any relationship.”
I smiled. “Like when I ask you what you want for dinner but I’ve already made up my mind?”
“Exactly.”
I laughed. “With that kind of wisdom, I can’t believe you were single.”
“Mostly by choice, but I’m ready to not be.”
“Good. In that case, I’m inviting myself over for the night.”
His eyed widened with surprise. “Not that I mind, but why?”
“Do I really have to explain?”
“Of course not.” He placed an arm around my shoulders, and we headed for the door. “Honestly, I didn’t want to be alone staring at the ceiling of my cabin tonight, either.”
I stopped by my cabin to brush my teeth and then slinked over to Kaiden’s cabin next door. Despite the vastly different circumstances, I was reminded of going to sleepovers at Adrianne’s house as a kid. I wasn’t sure if my former self from before the reset would have opted for a sleepover in this moment, but it’s what I wanted.
Kaiden’s eyes lit up when he opened his cabin door. “Welcome. It’s exactly like yours, so I don’t think you’ll have any trouble finding your way around.” Even if the space was unfamiliar, the compact design with a bed, wardrobe, and wash room at the back didn’t leave much opportunity for getting lost.
I stepped inside. “Thank you for humoring me.”
“I didn’t want to be alone, either, to be honest. It feels like everything could fall apart at any moment.”
“I can’t shake that feeling, either.”
He glanced between the bed and me, then began taking off his outer clothing like we did before every jump. The white base layers made for comfy pajamas, I’d found, so I’d brought nothing else over to wear.
When we’d finished stripping down, we sat down on the bed next to each other.
“Forget everything that’s going on out there,” Kaiden said. “Right now, we’re here together.” He reclined on the bed, gently pulling me with him. With our heads sharing the pillow, he wrapped one arm around me.
For the first time in days, I felt truly secure. I’d expected dark thoughts to keep me awake all night, but Kaiden’s warmth at my back and his arm around me really did help me forget the outside world.
Pounding on the door snapped me to attention. “Wha…?”
The clock indicated two hours had passed. I hadn’t even realized I’d fallen asleep.
Kaiden bolted upright next to me. “Who knocks rather than paging on the comm?”
“Not thinking clearly?” I speculated, shaking off the grogginess of sleep.
He slipped off the bed then stepped over to the door and cracked it open. His posture relaxed. “Maris, what—”
“You have to come!” she exclaimed. “It’s Toran. He keeps muttering about ‘ships’—” She cut off when she saw me sitting on the bed through the cracked door. “You…?”
Kaiden started to close the door. “Where is he?”
“Mess Hall,” she replied.
“We’ll be right there.” He latched the door, letting out a long sigh.
I started hastily dressing in my outerwear. “What are they even doing up at this hour?”
“No idea.” He started dressing, as well.
“That was nice, by the way,” I said as I slipped on my overcoat. “Even though I didn’t mean for anyone to see me over here. Not that I mind, just…”
“Yes, it was, and I know what you mean. I didn’t want them to make this into a big deal, either.”
“Maybe this thing with Toran will be enough of a distraction.”
“For Maris? No way. Relationship gossip is her lifeblood.” Kaiden finished slipping on his shoes.
“I had to dream.”
Once dressed enough to l
ook presentable, we hurried to the Mess. Maris was nowhere to be seen, but two women and a man stood outside the Mess entrance, looking concerned.
“Do you know what’s going on?” I asked them.
“We were unwinding after late shift when he came in—sleepwalking, maybe. She came in right after him,” the first woman said.
“He started talking about ‘dark ships’ and how they were coming,” the second added. “Freaked us out.”
“Then the brunette came in and told us to leave,” the man said.
“Thanks. We’ll get Toran calmed down,” Kaiden replied.
I approached the entry door with him. “Talk about a setback on our reputation campaign with the non-believers,” I whispered.
“We have bigger issues to worry about than our social standing.”
The door slid to the side, revealing the mostly empty Mess. Toran was standing in front of the wide viewports, trembling, and Maris was patting one of his broad, bare shoulders in what appeared to be an attempt to comfort him. With his back to us, I couldn’t see his face or get a sense of his disposition.
“Hi, Toran, what’s wrong?” I said in my friendliest tone.
Maris glanced toward us for a moment before returning her attention to Toran. “You were right earlier,” she said. “We’re starting to remember now.”
My heart skipped a beat. “What have you seen?”
“A world. Death. I don’t know where it was, but it’s dangerous,” Maris replied.
“Sounds an awful lot like what I saw.” I approached the viewport. “We should compare notes and see if we can put together a narrative for what happened—or might happen, however you want to put it.”
“Nothing we can do to stop it,” Toran murmured.
I was finally close enough to see his face, and to my shock there were tears welling in his reddened eyes and his flushed cheeks were damp. I wasn’t sure how to react; comforting had never been my specialty, let alone tending to the person who’d always been the rock on our team.
“Toran, hey, what’s wrong?” Kaiden asked, visibly shaken by Toran’s state.
The huge man sniffled. “I don’t know. It hit me all at once—almost like I stepped outside of myself.”
“The crew thought maybe you were dreaming,” I said.
“No, this wasn’t a dream.” He dried his eyes with the backs of his hands.
“Tell us what you saw. We’ve been having flashes, too. Maybe we can make something of it,” Kaiden urged.
Toran took a steadying breath. “I’m not so sure there’s anything we can do this time.”
“The last week has taught me that there’s always a way,” I told him. “Now, what is it about these ships?”
“We don’t stand a chance against them,” he said, his voice cracking again.
I swallowed hard. Alien ships… something about that was so familiar. I could envision them in my mind even though I only had a vague description from the Archive visions to go on.
Kaiden and I exchanged glances. “Could these have been the ships I saw in my vision inside the Archive?” he asked.
“Probably, but there’s one particular ship I keep seeing. I’m terrified of it and I don’t know why.” The flush in Toran’s face was fading and his eyes were more focused.
“Right now, gut feelings are all we have,” Kaiden told him. “Trust that impression.”
“I do, but…” Toran shook his head. “What if this is a memory from before the reset? What if that ship made us desperate enough to try anything?”
“This time, we have a heads up. We can be more on guard and not let it happen again,” I said. But what had transpired? I could feel the answer somewhere in the back of my mind, but it was just beyond my grasp.
“How?” Maris threw up her arms. “We don’t know anything new! We already knew there are dangerous things out there.”
“If some memories have surfaced, the rest are buried in there, too,” I insisted. “We just need to figure out a way to access them so we can stay a step ahead of the enemy.”
“Unless they also know what’s coming,” Maris countered.
“Things have already started to change,” Toran said. “This is a fresh start for both sides.”
“Except, now we’ve seen some of what they can do. We can have countermeasures in place.” I didn’t know what countermeasures were feasible against giant shuttle-snaring Darkness tentacles, but the Hegemony’s military needed to have something that stood a chance against them.
“It’d be helpful if we could shake off this amnesia,” Maris said.
“No, I don’t think it’s like that at all,” Toran replied, sounding much more like his usual level-headed self.
“If not amnesia, then what?” I asked.
“An incomplete download resulting from the limitations of the distributed hyperdimensional crystal-link.”
I stared at Toran and blinked.
He took a deep breath. “Sorry, I was reading up on it before I got distracted by alien ship visions, and all the techno-babble is still in my head.”
Kaiden smiled. “A plain-speak explanation would be great.”
Toran was silent while he collected his thoughts. “Okay, so, there are two basic parts to it,” he began. “Foremost, the crystals are a link to a higher dimension—we’ve known that for decades. Based on what’s commonly accepted, the hyperdimensional link between the crystals is governed by restrictions similar to the limited bandwidth of a computer network. While hyperdimensional storage is theoretically limitless, only so much information can practically be funneled through the crystalline network at one time. Consequently, it gets hashed and compressed when each reset point is established, with the individual crystals functioning as a sort of ‘cache’ to aid in the recall.”
“Okay,” Kaiden began, “so when the cache is full, that’s why old information is eventually removed from the hyper-memory, and entire prior resets may disappear from a crystal interface?”
Toran nodded. “Exactly.”
“What does that have to do with our memories?” Maris asked.
I cast her a silencing glare. “Let him finish.”
“This is where things get more contested,” Toran continued. “Some scientists believe that a part of our consciousness suspends outside of spacetime during the resets. Usually, that part of ourselves can come right back to our reconstructed bodies and it feels like we reverted to a prior time, reconciling the previous-future and the memories of everything leading up to that moment. I think in the case of the universal reset, though, those previous-future memories didn’t download.”
Kaiden scowled. “Why?”
“To put it simply, bandwidth issues,” Toran went on. “For a local reset, the data requirements are fairly small, allowing a long past span of time to be perfectly recovered. A planet-reset is still possible, but the risks of losing some memory of the previous-future increase; this might be one reason why large-scale resets are so rare. Now, beyond that, a universal-scale reset is a huge undertaking—way more information than the crystalline network can reconcile with its limited ‘bandwidth’, if you will. The hyperdimensional transfer through the crystal-interfaces is simply insufficient to allow full restoration of anything other than the matter, energy, and memories up to the time of the reset. The fragment of consciousness that exists outside of spacetime didn’t have a chance to resync, so the previous-future memories are inaccessible.”
I tilted my head. “Then how do the four of us remember?”
He shrugged. “Proximity to the locus of the event. The crystalline network might prioritize re-syncing of memories for people closest to the reset crystal.”
“So, the further away from the locus, the less a person would remember of the previous-future?” I asked.
“That does fit with what we observed,” Kaiden said. “Those crew members talked about the days running together—which could have been from routine, or maybe there was
the slightest hint that we’d looped back.”
Maris nodded. “That’s true.”
“The effects in others are weak, even on the same ship. Lightyears away—in the Capital, for instance—would they sense any déjà vu at all?” Kaiden wondered aloud.
“If it scales like anything else we’ve observed here, then no,” Toran stated. “But the scientific models would suggest that the other memories weren’t lost, exactly, just that they couldn’t be recalled during the reset. They should still exist in the part of our consciousness that dwells in hyperdimensional space—a theory which is supported by us being imbued with abilities we hadn’t learned yet.”
Suddenly, I wish I’d paid more attention in physics class. “Okay, where does that leave us?” I asked.
“Aware but still disconnected,” Toran murmured.
“We need to access those memories that didn’t resync,” Kaiden said.
“That not something that can be forced,” Toran replied. “Regardless, we still need to figure out what to tell the Hegemony’s decision-makers. Nothing in our visions points to a specific time or place.”
“You’re right.” I turned away from the others, wracking my mind for the answers I knew must be somewhere within me. The ships… Toran was onto something there. Why couldn’t I remember what?
The feelings of familiarity and fear were coming from somewhere. If I knew to be concerned, there was a reason why. For my own sanity, I needed to believe that I was in control. Maybe Toran was right and the details had been lost during the consciousness reintegration, but I wasn’t ready to believe that the memories were beyond my grasp.
I focused on the elements I had remembered so far, trying to put them in order so I could develop a sequence of events for what had happened leading up to the presumed reset. The dark planet must have come before the ships, since those seemed to be the end of that timeline. But what had happened in between?
Hazy recollections of something bright against the dark backdrop of space began to come to me. I was mesmerized at first, and then fear crept into the corners of my mind. “A light,” I murmured. “Did the ships come from a light?”