by Barry Kirwan
He experimented with the two main constructs: data packets represented by different animals or birds, and data channels, symbolized by the landscape architecture such as grass, trees, rivers and "man-made" structures. He picked clusters of data and brought them out of the background. In one case, the grass glowed red, and in another certain birds fell to the ground, frozen stiff, but they recovered quickly. He knew which Ulysses lighthouse markers had disappeared, but not what had happened to them. Deleted markers should leave a trace, such as grass burned to ash, or something rotten, like a carcass. He reversed time so that the landscape unripened from summer to spring, and then winter. But still he couldn’t figure out what had gone down. He ran through every tactic in the book, and then switched to the unorthodox ones which could induce psychotic feedback inside the analyst’s mind. Nothing. He was getting nowhere. The answers weren’t there.
With an inward curse, he exited, shut it off, and pulled the Optron headpiece boom away from him, rubbing his eyes. The fluorescent lights smarted after his benign virtual environment. He got off the reclining chair too fast, stumbled, and then regained his balance. He looked at his watch. An hour! He usually did thirty minutes, tops. He headed for the closest coffee machine in the corridor outside, almost colliding with Ben, the janitor, who looked pretty rough. Micah keyed in for an ultresso, just as Antonia turned the corner. They both froze. Micah made to speak, but she whirled and disappeared around the corner. He hadn’t even gotten the word "sorry" out. He turned back to Ben, but he had also gone. He shrugged, grabbed his cup with its steaming black liquid, and returned to the telemetry room, ignoring the strictly no food or drinks sign. He blew across the top of the coffee, savoring the synthetic cannabis aroma. Time dripped away. If only they’d given him a mental, rather than a physical booster.
He knew what he had to do – he had to enter Rudi’s world, see if any clues were there. But it was a violation of sorts, and could get him into serious trouble with the Optron committee if they ever found out. His eyes fell on the poster of the Ulysses crew. God alone knew what was going on up there; the people they were relying on had proven untrustworthy. He wondered if the astronauts were aware of it, what comms they were receiving from Earth, if anything. The key to re-connect with them was here, somewhere, he could sense it.
He downed the ultresso in one gulp and glanced at his wristcom. Four-thirty. Enough time for one more session. Micah went over to Rudi’s console, and searched around the desk, inside the drawer that Rudi avoided whenever Micah was watching. There was a picture of a scantily-clad girl, and on the back a nine-digit code, his Optronic frequency! He raced back into the chair, leapt onto it and reached for the ‘trodes, setting the Optron to Rudi’s frequency. If Rudi caught him, it’d be ugly. He took a breath.
He was immediately hit by the most basic of problems. It asked him for a password. Micah didn’t use a password, and assumed Rudi didn’t either, though of course it was allowed. It made him think he was on the right path, at least. But what could the password be?
Rudi loved women most of all – Micah had given up keeping score, and Rudi had thankfully long ago stopped recounting his sexploits – that game was only sustainable when there was at least occasional reciprocation. Micah suppressed the notion that he finally now had something worthy of grabbing Rudi’s attention – Louise – and tried to remember the names of Rudi’s lovers. It wasn’t that there were so many – just that none of them meant anything to Rudi. He swept aside the preposterous idea that Rudi would use his mother’s name.
Then he remembered Rudi’s reaction earlier that morning. He glanced at the keypad. He tapped in A-N-T-O-N-I-A and held his breath. The console light stayed red. Dumb idea. But it stayed in his mind. Maybe not. He recalled what Rudi called her. He keyed in P-R-I-N-C-E-S-S, and green lights illuminated Micah’s smile.
"Rudi! I always said your sex drive would be your undoing." He took one last look at the poster of the Eden crew, and activated the Optron.
He tensed as soon as he entered, completely unprepared for what he saw. He didn’t know if his physical body recoiled or not, but as soon as he arrived in Rudi’s world, as usual from a medium height above the landscape, he shot back upwards, away from the scene. The sky was a swirling mess of fierce blue and purple, streaks of scarlet zipping from one horizon to another. But that was not the worst. Beneath him was a charred city, bodies strewn amongst the ruins. Mutated human figures staggered amongst the carnage. Micah had difficulty controlling his breathing, and then realized why: a stench of burnt flesh. His own landscape was visual, but some analysts also used taste and smell.
Micah had never seen anything so apocalyptic – or had he? He remembered in training, once, the professor had briefly shown his students a landscape that had been used to develop a highly resilient and aggressive computer virus.
He thought about it: a virus, but not a normal one that just destroys. What had been done had been subtle, an "Emperor’s Cloak" virus. It prevented real data getting through and supplanted it with fake data, what you wanted to be seen. But this was also a virus in the more conventional sense, eviscerating a vast data-stream. Micah pulled back and gazed towards the horizon. Flames billowed in the distant sky; voluminous clouds of grey-black smoke drifted across the land. He flew, increasingly fast, to see how far it extended, whether the whole landscape was the same, and whether the virus had affected everything.
He covered a dozen kilometers surveying the devastation below, everything dying or dead. Raven-like creatures tore strips of flesh from corpses; it meant non-recoverable data deletion. Although it was sickening to watch, he was impressed – data streams were highly protected by security protocols – to do this inside the Optron environment must have taken immense skill on Rudi’s part. He saw a green flash down below, the color catching his eye. He dropped down. It seemed to be a figure, hiding behind the large stump of a tree. He was stunned when he got close enough. It was Katrina, the astronaut. Micah had never met her, but ten minutes ago he had been looking at her on the poster, even if she now had a jade green body. The simulacrum beckoned to him. He drew closer, at first reluctantly, and then he chided himself – nothing physical could happen to him here.
"Take me to the South river," she said. Her voice was scratchy, synthetic, she clearly had problems speaking. Micah knew that it meant her program was degrading. Yet there was desperation in her voice. He had no real plan in any case, so he nodded, and moved behind Katrina. Then he realized he did not know where South was, so he asked. She pointed to the right.
Weight wasn’t a problem in the Optron landscape, so he picked her up, holding her by her waist as they flew. There was little sensation of touch, Micah noted – presumably Rudi had toned down that particular sense – not surprising given the violence all around.
Carrion birds flocked in the distance. "Higher. Go higher," she gurgled.
Micah complied and whooshed above the birds. They were now so high it grew dark, though there were no stars. Katrina coughed. He knew the simulated air rarity affected her programming, and he made to descend, but she shook her head vehemently.
"Not yet."
After five minutes that included gut-wrenching coughing on her part, she pointed down to the right, and Micah swooped below. He saw green in the distance. He accelerated. With a sense of exhilaration he realized that it was his own landscape: beyond a boundary of red-soaked earth, lay green hills and trees, and a river winding toward the horizon.
"Stop!" she screamed, coughing in spasms that juddered Micah. He slowed down, intending to land on his own territory.
"NO! Stop NOW!" Lime green blood sprayed from her mouth.
Micah stopped dead, and they hung for a moment. Her body relaxed, though the coughing continued. Slowly he descended to the ground. She was a mess. She curled up in a fetal position on the damp red heather, and pointed to the other side, a few meters away.
"Walk," she croaked, and then resumed coughing.
Micah looked from her to the
green lawn, and walked towards it. As he made to step onto cool grass, he collided with an invisible wall; it connected with his foot, knee and head, and he bounced off, falling back onto the turf. It hadn’t hurt him, just been a surprise. He got up again and tested the barrier. He could barely see it, but it was impenetrable. No wonder she’d screamed at him to stop. He glanced back to her to check Katrina wasn’t going anywhere, then shot straight upwards at high velocity to find the top edge of the wall. About a kilometer above the ground, the glass curved backward behind him. A dome. No way through or out.
He traced his way back to the simulacrum. She’d crawled to the barrier. He realized there was another figure, on his own side. That worried him. Had Rudi inserted a virus in Micah’s landscape? But as he got closer, he froze. Katrina knelt with her two hands against the wall. On the other side was another green figure, her palms placed against the wall too, so that their hands appeared to be touching. Tears streamed down her face, and her body shook. It was Antonia.
Micah dropped to his knees. He felt like he’d just been hit by a hover-car. As he watched them, his hands tore some of the grass up by its roots, and he dug his fingers into the soil. Abruptly, he pushed himself back up. They were oblivious to him. He felt a sucking vertigo, dangerous in an Optron landscape, so he shut down his emotions and switched into analyst mode.
They don’t belong here, he thought, in either landscape. Someone had inserted them – a very smart programmer. They’d been hidden from him and Rudi for a long time. Autonomous programs. Secret contact channels, he guessed, and because the emotional representations in the programs were intense and well-scripted, they were encoded by the two personalities themselves, or at least one of them with the others’ consent. It was ironic. Love had been programmed in because it meant that these programs could hide, could adapt, and wouldn’t give up. As a systems analyst himself, he had to admire it, but in terms of what it told him about Antonia, it added iodine to the wound. She has a relationship with Katrina. The sting of that thought made the desolation of the landscape seem fitting. He looked away, toward the butchery in Rudi’s world, and then through the barrier to his own landscape, green and naïve, completely missing what was really going on. He hung his head.
After a while, he cleared his throat to gain their attention. He was burning Optron time. Katrina kept one hand on the glass wall, and turned to face him. Antonia seemed to be trying to see what was going on but couldn’t make out Micah, perhaps because it was too dark on his side, and too light in hers. He was glad for it.
"You should go now," Katrina said, her voice a thin scratch across his ears.
"What about you?"
"You can only help me from the outside. Or maybe from in there." She pointed to Micah’s world. He stared through the glass to note certain landmarks in his landscape to find the border again. He wondered if the Antonia simulacrum would remain there. He doubted it. These two would hide again quickly. The carrion birds would erase Katrina if they spotted her.
He gave the mental command to exit, and changed the setting on the Optron to his own landscape. In that brief instant he thought maybe he heard a small noise in the real world, but he didn’t have time to check it out; and there was no sign of Rudi.
It was refreshing to be back in his world. Rudi’s had been so stressful, in more ways than one. He headed to the far North of his landscape. After some minutes, he saw the landmarks: a telegraph line, a deserted stone farm building, and the river. But he could see nothing of Rudi’s world. He slowed down. In the distance, a similar telegraph line and a deserted stone farm building. He stopped and looked back, then forward. Idiot! He glided down and stood at the bank of the river. He saw two depressions in the grass where Antonia’s simulacrum had been, and in front of him, his reflection; a mirror, the perfect metaphor for reflecting a data-stream back on itself, and one difficult to spot given his chosen landscape format.
He tried to reason it out: Rudi’s landscape was chewing up the real incoming data from Ulysses, and feeding his with false data. But where do the false data come from? Rudi couldn’t create that, and it couldn’t be a copy of the Prometheus or Heracles data as they wouldn’t match. Later. He needed to get out before Rudi returned.
He imaged the exit symbol, kneading tired eyeballs with the heel of his hand, and removed the 'trodes'. As he opened his eyes, about to get out of the chair, he stopped dead. Rudi stood before him, aiming a pulse pistol at his face.
"Hello, Mikey, been anywhere interesting?"
Chapter 16
Eden Approach
Kat sprinted at breakneck speed but it was closing fast. She saw the hatch door open. Someone was shouting, egging her on. With a shock she realized it was her elder sister. In an instant she knew that was wrong – her sister had been dead for years – she must be in the dream again. Abruptly, her viewpoint shifted and she saw herself from above, running across Eden’s landscape towards the Lander. Eden was no longer green as she’d seen from the Prometheus vids – instead it was a sickly rust color. For the first time she saw the creature chasing her. It was hard to make out. It ran in a strange way, in spurts, like it was jumping, or hopping even. It was long, longer than a horse. She tried to count the legs, when it jerked suddenly, left the ground, and flew upwards towards her. Its head had small mandibles, but it also had a human-like face. She recognized it, wild with anger, the face screaming at her. She shrank back as it seized her shoulders and opened its blood-red gaping maw wide.
"Wake up! Kat, wake up, dammit!" Zack shook her hard.
Kat woke, drenched in sweat. Pierre stood behind Zack, looking at small holo-readouts emanating from her monitor. "She’s not supposed to dream in stasis," he said.
Zack huffed. "Well, she sure as hell was. Seemed like a real shitter, too. You okay, girl?"
She could see and hear them but she felt drugged, as if a transparent pillow was over her head. She didn’t know how to respond, her mouth not yet connected to her brain.
"She’s still pretty groggy," Zack said.
Although she couldn’t feel her tongue, she decided to try to speak anyway. She lifted her head.
"Kreechhhur; froo..." She rolled her eyes and flopped her head back down to the cushion.
Zack squinted at her, while talking to Pierre. "You sure she ain’t brain damaged?" He winked at her.
"Well, she just made a lot more sense than you did in the first five minutes of your revival phase yesterday." Pierre collapsed the holodata and turned to leave. "Give her a few minutes. I’ll be in the cockpit. The captain wants to give us all a briefing as soon as Kat’s capable."
Zack grinned at Kat, ran a stubby finger down the right side of her face, and made to go, holding the end of a makeshift walking stick. "See you soon, kid."
Kat managed to find the muscle co-ordination to grip his wrist. She needed to tell him. She tried to speak, but just gurgled.
"Hey, okay, take it easy. I’ll stay a while. Must’ve been some nightmare, eh? Deep breaths now. Try to move your tongue and jaw – loosen them up."
Kat tried. Her throat felt baked. She was desperate to tell someone what she’d seen – the creature, the desert. It was already slipping from her mind, like sand falling through floorboards. Finally she found some words.
"Saw it – big – fasht – aily-in... alien." Kat caught her own reflection in the stasis lid: hair matted with sweat, and the four days of stasis had brought out freckles on her cheeks.
"Wait – you mean after all these nightmares you finally saw the thing chasing you?"
"Yessh." Her tongue felt swollen. She coughed. Zack reached somewhere out of her line of sight, and produced a chrome mug of warm liquid, and brought it to her lips. Half of it didn’t stay in her mouth, but it was strawberry sweet, a hint of menthol, and soothed her throat. She gulped it down, then gasped for breath.
Zack’s features sharpened, as the fuzz lifted from her brain. White noise she hadn’t even noticed phased out. Her shoulders relaxed.
"
Thanks, Zack," she sputtered, coughing.
"S’nothing. Took me fifteen minutes to come round properly." He leaned closer, a heavy hand on her shoulder. She’d never minded before that he was physical with her – he never meant anything by it, and she could tell the difference – but this time... He must have seen a small reaction, because he transferred his hand to the edge of the cot.
"So, tell me. What’d it look like?
She’d been struggling to remember what it reminded her of most. Her first thought was of an insect – a praying mantis – but that wasn’t quite right. A grasshopper wasn’t right either. It didn’t look like anything she’d ever seen. She imagined how Pierre might describe it – objectively, matter of fact. She closed her eyes, placing her mind in free recall mode.
"A three meter long insect; can bend in the middle; six legs, trapezoidal head like a hammerhead; black body; six wet-looking slit-eyes, dripping red, no iris or pupil; no wings… muscular, armored like… like a rhino." She opened her eye-lids wide and stared at Zack. She shuddered. She was relieved she’d been able to remember it, but now the terror of it was more real. It was fixed in her mind, and from now on it would haunt her when awake.
Zack pursed his lips and blew out a long breath. "No wonder you were running, kid." He frowned. "And Eden? Did you see Eden this time?"
She squeezed her eyes shut again to help remember, then opened them.
"Yes! But it was reddish-brown, dry. Not green anymore. Withered trees scattered around. It was a desert."
Zack snorted triumphantly. "Well, there it is then, Eden’s greener than Earth – than Earth used to be, that is. So, just a nightmare, kid. Case closed." He made a mock salute. "I’ll inform the skipper we can land there after all! That’ll teach you to eat too much cheese before going into stasis."
Kat offered one of her crooked smiles.
"Now, you get up in a few minutes, and take a shower, because, I’ll let you in on a little secret of my own – after stasis, you stink! Then join us up front, okay?" He turned, grinning, and shuffled off, his metallic cane clunking on the floor.