Reality Dysfunction - Expansion nd-2

by Peter F. Hamilton

  Lewis reached the landing pad and tensed—this was it, make or break time. He had altered his facial features considerably during the starflight; that old journalist back on Lalonde had given him a nasty moment. He waited for the approaching Edenist to shout an alarm to the island.

  Eysk gave a slight bow in greeting, and directed an identity trait at Lewis. He waited politely for Lewis to return the punctilio.

  Lewis didn’t have one. He hadn’t known. His only source of data on Edenist customs was far beyond his grasp.

  Deep down at the centre of his brain there was a presence, the soul which used to own the body he now possessed. A prisoner held fast by the manacle bonds of Lewis’s thoughts.

  All of the possessors had a similar prisoner, visualized as a tiny homunculus contained within a sphere of cephalic glass. They pleaded and they begged to be let out, to come back; annoying background voices, a gnat’s buzz across consciousness. The possessed could use them, torment them with glimpses of reality in return for information, learning how to blend in with the modern, starkly alien society into which they had come forth.

  But the centre of Lewis’s mind contained only a heavy darkness. He hadn’t told the others that, they were all so boastful of how they controlled their captives, so he just brazened it out. The soul he had usurped as he came to this body neither entreated nor threatened. Lewis knew it was there, he could sense the surface thoughts, cold and hard, formidable with resolution. Waiting. The entity frightened him, he had come to possess the body the same way he had walked Messopia’s corridors, The King of Strut—thinking he could handle it. Now the first fractures of insecurity in his hyped-up confidence were multiplying. The usurped soul’s personality was far stronger than him; he could never have withstood such dread isolation, not simply beyond sensation, but knowing sensation was possible. What kind of person could?

  Are you all right?eysk asked kindly.

  I’m sorry. I think it may have been something I ate. And the ride down was a god-fucking bitch.

  Eysk’s eyebrow rose. Indeed?

  Yeah, feel like I’m gonna puke. Be all right in a minute.

  I do hope so.

  “This is Walter Harman,” Lewis said out loud, knowing he was making a colossal balls-up of things. “A pilot, so he claims. After that flight, think I’m going to ask the captain for a dekko at his licence.” He laughed at his witticism.

  Walter Harman smiled broadly, and put out his hand. “Pleasure to meet you. This is one hell of a planet. I’ve never been here before.”

  Eysk seemed taken aback. “Your enthusiasm is most gratifying. I hope you enjoy your stay.”

  “Thanks. Say, I tasted some gollatail a year back, have you got any round here?”

  I’m just going for a walk, get some air,lewis said. Down in his memories were a thousand hangovers; he gathered together the phantom sensation of nausea and cranial malaise, then broadcast them into the affinity band. It ought to clear my head.

  Eysk flinched at the emetic deluge. Quite.

  “I’d like to try some again, maybe take back a stock of my own,” Walter Harman prompted. “Old Lewis here can tell you what our ship’s rations are like.”

  “Yes,” Eysk said. “I believe we have some.” His gaze never left Lewis’s back.

  “Great, that’s just great.”

  Lewis stepped over the half-metre ridge of electrophorescent cells around the pad, and headed towards the island’s rim. There was one of the floating quays ahead, a twenty-metre crane to one side for lifting smaller boats out of the water.

  Sorry about this,lewis told the island personality. A flight has never had this effect before.

  Do you require a medical nanonic package?

  Let’s leave it a minute and see. Sea wind always was the best cure for headaches.

  As you wish.

  Lewis could hear Walter Harman chattering away inanely behind him. He reached the metal railing that guarded the rim, and stood beside the crane. It was a spindly column and boom arrangement made from monobonded carbon struts, lightweight and strong. But heavy enough for his purpose. He closed his eyes, focusing his attention on the structure, feeling its texture, the rough grain of carbon crystals held together with hard plies of binding molecules. Atoms glowed scarlet and yellow, their electrons flashing in tight fast orbits.

  Miscreant energistic pulses raced up and down the struts, sparking between molecules. He felt the others in the spaceplane cabin lending their strength, concentrating on a point just below the boom pivot. The carbon’s crystalline lattice began to break down. Spears of St Elmo’s fire flickered around the pivot.

  A tortured creaking sound washed across the rim of the island. Eysk looked round in confusion, peering against pad eighteen’s glare.

  Lewis, move now please,the island personality said. Unidentified static discharge on the crane. It is weakening the structure.

  Where?he played it dumb, looking round, looking up.

  Lewis, move.

  The compulsion almost forced his legs into action. He fought it with bursts of mystification, then panic. Remembering the power blade as it descended, the sight of blood and chips of bone spewing out of the wound. It hadn’t happened to him, it was some horror holo he was watching on the screen. Distant. Remote.

  Lewis!

  Carbon shattered with a sudden thunderclap. The boom jerked, then began to fall, curving down in that unreal slow motion he’d seen once before. And nothing had to be faked any more. Fear staked him to the ground. A yell started to emerge from his lips—

  —Mistake. Your greatest and your last, Lewis. When this body dies my soul will be free. And then I can return to possess the living. And when that happens I will have the same power as you. After that we shall meet as equals, I promise you—

  —as the edge of the boom smashed into his torso. There was no pain, shock saw to that. Lewis was aware of the boom finishing its work, crushing him against the polyp. Body ruined.

  His head hit the ground with a brutish smack, and he gazed up mutely at the stars. They started to fade.

  Transfer,pernik ordered. the mental command was thick with sympathy and sorrow.

  His eyes closed.

  Pernik awaited. Lewis saw it through a long dark tunnel, a vast bitek construct glowing with the gentle emerald aura of life. Colourful phantom shapes slithered below its translucent surface, tens of thousands of personalities, at once separate and in concord: the multiplicity. He felt himself drifting towards it along the affinity bond, his energistic nexus abandoning the mangled body to infiltrate the naked colossus. Behind him the dark soul rose as smoothly as a shark seeking wounded prey to re-inherit the dying body. Lewis’s tightly whorled thoughts quaked in fright as he reached the island’s vast neural strata. He penetrated the surface, and diffused himself throughout the network, instantly surrounded by a babble of sights and sounds. The multiplicity murmuring amongst itself, autonomic subroutines emitting pulses of strictly functional information.

  His dismay and disorientation was immediately apparent. Ethereal tentacles of comfort reached out to reassure him.

  Don’t worry, Lewis. You are safe now . . .

  —

  What are you?

  The multiplicity recoiled from him, a tide of thoughts in swift retreat, leaving him high and dry. Splendidly alone. Emergency autonomic routines to isolate him came on-line, erecting axon blockades around the swarm of neural cells in which he resided.

  Lewis laughed at them. Already his thoughts were spread through more cells than the body which he’d abandoned had contained. The energistic flux resulting from such possession was tremendous. He thought of fire, and began to extend himself, burning through the multiplicity’s simplistic protection, seeping through the neural strata like a wave of searing lava, obliterating anything in his path. Cell after cell fell to his domination. The multiplicity shrieked, trying to resist him. Nothing could. He was bigger than them, bigger than worlds. Omnipotent. The cries began to die away as he eng
ulfed them, receding as though they were falling down some shaft that pierced clean to the planet’s core. Squeezing. Compressing their fluttering panicked thoughts together. The polyp itself was next, contaminated by swaths of energy seething out of the transdimensional twist. Organs followed, even the thermal potential cables dangling far below the surface. He possessed every living cell of Pernik. At the heart of his triumphant mind the multiplicity lay silent, stifled.

  He waited for a second, savouring the nirvana-high of absolute mastery. Then the terror began.

  Eysk had started to run towards the rim as the crane creaked and groaned. Pernik showed him the boom starting to topple down. He knew he was too late, that there was nothing he could do to save the strangely idiosyncratic Edenist from Jospool. The boom picked up speed, slamming into the apparently dumbfounded Lewis. Eysk closed his eyes, mortified by the splash of gore.

  Calm yourself,the personality said. His head survived the impact. I have his thoughts.

  Thank goodness. Whatever caused the crane to fail like that? I’ve never seen such lightning on Atlantis before.

  It . . . I . . .

  Pernik?

  The mental wail which came down the affinity link seemed capable of bursting Eysk’s skull apart. He dropped to his knees, clamping his hands to his head, vision washed out by a blinding red light. Steel claws were burrowing up out of the affinity link, ripping through the delicate membranes inside his brain, shiny silver smeared with blood and viscid cranial fluid.

  “Poor Eysk,” a far-off chorus spoke directly into his mind—so very different to affinity, so very insidious. “Let us help you.” The promise of pain’s alleviation hummed in the air all around.

  Even numbed and bruised he recognized the gentle offer for the Trojan it was. He blinked tears from his eyes, closing his mind to affinity. And he was abruptly alone, denied even an echo of the emotional fellowship he had shared for his entire life. The grotesque mirage of the claw vanished. Eysk let out a hot breath of relief. The polyp below his trembling hands was glowing a sickly pink—that was real.

  “What—”

  Hairy cloven feet shuffled into view. He gasped and looked up. The hominid creature with a black-leather wolf’s head howled victoriously and reached down for him.

  Laton opened his eyes. His crushed, faltering body was suffused with pain. It wasn’t relevant, so he ignored it. There wasn’t going to be much time before oxygen starvation started to debilitate his reasoning. Physical shock was already making concentration difficult. He quickly loaded a sequence of localized limiter routines into the neuron cells buried beneath the polyp on which he was pinned by the twisted crane boom. Developed for his Jantrit campaign, their sophistication was orders of magnitude above the usual diversionary orders juvenile Edenists employed to avoid parental supervision. Firstly he regularized the image which the surrounding sensitive cells were supplying to the neural strata, freezing the picture of his body.

  At that point his heart gave its last beat. He could sense the desperate attempts by the multiplicity to ward off Lewis’s subsumption of the island. Laton was banking everything on the primitive street boy using brute force to take over. Sure enough Lewis’s eerily potent, but crude, thought currents flowed through the neural strata below, flushing every other routine before him; though even his augmented power failed to root out Laton’s subversive routines. They were symbiotic rather than parasitic, working within the controlling personality not against it. It would take a highly experienced Edenist bitek neuropathologist to even realize they were there, let alone expunge them.

  Laton’s lips gave a final quirk of contempt. He cleared a storage section in the neuron cells, and transferred his personality into it. His final act before consciousness and memory sank below the polyp was to trigger the proteanic virus infecting every cell in his body.

  Mosul dreamed. He was lying in bed in his accommodation tower flat, with Clio beside him. Mosul woke. He looked down fondly at the sleeping girl; she was in her early twenties with long dark hair and a pretty flattish face. The sheet had slipped from her shoulders, revealing a pert rounded breast. He bent over to kiss the nipple. She stirred, smiling dreamily as his tongue traced a delicate circle. A warm overspill of gently erotic images came foaming out of her drowsy mind.

  Mosul grinned in anticipation, and woke. He frowned down in puzzlement at the sleeping girl beside him. The bedroom was illuminated by a sourceless rosy glow. It shaded Clio’s silky skin a dark burgundy colour. He shook the sleep from his head. They had been making love for hours last night, he was entitled to some lassitude after that.

  She responded eagerly to his kisses, throwing aside the sheet so he could feast on the sight of her. Her skin hardened and wrinkled below his touch. When he looked up in alarm she had become a cackling white-haired crone.

  The pink light shifted into bright scarlet, as though the room was bleeding. He could see the polyp walls palpitating. In the distance a giant heartbeat thudded.

  Mosul woke. The room was illuminated by a sourceless rosy glow. He was sweating, it was intolerably hot.

  Pernik, I’m having a nightmare . . . I think. Am I awake now?

  Yes, Mosul.

  Thank goodness. Why is it so hot?

  Yes, you are having a nightmare. My nightmare.

  Pernik!

  Mosul woke, jerking up from the bed. The bedroom walls were glowing red; no longer safe hard polyp but a wet meat traced with a filigree of purple-black veins. They oscillated like jelly. The heartbeat sounded again, louder than before. A damp acrid smell tainted the air.

  Pernik! Help me.

  No, Mosul.

  What are you doing?

  Clio rolled over and laughed at him. Her eyes were featureless balls of jaundiced yellow. “We’re coming for you, Mosul, you and all your kind. Smug arrogant bastards that you are.”

  She elbowed him in the groin. Mosul shouted at the vicious pain, and tumbled off the raised sponge cushion which formed his bed. Sour yellow vomit trickled out of his mouth as he writhed about on the slippery floor.

  Mosul woke. It was real this time, he was sure of that. Everything was dangerously clear to his eyes. He was lying on the floor, all tangled up in the sheets. The bedroom glowed red, its walls raw stinking meat.

  Clio was locked in her own looped nightmare, hands raking the top of the bed, staring sightlessly at the ceiling. Unformed screams stalled in her throat, as though she was choking. Mosul tried to get up, but his feet slithered all over the slimed quaking floor. He directed an order at the door muscle membrane. Too late he saw its shape had changed from a vertical oval to a horizontal slash. A giant mouth. It parted, giving him a brief glimpse of stained teeth the size of his feet, then thick yellow vomit discharged into the bedroom. The torrent of obscenely fetid liquid hit him straight on, lifting him up and throwing him against the back wall. He didn’t dare cry out, it would be in his mouth. His arms thrashed about, but it was like paddling in glue. There seemed no end to the cascade, it had risen above his knees. Clio was floundering against the wall a couple of metres away, her body spinning in the hard current. He couldn’t reach her. The vomit’s heat was powerful enough to enervate his muscles, and the stomach acid it contained was corroding his skin. It had risen up to his chest. He struggled to stay upright. Clio had disappeared below the surface, not even waking from her nightmare. And still more poured in.

  As far as Lewis Sinclair was aware, Laton’s corpse lay perfectly still under the crumpled crane boom. Not that he bothered to check. Pernik Island was big, much larger than his imagination had ever conceived it, and for someone with his background difficult to comprehend. Every second yelled for his attention as he sent out phobic fantasies through his affinity bonds with the slumbering populace, invading their dreams, breaking their minds wide open with insane fear so more souls could come through and begin their reign of possession. He ignored the bitek’s tedious minutiae—autonomic organ functions, the monitoring routines which the old multiplicity employed
, enacting muscle membrane functions. All he cared about was eliminating the remaining Edenists; that task received his total devotion.

  The island’s cells glimmered a faint pink as a result of the energistic arrogation, even the shaggy coat of moss shone as though imbued with firefly luminescence. Pernik twinkled like a fabulous inflamed ruby in the funereal gloom of Atlantis’s moonless night, sending radiant fingers probing down through the water to beckon curious fish. An observer flying overhead would have noticed flashes of blue light pulsing at random from the accommodation tower windows, as though stray lightning bolts were being flung around the interior.

  Long chill screams reverberated around the borders of the park, emerging from various archways at the base of the towers. By the time they reached the rim they had blended into an almost musical madrigal, changes in pitch matching the poignant lilt of the waves washing against the polyp.

  Housechimps scampered about, yammering frantically at each other. Their control routines had been wiped clean by Lewis’s relentless purge of the multiplicity and all its subsidiaries, and long-suppressed simian tribal traits were surfacing. Fast, violent fights broke out among them as they instinctively fled into the thicker spinneys growing in the park.

  The remaining sub-sentient servitor creatures, all eighteen separate species necessary to complement the island’s static organs, either froze motionless or performed their last assigned task over and over again.

  Unnoticed amid the bedlam and horror, Laton’s corpse was quietly dissolving into protoplasmic soup.

  Edenist biotechnicians examining the wreckage of Jantrit had called the process Laton used to doctor the habitat’s neural strata a proteanic virus. In fact, it was far more complex than that. Affinity-programmable organic molecules was a term one researcher used.

  Deeply disturbed by the technology and its implications, the Jovian consensus released little further information. Research continued, a classified high-priority project, which concentrated on developing methods to warn existing habitats of the sub-nanonic weapon being deployed against them, and a means of making future habitats (and people) immune. Progress over the intervening forty years was slow but satisfactory.