Mindwarp

by James Follett

“It is very faint indeed… I have very little to go on.”

  “Give me what you have.”

  Ewen moaned in his sleep.

  “He’s resisting,” said the computer.

  Inman turned his attention to the cube of blue light. An image formed that remained ghostly and tenuous. It was a woman, he could see that, but the face remained blanked out as did her breasts.”

  “No…” Ewen muttered. “No…”

  “Deeper,” said Inman, now totally absorbed in the figure in the luminescent cube. Patterned lines of dancing light were zig-zagging in front of the woman’s face and upper torso. Ewen was fighting hard to obliterate her identity. Whoever the woman was, she was someone whose identity he could never admit to, not even to himself. Especially not himself.

  Such denial.., thought Inman. A sudden glimpse of dark hair that disappeared the instant it appeared. And then full, rounded breasts that were gone in an instant. Inman knew who the woman was. He had first seen her as a child when he had watched her performing her selection tests. Since that day she had become very special.

  Kally.

  “Stop!”

  Ewen gave a little cry of relief in his sleep as his guilt snatched the figure from the cube and buried it deep and safe in his subconsciousness from whence the mindwarp probe had dragged it.

  Inman was lost in thought. This was real guilt. And of course, it was doubtful that the boy would have told his mother the truth about Tarlan’s death. An intolerable burden of guilt. Magnify the tenuous, harmless fantasies that boys often have about their mothers into something huge and overbearing that he was forced to face, add it to the existing burden of guilt, and the chances were that it would destroy a lesser man.

  But would it destroy Ewen?

  “Put one together that is identical to his mother,” he ordered.

  “It is ready,” the computer confirmed a few seconds later.

  Inman’s cold gaze at Ewen was too impassive to determine whether it was rooted in loathing. “We’ll start with Scenario 25,” he instructed. “Go.”

  The mindwarp hummed.

  It was a terrible weapon but Inman had no compunction about using it. There had been others he had used it on with varying degrees of success. Others like Ewen, who had strayed from the path of righteousness.

  It was all a question of make or break.

  9.

  The new dream was merged into one with the old dream. He had not hurled Tamara from him in a fit of guilt and remorse, but had feverishly stirred her to climax after climax as she ground her pelvis in a willing frenzy against his hand.

  “Now it’s your turn,” she whispered in his ear when she had got her breath back. Her voice had a curious adult quality that did not sound right, but nothing mattered so long as she kept up that divine movement of her hand. He felt her hair brush across his stomach.

  A tiny alarm sounded:

  Tamara does not have long hair.

  He was about to open his eyes but suddenly the wondrous touch of her hand was replaced by something even more magical as a softness and warmth that he could not have imagined possible engulfed him. She moved her head with a sublime skill, her knowing tongue snaking and curling and teasing in a way that forced a loud groan from him. His hands went down to her head, and his fingers and reason became lost in the luxuriant, silken tresses.

  Tamara does not have long hair.

  He moved his hand and found a full, wonderfully rounded breast, heavy and pendulous. His fingertips traced an aureole - an area of tactile bliss that seemed unending. It swelled with a strange urgency to match the mounting feverishness of his touch.

  Tamara’s nipples were tight little buttons.

  Her rhythm quickened.

  And her breasts were hard and small.

  His buttocks clenched and unclenched. His tormented heart seemed to beat in crazy unison with her head, pounding at his senses, breaking through the walls of his libido. Her lips were living creatures working an independent devastating magic that were spurring him to the brink of a feverish insanity. The little moans deep in her throat when she felt the first of the telltale spasms sped him to the edge.

  He gave a loud cry. His back arched off the bed, and he jack-knifed forwards to pull her head away. His eyes snapped open and the horror that lay before him hit him with the force of an avalanche.

  The woman looked up, her lovely face was framed by a dark, dishevelled cascade of hair that spilled across his white belly. She smiled and wiped away the tendrils that laced her lips and cheeks. “Wasn’t that nice, Ewen, darling? Wasn’t that something you’ve always dreamed about?”

  He screamed. And kept screaming, rolled into a tight foetal ball of personal agony.

  Seconds later Kally burst into the bedroom, pulling a nightdress about her shoulders. She gathered Ewen into her arms and cradled his head against her breasts as she had done years before when he had woken from nightmares about the blue dome.

  “It’s all right, darling,” she crooned. “It’s all right… It’s only a dream… Only a dream…”

  Her words reached through the blinding fog of his guilt and misery, and gave him hope.

  Only a dream… Only a dream…

  He opened his eyes.

  “Only a dream, darling…”

  But the touch of her full, rounded breasts, pressing warm and yielding against his cheek, and her hair, her voice, and her scent screamed a treacherous, hideous reality.

  It hadn’t been a dream!

  With anguished sobs of despair, he leapt from the bed, hurling Kally to one side, and beat his head furiously against the wall until the blood spurted.

  10.

  Jenine tried not to look furtive. She hesitated at the automarket’s toiletry display and looked left and right. A technician-student did not command the awe of a technician, nevertheless the other shoppers were avoiding her aisle. She had seen what she wanted but ignored them. She took a tag off the display hook for a capsule of toothpaste and dropped it in the plastic pot that was hanging from her wrist. It was followed by a tag for a soap stick that she didn’t need, and two tags for unwanted shampoos. Finally she summoned the courage to snatch the tags she really wanted before moving away quickly to look at the offerings in the store’s fabric section.

  She lingered near the auto check-outs, waiting until they were quiet. A lull in trade and she seized her chance. She emptied the tags into a check-out hopper. The machine rattled and gurgled as it sorted them out. Colour pictures of her intended purchases appeared one after the other on a screen. Jenine hurriedly touched the confirm pad to clear the images. The total purchase price was displayed using the dot notation system that was understood by the public. She passed her medallion in front of the reader and the cost of her purchases was deducted from her student account. A minute passed. To her annoyance a woman used the next check-out. The shopper looked curiously at the technician-students’ uniform and quickly averted her gaze when she caught Jenine’s eye.

  The conveyor started and Jenine’s purchases appeared. The three packets of sanitary towels looked huge and incriminating. She bundled them into bags and fled to her waiting auto taxi.

  Jenine was hiding her smuggled acquisitions at the back of a cupboard in her shower room when she heard someone enter the study. She found Ewen slumped in a chair, looking pale and distraught.

  “How did it go?” she asked.

  “Terrible.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “No.”

  She wasn’t going to allow him to wallow in self-pity. “I know it must have been rough, but you don’t have to be curt with me.”

  “Rough?” He laughed bitterly. “Do you know what I wanted to do at the station? I wanted to throw myself under a train. I still don’t know why I didn’t, and I don’t know why I’m here.”

  She sat on the arm of his chair. “Have you forgotten what I told you? Whenever you feel like this, you must tell yourself that Tarlan would be dead by now anyway.”
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  “It’s not only that.”

  “What then?”

  “I’ve got to escape from here before I go mad.”

  “Leave the Centre?”

  He gave an indecisive gesture. “I don’t know…” He lapsed into a moody silence.

  Jenine noticed the patch of Nu-skin that had been sprayed on his head. She could see a cluster of half-healed cuts and lesions through the transparent, artificial tissue. “What happened to your head? Your guilt complex fall on you?”

  Calen kicked the door open and staggered in carrying a packing case. “This was outside,” he complained, dumping the case in the middle of the floor. “I fell over it. Why is that I’m condemned to room with fellow students who seem determined to cause me the maximum grief and misery?”

  Jenine read the delivery label. “It’s your seismoscope.”

  Ewen’s depression evaporated. He went down on his knees and helped Jenine open the case. He lifted the gleaming instrument out of its packaging by its shoulder strap and set it carefully on the table.

  Calen frowned when he read the instrument’s designation label. “A seismoscope? No one uses these things anymore.”

  “Well I’m going to,” Ewen replied, shaking an operating manual datacard out of its envelope. He snapped the card back and forth to change its pages. “I’m going to start using it tomorrow.”

  PART 5. Discovery.

  1.

  Jenine brought the mag-lev servicing truck to rest alongside the inspection panel that was set into the tunnel wall. Deprived of lift, the de-energized travelling wave induction motors allowed the truck to settle on the broad rails. It was a quiet time of morning when the chord-metro system was reduced to a fifteen-minute service on this section of the Keltro-Steyning line. Ewen had selected this location because of its close proximity to several other lines so that the known positions of the other tunnels would enable the seismoscope to be accurately calibrated.

  “Be quick,” Ewen muttered, busying himself with the seismoscope.

  It was an unnecessary admonishment; Jenine was aware of the need for haste. Even if there was no need, she would have hurried anyway; she hated the confined spaces of the chord-metro tunnels. As she unlocked the panel and pulled it open, an automatic light came on, illuminating the complex web of tunnels on the schematic display panel. She touched her stylus on the section they were in and a list of diversion options appeared for closures ranging from ten-minutes to a week.

  “There’s a possible closure Option C that re-routes this section through Steyning Junction.”

  “How long will it give us?”

  “Sixteen minutes.”

  “That’s not long enough.”

  “There was a bird sighting at Carian yesterday. The station’s closed until next Tenth Day. The diversions have affected all schedules.”

  “There’s got to be some sort of time slot we can work in.”

  Jenine consulted the panel and made a few fast entries on its keypad. “The next option gives us forty-one minutes.”

  Ewen opened a toolkit and fished out a portable laser cutter. “Go for it,” he instructed. A gentle current of air caressed his face. A train was coming. A long way off.

  “We can’t, Ewen. The knock-on effect will extend to too many lines. The closure will be certain to be noticed. It’s got to be C.”

  The movement of the air quickened. Both of them could now hear the faint squeal of guide shoes as the hurtling train rocked on uneven sections of line. There was no danger of a collision with the stationary service truck; the safety system would automatically energize the truck’s motors and send it scudding ahead of the approaching train if it got too close. But that was not the object of this exercise.

  “Okay C,” Ewen agreed. “We’ll just have to work fast.”

  Jenine keyed-in the appropriate instructions. Up and down the line auto-points changed polarity to allow for the closure. On adjoining lines, computers made infinitesimal adjustments to train velocities and stopping times to allow for the altered balance of the network.

  The air being driven before it by the approaching train rose to a miniature hurricane and then diminished rapidly as the passenger capsules hurtled along a connecting spur tunnel.

  Jenine and Ewen had already practiced with the equipment therefore there was little need for words between them. Ewen straddled the inspection platform and worked the controls that lifted him to the roof of the tunnel. He applied a gripper tool to one of the lining panels and pulled it clear, passing it down to Jenine. Behind the panel was relatively smooth rock scoured by the marks of the boring machine that had cut the tunnel in another age. He pulled down a face visor and signalled Jenine to pass him the portable laser cutter.

  “Have you double-checked the diameter and depth settings?” he asked.

  Jenine snapped the thin datacard several times to display the appropriate page. “Forty by sixty,” she reported. She checked a lapsed time indicator and added, “We’ve got eleven minutes.”

  Ewen checked that the machine’s settings agreed. He steadied himself, pressed the cutting head against the rock, and pulled the trigger. The turbine pump howled, sucking vaporized rock into a reservoir as the laser burned into the tunnel roof. The machine cut out automatically after a minute. Ewen carefully lowered the tool and surveyed his handiwork: a neat, blind hole of the correct diameter and depth bored into the rock.

  “Eight minutes,” Jenine reported. The seismoscope’s transducer was already connected to the instrument by a coil of heavy cable. She passed it up to him.

  “The gun first!” Ewen hissed impatiently, snapping his fingers. He snatched the sealant gun from her and injected a thick paste into the hole. It started to set immediately. He fumbled the task of ramming the transducer home and swore. Eventually he jammed it into the hole and held it for a few seconds to be certain that the paste was doing its job.

  “Six minutes,” said Jenine. She switched on the seismoscope. An old-fashioned red standby light flashed. She read from the datacard, ““The paste can take between three and six minutes to set depending on temperature and humidity. Under no circumstances should tests be started until the red standby light is extinguished and the green ready light is illuminated, otherwise severe damage will be caused to the transducer”.”

  The infuriating red light continued to wink.

  “Five minutes,” said Jenine calmly. Both knew what would happen if they didn’t open the section within the alloted time: the computers would perform an emergency close-down of the entire line. Passengers would be stranded, and there would be a major row.

  The seismoscope’s red light went out and the green light burned steadily.

  Ewen gave a whoop of relief. He jumped down beside Jenine. She checked the datacard again. “The instructions say that wide angle beams should be used for the calibration tests.”

  Ewen set the beam width control to wide angle.

  Four minutes.

  He flipped up the guard on the firing button and pressed it. A bolt of energy surged through the crystal in the transducer causing it to distort and recover with a violence that was akin to the detonation of a small explosive charge. A beam of sound waves pulsed and spread through the rock. Some of the sonic patterns were reflected and deflected by variations in the density of the strata, other waves were lost when they encountered cavities. Harmonics were reflected back to the transducer. The results were captured in the seismoscope’s memory for later analysis.

  “No wonder the paste has to be hard,” Jenine muttered.

  Three minutes.

  Ewen changed the beam angle settings and fired a second charge.

  The sound boomed along the tunnel. Three more firings followed in rapid succession.

  “Two minutes!” Jenine called out in alarm. “We’ll have to abandon the last test.”

  “It won’t take-”

  “One minute, forty, you idiot! We don’t have time! Five shots are plenty!”

  Ewen saw sense.
He quickly unscrewed the transducer and pushed the tunnel lining panel back into place. It refused to fit and he lost valuable seconds turning it this way and that until it snapped home.

  They finished clearing up and were on the move with forty seconds to spare.

  “Ewen,” said Jenine as the service truck sped along the tunnel. “How many more tests did you have in mind?”

  “It depends on the results of this one. And today’s tests are only calibration tests. Why?”

  She glanced at him, secretly pleased to see how alert and alive he was looking. Being busy was good for him. “No more in metro tunnels, please, Ewen. They’re bad for my nerves and I think those bangs have given me a loose filling.”

  2.

  The results were startling good; better than they had imagined possible.

  “And that must be the fast, non-stop link between Delman Central and Jelna,” said Jenine excitedly, pointing to a shadowy outline on the datapad’s screen.

  The couple were in their favourite position for intensive study or acrimonious debates - sprawled on the floor. Such uncivilized behaviour met with Calen’s disapproval, as did eating army-issue biscuits. He considered that lying on the floor while stuffing oneself full of useless snack foods was symbolic of the general decadence and lack of any sense of style that was afflicting modern students. Having made his views clear, he settled at the table to write some theology notes.

  Ewen called up the second image obtained from when he had directed the sonic beam upwards. He pointed to the vague area along the top of the picture where the traces faded to nothing. “That’s odd,” he observed. “There’s hardly any sign of returning echoes - everything gets lost quite quickly, but on the fifth image, where most of the sound was sent sideways, there’s plenty of echoes for a greater distance.”

  Jenine switched between the two images. By comparing the seismographs with maps, she and Ewen were learning to read the curious light and shade patterning of the images with some skill, and had discovered that reversing them to negative pictures revealed the presence of tunnels and galleries with greater clarity.