by J. K. Norry
“Hey, pretty girl,” he said. “That was nothing. Sorry, just being completely honest with myself about how I feel about someone else.”
He spread his hands.
“Not you, of course,” he added. “I’m somewhat fond of you.”
His heart had started pounding the moment he saw her, and his reaction to seeing her surprised him even more.
Did I just call her ‘pretty girl’? Link thought, flushing. Did I just say that I’m ‘somewhat fond of her’? What is this, the fifties? Europe?
She giggled, and his tension eased a little. A smile brightened her features, and Link felt as though his own was beginning to go more than skin deep. At that moment, the door opened and Steve entered the hallway. Link let his smile fall immediately, and rolled his eyes.
“Hey!”
Steve was as exuberant as he had been in the washroom, smiling at them in turn. He pointed at Link’s pants, where he had wiped his hands, and smirked.
“Uh-oh,” he said. “Looks like you got a little on you.”
The flush had already crept up the back of his neck, to set his scalp aflame. Link felt the blood rush to his face as he sneered back.
“You were standing between me and the paper towels,” he said. “I had to choose between wiping my hands on my pants and shaking hands with an animal that doesn’t have the decency to wash or keep quiet in the bathroom.”
He looked down, at the stains.
“I chose well,” he added. “In case you’re too daft to get that too.”
What should have been the most awkward moment of his work day had somehow become his most triumphant moment in recent memory. All he had to do was stare at the guy, at this point, and hope he would slink away. Link made sure that Sherry didn’t see his sigh of relief, when Steve actually decided to move off without saying more. She looked at him, not knowing that this was not the guy Link knew himself to be.
“Really?” she said, glancing after him. “Did he really not wash his hands? That’s so gross.”
Link had to make sure his eyes didn’t gleam, with the blood pumping through his veins or with his delight at her comment.
“Right?” he said. “Hygiene is so important.”
He was puffing his chest out a little, without knowing that he had done it. His shoulders even felt more broad, until he thought back over his words. They dropped, then; and his chest deflated. The statement had not been nearly as testosterone-driven as his verbal attack on Steve.
“So, uh...” Link began.
The shroud of fog was back, and his thoughts went somewhere completely different than where he was at the moment. Link shuffled his feet, and watched them like they belonged to someone else. Every time he glanced up at Sherry, it looked like she was about to say something or was hoping that he would; so, he stopped glancing up at her. Something in their dynamic had changed, and Link couldn’t put his finger on what it was.
“Back to work, then,” he mumbled, feebly.
As he pivoted in place, and felt the flush climbing his back once more, she said his name. Hearing it from her lips was like a cool stream of fresh water, quenching the fire of his embarrassment.
“Link,” she said. “My name is Sherry.”
He stopped, and hesitated to turn. His face still felt flush, even if his heart pounded now for a different reason altogether. Before he could respond, she spoke again.
“But I like ‘pretty girl’, too,” she added.
Link stood there, his back turned and his mind whirling. In the absence of anything clever or even fully formulated leaping promptly to mind, he chose to walk away smiling.
SEVEN
All of his internet searches, both at home and at work, were about the drug he was taking. Link learned that some notoriously smart people were using it to be smart for more hours in a day, but there was nearly nothing on how it affected people who took it right before going to sleep. Most reports on the dreams that others had experienced on the drug were footnotes in studies focused on other results; he found more anecdotal comments than anything, and slogging through all of them was slow going.
Nightmares were neither common nor uncommon, according to the studies, and lucid dreams seemed to be featured heavily in any mention of positive effects the pills had on sleep time and quality. No one said that they went to another world, or visited the same spaceship every night when they went to bed. Even if they had, he realized after searching for them exhaustively, what would he do about it? Send them an email, try to have lunch with them in another galaxy sometime?
Nothing made any sense, except pursuing the one thing in his life that he felt genuinely curious about. His own errant behavior had already made him lose interest in Sherry a bit, as he couldn’t stop wondering if she would expect the brazen attitude he had displayed earlier to show up every time Link did. Whoever he was, Link was not that guy. Thinking back over his interactions with both her and Steve, all he wanted to do was take a shower and go to sleep.
The anger that lingered was of no interest to Link. He had no desire to examine why he had stepped from his comfort zone for a moment, why he resented Sherry for liking it, or why he loathed his own stew of thoughts. Hopefully the shower would wash away the whole mess, and the sleep would make him completely forget about all of it. At least in his dreams, he didn’t have to wonder about the strange story unfolding behind his eyes; it was just a dream, after all.
Link could only remind himself of that so many times in a day, before he started analyzing why he was repeating it like a mantra to his muddled mind. He reminded himself of it again when he noticed that he could see a visible difference in how full the bottle of pills was. After careful consideration, and another broken record reminder, he decided to take only one of them.
Lying down, he closed his eyes and watched his breaths. They looked different than before, and he began to marvel at how he might have taken on a complicated new breathing pattern while living through one of the most unconscious weeks of his life. The doorway came at him like before, and he slipped through it easily as his thoughts drifted from his mind with no effort on his part. Link looked out through open eyes, without opening his own.
Two people were strapped to chairs, directly before him. They both looked agitated, but in completely different ways. The woman was frowning fiercely, her face and eyes set in a look of determination that made her look striking in a way the most complicated features never could. Her eyes were dark, but they glowed with a pain and a promise that Link could only guess at.
The man was in pain, as well. He was not bearing up under it like the woman, and his face seemed twisted by fear more than it was set in any kind of stubborn defiance to it. Link found his eyes going back to the woman, although it was not his will that made them move.
No one paid attention to the other figure in the featureless space; he sat in the shadows, turning dials and punching buttons on a small device in his lap.
“You have barely served a quarter cycle,” Link said.
It wasn’t him saying it, except that his lips moved and his voice issued forth. Wherever the thoughts that propelled the words were coming from, it wasn’t his decision when they came out. In all honesty, none of it even made real sense to him. As he watched, his voice went on.
“Your performance has been exemplary,” he said. “You went from top flyer to team leader in less time than anyone ever has.”
Link felt a smile stretch the corners of his lips, although there was nothing in their pain to smile about. A dark chuckle poured out of him, and he nodded against his will.
“Even me,” he added, still smiling humorlessly.
The young woman’s eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly, and her stubbornness showed in her own fixed expression. Link watched his field of vision shift as the body he was in did, and his gaze came to rest on the man. He felt the smile fall, and his own eyes narrow.
“You,” he said. “You’ve never impressed me. You may have impressed everyone else, but not me. Everything you do is so rote, and practiced. There is no imagination in you, only a long list of rules that you unconsciously live by. I thought you excelled at mediocrity, and taking orders; and that was reason enough to let you lead, along with the way everyone responded to you. I thought you lacked the imagination to do anything but what you were told, and that was exactly what I was looking for in my top team leader.”
Link leaned in, and heard his own voice go lower.
“You get the most promising and experienced flyers,” he said.
He glanced at her.
“She gets the worst,” he added.
His eyes settled on the man again.
“She gets more out of them than you,” he said. “Which was fine, until today. Today she came to me, to do something terrible.”
Link felt the form he was inhabiting straighten, and he walked along with it to tower over the other prisoner once more. Every cell in the other man’s body felt like it was on fire, aching to let everyone around him feel the burn. He didn’t know what kind of pain the two people strapped to the chair were experiencing, only that they were; beads of sweat stood out on both of their brows, and they were each trembling from head to toe. Link felt like he shared some electrical connection with them, and that he was feeding on their agony.
“Top flyer,” he spat, glaring at her.
“Natural leader,” he went on, “and brilliant strategist. And now this. You have branded yourself turncoat, and called out the top team leader on the most egregious of all crimes. Why would you do this?”
Out of the corner of his eye, Link saw the man drop his shoulders ever so slightly. A new fire burned within him, and somehow the rising anger only made his voice even more calm.
“You know the consequences,” Link said.
The woman bore up under whatever was taxing her system, and looked him in the eye. The look was earnest, or challenging, or defiant; or all three. Link couldn’t tell, until she spoke.
“I had to,” she said. “For the sake of the fleet.”
Her voice was trembling even more than her body was, and she took a deep practiced breath before speaking again. Link watched a bead of sweat run from her forehead to her chin, unnoticed and unchecked.
“He came to me,” she said, “to inform me of the central system’s plan to remove you from power.”
She sighed painfully, heaved in a labored breath, and went on.
“You had to know,” she gasped. “No matter the cost to me.”
Link was squirming under the other man’s skin. The pain evident in both of their faces and postures was disturbing to him, and it disturbed him even more to have to watch passively; but most disturbing was the joy he felt rising up in him. He felt alive, cracking with the energy that was being drained from the prisoners. Torn between watching the view through his eyes and the tide of explosive anger awash within him, Link rode along as the view moved to the man again.
“I won’t ask,” he said, “if this is true. I lose two leaders this day, either way. Even if every other aspect of your performances were exemplary, I cannot trust the accused or the accuser.”
Part of him was unable to ignore the small details that the body he was in was watching for. Although his eyes were on the man, his attention was on the woman; he saw her posture stay resolute while the man’s drooped even further. He spoke, bitterly, while she maintained her calm silence.
“You would be a tyrant,” the man said. “You want blind allegiance, and you plan to kill everyone that does not give it. I had to try and stop you. For the good of the fleet.”
The woman burst out laughing, despite her pain.
“There would be no fleet,” she spat, “if he had not taken control. We would have burned with our brethren, and our people would be no more.”
All eyes were on her, although Link still stood before the man. He saw her glance up at him, briefly, before dropping her chin to her chest to hide her next wave of pain. There was a reverence in her gaze that startled both him and the owner of the body he was in.
Link glanced at the man with the device, pointing at the one strapped to the chair.
“Give him all he can take,” he said. “I’ll be back in a few hours, to give him more.”
His hand fell to his side, and his eyes went to her.
“End her pain,” he said.
Link had a moment of terrified panic, and he thought he was about to see her go completely rigid and then go forever limp. Instead, her features relaxed and the trembling in her body stopped. She looked up at him, a puzzled expression on her face.
“I will figure out what to do with you later,” he said.
He looked at the man with the device once more, and watched him turn the knobs in quiet delight for a few seconds.
“Get her to a cell,” he said. “And bring me the code to open it. Only me.”
EIGHT
After waking from the dream, Link found he was unable to get back to sleep. He was shaken, and felt like he might be sick. Instead, he rose before the sun did and began his morning ritual early. A shower and clean clothes made him feel a little better, and he took his second cup of coffee out on the cramped balcony that he seldom used. It was still dark, and he stared at the stars while he sipped at the steaming brew. Only the brightest could shine through the glow cast by the streetlights; Link fixated on one, then the next, until the nearest star began to light the sky.
Either he was a lot more twisted than he had ever thought, or he was visiting another world in his dreams. One seemed as likely as the other, but neither presented a clear or easy way out.
If he was working through his personal demons by personifying them in robots and people in his dreams, only to destroy or torture them, there was definitely something deeply wrong with him that the pills couldn’t help with. On the other hand, if he was actually visiting another world...well, that put a whole different light on it.
Link shook his head, as the first rays of sunlight turned the brightest stars to pinpoints, and took his eyes off the distant fires. Instead he let them find a space between stars, dark and vacant but for the possibility of a spaceship inhabiting some of the emptiness between him and the rest of eternity.
Or a fleet of spaceships.
“They don’t talk about their world,” he muttered, under his breath. “They talk about their fleet.”
Link drained the cooled remains of his coffee, and dug his phone from his pocket to check the time. He left behind the little balcony, likely for another several months, and took his thoughts with him to work. Between the pile of documents on his desk and the balancing act of deciding what he wanted to believe, the first couple of hours flew right by. The day was beginning to look like it would pass swiftly, and he would be all set to get to bed early. By the time a head poked into his cubicle, Link had made up his mind.
He would help the robot, and try to stop the body he kept jumping into from doing whatever it wanted to do. Looking at that man from the inside had terrified him, and watching him torture both ally and enemy had been enough to shake him to his core. Whatever that angry twisted mind was planning, it was clear that it wasn’t good.
It was also clear that it wasn’t Link’s own mind that he was battling, from this perspective. If he failed, it only meant the death of some distant star stragglers that no one on Earth would ever know about; contemplating failure when it was his own well-being on the line was not an option, if he was to participate without the kind of anxiety gripping him that so often froze his thoughts and body alike.
The head that poked into his space was Steve’s, and it had to say hello twice before Link registered hearing him. He swiveled his chair, slowly, to face the unwelcome intrusion head-on.
“Steve,” he said.
He
didn’t ask what he could do for him, or what Steve was doing here. Link waited, wearing a look of practiced impatience, until the words came spewing forth.
Steve nodded.
“Lincoln,” he said. “It’s Lincoln, right? The boss says I need to work with you for a couple days, so you can train me on the software you guys use here. She said you really know what you’re doing, and that you’re the best person to show me the ropes.”
He paused, and shifted uncomfortably.
“I know we got off on the wrong foot,” Steve continued, “and I’m real sorry about all that. I shoot off my mouth, sometimes, especially when I’m nervous. I didn’t know you and Sherry were a thing, and I didn’t mean to be disrespectful. I’m nervous now too, if you can’t tell. I hope I’m not saying something to further offend you, or put you off.”
Link held up a hand, when he realized that this guy wasn’t going to shut up unless he interrupted.
“Steve,” he said. “Relax. Call me Link.”
He didn’t tell him that his friends called him that, so there would be no mistake made. An admission of anxiety went a lot way with him, though; and Link kind of liked the thought of helping him be a little less nervous. The way Steve was holding himself reminded him too much of the man he had seen strapped down and in agony not so long ago.
Rather than lower his hand, Link gestured with it.
“Go get a chair,” he said, “and some way to take notes.”
Steve nodded, exuberant, and started to turn away.
“Oh, and also,” Link added. “Sherry and I are not a thing.”
Steve reversed his movement, and cocked his head as he faced Link once more.
“Really?” he said. “You might want to tell her that. I heard her talking about you, in the break room, and it sounded like you two were maybe definitely a thing.”