Black Shift (The Consilience War Book 1)

by Ben Sheffield

  The illusion gets even easier when peers confirm the false memory. In 1951, a man called Solomon Asch collected students, and made them view a card with a line on it, and then flip the card to reveal three lines labelled A, B, and C. One of those lines was the same length as the first line, while one was longer, and one was shorter. Each participant was asked to say which line matched the line on the first card.

  Unknown to the participant, all of the other "students" in the room were assistants of Asch. Prior to the test, these assistants would sometimes be told to cite the wrong line. Faced by the peer pressure of everyone in the room, the experiment subject would frequently "remember" the wrong line as being the correct length. The same one that everyone else picked.

  But suppose someone wiped out all the memories from a man's head, and gave him a single description of who he is? “You are a farmer,” for example. What would he do? Would he accept this, even in the absence of all evidence? That would be interesting.

  It is, of course, unethical to test anything like this. Our best conjecture of what would happen is as follows: the brain would seek to reconstruct its memory by the fastest route possible, and would become very tolerant to the production of false memories.

  Tell such a man that he was an ice-cream truck driver, and false memories would populate his brain of driving an ice cream truck, adding chocolate sprinkles to cones, having all his product melt during a hot day when the cooler breaks, and dealing with engine repairs.

  Tell a man he was a tinker, and it would be so. His brain would fill in the rest. Or a tailer. Or a soldier. Or a spy.

  Most readers would find this disconcerting - both in practice and in theory. But it's better than the alternative. Having no memories at all. No name, no identity. Looking at yourself in the mirror and staring into the eyes of a stranger.

  Even lies and fiction would be better than that, wouldn't it? An army in possession of such a soldier would be outright cruel to abstain from giving such a man a whole new identity with one spoken sentence.

  [The Black Shift Project, by Emil Gokla, 2100 edition. Rights resolve with the Black Shift Archives.]

  Caitanya-9 – March 18, 2136 - 1540 hours

  He woke up, his head in the lap of a woman.

  “Have some water,” she said. He felt the liquid spill into his mouth. His lips and tongue were so dry that it the water almost seemed to slice them like a straightrazor.

  All around him were plains of purple rock, under a thunderous cover of cloud.

  “Who am I?” He asked.

  Unbidden, a memory sprang into his mind.

  I am Awake.

  “You’re my husband,” she said, cradling his head with affection and love. “And you’ve been hurt. What can you remember?”

  What can I remember?

  Behind his eyes, he felt like a man taking a running leap into a pool of water…and thudding painfully onto dry hard ground.

  There’s nothing here.

  Where are the memories?

  He stuttered and stammered, hoping that he’d be able to tell her who he was, how he’d gotten here. Hoping he could explain the waves of dread passing through his body, as if something inexplicable and world-ending had just happened.

  Hoping that the pool would somehow fill up with water again.

  “Don’t you recognise me?” She asked, her voice raw with emotion. “I’m Zandra. I’m your wife.”

  “Are you?” He was dumbfounded.

  “All I can recall is that I was falling out of the sky with you, and we landed on this planet. Do you know anything about what happened?”

  He shrugged, because he didn’t.

  He looked around, and recognised things. Rocks. Dust. He recognised the rock as feldspar, and he could guess its silica content based on columnar fracture lines. He looked at the sky, thought he could fly if only he had Vyres on his back.

  Vyres? How do I know what those are?

  He went through his memories. There was knowledge there, but the critical core of his identity was missing. Twigs and leaves were scattered around, but the tree had been ripped away.

  Was this woman his wife?

  She was pretty. She had an upturned nose, and despite her blonde hair she clearly spent a lot of time in the sun.

  But he loathed her. Absolutely hated every corpuscle of her being. And this was strengthened rather than lessened by the fact that he recognised not a single thing about her.

  He sat up. “Please, can I be left alone?”

  Just stay away. I think I’m dead, and I think I want to kill.

  “Let’s go and explore. We might see something that you recognise.”

  He stood up, unsteadily. His muscles were communicating curious things to him, as if latent electrical impulses from moments ago were still trickling through bottlenecks.

  Stop. Fall down. You shouldn’t be moving. You’re no longer alive.

  All of these thoughts were upsetting, and he tried to push them away. But there was no occluding detail in his mind to lose them in. No matter where he shoved them, they stood stark and unavoidable in the halls of his mind.

  They walked across the barren soil, and the desolate land. Stormclouds still thundered overhead, like celestial bruises.

  Andrei saw that there was a tent pitched on the plain, as well as a stack of supplies. Behind the tent was a huge, ethereal globe of silver that seemed to ripple gently with the wind. It lit up the landscape with a piercing light. In a world full of dullness and chiaroscuros, it positively glowed.

  “What’s that?” He pointed at it.

  Sphere! His subconscious shouted. Sphere! Sphere!

  “That’s a device that was on the ship. It seems to be a personal transport vehicle of some kind.” She seemed to grow agitated. “I’m sorry, but can you say something? We’re lucky to be alive, so lucky, and you’ve hardly spoken ten words.”

  He stumbled forward, in a fugue of unreality.

  Now they were in a field of shattered and smoking metal. It seemed to extend for many kilometers. The ruins caused him to feel strange emotions.

  This woman claims to be my wife, but it’s this debris field I care about.

  He picked up a piece of aluminium. It had words stamped on it.

  KONOTOURI DELTA CONTAINMENT SECTOR

  He was maddened by the lack of truth. It was like trying to solve a jigsaw with half the pieces dumped on the ground.

  But he got the sense that he wouldn’t like the truth, after he had it.

  “A few things are coming to me now,” Zandra said. “We were employees of a man called Sarkoth Amnon. We stayed up on the space station, while he went down to the planet.”

  Sarkoth Amnon.

  No coherent emotional reaction to that. Just a !?!?!?!, echoing louder and louder in his head until it was a scream.

  “We should look for him,” she said. “I can’t recall the specifics, but he’s probably our only bet for getting off this rock.”

  “Listen, can you tell me my name?” He said.

  “I don’t know,” she cried. “All I know is that I’m your wife, and you’re my husband.”

  She took his hand in hers, and kissed him. A gesture of love. But he felt revulsion well up inside him, as if that kiss was a rope drawn tight around him, restricting him, controlling him.

  He shoved her away, and she fell.

  “Don’t you fucking touch me.”

  “But…”

  “You know your own name, and you know the name of our boss, but you don’t remember mine.” He said. “You said that Sphere thing is from the space station, but it looks nothing like human technology. This doesn’t make sense. Nothing makes sense. Why don’t you tell me the truth?”

  She started crying.

  And that thrilled him. He’d hurt her, and it made him feel wonderful. He’d done something, had affected the universe’s blind calculus. He was a non-existent ghost of a man, but he’d left a mark: even if it was only a welt.

  He wandered deeper in
to the wreckage field, hoping to discover something of his past.

  Then, he stopped, as if snap-frozen.

  There was movement coming from underneath a sheet of metal.

  And when he saw what was under it, his breath stopped for a moment.

  It was a woman, dressed in soldier clothes. She was dying, her body shattered beyond repair. Bruises flowered across most of her upper body, where her uniform had been torn away. One of her eyes was closed. Blood drenched her face, her hair, and her surroundings.

  She gurgled something incoherent, and raised her arm. It terminated in a stump.

  On her back were a pair of biokinetic wings. Vyres. Incongrously, they seemed almost perfectly undamaged.

  Do I know you?

  Have I seen your face before?

  “Come.” He told Zandra. “There’s a survivor.”

  Zandra stood beside him. “Leave her. She’s dead.”

  Her voice held no concern, or compassion.

  Zandra turned to go, but his hand grasped her. “Zandra, heal her.”

  “I have no medical training,” she pleaded. “And it wouldn’t matter if I was the best doctor on Ceres. She’ll be dead in seconds.”

  His hand tightened to a near-bone crushing grip. “Do you think I’m stupid? Do you think you can away with lying to me? I fell out of the sky from a disintegrating spacecraft. My terminal velocity would have been on the order of six meters per second, in the middle of a hailstorm of metal and fire. I had no parachute, no Vyres, no landing apparatus at all. And yet I am completely unharmed. There is not even a bruise on my body, and I can’t see any on yours, either. The first option is that you’re lying about all this. The second is that you have some sort of healing technology. The third option is both.”

  Zandra shook her head. “You were lucky.”

  He gestured at the bleeding woman. “Then make her lucky, too.”

  He cared not at all for the woman on the ground. He despised her, just as he despised Zandra, just as all things dead despise the living.

  But she had knowledge in her head, perhaps. Clues.

  Once I’ve wrung every last trace of information from her, I think I’ll kill them both.

  Zandra tried to pull away, but his hand was too strong. “I’m serious. I can’t do anything. I wish I could, love.”

  Something in him recoiled, as if galvanised with dark electricity.

  “Don’t call me love.” He growled. “I don’t know what I am, but I’m not your love.”

  A voice croaked from the ground.

  “Wake.”

  That was it. An inner dam broke inside him, water swallowing the vast ravine of emptiness, and he collapsed to his knees.

  He let go of Zandra’s hand, and stared into woman’s single remaining eye. “My name.” Or is it? “You’ve told me my name.”

  With Zandra spluttering excuses, he took his eyes from her and knelt, speaking to the crippled woman on the ground. “Do you recognise this woman? She says she’s my wife?”

  Her eyes rolled back in her head, and for a moment Andrei despaired of getting an answer. Finally, words flowed out her mouth like sewage from a choked pipe. “Wuh….wuh….wife? No….wife…”

  Wake’s next movement was brief, and decisive.

  He stood up, and smashed a punch into Zandra’s face.

  You can handle a punch well if you can see it coming. Zandra didn’t. She lived in a world where no man had ever raised a hand to her in anger.

  She was hurled from her feet, landing painfully on the ground.

  “Did you just hit me?” She asked. “Did you just…”

  “What do you think you’re playing at!” He screamed, veins standing out on his neck. “What the goddamn hell is wrong with you? Are you in my head? Are you changing things? Did you cause me to lose my memory?”

  She sputtered and waved her hands uselessly.

  “The first thing I’ve ever seen, perhaps the first thing that’s ever happened to me ever, was you telling me that you’re my wife.” Andrei said. “You have explaining to do. An entire missing brain’s worth. But first, heal this woman.”

  “Don’t listen to her,” Zandra said. “She’s confused, rambling. She’s probably got you confused with someone else.”

  His expression contorted into a sneer on his face. “There’s an easy way to test that. Heal her with the device that healed me.”

  Although he knew nothing about Zandra, his brain was picking data that matched into interesting categories.

  The way she moved – slowly, furtively, as if trying to disguise her own motion.

  The way she wouldn’t make eye contact.

  The way she kept her body was angled away from him, so he couldn’t see her back.

  It all added up to…

  “You have a weapon.” He said. “And you’re trying to draw it. Knock that off, now.”

  “Fuck you,” she said, and drew the pistol behind her back.

  She was quick. She’d trained her draw many times at the Vanitar Cloudchaser, shaving off milliseconds each time. But there’s always someone quicker.

  The gun actually got most of the way up before a flung stone from the ground struck her hand, breaking two fingers.

  She cried out, the pistol thudding to the ground.

  Instantly, Wake was on top of her. A kick to the stomach. A knee to the chin. He threw her to the ground, and she struggled in vain to shift her weight.

  “Get up, heal her, or I’ll kill you. Last warning.”

  She whimpered, pressing herself into the ground, as though she could escape through the gaps in the dirt particles.

  He scooped up the fallen gun, and pressed it under the shelf of her chin. “Do it now! That’s an order!”

  She got to her feet, struggled over to the fallen woman, and unclipped the disklike device from her belt.

  Her pain-twisted face was suddenly illuminated by a soft, silvery glow that seemed to ease out dirt and remove wrinkles. Andrei watched in wonderment as beams started blazing from the instrument, enveloping the woman on the ground.

  “Who are you?” Wake asked her.

  “Don’t make her talk.” Zandra said. “It disrupts the polymeshing.”

  “I’m Ubra Zolot.” The woman said.

  The light settled on various parts of Ubra’s body, and started repairing them. Flesh knitted together. Burns scabbed over and then sunk into her skin, dissolving as they did.

  When the woman’s ruined eye reformed, rising from its socket like congealing bubble of candlewax.

  As he made eye contact with the new eye, he was possessed by awe.

  The amputated hand emerged from the wreckage, rising like a puppetmaster’s trick. It made contact with the stump, and flesh boiled over the cut.

  When it was finished, Ubra sat up, and then stood.

  “Is my name really Wake?” He asked.

  “That’s a name you gave yourself. Your real name is Andrei Kazmer.”

  He shrugged. He liked Wake better. The other one made him feel disturbed, as if he was still a non-existent person, and Andrei Kazmer was just another chapter of that nonexistence.

  But there was one person there who they sensed did understand. Zandra.

  They turned on her, and she wilted from the two angry stares.

  “What do you know about this?” Ubra said. “Are you one of the Spheres? Did you wipe his memory?”

  More images sprung into his mind. Shooting. Poison gas. A man called Golestani. Another one called Nyphur. The eyes of the planet, examining me as I was crucified in space.

  He shook his head, clearing away the images. Without a framework of memory to snap those facts into, they were like the buzzing of flies. Irritating and distracting.

  Zandra shook her head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You said you were my wife,” Andrei said. “And clearly, that’s not the case.”

  Zandra looked ready to crumble, and for a while seemed on the verge of admitting it.r />
  But then she doubled down. “I am your wife.”

  “You’re not.” Ubra said.

  “I am.” A confident smile was back on her face. “I have memories that say I am. On what evidence do you disagree? That you have memories that say otherwise? Why are your recollections better than mine?”

  “If I had a wife, I’d remember her.” Wake said, visibly disturbed. “Of that, I’m certain. You’re tricking me.”

  “You can’t even remember your own name.”

  “You’re Andrei Kazmer,” Ubra said. “You were a marine, sent to investigate a strange event on this very planet – a battle is now being fought over the issue. You broke ranks with your fellows, were imprisoned, and are now a fugitive from justice. You must stay far away from Sarkoth Amnon. We have to get to the Defiant immediately.” She pointed at Zandra. “I don’t know who you are, but you’re a snake in the grass.”

  “Ridiculous lies,” Zandra said. “Based on nothing. You’ve had a fall, and you’re hallucinating.”

  Ubra got to her feet and fumed. “So what’s your game, Zandra? I think Nyphur mentioned you – you’re Mykor’s daughter. Are you running away? Going off the reservation, and you thought you’d bring Andrei along?”

  Don’t call me that. He thought.

  “Delusions. You’re running at the mouth. This sometimes happens with polyfleshing.”

  Wake had completely disassociated from the fight happening around him.

  He sat on the purple ground, legs crossed, staring off into space. His thoughts were unreadable behind the blank cipher of his face.

  The only part of him that moved were his hands. They were rolling Zandra’s gun between them, back and forth, back and forth.

  Ubra was yelling at Zandra now. “You’ve memspiked him, haven’t you! You either killed him or found his dead body, and brought him back. That’s why he can’t remember his name.”

  “Shut up.”

  “I listened to you. You wanted to let me die. Was that because you feared I might tell him the truth?”