The Tomorrow Tower: Nine Science Fiction Short Stories

by John Moralee

  Roual looked at the Great Pyramid and thought of its contents. The ebola virus was just the beginning of the end. He had he really believed he was ready to use vacuum energy without trials, safety precautions and controls. He could taste Santari’s thoughts still in his mind, as if they had coated him in corruption and madness.

  Ancient B-52s, surplus bombers bought off Jack Holman, rumbled across the skyline carrying their lethal payload.

  General Malawi strolled onto the balcony. “I am glad to see you are feeling better, sir.”

  Roual nodded. He’d persuaded the general he’d decided on a personal search for the assassin, and with no knowledge of the failed loyalty implant the general had no reason not to believe. He could play the part of Santari and no one would ever know. He possessed Santari’s memories, but was no longer controlled by them. But when he thought of Kishtar dying and Santari’s sons dying the feelings mixed and twisted and fermented in his stomach. He was sick of the regime. Santari had hated the Americans, but he did not. Santari’s pyramid was an offence to nature. Roual would not destroy the world.

  “The deadline is past, sir. Should I give the order?”

  “No, General.”

  “Sir?”

  “What would you do if you thought I was not myself any more?”

  “I don’t know what you mean, sir.”

  “The engrams failed, General. That’s why I don’t like cigars. The real me doesn’t smoke. I’m just some poor victim. You could never make me into that vial abomination you call a leader.”

  Malawi reached for his weblink - but stopped when Roual raised his pistol.

  “Tell me the truth. Why did you do it?”

  “We needed a great leader, sir. When you died, we did what we could to save your memories. We used a prisoner and gave him extensive surgery and implanted your mind, as best as we could.”

  “I know that. But why?”

  “You are the man who keeps this country together, sir. With no leader, everything will be lost. We need firm guidance and your vision. Don’t you understand that?”

  “I understand perfectly it has to end.”

  Roual shot Malawi in the temple. Malawi was so surprised he stood there for several seconds, until he flopped over the balcony. Roual watched the body land in the grass.

  He opened his weblink to Security.

  “Open the palace gates,” he said, knowing their loyalty implants would force them to obey. “Let the people in.”

  For once, Roual thought, Santari would be a true hero.

  Waves on a Distant Shore

  After the car crash that killed his wife and baby daughter, David Bachman’s dreams were like road signs on a fog-bound motorway. He glimpsed strange things, but they were gone before his mind could recognise them. He would wake in the hospital bed knowing there was something vital his unconsciousness was trying to tell him, which was more disconcerting than no dreams at all. Instinctively, he knew that to remember the dreams would have dire consequences, giving him the directions to a place he did not want to go.

  Once David’s broken bones had recovered he went back to teaching English at Fenchley Comprehensive School, mostly to have his mind occupied with work, to blank out the pain of loss, but his mind didn’t feel right. It was as though he and the rest of the world were running at different speeds. Like the purple scar on his cheek, his mind would not heal, not fully. He was in a loop of denial and remembrance. Any time of day or night he would see the red smear of the drunk driver’s rear lights and be transported there, in the car, as it was happening. Suddenly braking on the infinite road. Desperately clawing at the wheel. Melissa crying out his name in sheer panic as if he could do something, anything. The tree. The bushes. The rocks. The impact. The explosion. He should have reacted faster. Should have ... what?

  His fear of the dreams grew with each night until he could not sleep more than minutes at a time. He would suddenly sitting bolt-upright, his heart palpitating, reaching for a wife who was no longer there. Then he would lie down again and attempt sleep. Eyes closed, pressure-sense Rorschach patterns painted his eyelids, inkblot studies into madness. He could almost see human faces in the patterns. But just as he thought he was about to see something important, it would be swept away by the sea of nightmares. He could almost see Rachel and Melissa, two X-ray skeletons, their jawbones moving silently, calling him. Needing him. But he didn’t want to join them in the blackness. The blackness was death.

  Death was not the way. He didn’t want to die. So he kept himself awake with coffee and cigarettes and late-night TV. A terrible self-enforced insomnia ruled the darkness. Sleep eluded him as if he were trying to grip an electric eel. Staying awake was just as painful as succumbing to sleep, tiredness draining the colour out of his days.

  He was going crazy, he knew.

  The human mind required REM sleep to function, or thoughts would build up like lava in a volcanic vent, exploding in a psychotic episode. This he knew; this he could feel. The pressure building up in his head was incredible. In the English lessons he taught, pupils started asking what was wrong with sir; he seemed so distant. He was so tired and irritable he could not focus on the teaching. They assumed it was only the tragedy - that drunk driver, the loss of his family - plaguing his thoughts. But even his thoughts seemed alien. Weird. Somehow imposed from somewhere else.

  Then came the visions.

  He could look at his students and see fleeting images, like tracing paper over a drawing.

  The world behind the real world.

  It was 3.11 p.m. - four minutes to go before the final lesson ended - when the world he knew and believed in shattered.

  One second he was telling everyone to pack up their books, and the next he could see ... everything.

  *

  Strange funnels of rainbow light snaked between his students, joining and entwining, sprouting loops and limbs. They were all connected, some connected with vast pulsating tubes, like bunched fibre optic cables, some connected with smaller ones, diaphanous cobwebs. Those students he knew were best friends had the thickest connections. Teenage romances were thick knots of rainbow light. As students looked around, picking up their books, snaking coils passed out of them and into others, blue-white flashes like sparks from a Van de Graaff generator. David could see flirting glances as red lasers. A girl with a supposedly secret crush on him bathed him in crimson light.

  Then the vision vanished, leaving him wondering if it had happened at all.

  Had his brain been damaged in the crash? If so, how come the MRI scans had shown nothing? The doctors wouldn’t have released a madman, would they?

  “D-dismissed,” he said, and watched his students leave.

  *

  “David,” said the headmaster in the second week of the term, “you need to take more time off.”

  “Time off ...” An aura danced out of the headmaster’s head. An electric Medusa. Couldn’t he see it?

  “I lost my own wife to cancer, so I know how you feel.” David could see how he felt, too. Black and grey spikes coursed through his hair. “It’s worse than losing a leg. You need to sort things out in your mind.”

  “Sort things out.” David nodded. He wasn’t ready to come back to work. And he definitely needed to sort out his mind. He could see his bones through his skin and the blood flowing in his veins. “Thanks.”

  “Get yourself well, David. Don’t worry about the job. It’ll always be here for you. Take a holiday in the sun. Spain’s nice this time of year. That’s where the kids go when they should be at school.” The headmaster paused. A green cone of concern leapt out of him, striking David, moving like a tornado over his skin. It was oddly beautiful, bringing tears. “And if that doesn’t help, I know a good psychiatrist you could talk to.”

  “Psychiatrist?”

  “She specialises in bereavement counselling. Her name’s Joyce Benson.”

  I need more than a psychiatrist, David thought. His thought was a black ribbon, blowing in a br
eeze.

  *

  He did not see the psychiatrist. A sympathetic doctor with purple flutes shimmering out of his hands wrote a barbiturate prescription to help him sleep, but as soon as David was home he realised he could not take the sleeping pills. Pills may have given him the blankness of enforced sleep, but what if he dreamt the dream and remembered it? What then? No, he could not risk it. First, he needed to understand this phenomenon, why this thing was happening, what it meant, why dreaming filled him with dread and why he could see things which were not there.

  He dressed in jeans and a T-shirt to pass himself off as a post-graduate student and went to his local university library. Surrounded by undergraduates with giant coronas coming out of their heads, coronas brightening to supernovas each time they read something enlightening, he looked for answers.

  Psychology texts didn’t help much, just telling him he had a problem, so he turned to other subjects: medicine, philosophy, cosmology, religion ... and mathematics. Why he was drawn to the mathematics section was then a mystery; he’d never liked the subject at school, never mind understood it. After all, he did teach English for a reason. But now he was drawn there.

  The dusty shelves looked like they’d never been touched. But leafing through the red leather-bound hardbacks, he saw things starting to fall into place. Computer-produced fractal images looked exactly like some of the patterns he’d seen at 4 a.m. behind his eyelids. Then he read about Fourier waves and topology and geometry and ... though he didn’t understand many of the symbols and equations, he knew he was onto something. As he pored over text after text, reading, reading, reading, his jigsaw knowledge started assembling itself, becoming whole.

  There was a theory in a physics journal that knotted his stomach and sent his head pounding.

  M-theory.

  Apparently, M-theory could be the “Theory of Everything”, if it was solved. He pored over the article with deepening concern.

  He was carrying a pile of books to a desk when he noticed one student wasn’t emitting any strange light. There were shimmering threads entering her, but none being produced. She was asleep.

  He was looking at her when his mind started to wander. And something forced its way into his mind. Seeing the sleeping student had triggered a mental reaction.

  He had a waking dream.

  *

  In his dream he was standing on a white beach with a rocky shore, looking out at the ocean. The waves were coming in, huge breakers exploding against the rocks with extreme violence. He could feel the cold spray hit his face from the safety of the sand. After each wave receded there was something new washed up on the shore - a car tyre, a steering wheel, a rusty exhaust pipe ... parts of his wrecked car ... and then there were two bodies, Rachel and Melissa, rolling over in the wet sand. They were alive. He heard them call to him.

  He ran towards them, but a second wave rose up and engulfed them, submerging them it its icy water. He dived into the wave, swimming as hard as he could. But the wave disappeared, leaving him floundered on the empty beach. The waves continued, but nothing more was deposited on the sand. Rachel and Melissa had been dragged back into the ocean.

  On the horizon there was a black line separating sky and ocean that had not been there before. The line was widening. It was a wave, a vast wall of water, a tidal wave longer and higher than he thought possible. It was powering towards the beach. He looked around. There was no way of escape because the beach ended at a cliff. The tidal wave roared, pushing a cold wind ahead of it. It was coming closer and closer to the shore. A perfectly vertical wall of darkness.

  He ran. The shadow soon fell on him. It would drown him and crush him and squash him against the cliff. He screamed.

  The waking dream dissolved before his eyes.

  *

  The student had woken up at his scream. She was looking at him as though he were a pervert. Dark green concern flayed out of her head and quickly changed to red anger. He left hurriedly.

  *

  Outside the university he suddenly he understood his problem. And it scared him, for what he learnt was a revelation as large as the universe.

  His dreaming was dangerous, and it was connected to his reading about M-theory. M-theory was an attempt by theoretical physicists to create a simple theory that explained the universe. It was an extension of superstring theory, overcoming the problems of that theory and going far beyond. M-theory had many solutions, and only one fitted the universe. In M-theory there were eleven dimensions, with the familiar four experienced by humans just the surface of a deeper reality. He was seeing those dimensions. And if he dreamt the solution he would cease to exist, winked out of existence.

  He needed help desperately because the crazy thing was he believed his own theory.

  So that was why he ended up in the pink carpeted office of Dr Joyce Benson, staring at the psychiatrist through his black-ringed and bloodshot eyes. He was relieved that his visions had stopped for a moment, the world returning to its solid three-dimensional self. He smoked cigarette after cigarette. The leather chair creaked under him. The black couch was the only item in the room that fitted his stereotype expectations, and he’d chosen not to use it. Everything else could have been in a hotel suite. A large window poured light in through the pink blinds. Van Gogh’s Sunflowers hung on the wall. A bad choice, he thought, since the artist went insane with syphilis. There was no desk, no “ego wall” packed with certificates and awards. A dictation machine whirred on the coffee table between them recording the silence. The pink room said friendly.

  “I haven’t been to a psychiatrist before,” David said. He regretted his tone immediately; it implied he was above visiting a psychiatrist. He didn’t feel that way. Maybe it was all in his head. Deluded people thought bizarre things were real. That was how you knew they were deluded. Sanity was just a consensus vote.

  Joyce Benson tapped her notepad with her fountain pen. She offered a grandmotherly smile. “Most people who visit a psychiatrist aren’t crazy, you know.”

  “They aren’t? I mean, I don’t suppose they are.”

  “The crazy ones get seats in the Houses of Parliament and make the rules.”

  He laughed uneasily. A political psychiatrist. Great.

  “Relax, David. I’m not a Freudian, I don’t ask questions about your mother.”

  “She’s dead,” he said, surprising himself with the harshness in his tone. “The dreams killed her.”

  Shouldn’t have said that, he thought. Why did I say that? Now she’ll know I’m a nut. Listen to me, talking to myself. Nut, nut, nut. You’re a nut, that’s what you are. They could packet you and sell you in pubs. But he knew that it was true: his mother had killed herself because of the dreams. She’d died when he was a baby, but now focusing on it made him remember her as if her suicide had happened yesterday.

  “I have to stop the thoughts in my head,” she had said, leaning over his cot, kissing him gently. Then she had gone away, forever: a bottle of aspirins had done it.

  “What was that you said?” the psychiatrist asked.

  It is a hereditary problem, David realised. The hallucinations were not caused by the accident. The accident and the bereavement had merely triggered his mind into a different way of perceiving reality, unleashing some hidden talent stored in his genes.

  The psychiatrist leant forward, putting the notepad aside.

  She said something.

  “Pardon?” he said. His thoughts were too loud, like tinnitus, muffling the sounds of the external world.

  “I said you don’t have to talk about anything that makes you uncomfortable. I won’t write anything down, if it helps. Please, David, I suggest you tell me what you want from these sessions. Be as complete as you can.”

  “I’ve been having these dreams,” he said, and told her what she would accept, including the glimpses of another world, but stopping his story at the point before he visited the university library. He needed to trust her before he told her the results of his res
earch. He concluded: “I need to prevent this dream from coming through from the dark place. I know it sounds vague, but I assure you the feeling I get is very real and very scary.”

  “Insomnia is often a manifestation of a deeper problem,” she said. “Fear of sleep is unusual, but not unique. Obviously, the sudden deaths of your family have deeply hurt you. Such a stressor can do more harm than you can imagine. Do you fear that by going to sleep and having this dream, you will die in the dream - and consequently die in real life?”

  “Yes, but it’s worse than that.”

  “Worse than death?”

  “Definitely.”

  The dictation machine clicked off. He’d been talking thirty minutes. Dr Benson ejected the cassette and flipped it over. She made two coffees before resuming the session.

  “What’s worse than death?” she asked.

  “An absence of everything. A void of absolute nothing. At least with death the person is remembered by those still living, but this ... this thing in my dream transcends death. This dream is the sum of the whole universe, positives and negatives cancelling out everything, breaking down the symmetries that everything is built upon. It’s nothing in all meanings of the word. And if I dream it, it will become real.” He was sweating as if he’d been running a marathon. It dripped off his forehead and onto the pink carpet, where it stained like blood. Do I sound crazy? he wondered. Yes. Do I sound like a madman ranting at a brick wall? Yes. Am I crazy? No.

  “A dream can’t alter the universe,” she said.

  I do sound crazy.

  “I’ve been researching it,” he admitted. “I have a theory. It probably sounds like pure fantasy, but I need someone to listen.”

  “I’m listening, David. Whatever you say will remain confidential. Now, what’s your theory?”