Restricted Fantasies

by Kevin Kneupper

  But it was a chance. And if he wanted to take it, he had to act now, before one of their tasks changed and the puzzle rearranged itself.

  He was going for it. He had to. He hugged his duffle bag to his chest and launched into a run, getting himself within a suitable range, counting the seconds as he went. He was physically out of shape, and he never could have won this race on his own, but fortunately the exoskeleton did most of the work for him. He got as close as he dared, then stopped behind one of the trees, waiting for the final sprint. He counted and counted.

  The pattern held. The Koreans assembled by the rovers without even knowing they were doing it.

  And Mordecai ran for his life.

  He hit the entrance to the spire and skidded inside, ducking down and scrabbling along the ground. It was a tunnel through the barky exterior of the spire, the ceiling low, the insides lit by glowing blue plant colonies that grew along the walls. He crawled forward as quickly as he could go. He could hear voices behind him: the Koreans, heading back inside with more equipment, oblivious to what he’d just done.

  The tunnel turned, and he saw an exit up ahead. There were voices up there, too. But in for a penny, in for a pound, and Mordecai was in for it all.

  He stopped at the opening, sneaking a peek further into the spire. The rest of the diving clan was in there all right, but they weren’t anywhere near him. The voices were coming from somewhere up above. The spire was hollowed out inside, and the ceiling above him was a thin translucent skin. Veiny cracks ran along the bottom, and he wondered whether it was as alive as the rest of the city. He could see things through it: dark blotches that might be furniture, or maybe machinery. No feet, though. Rikksin had climbed higher, so higher he’d go.

  There was a ramp at the other end of the floor, and a line of glowing plant colonies led the way there. Otherwise the first floor was mostly empty: a few perfectly spherical blobs of fungal material that rose almost to the ceiling and a scattering of sleek chairs molded from some kind of clay, a few feet too long to be a proper fit for humans. They curved the right way, though. A slab to sit on, and a slab for the back. The Cousins were supposed to be humanoids, and that bit of data fit with all the rest.

  He heard more noise behind him. The Koreans were back inside. The four minutes were up, and the gap was closing. No time to waste. He booked it across the room, following the glowing plants and rushing up the ramp to the second floor.

  He almost ran headlong into another one of the Koreans. The man was busy installing some kind of computer next to one of the fungal spheres, his back to Mordecai. “Rikksin wants the splicers up there, and he wants them up there now,” said the Korean. He didn’t turn around. Thank god, he didn’t turn around.

  “Will do,” said Mordecai in a shaky voice, and he hurried away into the darkness before the Korean could realize his mistake.

  He moved more cautiously from there, staying away from anything that glowed and sticking to the shadows. There were plenty of them, but he had his cybernetic eye to lead him through the darkness. Some of the Koreans would have implants, too, but if he didn’t get too close and didn’t act too strangely they probably wouldn’t think to use them. Everyone here was wearing vacuum suits, and unless they were within a few feet of one another they likely wouldn’t notice the difference.

  He switched his eye to infrared and tried to get a bead on them, but the spire lit up like a Christmas tree. This floor was dark, but when he looked up there were spots of heat everywhere. The Cousins. They were up there, and they were alive.

  He looked a little closer, and he thought he saw some of the spots moving a few floors up. It had to be Rikksin’s clan. If he could make it there without getting caught, he might be able to get an idea what they’d found. He didn’t know what he’d do then. Maybe head back to Fort Twicken to analyze the data. Maybe hide out overnight for a little friendly sabotage. It all depended on what they were doing.

  It all depended on what was up there.

  He headed up another ramp and up another floor. More fungus, more strange furniture. He started towards the next ramp, following the glow. Then something brushed against his leg in the darkness.

  He almost screamed. This time the anxiety was what saved him. He was too paralyzed by fear to cry out. All he could do was stand there, but he managed to calm himself when he saw what it was. A little plant. Maybe it was a plant. It tottered around in the darkness like a blinded infant, a fleshy mass at its center and green stalks protruding at the top like antennae. A swarm of tendrils worked as its feet, and it was carrying something with them.

  A metal wrapper from a quant chip casing.

  His courage came back, what there was of it, and curiosity got the better of him. He left the light of the trail and followed the thing into the shadows, albeit at a comfortable distance. It was feeling its way towards the wall. And when it made it there, it deposited the little bit of human trash into a hole and stumbled off into the darkness again.

  It was some sort of alien janitor.

  Everything clicked. The Koreans were shipping out all that new equipment for a reason. Man made his slaves of metal, but the Cousins used organic materials. They’d mastered the genome, or whatever their local equivalent of it was, and they’d grown their tools instead of forged them.

  It was going to make things so much harder. Whatever kind of computer system they used for their simulation, it wasn’t going to be anything like the processors mankind had developed.

  They’d be using something biological, most likely. An organic computer. Maybe that’s what those plants were for. Those trees. All living beings were computers in the end. Their DNA their code, their brains their processors.

  But Mordecai was an amateur biologist at best. He dabbled in virtually every branch of science just for the fun of it, but that didn’t make him an expert. And even if he were, what passed for DNA on this planet might function entirely differently from how it did back on Earth. Different building blocks, different structure, different mechanisms. The only consolation was that the Koreans would be just as helpless as he was.

  Still.

  He didn’t have to make first contact to get what he wanted. All he needed was first anything. Some milestone, some advance, something he could claim as his own and use as a springboard to the kind of life he wanted. To the glory. To the fame. And to the connection to people that came with it.

  That mattered more than anything in the end. He was too eccentric, too weird. He couldn’t change that. He had his own tribe of people, after a fashion, but none of the other divers ever left their conapts. He still had that core human urge for connection. To socialize, to talk, to bond. But no one wanted to bond with an oddball diver who’d surgically removed one of his own eyes and could barely hold a conversation without melting down in fear.

  The fame would change that. People would want something from him, no matter how odd he was. They’d want the status that came with knowing him, with talking to him, with being seen with him. It’d all change, if only he could notch that first. He’d make connections, and they’d be on his terms.

  He was going to make some kind of discovery, the Koreans be damned. He headed to the next ramp and up another floor. And there they were.

  The Cousins.

  The whole floor was full of them, laying on hammocks made from vines growing out of the walls. All of them asleep. Row after row after row. There must have been thousands, and that was just on this floor. The spire went hundreds of stories further up.

  Mordecai crept towards the closest one. Its chest heaved up and down, ever so slightly up and down. It was alive, and it had something like lungs. They were humanoids, all right. Around ten feet tall, their yellow skin a patchwork of goosebumps and fungus. Whether the fungi were separate colonies or whether they were actually a part of the Cousins, he couldn’t tell. Either was plausible. The Cousins might have modified themselves just as heavily as the contraptions they’d created from the local plant life.

 
They had what he thought might be an eye at the center of their heads, a long patch of dark skin with no lid to it. Maybe it would look different if they were awake, but that was just speculation. There were two arms and two legs, but the ends were tipped with tendrils, just like that garbage gatherer had.

  But the strange thing wasn’t how they looked.

  The strange thing was that there wasn’t a single piece of mechanical equipment around. No computers, no tubes, no wires, no anything. He’d seen photos of the other xenos, and they’d all been obviously hooked up to some kind of simulation. Whether in vats, in pods, with surgical grafts, with goggles, with whatever, they’d all descended into an artificial reality.

  If the Cousins hadn’t, then that was a first all its own.

  He was lost in a trance, staring at the Cousin and pondering this most complicated of puzzles. He almost didn’t hear the voice behind him until it was right on top of him.

  “Hey! Hey, you!”

  He nearly shit his pants. He knew that voice. He knew exactly who it was.

  Rikksin.

  Mordecai turned, but barely. He kept his faceplate hidden, angled so Rikksin couldn’t get a clear look. But Mordecai saw him. And he looked royally pissed.

  “I want those skin samples. One from every one of these things on this floor. Tagged, bagged, sorted. No daydreams, no fucking around. I don’t pay you to fuck around. Get to work.”

  Mordecai tried his best at a subtle nod. But he could barely manage it. His heart was pounding, faster and faster, like it wanted to claw its way out of his chest. He was sweating all over inside the suit, and droplets ran down his forehead and blurred up his cybernetic eye. His breathing was fucked, totally out of control, turned into a quick gulping that sucked the air out of his helmet and made him dizzy. Little dots appeared at the corner of his vision, and his legs went wobbly.

  “I said get to work!”

  Rikksin was screaming now. Mordecai felt himself sway. He was a goner. It was too much. He stuttered out something in Commercial Mandarin. “Yes, sir, of course—” And then he stumbled to his knees.

  He turned, exposing his face entirely to Rikksin, ready for whatever came so long as it would end the panic.

  But Rikksin was gone. He was halfway across the room, stomping towards someone else on his team. He’d chewed up his subordinate, spit him out, and now he was on to another.

  Mordecai crawled behind one of the rows of Cousins, laying himself down on the floor and out of sight. He couldn’t breathe. It had been hard enough to work up the courage to come into this place, but Rikksin was too much. And the helmet was making it worse. There wasn’t enough air in there. There just wasn’t. And the regulators had worn off. He tried to meditate, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t think, he couldn’t calm himself down, he couldn’t do anything. Not on his own. He needed another pill. He couldn’t have one. He knew that. But he needed one, and to hell with the consequences. He had to have it, and he had to have it now or he was going to melt, he was going to scream.

  He pawed at a pouch on his belt, spilling white pills all over the floor. His fingers trembled, but he managed to get one into his palm. And with his other hand, he managed to get the visor to his helmet open.

  Just a crack, but the air in his suit rushed out. He couldn’t breathe. Not at all. His lungs weren’t powerful enough, the suit wasn’t designed for this, it had been a mistake, a moronic idea, not an idea an urge—

  He scrambled to get the pill into his mouth, in full on panic mode. The loss of air would kill him, but so would hyperventilating to death in this cramped suit. He felt the pill on his tongue and swallowed. Then he slammed a button on his head, shut the visor, and watched the read-out on his wrist display go from red to yellow. He still had air. He had enough. He’d make it. He would. He’d be fine, just fine.

  The pill was calming him down, but he’d just dumped a helmetful of foreign air into his suit. The filter was working overtime. He looked at the read-out again. The toxin levels were off the charts, but it wouldn’t be fatal. It might damage his lungs a little, but he could fix that. The regulators were doing their job, the anxiety was disappearing, and all he had to do was sit here and wait it out. He’d be fine.

  And then the world turned a bright yellow.

  He was outside. Out in a jungle clearing, the sun beating down on his bare skin. His bumpy, yellow skin. His vision flickered, turning into a mess of incomprehensible colors. Static, like on one of those old television sets. Then pure black, then an oscillating rainbow blur. There were shapes in the colors, but he couldn’t make them out.

  Then it was back again. The jungle. He raised a hand in front of his head. Not a hand. Tendrils. He could feel them. He could move them. Ahead of him he could see a row of people. No, not people. Cousins. They were standing by one of those trees. It should have scared the hell out of him. He was worried the panic would incapacitate him again, but he didn’t feel it. He didn’t feel any of it.

  Another flash, and everything disappeared into a jumble of pixilation. What the hell had been in that pill? Everything was blurred, everything was melting, everything was nothing. All he could do was lay there and ride it out.

  He didn’t know how long it took, but somewhere along the line the world came back. The jungle was gone. His hands were his own again. He was back in the spire, back to normal after that freaked out drug trip. Somewhat normal, anyway. He was sweating, he was short of breath, and he felt like all his energy had been sucked out of him.

  He looked down at his wrist. The display was going wild. He tapped out a few commands and called up a report.

  Those toxins. He’d assumed it was just something unbreathable from the atmosphere that had gotten into his suit. But it was more than that. It wasn’t a chemical, and it wasn’t a gas.

  It was spores. Fungal spores. He’d been out for nearly twenty minutes. Long enough for the air filter to work its magic and clean it all out. The room must be full of the stuff. Those giant spheres of fungus, the lights, and whatever was growing on the Cousins themselves. No machines, just fungus, and it had done a number on his brain when he’d inhaled it.

  He rummaged in his duffel bag through various and sundry devices until he found the little box he was looking for. A mini-quant. Nothing like what the Koreans had back at the fort, but encased inside the tiny black cube was a phenomenal amount of processing power and a civilization’s worth of books, articles, and other information. Jacked into his suit, and connected to his own cybernetics, he’d have more than enough computing power to solve this little puzzle.

  He hooked it up and started in on the spores. The suit logged them as foreign matter, plant based, but more than that it didn’t have a clue. And of course it wouldn’t, but he needed to know more. He had a filter full of the stuff, and he started running tests. Genetic analysis, molecular analysis, a review of the structure from top to bottom.

  It was strange stuff. Not the spores themselves, but the genes. The chromosomes. They had them, and they were almost identical to the ones back on Earth. It explained the name “Cousins.” They might look nothing like us, but inside they were running the same code. The similarities were striking, but not entirely surprising. Panspermia, they called it. The theory that microscopic life could survive in space, and that in the end we all evolved from the same little creatures floating through the cosmos and seeding planet after planet with life. It had gained credence in recent years, especially given how closely some of the xenos mirrored life on Earth.

  But what was truly surprising about the chromosomes was that there were too damned many of them.

  A human cell has twenty-three pairs of chromosomes. The cells of these spores had forty-eight. Not all that strange, given the planet they were on. It wouldn’t even be strange back on Earth. Plenty of other species had more.

  But these looked grafted on. The fingerprints of splicers were all over them. Like the original spores had twenty-four pairs of chromosomes a cell, and the Cousins had decided to t
ack on another set for their own purposes.

  What’s more, there were two distinct types of spores. The room was filled with them, an invisible cloud hanging over the entire building. He wondered if the Koreans knew what these things did. They probably weren’t fool enough to take off their helmets and figure it out. The Cousins knew, they were breathing the stuff in as they slept, or whatever they were doing instead of living in a simulation like everyone else in the galaxy—

  And then it hit him. A theory. A crazy one, but it fit. He realized exactly what the Cousins were up to with their penchant for using plants in place of machines.

  Simulation through hallucination.

  It had to be it. It made perfect sense. An organic simulation was certainly possible. That’s all human consciousness was, anyway: a simulated reconstruction of reality based on inputs of often questionable accuracy, with gaps in the senses filled in by the brain as it went.

  He’d seen the Cousins in there. If it were really them and not just a figment of his fried synapses, that meant that whatever the hallucinogen was, it contained information. It transmitted it into the body. Badly for him, given his biological incompatibility, but the biology of the Cousins was close enough to human that he wouldn’t be surprised if his brain could process at least some of it.

  The spores must have information encoded in them. Those extra chromosomes the Cousins had grafted onto them. Organic creatures were all carriers of information in the end. DNA was code, and DNA was information. The Cousins had created the most magical of mushrooms, a genetically engineered fungal hallucinogen whose DNA had been hijacked to be a carrier of sensory input.

  Their city was millions of years old. They could have done it. They’d certainly had the time. Maybe they’d studied their reactions to the stuff, created cocktails of hallucinogens they knew their brains would process in a certain way.

  That all made sense. But the difficult part wasn’t creating a simulation on wetware instead of hardware. It was the shared nature of the thing. Maybe what he’d seen was just his own private fantasy. But what if it wasn’t? They were all here in the same room, sharing the same air, breathing in the same spores. If the Cousins built cities, they were a social species, and a social species would go mad if they isolated themselves. It had to be a mass hallucination, not just an individual one.