System Seven

by Parks, Michael

  He breathed deep from a rising breeze, sensing all the awareness flying around unseen corridors of reality. The world was alive with consciousness.

  “What about dreams then?” he asked Pons. “What can you teach me?”

  “Well, you already know that sleep is the act of unplugging from the grid. We withdraw all but the life cord of the droichid, withdrawing almost completely into our meta-self. For recreation, as problem solving exercises, or whatever the reason, we dream. A dream is a stage set by a meta in Saoghal, a bubble of reality unto itself. Everyone spawns these bubbles because everyone dreams. The Comannda’s korjé are rangers in this realm. They take control of a dreamer, of the reality, unless the dreamer is also lucid. In that case it becomes a question of power and cunning. Not lucid or overpowered, a dreamer becomes imprisoned for as long as the korjé can manage. The imprisoned cannot wake up, cannot plug back into the grid. The body is suspended. This you saw with Austin. The good news, Johan, is that you have no match. Or shouldn’t, if the Words are right.”

  “So I kicked korjé ass, eh?”

  Pons smiled. “Yes, you did. But who knows what would have happened had you stayed longer to fight? Hmm? That is what we are going to try to find out today. Right now, in fact.”

  “Right now?” He reached into his pocket for the pillbox Edward gave him.

  “No,” Pons put up a hand, “you won’t use those. You are going to learn to dream on the go.”

  “On the go.”

  “Yes,” Pons twisted the toothpick in his mouth. “You daydream, right? Everyone does. Far more than we realize. Even while driving.”

  “Pons, those are thoughts. Hardly the same as dreaming.”

  “You think not? Many of the same components are in play. People interact with their meta store and throw things on the stage, in a bubble. They are lucid dreaming without realizing it. I am going to teach you to hijack the stage.”

  He stumbled over the implications until they culminated in one unavoidable realization: he was talking mind control.

  “You’re going to teach me? Now?” he asked.

  “I am going to try. You must make the proper leaps.” Pons blinked several times before continuing. “Now, there is a benefit to being right next to someone you want to drag into a dream. It takes most of the work out of it, provided you know what you are doing. Distance is a factor for most. For me it is.” A butterfly flew in the window, fluttered in a circle, and left through the doorway. “You extend right into their meta flow, but quietly. Do a little number with the local loop, at the brain stem. Some call it ‘planting the tree’ or ‘setting base camp’. Then you enter the droichid and follow their flow into Saoghal.”

  The window panes seemed more orange than yellow. Probably the angle of the sun.

  “Once there, you spawn a dream via their meta, one that perfectly matches the grid around them. You do this by using fresh physical data from the meta stream in the local loop. Their eyes, their ears – every sense flows in meta, giving you the ingredients to create the stage. You can imagine the dexterity this involves, yes? It takes practice, lots of practice. You must be careful, so they don’t detect it, so they are not distracted by the act of constructing it.”

  The drapes began to sag, lengthening on the rods.

  “And then once built, once synchronized, you will have slipped your dream over the top of their reality. A joining. A merging.” He paused, eyeing him. “You are doing quite well in the realization that you’re now dreaming lucidly. At this point, most people become emotional. They feel disconnected from their body and are scared to death of me or thinking they’ve lost their mind. But not you. I am impressed. I should probably thank you for your restraint, because I imagine you are holding back.”

  “I am.” Glued to the druid’s every word, he resisted trying to take control and focused instead on what he’d just sensed. Just like that, they were dreaming the druid’s dream. “How is this possible?”

  “We daydream.” Together. Pons’ voice resonated in the center of his mind. He resisted blocking it out.

  “You’re not holding me in this, are you?”

  I was, but you feel it now, of course. You could break it if you wanted but please don’t, not yet. I’ve wonderful teaching tools here. Get comfortable now, and relax. Trust me.

  Pons proceeded to describe the technique to initiate dream control, coupling his words with concepts born from thought. Learning this way made the knowledge familiar and easier to transfer.

  It is like a mini-dream unto itself, Johan. A dream inside a dream. You form it and trust its validity, trust your sense and the intended outcome. With practice, it will drive any dream. You understand?

  He nodded.

  Satisfied, Pons continued aloud. “Now you have the concept of the local loop and how to manipulate it. What I’m curious about right now is if you can break from this dream. I’m going to harden it, clamp down as much as I can, and then see if you can shake it off. Are you ready?”

  He tried to nod but couldn’t. The same paralysis from the cave dream had suddenly set in.

  “Try to stand.”

  Nothing responded from head to toe, save for his eyes. His heart began to pound madly. Seconds passed. Pons watched him.

  In the cave, he’d found an edge which led him to an entirely different scene. Such a move might be dangerous here, considering the Comannda’s interest in him – plus, it was too much like running away. This was the dream he had to control. Instead of looking for an edge to tear at, he searched for what was driving the dream: the spout, the source.

  Under intense scrutiny, a difference between waking and dreaming became apparent. Aside from the melting curtains, the color changing windows, and now the thousands of ants burrowing up from the flattened carpet, the dream version of the old man’s house held an underlying evanescence, as if the room might shift under the right circumstances, might give.

  But how to push?

  Edward’s insistence on imagination’s importance led to the solution. Pons had explained exactly how to drag someone into a dream: extend across the grid into their meta stream and up to their meta body to spawn a dream. That meant he was the inadvertent dreamer in his own meta body. That fact revealed a transcending lucidity that he snapped to instantly. A veil lifted and he woke from the dream. The windows were a proper nicotine yellow, curtains at normal length, the carpet free of insects.

  The old druid smiled. “Bien. Très bon! The best kind of student. Now, I will do it again but then I will go a step further and bridge to another dream hosted by an associate. A transfer, you see? You will then be a guest in her reality and when she hardens it, you will become twice the prisoner. Try to wrest control from her.”

  Johan nodded and studied the carpet. A chance to beat him at the game. If he could detect the druid’s initial incursion into his awareness, there’d be a chance at figuring out his entire method.

  It came as a delay, a ripple in time. Tiny, subtle, and nothing after – it had to be the druid. Locked onto the knowledge of an intrusion, just the fact of it, he became supremely lucid in the moment, waiting to act.

  Pons’ expression grew serious. He rolled his toothpick idly between his teeth but otherwise sat still, pensive. The surf crashed beyond the yard, a punctuation in time. A breeze stirred the chimes and swirled dust motes through sunbeams. The moment drew long with all the elements of a standoff.

  Pons nodded in a gesture of acquiescence. “I think I need my pipe.” He stood and walked to his desk.

  The druid remained there in his flow. Without knowing what to feel or what to look out for, instinct led the watch.

  Pons loaded his pipe and tamped the tobacco. He appraised him with a critical eye. “You know, if everyone had the uncommon awareness you do, we would either be well on our way to a brighter future or digging our own graves. Of course, it is the former we aim for.”

  “How many can do this?”

  “At this level? Only a handful. Until now, per
haps.”

  “Why? And why can I?”

  Pons shrugged. “It is what makes us different.”

  “Did they think you were the Change?”

  “At one time I was considered a candidate, yes. Same with the others.”

  Johan looked around the room. “You don’t leave this place, do you?”

  “Rarely. I am all too familiar with our beloved space rock. Dreams, now, they are worthy of exploring. New and meaningful. Tied to the underpinnings of mankind and thus to the future.”

  Johan nodded, unwilling to relinquish his post. Something began to reveal itself. A sense of otherness. Too nebulous to isolate, it sought to bury itself in his common, everyday sense of self – he would soon lose track of it. Pons was on the move.

  A memory surfaced of gold panning in Switzerland with his parents. Sifting out ordinary rock in the hopes the heavier gold would remain. Still bearing strict attention, he did just that and let the ordinary fall away, as he had when fleeing Amsterdam.

  Like a tiny hidden nugget, Pons’ awareness was revealed within his own, the druid’s meta stream waiting to be followed. He wasted no time and shot straight into it, a nearly instantaneous trip into Pons’ local loop. There he found a busy junction of energy, thought, and emotion – a truly well oiled, if chaotic, machine.

  Three things happened almost at once: Pons raised a block, Johan effectively denied the block, and then Johan stalled, an oversized sumo sitting atop his opponent without knowledge of the rules of the game.

  “Are you sure you haven’t done this before? Please be careful.” Pons sat down at his desk and slowly lit his pipe.

  “How can this be?” he asked. “We aren’t daydreaming now, and we’re not asleep.”

  “There are levels of consciousness that most people keep, or acknowledge. A convention, if you will. You and I are breaking from that convention. ‘Heavily blurring it’ is a better description because reality is anamorphic. We’re raised to experience it in linear, unimaginative ways because that’s the most effective and comfortable means to build and tightly control societies. As you can see, there is so much more to life and perception.” Smoke streamed from the pipe. “Now, since you’re here, see if you can trace to my core. The meta flow might seem thicker the nearer you get, if that helps.”

  That he’d managed his awareness so long and even held the druid at bay felt like an accomplishment, as if he’d beaten a wizard at a game of spells. Still so much to learn, though. The druid’s meta stream flowed more dense in one direction, awaiting only his intention to join it. He hesitated at the thought of crossing into Saoghal.

  Nothing ventured, nothing gained...

  Arrival happened as a gunshot – in an instant, hundreds of years of memories and emotions assaulted him, a vast catalog of human knowledge and wisdom bound by an overwhelming love of existence and thirst for survival. One could easily drown trying to absorb even a portion of it. However, a sense of duty stood out powerfully; a duty to the Family first, then to all of humanity, to the entire planet, and to –

  “Okay – deep stab, that. Quite piercing. That’s all you need right now,” Pons said quickly, jolting him back in a one-two punch of unexpected imagery and bland, blocking emotion.

  He went to catch a glimpse of what else Pons was duty-bound to but the druid was in the way, protective and defensive of those memories, of something bigger. He yielded in respect.

  Pons redirected the moment into something positive. “Unless you care to try to spawn a dream from my meta.”

  The challenge eased the moment and engaged curiosity. Several concepts of how to do it came and went, all of which proved useless. Again, he remembered Edward’s discourse about imagination. At once an idea came, simple and powerful: start imagining. Fully centered in Pons’ meta, he imagined a street in Berlin. A world flickered into being, was gone, and then reappeared with a steady push. They stood on a snow-lined street outside a bar, the night air biting-cold. Two women under a covered patio smoked and talked. Music thumped from a nearby club. Pons looked around and nodded.

  “You have it. You are a natural, Johan. There’s more to learn, but at this rate, you won’t have much homework.”

  Chapter 15

  To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage

  that a soldier needs.

  - Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803 - 1882, American Poet, Essayist

  An autumn-tinged evening descended on the London burb of South Lambeth. Brick row houses lined Killyon Street. Streetlamps reflected from shiny hoods and windshields of cars parked along the curb. A half a dozen youngsters perched on a low wall. Their voices rose and fell, lost in the sounds of traffic and trains running the nearby line. The 8:45 from Brixton rumbled into Wandsworth Road station.

  Sean sat on the porch steps of the flat chewing jerky with a beer in hand. A couple walked a pair of French poodles past. The woman gabbed of adulterous intrigue in the neighborhood while the man looked as leashed as the dogs and far less enthused. A cab drove by, too fast for the narrow lane.

  A few minutes later Sean stood, timing it. A swig of beer. A bite of jerky. Again a swig. He glanced left and saw a second couple turn the corner. Austin and Anki arrived right on time.

  “Evenin’, mates,” he said as they approached. “Party’s on the inside.”

  Johan banked the cue ball and struck the nine into a corner pocket.

  “Well played.” The old man shook his hand. “I suspected you were a shark.”

  “Thanks for not cheating.”

  Anki entered the sunroom-turned-billiards hall and went directly to Johan. They embraced, kissing.

  Soldado looked up from his notes. “Looks like we’re all here.”

  Austin stood in the doorway. “Bloody fine evening for a shindig, but why the rat’s hole?”

  The old man brushed past him. “Blending, is all.” He wore an untucked dress shirt over jeans and the face of an old Italian. It had to be Edward. “Congratulations, by the way. I knew you’d push the boundaries.”

  “I had a good coach,” Austin said, indicating Sean.

  “Just pointed you, is all,” he replied.

  After dinner, Sean drew crimson drapes closed in the sitting room and turned up the radio. Anki helped pass around glasses of wine.

  The flat brimmed with secondhand store furniture. A worn couch and mismatched Morris chairs filled the narrow room. Poorly hung track lighting lit the room along with a pair of buffet lamps on battered end tables. The stale odors of past fraternity parties mixed with the berry-scented candles Anki had found in a hallway drawer.

  A laptop rested on a coffee table with a fist-sized cube plugged into it. Anki took a seat between Johan and Austin on the couch.

  “Thank you, Anki.” Edward raised his glass. “Now, a toast to each of you, for the progress you have made is historic.”

  They all drank.

  “Johan, your power in the dream state has never been seen before. Austin, your affinity with the grid will change things in ways we cannot yet imagine. We are grateful for your alignment and have already learned much from you. Soldado, your insights into frequency channeling and distributed associative encryption resequencing may well be the breakthrough needed to gain a beachhead on their communications. Mr. Lathrop has only the highest praise for the way your mind works. And Anki, your finely tuned empathic sense will continue to guide us, your very presence a reassurance that we are on the right path. Believe it.”

  “Okay, Edward, why the buttering up?” Soldado said, smiling. “What’s the meeting about?”

  “Time is pressing on an issue of great importance. Our immediate action is necessary. You may consider this your first commission.”

  Sean clicked the lights off. The cube shot an image to the wall. The face of a Japanese man in his sixties stared into the room.

  “Yukitake Sakuma, oyabun of the largest yakuza crime family in the world, the Ookami-shita. As godfather, his expansionist policies
brought him power and wealth far in excess of any of his predecessors. They bring in billions of dollars a year from extortion, gambling, guns, drugs, real estate and more. Stock market manipulation, internet porn, construction kickback schemes, they do it all. A significant amount of that wealth is due to work done in the digital territories. Soldado, I’m sure you’re familiar with the yakuza’s ‘digital warriors’.”

  He nodded. “The Dejitaru. Pure digital. We’ve contracted with individuals and small cells. Mostly bag jobs on tight databases or proof of concept threats. Some thrash attacks and data drills. They’re expensive but we’ve used them on Asian targets because they know associations and routes in that part of the world. They move like light through glass, even in Chinese space. That’s why they’re expensive to get.”

  Edward glanced at the oyabun’s image. “Sakuma’s Dejitaru bring him great wealth, a wealth he wisely shares with them. Out of the estimated forty thousand members in the Ookami-shita, as many as four thousand are Dejitaru. Compare that to your five hundred in the Underground and you get an idea of what they are capable of. Our interest in their operations recently uncovered this man,” the screen split to display the photo of a white male in his forties, slim with an intelligent face but otherwise unremarkable, “a Comannda Group 2 agent. He greases the wheels of the unwashed masses, influences thought processes, and uses money and other incentives to secure cooperation. To make agreements with the yakuza in this manner is expected, as they tend to honor them when made face to face. Getting Sakuma’s commitment saves them the task of manually driving lesser bosses from behind the scenes. He is one of a few we have ferreted out and are trying to keep track of.”

  “What’s he up to?” Johan asked.

  “He’s been working on Sakuma to bring him into a deal he’s resistant to. Encounters are shielded, any and all observation blocked. When he’s alone, we sense Sakuma is disturbed at the proposal, but we can’t get in to learn the details and he speaks to no one of it.”