Hyperthought

by M M Buckner

  The walls pulsated with a light so cold and piercing, I could actually hear it screech. I covered my face with my hands, but even so, I sensed the light growing brighter. Then it flared so intensely, I saw the very bones in my fingers. And then darkness. Quiet.

  “Interesting,” Jin said.

  He dropped down beside me on the chamber floor. I was whimpering like an idiot. I felt his knee pressing against me. Slowly, I uncovered my eyes and looked around. Occasional flickers of electricity. Gentle breeze. Jin was sitting cross-legged beside me, staring up at a small hole at the very top of the chamber.

  “I h-hear it now. Almost like music. So many strains. Hard to sort out.” He rocked back and forth on his haunches. He was speaking much slower than before. “T-t-tons of Earth above us. I hear the pressure. Vectors of f-forces warping the walls.” Then he stretched his legs out and lay flat on his back, staring up at the vaulted blue ceiling. “Hold my hand, Jolie. The rocks are singing. You’ll tell my father about this, yes? You’re my witness.”

  I took his long bony hand in mine, but he didn’t respond to my touch. His gaunt fingers lay dry and lifeless in my grip.

  “My f-father,” he whispered. “I hear my father, Jolie. He’s fighting to save Pacific.Com. The Com’s his whole world, and Greenland wants to rip it apart. He’s terrified.”

  Jin sucked a sharp breath and pressed his temple. He was in pain. Whatever anger I might have felt before vanished when I saw him suffering. I felt useless, not knowing how to comfort him. He must have been wrong about living forever.

  Jin’s words whispered through my mind like thoughts. “My god. I understand now. It’s pointless to care if father loves me. What he’s doing is depraved. I have to stop him.”

  Jin opened his eyes wide and looked right at me. “The truth I’ve been seeking, Jolie, I’ve known it all along. I have to remove him from power.”

  Suddenly he laughed. “Father would find this hilarious. Because it doesn’t change how I feel. I still want him to love me.”

  All at once, he groaned and closed his eyes. The pain must have been fierce. His next words came in a rush. “I hear the Earth’s core spinning. Loops of molten iron. Whirling. The magnetic fields scream. They scream!” He ripped his hand from mine and covered his ears. “Billions of heartbeats! Cells. Dying. They’re all dying! The sound of their fear is horrible!”

  With impossible quickness, he sprang to his feet, holding his head in both hands. “The extra dimensions are coming uncurled. I perceive all of them. I see universes swelling like bubbles. Too much input!” He staggered in circles as if he’d gone blind. I followed, but his strength rose from unnatural sources, and I couldn’t keep up.

  “There is no number!” His shrill cry echoed through the chamber. “It’s chaotic. I can’t differentiate one sensation from another. I can’t find the chord. I thought everything would be clear. I thought—”

  He started running straight up the curved wall. When he’d climbed as high as his momentum would carry, he slipped and tumbled down like a broken manikin to the center of the floor again. Then he struggled up to his hands and knees, and swayed as if he might fall over. I ran to catch him.

  “The chord,” he moaned. “I expected—a single chord. One harmony. But there’s only this—screaming. Vortexes forming. Dissolving. Birth. Death. So much willfulness to be. Fear of dying. It’s all screaming. Wanting to survive. I can’t stand it!”

  Without warning, Jin bashed his head against the rock floor. Then he did it again. I climbed on his back and locked my arms and legs around his body, but he’d grown so powerful, I couldn’t make him stop. Desperately, I laced my fingers around his forehead, and he smashed my hands into the rock. Mes dieux, but it hurt. When he did it the second time, I heard bones snap, and I let go. Finally, I just lay down on the floor under his head. I don’t think he even knew I was there. He pounded his head into my chest, over and over, and I sprawled there, clenching my muscles and taking it—until, thank the Laws, he wore himself out.

  He rolled over on his side, and I curled around him. For a long time we lay together, shivering quietly. Then he stretched out on his back again. When I sat up to examine his head wounds, pain stabbed under my ribs and made me cough. It really hurt to move. Both my hands were bleeding. In the dim light, I could see a lot of blood streaming from a gash above Jin’s left eye. I coughed again and almost couldn’t stop. It felt as if a knife were lodged in my side. I guess maybe Jin cracked one of my ribs.

  By the time I got my cough under control, Jin’s huge beautiful black eyes were staring straight up at that hole in the ceiling. Who knows what visions loomed there. I pressed his head wound with my filthy, disgusting sleeve to stop the bleeding, and I said stupid things like très bien, you’ll be all right, I love you, whatever I could think of. My skin felt hot and itchy, so I stripped off the musketeer uniform. Wearing nothing but my old paisley bodysuit felt better.

  “The b-bacteria,” he whispered. “They’re crying for f-food. They just want to live.” A moment later, he looked up at me in surprise. “You sound the same, Jolie. The same as the bacteria. Stubborn.” In the dim blue light, I saw his eyes shining. He seemed rapt.

  “The quantum fabric wants to take form. And once formed, it wants to persist. Greed and fear create the pattern.”

  “And love, Jin?” I tore a sleeve off my uniform to bandage his head. His eyes rolled back and forth as if he were seeing monsters.

  “N-not what I expected. No harmony. No single mind. It’s gnashing. Turbulence. Ripping. One thing changes into another. Violent.”

  “Do you hear anything good?” I asked. Dumb question, I know, but still I wanted an answer.

  His glance wandered in my direction. “Yes. Yes. It’s beautiful.”

  His skin had gone cold and sweaty. When I kissed the bridge of his nose, his eyes cleared. He spoke with renewed urgency.

  “Jolie, you have to remember. There’s so much I need to tell you. Understand? You have to memorize all of it.”

  “D’accord,” I whispered, stroking his cheek.

  “Help me sit up,” he said. So I folded my uniform to make a pillow, and I propped him up in my arms.

  He began to talk, stuttering at first, trying to find the right words. Once he got going, the sentences flowed. And even though I understood little of what he said, he seemed lucid. He said there wasn’t a word for what he was sensing. It was something like music.

  “It’s so simple,” he kept repeating, although his explanations seemed complex beyond reason. Still I memorized as much as I could. He spoke often of will. “In the beginning is the will to be,” he said. “After that, the pattern branches.” And again, “One will. Many choices. The quantum fabric builds by branching.”

  I learned his metaphors by heart without understanding them. He spoke of life as a trail through a bubble chamber and as a mote of quicksilver bursting with starlight. At times he moaned with pleasure as if experiencing violent orgasms. “Greedy life. Everything fights for a place.” Then he would cry and claw at his ears. “Milk, blood, shit. I can’t endure this rainbow.”

  Several times, his voice deepened and vibrated in many tones at once. “I have no beginning nor middle nor end,” and also, “I am a path.” More than once he repeated a kind of chant: “One will. The will to be.”

  His words terrified me and filled me with hope. My gut knotted up. He painted pictures I could only feel, not see. His descriptions so mesmerized me that I forgot my physical pain. Delight and sadness flooded through me together, and when he finished, I realized I was weeping.

  No, I couldn’t understand what Jin said, but I retained his words. It seemed so important to him that I bear witness. Finally, he rested. The tension went out of his muscles, and he closed his eyes. I thought he might be asleep, but I was mistaken. His lashes fluttered open, and he laughed gently. “I hear the solar wind.”

  And sometime later, he said, “Emotion is a kind of sight, too.”

  The cut above his
eye had stopped bleeding. He lay still and calm, with a faraway look sometimes joyous, sometimes thoughtful, sometimes simply attentive. His skin had grown icy cold. He chuckled softly. “Beautiful stubborn screaming.”

  In the chamber, the wind and lightning were starting up their alternating routine again, and my own awareness of my physical pain returned in spades. I knew the wind was cold, but every gust seemed to flay my skin like a blasting torch. Jin lay rigid in my arms, and when I tried to move him, he winced.

  “Jolie,” he said.

  “Ssssh.”

  “Jolie, don’t be afraid of death. The quantum fabric is not energy or mass. It’s the pattern. One thing changes into another. Only the pattern persists. You are not your body but the path you choose. Your choices affect everything that comes after you, Jolie. You reverberate forever. There is no death. Tell him, pet. Tell my father. He won’t care, but he’ll know.”

  “Yes, Jin.” I kissed his damp hair.

  Much later still, he opened his eyes again. “You’re still here, Jolie?”

  “D’accord, I’m with you, Jin.”

  I heard him sigh, ever so gently, and then he did go to sleep.

  17

  Saviors

  “CHIII——CAAA!” THE SPANGLISH word filtered down to me through folded layers of sediment. “Chiii——caaa,” it echoed, sometimes near, sometimes farther away.

  I knew it had to be a figment of my fever. Still I cupped a hand around my mouth and yelled, “Vinnn——cente!” Only a wheeze came out.

  How many hours ago had I strapped Jin’s unconscious body to my back with the torn strips of my stolen musketeer uniform? How long had it taken me to scale the walls of the windy blue chamber and find the opening at the top? In the darkness above, I’d crab-walked through a labyrinth of strange tube formations till my joints ached, and I’d lost track of time.

  “Chiii——caaa!” the long syllables reverberated. In my febrile waking dream, I imagined I’d returned to the clinic, where the brawny old caretaker kept stealing my Net node. “Chica!” the imaginary sound wafted through my head as I stumbled into an immense hall of white crystals.

  Above me, electricity danced through the sparkling crystal matrix that stretched higher than I could see. The formation seemed to glow from within. Millions of glassy white hexagonal needles spiked out in fans and starbursts and crisscross patterns. In the shifting light, the needles changed from soft opalescence to blazing prismatic rainbows. There was a charge in the atmosphere. My hair stood on end, and my fingers tingled. I leaned so far back trying to see the top of the formation, I nearly fell. Never in my life could I have imagined such a fantastic sight, but I was too tired to appreciate its beauty. Jin’s weight dragged at me, and the strips of the cloth harness sliced into my shoulders like handsaws.

  My thoughts stayed basic. The white crystals led up. I wanted to go up. Hence, I had to climb. So I tightened the wrapping around my broken hand and gingerly touched a nearby spike. It felt warm and smooth. I got a good grip and clamped my legs around its hexagonal shaft and started shinning.

  Each time I stretched for a higher grip, Jin’s body flopped like a corpse in the improvised harness on my back. He hadn’t awakened since we left the chamber. At first, I had stopped every few minutes to check his pulse, but now that my own strength was fading, I gave up on that. Every breath sent shooting pains through my chest, and my right eye had swollen nearly shut. But the worst was the rash covering my body. It had started to seep a clear liquid. What could I do anyway, if Jin’s pulse stopped?

  When I had first torn the musketeer uniform into strips to make Jin’s harness, I told myself I would never let Merida catch us. Now I longed for her, for anyone who would save me from my own stupid plan. Could that really be Vincente up there? I yelled his name again, but the sound didn’t carry. I couldn’t get enough breath in my lungs.

  See, besides my fatigue and thirst and broken bones, those bacteria Jin had heard crying for food, they were making a feast of Jolie Blanche Sauvage. Conveniently, the glowing crystals lit up my blistery red arms and legs. In the last couple of hours, my rash had turned rank. But I didn’t need to see the lesions to know I was mortally sick.

  Truth be told, I’d been hoping all along that I’d get to the surface in time for therapy. I’d pictured myself saving Jin and winning his gratitude and living happily ever after on some movie set. How exactly that was going to happen I had never worked out. Maybe when we got to the surface, the Nome troopers would find us and take pity.

  We humans never believe in our own deaths, do we? Not for real, not till the absolute last possible nanosecond. I think, up until that actual last breath, every one of us lives in denial and fights like hell. Me, I do.

  At this particular moment, all I wanted was a drink of water. That, and to save Jin. I’d come this far. If I could just survive long enough to get him to the surface and maybe steal or borrow a Net node and call for help, that would make everything right. Then Jolie’s Trip with a capital T would be over. I had lived 26 interesting years, known a lot of good people, seen some sights. I had loved and made love to the only man in the world I wanted. How many girls could say that? D’accord, I could let go of life with dignity. It wasn’t as if I reasoned this out through some clever philosophy. I just felt it. You know me. Not the brightest light.

  But I wasn’t dead yet. I could still clasp my knees together and place one bruised hand above the other and shin a few centimeters higher up that preter-vicious white crystal. And that’s what I did, over and over like a robot programmed on a repeating loop. My sole focus narrowed down to one clean series of motions.

  “Chiii——caaa!” The echo sounded half a heartbeat nearer. “I’m coming for youuu!”

  Vincente found me hemmed in under a ledge where the top of my white crystal had branched fractal spikes as thick as a root ball. I was too weak to extricate myself, and both ray eyes were so swollen, I could barely see him. He wore a surfsuit and metavisor and I knew he had to be a hallucination. From his gear belt, he unclipped an outlandish implement that looked like a medieval laser blaster. Just before he started cutting me out of my crystal cage, he mumbled something into a flat blue box strapped to his forearm. My freakin’ Net node!

  “That’s mine,” I yelled, but no sound came out Pain doubled me over, and it took all my resolve to twist around and feel Jin’s throat for a pulse. There it was, that minute warm throb against my fingertip. Even if this were a dream, I decided to thank the Laws.

  Vincente’s headlamp blinded me so I couldn’t see his features through his helmet faceplate. For an instant, I shrank back. “You’re not working for Merida, are you?” I don’t know if I said the words aloud.

  When his gruff old voice croaked through the helmet speaker, I knew he was real. “Chica, you have less brains than the Pope’s own saints. Why you try to kill yourself, eh? Whew, you look odioso. Let go of that bundle now. I will take El principe.”

  Vincente carried a miraculous amount of climbing gear, but no water except the recycling system inside his suit “Alto,” he said, “we must go up.” He rigged a real climbing harness and hoisted Jin’s limp body to a higher position. Then he scampered back down and did the same for me. In my hazy vision, the old man seemed to dash up and down the crystals like some tree-dwelling primate.

  “We’ve cut a senda—a path,” he said, coaxing me along the ledge toward Jin’s inert body. “Tan is above. He is bringing the water.”

  Tan? I knew that name. But my mind had gone all muzzy, and I couldn’t concentrate. Jin still wore the dirty hospital wrapper, and his thin bare legs were so pale, his skin looked translucent. I wanted to cover his nakedness, but then I remembered that I myself wore nothing but a filthy paisley bodysuit, now ripped in a hundred places.

  “Your friend, Tan, he teach me much about the Net He is the supremo geek. My preceptor. You see him soon, chica.” Vincente busied himself making a sort of travois sled out of the improbable gear that kept emerging from his
belt. He secured Jin in the sled and attached it to his belt loops so he could drag Jin behind him. Then he slung me over his shoulder like so much dead weight, which in fact I was. Hunkering over, he began slogging up the path he’d blasted with his laser.

  Sometime later, cool fresh water dribbled into my mouth. I tasted the plastic tube against my lip and opened my eyes. I saw a bright blue sky with a yellow sun stitched in white thread. It took me a second to realize we were squeezed together inside a fabriglass tent, the sort of airtight emergency shelter we’d often used on Jolie’s Trips. Someone had gotten cute with a sun appliqué on the blue ceiling. Now I saw yellow stars and crescent moons sewn on as well.

  Vincente removed his helmet and settled Jin onto a folding cot next to mine.

  “He’s sleepin’ sound,” said a familiar voice. “You should sleep, too, ma’am.” I glanced around, and there was the boy with the burns on his face, the boy called Tan. I remembered him now. Red rodeo helmet. A lifetime ago, we’d counted stars together in the California desert.

  Besides our two cots, the tent was just large enough to hold a small collapsible table, a camp stool, and a stack of gear cases. Zipped tight to the door flap was an inflatable airlock, and from the center support pole, an electric lantern dangled. On the floor sat a portable air-recycling unit. I could hear its rhythmic whine.

  Green diodes winked from a row of squat black boxes on the table. Tan’s computer gadgets. He’d set up a sort of workstation. Vincente leaned against the stack of gear cases and watched while Tan slipped a sharp silver cybernail onto his right index finger and activated a light matrix interface. A cube of holographic icons popped up above one of the boxes. Tan started pointing with his finger, twirling his cybernail through the shimmering dots. Soon I heard Luc’s faraway voice. They were exchanging coordinates.

  My right eye had swollen completely shut, and the left one ached. I seemed to be gazing through water. Rainbow colors haloed every object, and the electric lantern shot out rays like a star. I coughed, and Vincente hurried over. He gave me the drinking tube, but when I moved to take a sip, I thought my skin would crack open. The whole surface of my body had dried to a hard crust.