Chasing Solace

by Karl Drinkwater

  There was no hope once you fell down there. Opal closed her eyes. She held in the vomit that threatened. She asked the suit to turn off the speakers. Silence.

  And in silence they hacked the wobbly platform and moved it towards the unbroken walkway beyond the scene of battle.

  In silence Opal picked up the hand burner and unmelted the frame areas enough to open the door, strands of red-hot metal stretching like flesh, dripping like fat. No. She would not think.

  The burner was nearly empty. She set it back on the floor. It seemed out of place. Maybe everything she touched was out of place. She limped onwards. These should be the final sections.

  Exploring

  < 15 >

  THROUGH THE DOORWAY was a short corridor with angled walls that came up to a point. It was identical to the corridor that had the yellow void behind one door. The corridor ended at blank wall. There were two heavy rectangular doors on either side of the corridor though, and some support struts which blocked part of the view. Recessed lights in the ceiling were enough to see by, in a gloomy fashion, and illuminated the motes drifting in the air.

  Opal took a deep breath. She couldn’t leave part of her mind elsewhere. She needed to keep it here, in the moment, where new dangers might arise.

  The floor was layered in greenish sediment. Things seemed still. Undisturbed. She took a step into the room, then pulled her leg back.

  Too still.

  “Something’s missing,” said Opal. “Footprints.” She squatted down painfully to get a better look at the flooring before she stepped on it.

  “I can detect traces,” said the suit. “Someone has passed through here recently, but the dust has already obscured most of their tracks. It’s like snowfall.”

  A display window opened on the HUD, showing an animation of white flakes settling on a path and turning it into an even white field; at the same time the room’s view on the HUD was overlaid with small red shapes of footprints to enhance the traces the suit had detected.

  “I don’t like snow,” said Opal, killing the window with a double blink. “These footprints must be showing the direction Xandrie came from.” They led to one of the closed doors on the right. “Mystery solved.” Opal entered the corridor cautiously, but there were no hiding places big enough for a human. “Any word from Athene yet?” she asked.

  “Negative. This area is also radio-secure. I will notify you as soon as signal strength improves.”

  Okay. Pick a door. Any door.

  She felt aversion to the doors on her left. Maybe it was just a frozen echo of what happened last time she took a mystery doorway on that side. Hungry, numbing yellowness. No thanks.

  Xandrie had reached the walkways over the chattle pits in one piece, so following her route might be safest. The second door on the right, then.

  Opal had her weapons retracted – it made manipulating things with the gauntlets easier – but she was ready to arm herself at the slightest disturbance. She put her back to the wall and pressed the panel by the door. It slid smoothly up into the structure, no grinding sounds this time. Nothing leapt out, so she peered around the edge to see another badly-lit, green dusty corridor. Onwards.

  Thirsting

  < 15 >

  NO APPARENT DANGER. Green flecks worked with the gloomy orange lighting to reduce visibility even further, so that it was hard to make out the room at first. Then it seemed to clear a bit. Doors to the left and right, cutting into the strangely-angled walls.

  “Did you notice a sort of shimmer just then, passing over the walls?” asked Opal.

  “I am afraid not. Static affected my recording senses, perhaps interference from a faulty energy source nearby.”

  Fatigue. That would explain it.

  Opal’s feet dragged through the green sediment which had settled over this corridor’s floors, scraping a path and raising puffs of dust.

  There was so much pain in her side. She felt like putting her hands there but refrained. It would do no good, a mere symbol. The suit would offer to dull the pain and Opal would refuse. She was all too aware of how easy it was to get trapped in repetitive cycles. Instead she pretended to be thinking hard about which exit to take, surreptitiously resting her body.

  After a while a plastic tube extended from the panel inside her helmet and stopped when it was in front of her mouth.

  “You are dehydrated,” said the suit.

  Opal took the straw in her mouth and sucked. Chilled liquid ran over her parched tongue. It was sweet, yet with a tangy aftertaste. No doubt it contained various nutrients and salts, and also sugars for energy. She gulped it down.

  “Thanks. Feels like a long road we’re on.”

  “My own energy reserves are lower than I would like,” replied the suit, a hint of weariness to its voice. The huskiness now sounded less like a sexy affectation, and more like the hangover of someone who’d been up all night partying. “I need to monitor them more closely, to make sure there isn’t some anomalous loss taking place.”

  “You do that.” Opal yawned.

  She was wary of one of the left-hand side doorways. Something to do with yellowness? She couldn’t remember. Perhaps exhaustion was causing confusion. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t the way she wanted to go.

  There were vague footprints in the dust, leading to the second doorway on the right. The suit highlighted their placement. Xandrie’s trail. Opal followed it.

  Tiring

  < 15 >

  SADNESS FOLLOWS YOU. Or at least, traces of it. Sometimes you can’t even make out the shape of the original source. It gets added to all the other traces and becomes a mass of its own design, unlike anything else. Our own fingerprint, pressing down heavily.

  “No signal?” asked Opal.

  “Nothing,” replied the suit.

  Opal couldn’t tell which of them sounded the most despondent.

  The miserable lighting didn’t help. Shadows at the edge of her vision, indistinct shapes in wait behind support struts. Orange and green and grey were the colours of this world, and they all made her feel queasy.

  There were four doorways in addition to the one she’d entered by. Two on the left, two on the right, all closed. She felt a strange aversion to the ones on the left. The suit highlighted traces in the dust that could have been footsteps long past. They led to one of the further doorways, on the right.

  “You ever get the feeling of having been somewhere before?” asked Opal.

  “A past culture had a name for it – déjà vu. Perhaps it is caused by a situation where something in the present has similarities to an experience in the past, or even something felt vicariously. The similarity is enough to trigger familiarity, but not enough to trigger memory recall. I do feel such a thing. It nags at my mind.”

  “Strange that you can feel it too.”

  “Would you be surprised that Athene can feel such a thing? If not, then you should not be surprised that a condensed version of her personality can also interpret the world in that way.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it as an insult. It’s all me. I’m just so worn out. All my sharpness has been dulled. I feel like we’ll never get anywhere. It’s like when my mind gets stuck in circles figuring out a problem. You see those traces in the dust?”

  Opal squatted and ran a hand over the surface layers of sediment.

  “Yes, they resemble footprints from long ago.”

  “Like Xandrie came through here, then the dust covered her tracks.”

  Opal brushed away some more and tilted her head, followed each apparent footstep with her gaze.

  “They’re pretty close together. Like she was moving slowly.”

  “Perhaps she was tired too?”

  “No, there’s something weird going on. I feel it.”

  “We could follow the footsteps and see where they lead,” suggested the suit.

  “Yes, they should take us somewhere. But ... hold on, can you get an impression of these footprints. Do any of them have more detail?”r />
  Opal stayed in a crouched position, following the trail.

  “That one,” said the suit. “It seems clearer. I can make out the grip pattern.” An enhanced version of the image was overlaid.

  Opal looked at it, then at the sole of one of her boots. She placed her foot down on the footprint, and it fit perfectly.

  “Xandrie had a different suit from me. Would the design of the grips match? The size?”

  “Unlikely. Stealth suits such as hers are built for auditory and visual signal reduction. Whereas the hardened edges of your boots are designed for electrical conductivity and magnetic contact.”

  Opal stood. “This weird feeling, this tiredness, as if I’ve done all this before ... it doesn’t make much sense, but these seem to be my own footprints.”

  “That is a likely conclusion.”

  Opal slammed open the panel for the nearest door. A pentagonal corridor led on, with two doorways on each side. She did not step through; instead she opened the next door. Another corridor, swirling with green dust. Vague footprints. She skipped the first door on the left, the one that she associated with yellow void, but her third doorway also showed identical pentagonal corridors. All had footprints leading away.

  She returned to her entrance, opened it, rushed into the passage she’d originally come from. It looked identical. She tried some of the doorways from there. Corridors, all with the same number of doorways, the same dust, the same cross-section, the same orange lights, the same traces of footprints. It was endless.

  “I’ve been wandering these halls for some time, I think,” said Opal.

  “I have no record of doing so, but one of my underlying rules implanted by Athene is that when my sense data differs from your reports and feelings, I am to override my records and act on what you see.”

  “Really? Athene set you up to believe me even when it makes no sense and when it differs from all the evidence in front of you?”

  “Yes. She has full faith in you.” After a pause the suit added, more quietly: “As do I.”

  Opal didn’t reply. But the feeling it gave her was a shot in the arm, dispelling some of the lethargy that had been building for ... well, who knew how long?

  Opal picked one of the corridors she hadn’t been down. Tried doors in that too. They led to identical passageways.

  And she noticed that as she looked into each room, her footprints always led away from the door she opened – even for doors she hadn’t passed through.

  “This makes no sense,” she said. “Things are rearranging themselves to repeat the same scenario, even when it isn’t physically possible. I think the ship’s playing mind games with me again.”

  “I agree that something is manipulating local conditions. Do you want to keep running and trying doorways? One of them may lead out. I could inject you with stimulants.”

  “Screw that, we need to be cleverer. Maybe what we see isn’t really there, like the trick the blue crystals tried. So let’s test it out. Repeat the blue pulse we copied from them.”

  The suit charged for a few seconds, minor modifications listed in a fast-scrolling window at the edge of her vision. Then a single word blinked: “Ready.”

  Opal nodded.

  A bright light flashed out, but as it faded it also seemed to slow. The HUD froze completely, the suit locked immobile; external sounds ceased, so she only heard her breath. Instead of brightness giving way to a world dulled by contrast, this light extended and stretched, and Opal could see individual beams like blue arrows cutting through treacle, impossibly slow, so that as they touched surfaces they reflected, shimmered, interconnected ... she was the source of azure starbursts shaking the world around her, deconstructing it, slicing through it, until even the beams slowed enough to freeze in place, icicles of light that illuminated everything. Blue fairy lights from a memory, beautiful and painful and happy, diode lights that would make a child smile with wonder and perceive magic in the simplistic electrical circuits where everything adds up to more than the sum of its parts via the addition of imagination. And she was happy to be frozen in this wonderland as she finally fell through the gaps in the laws of that dream world, back into the real world.

  Sleeping

  < 14 >

  IT HAD ALL BEEN A DREAM.

  Opal yawned, stretched her skinny teenage arms and sat up. The fevered dreams of spaceships gave way to old painted walls with dirty handprints near the environmental control panels, and a cracked vid screen showing images of a burning fireplace, as if the imitation warmth and brightness could extend out to touch the apartment. Terrifying space monsters gave way to bright crayon drawings around the lower parts of the painted walls, where Clarissa had sketched people whose spiky-fingered hands resembled claws, and whose wide tooth-filled faces were more of a threat than a smile. The tightly-compressed space suit was really a skin-hugging silvery vest top and knee-length running shorts Opal could hardly squeeze into. Clothing that didn’t attract predatory stares from older men; clothing that meant she could run and climb and fight if she needed to. And the fictional AI friend gave way to the real Clarissa, who lay on her front playing with RearroBlox.

  There wasn’t really a powerful being protecting Opal: there was only Opal doing her best to protect her sister since their parents had died. To protect her from the outer world by keeping her in their own world. The same home, the same smells, the same views of other sky-towers below grey skies, the same half-broken electrical systems. They might not be glamorous, but they were familiar, and that helped ameliorate loss.

  “You want something to eat?” Opal asked, rolling over to where her sister lay. “I could do you some noodles.”

  Clarissa shook her head without looking up, too focussed on the current pattern of blocks she’d arranged.

  Opal was good at protecting. She’d stolen food from a mega-market only yesterday. She chose a different outlet each time, and always scoped out an escape route in advance, one that only an agile and lanky person could jump and clamber up, scaling walls and vaulting over balconies, while leaving armoured security staff panting impotently down below.

  She would provide the basics of life, which were the same planet-side as they were in outer space. Air. Heat. Water. Food. But they were pointless without the other things: the love, companionship, and laughter that Opal and Clarissa experienced only with each other. No-one else could be trusted. Opal knew that. Her parents had made it clear to her from an early age. And she was to protect her younger sister. It was her duty. Her parents had emphasised that above all else. And now they were gone, it would be a double failure if she did not stick to it. She could not disappoint both the living and the dead.

  Opal walked her fingers along the floor, up to and over one of the blocks, as if her hand was a giant spider that had lost three legs. Sometimes you had to break Clarissa’s line of sight in order to break her concentration. Clarissa looked at her and smiled. Such a big grin, all her teeth showing, Opal couldn’t resist mirroring it. Then Clarissa turned back to her blocks, and Opal reached over and stroked the frizzy tangles of Clarissa’s hair.

  “I’m gonna comb and braid this for you later,” said Opal. “Tame it.”

  “No. It hurts when you do that. Leave it like yours. I want to look wild and scary too.”

  Opal laughed and shook her head. It was so good to hear Clarissa’s voice. She spoke rarely, even to Opal, and was only ever silent with other people. It was such a shame when her voice was so lovely and cheery. It made Opal warmer than any faulty infrared panels ever could.

  Clarissa turned back to her toys, moving the cubes to a new alignment, and Opal was just happy to watch her having fun.

  Of course, as a ten-year-old Clarissa would be seen as too mature for kids’ toys like RearroBlox, but she’d always enjoyed them, refused to let their parents replace them with toys more suitable for her age. Maybe it was part of her communication issues, and provided an outlet. Maybe her brain worked differently, and what she saw in the pictogram and l
etter combinations was different from what Opal saw.

  Or maybe it was because the blocks were Father Festivalue presents from their parents, a collection increased by new blocks every holiday, so that the extensive assortment must be inextricably linked to happy memories that could never be repeated or relived, because the world only moved one way.

  Forwards.

  Right now Clarissa had the blocks laid out in semicircles in front of her. Some displayed pictures, some text; Clarissa would pick them up, tap them on each other to merge and split content, sharing or copying or generating new displays on each side, then laying them out in fresh combinations with the favoured surface uppermost so that the other five sides switched themselves off. The colour waves passed over the cubes in sequence, connecting them in their new meaning-schemes that only made sense to Clarissa, and after moments of parsing the inter-related displays she would repeat the process. Impenetrable to anyone watching, even Opal. And asking for explanations never worked. This was Clarissa’s world alone. You could observe, but you could never get in.

  The ex-comm chimed, indicating a visitor at the door. Opal hadn’t ordered pizza or anything else, so the caller wasn’t of importance. Clarissa didn’t even look up from her esoteric rearrangements.

  A second chime. Usually they’d go away after that.

  Opal decided against checking the comm-panel to see who it was. Better if the outer world continued to ignore them, as it had for the past two months.

  Clarissa shifted the positions of three blocks. The image on one of them, like a red mountain, changed to a sunset vista and spread colours onto the blocks to either side.

  A third chime. It was getting irritating.

  Maybe Opal could break open one of the panels and disable the mandatory signal protocols. It would be a fun challenge. She’d always had a knack for analysing circuits and networks, picturing the nodes of connection, and sometimes working out more efficient routes, or interesting ways to bypass systems. Her father had a well-equipped tool-case with all sorts of adapters and shifting devices. Opal wasn’t sure what he had done for a living because it was Top Secret (or so he’d said), but the fact that he owned such cool covert kit made her think he was a super systems analyst for the government – or maybe a super-hacker against them, which would have been even cooler.