“Feels like I’m dreaming, rather than awake.” She twisted some more. At first it had felt like she was suspended in liquid, but it was freer than that. This was not an amniotic sac of her own, but a current of cold wind upon which she floated and turned. “I didn’t think you’d work here – wherever we are.”
“Then let us be joyful that we were wrong. I am detecting things that make little sense. In fact, most of my sensors report such anomalous data that I have to discard it. What I see keeps changing. I am afraid I will be little help in navigation since I am effectively blind. Yet you seem to be adapting well.”
“I feel ... strangely okay. Calm. It makes a weird sense to me. I can move, like this.” And she drifted up (or down, or horizontally – she had to forget the old definitions here), ripples of ice passing through her as she did so, making her body shudder. “I can sense all around me, and way off into the distance too. I’m not on the Lost Ship any more, I know that. Somehow it has brought me here. Wherever here is. Some place in The Null, or beyond. And it’s actually beautiful.”
“I take your word for it. If I sense anything, I’ll tell you, but most of what I get is blackness and noise. My connection to you is my connection to this world. I will do my best.”
“Thank you. I’m glad to have a friend here with me. I don’t even think this is a physical place.”
“I suspect it is physical in the sense of existing within a schema of laws, but probably laws we have had no encounter with, no evidence for. It is a great shame that I cannot see or measure what is here. But for me to function suggests that the laws we are familiar with are still present here, even if only in close proximity to you. Electrical conductivity, mass, temporal progression, molecular functioning ... the basics exist. Their applications are just being distorted by local phenomenon.”
“Tell you what, I’ll let you worry about all that. I’ll worry about what the hell I’m seeing, and how I can get around beyond this point without making fatal mistakes. Last thing I need is to find that there are invisible cliffs here, or the equivalent of drowning, or that blinking will make me explode.”
“Okay. Perhaps only close one eye at a time to begin with.”
Opal had been through so much to get here. And yet, as she hung in this flickering transparent shadow world, something told her she’d had it easy compared to what she was going to face next.
Acclimatising
< 10 >
OPAL DID HER BEST TO relay what she experienced, and what she could sense. And a lot of it sounded like nonsense. For example, the flickering static that might be interference, or revelations of multiple places existing in the same space. Not that the perception of space here was likely to bear much resemblance to what she was used to.
In turn, the suit updated the HUD with displays and potential physical models. It was hard to focus on the HUD when Opal was seeing through the suit to the shining outlines and layers beyond at the same time, but with effort she could observe some of the display as yet another ghostly layer.
When she “moved” she relayed the changes to the suit, so it could try and match any patterns she noticed with anything it detected, attempting to organise the chaotic-seeming inputs.
“It is like decoding a secret message,” it explained. “Identify the frequencies of occurrence, and compare them to known frequencies of letters and words, looking for correlations; make guesses and then extrapolate them to the rest of the presented pattern to see if they make sense; then do it another thousand million times and keep your fingers crossed.”
“You can do millions a second, right? Athene boasted about that.”
“Unfortunately, I cannot. Even if I transfer all resources to processing and do away with low-priority functions like weapons and life support – please note, that was humour – I have only about one per cent of Athene’s processing capacity. My mother is a goddess, and I am only a humble human by comparison.”
“Humble human ... ha ha, another jokey put down?”
“No, that one was just accurate analogy.”
Opal’s arrival point was a bubble that seemed relatively featureless compared to some of the translucent topologies that flickered beyond and throughout. Within them were entities that moved, but so out-of-focus she could not even guess what they were. Some patches suggested landscape-like contours, while others were more nebulous. But her current location was definitely plainer than what she sensed beyond.
“Maybe I’m in some arrival hall. Like an antechamber, or airlock, which is why it seems less complex compared to the other things I can sense.”
“Or maybe you have been placed in a simple area as a form of acclimatisation, so that you are not overwhelmed.”
“A training room? That implies there’s something benevolent looking out for me.” She drifted and turned, more confidently now. “I like that idea.”
“It may even resemble when a room is prepared for a human toddler. Electrical sockets might be covered, doors that would lead to steep steps are locked, poisons stored out of reach. That is good, though it means we must be prepared for anything once you leave this area.”
“If I leave it. Maybe this is all there is. Maybe I’m lost, like on a desert island.”
“I recommend discarding theories that lead to inaction. They become self-fulfilling. Let us work on the assumption that you are here for a reason, and just have to work out how to move on.”
“Okay. Here’s a new consideration. I think I’m moving. Kind of upwards, but if there’s no real gravity then I might be diving down, right? And I’m passing through what seemed to be ground, so perhaps that’s just an illusion, or it is like water – or maybe even a border between two different gaseous layers that won’t mix? Anyway, up, down, through: doesn’t matter. All relative. Point is, I feel like the area’s small, but even though I’m drifting continuously, I’m not reaching what looks like the edge of the bubble. Plus, the see-through worlds that I sense within and beyond it hardly change as I move, implying huge distances, as if I’m inside a bubble of world as big as a fricking moon. I’ll keep moving in this direction.”
“I hope it isn’t such a huge sphere ... Opal, we have a potential problem.”
“Why am I not surprised? Go on.”
“Our already-limited emergency resources are draining fast. Oxygen, power, nanogel. I am unable to account for it. We cannot waste any time.”
“Shit. Okay, we need to figure this out, get somewhere else.”
Opal ceased the drift that seemed to go nowhere. She focussed on what she could determine. Maybe there was an equivalent to a door, or a road.
She had a headache from the strobing visions that assaulted her. She closed her eyes. She still had a feeling of layouts, and pictured some of the world around her, but it was less insistent, less buzzy. She could allow the other sensations to exist, try to categorise them, and see if they provided any clues.
Nose? Nope. There weren’t any smells apart from the hint of sterilising agent in the recycled air within the suit. Obviously human olfactory senses didn’t have the reach of what her eyes could pull in. The same for taste.
Ears? It was still mostly silent in the world beyond. She heard her breathing, and the almost inaudible hum of the power suit, and beyond that ... occasional strange sounds she couldn’t interpret. Interference. Drips in an alien cave. A rattling pipe as something moved through it. An echo of a moan below soil. A hiss of escaping steam. They were none of those, of course, but she couldn’t shut off any interpretations. She had to be open, not base things on the rules she’d been brought up with. When in doubt she always went with her gut feelings.
Her bodily sensations though ... She examined the cold that ran through her, like wind at high elevations that almost felt like it penetrated you. It shifted, resembling air currents even more, and the shifting brought back her thoughts of motion and floating. Perhaps it was tied to how she moved. It buffeted one way and then the other. She opened her eyes and tried to feel it and see if
it matched anything out there.
It didn’t take long to see the connection. The other flickering places brightened slightly, dotted patterns and outlines glowing in the directions this mysterious cold flow came from, as if it caressed and excited the realities in its passing.
She explained all this to Aegis.
“Focus on it. You said that the rest of the world seems to jump, static changes between states, but that may be caused by this thing that passes through them. It could be useful.”
So she did follow it. Waves of cold brightness sweeping through the lands, banishing black as the shades temporarily brightened. And it was as if she could adjust her focal length even more, with practice, to track the changes nearer and further.
She remembered trying to teach Clarissa how to make herself cross-eyed by putting a fingertip a forearm’s length in front of her face and focussing on it, and keeping that focus as the fingertip slowly moved in to touch the tip of her nose. It was Opal’s fingertip, Clarissa’s nose, and Clarissa had laughed each time Opal tapped her nose tip but she persisted, until she could do it too. A trick; something learnt; and then you do away with the crutch of the fingertip because you remember how it feels to control it, and then you can do it instinctively whenever you wish.
She could already track the shimmering current, move with it, towards the areas that brightened, seemed more real, like looking through a rain-washed window in a storm and suddenly the rain stops and the blurred mess beyond starts to resolve into concrete walkways and graffiti once more.
“I can sense something,” she said. Even with her eyes closed she was aware of some kind of barrier in front of her. It had been there all along, moving with her as if she had a far smaller bubble surrounding her and close enough to touch. She’d only been able to sense it when she focussed on that distance, awareness attracted by a faint glow as the cold wind passed through her personal sphere, refreshing its outline.
And this time, when she opened her eyes, she could still make out this small spherical area’s circumference, like a skein of soft tissue. It made her think of a cornea, jelly-like, glistening. She was inside it, looking out.
More detail appeared, the longer she stared at it. There were patterns within the layer. The suit didn’t interrupt her with questions – maybe it could tell she was concentrating.
A pattern of interlocking designs. Like a texture, or writing based on raised bumps, or static models of atomic layouts. And she’d seen the pattern before, something familiar about it ... Yes. It was the alien shapes she’d seen on Lost Ships sometimes, built into rails or walkways, recurring in unexpected places. Spirals divided by criss-crossing lines, all interconnected like gears, like building blocks. They became clearer and grew in size the more she stared, like focussing on something fine in front of your face, a web, maybe, blurriness becoming distinct lines where there had been no lines moments before, until she could reach out and touch them. The wind passed through and they glowed, almost as if she manipulated them with her mind, could pull on them, or turn them. Hey, that reminded her of cracking a manual safe once, back when she needed access for ... no distractions, just focus.
She imagined them turning. One of them rippled. She frowned and concentrated harder, an action that felt vaguely familiar, like a memory of a half-remembered dream. And a motion began, one of the smallest angular spirals appearing to rotate in place, clicking into a new configuration. It stood out amongst the rest of the pattern now, yet still fitted into the whole. A divergence in the mass.
She tried to turn it again, using her mind to manipulate the cold winds of force passing through this barrier. The mental breeze refreshed the outlines, making them glow like blue fire. It rippled, but resisted turning. She gritted her teeth and tried to imagine the wind spiralling around, but it was not enough.
She relaxed. Sometimes brute force wasn’t appropriate. This was one shape amongst millions. She tried adjusting her mental focus, viewing it from a different perspective. Angles stretched and changed, but still all the spirals were subtly connected. A change in one would affect the others, but not break them. Maybe each one could only be turned so far alone, like a spring coiling up until it could get no tighter? She thought of herself as a coiled spring, full of tension. What would she do? How could she function? An individual only has so much strength, whether person or cog. She thought of Athene. Of Aegis. Of course ... when things get too much, you call for help to those nearby. Spread the load.
She switched to an adjacent spiral, imagined the breeze pushing on it, and it glowed in blue fire and rotated smoothly, clicking into the same configuration as the first. The movement felt right. She continued circling the first spiral, changing partners around it, becoming more fluid at making the transitions.
Where the shapes had been rotated, they had a different look to them. More transparent, like blue glass or coloured force fields. Mmm.
Then she began the larger ring around those she had changed, and realised that she was adjusting the small cogs in a spiral pattern. What had Athene said back on the Lost Ship? Something about the pattern containing fractal shapes that repeated at different scales. Opal knew how that worked. Whatever scale you looked at, the overall impression would be the same, just as you could take a grid of squares and draw boxes of many different sizes with the same shape. One big box, or four smaller ones, or sixteen even smaller ones. Always the same forms as you zoomed in.
Or out.
After she’d created another ring of rotated shapes, she imagined a change in perspective again, zooming out further, and trying to grip the whole new spiral made up of smaller rotated spirals. At first it resisted, as if it had mass, or faced friction, and she was forced to concentrate so hard that sweat broke out on her forehead ... but the collection began to shift and rotate further. A single movement, and it changed everything she’d already done in a fraction of the time. Instead of a pinprick, she rotated something the size of a fingertip.
The pale bluish area that she was creating resembled a hole now. An absence in the fractal spiral design’s canvas. Of course, it was too small to be useful ... but if she rotated more of the spirals at this scale, then she could do the same again once that ring was complete. She’d be moving something the size of a palm. Then it would be a forearm.
Then a body.
As she worked with ever-greater ease and speed, the shapes expanded, grew, a net of glowing patterns as larger circular patterns in the spirals unlocked, or opened, or whatever it looked like in simplistic human terms. It was also like glass cracking under force, the lines like fissures spreading out in a shatter pattern amongst the ever-larger angular spirals she rotated, creating a growing bluish absence in the atom-like building blocks. A gap was opening, and a memory echoed, the flesh portals on the first Lost Ship, the Humungrs able to transit through materials that way.
The blue glowing hole was large enough. Click, interact, grip on, and suddenly the fracture symbols pulled her in and through the pattern.
And it felt like she was being fed through a grater.
Mapping
< 9 >
SHE MANAGED NOT TO scream once she realised she was assembled again, still whole, with Aegis asking her what had happened. As her breathing slowed, she explained as best she could. She was in a new area, different topologies, these ones a swirling set of vortices as if whirlpools grew in and throughout the space, tugging her – sometimes smoothly, sometimes with greater force, almost possessive. She found it hard to maintain her calm in the turbulence.
The scenes beyond/within/coexisting had changed too. She had transited, from one location to another. She looked back, and saw the smaller area she’d first arrived at, now a distant sphere split by a rough divide which might have represented a rocky, alien plain below a sky, or a gaseous ocean separated from some other element.
“Amazing, Opal,” said the suit. “I’m playing catch up to you. Still unable to recognise what you detect, but the changing signals as you passed through wha
t you described as the broken glass shape –”
“The fracture point. That phrase stuck in my head.”
“Okay, as you passed through the fracture to a new area – that led to a spike in readings. If I can understand and replicate the key then I may be able to help speed things up.”
“Resources still running down?”
“Unfortunately, yes. And I cannot estimate when they will become critical because I don’t think local time matches our mental experience of it. But still, you are doing brilliantly. It’s almost as if you have been here before.”
Opal’s body was spun in another vortex, but she didn’t feel stressed: it was playful. She let it take her around a loop then used the strange mental propulsion she had here to fling herself out and into a more static area of space between the network of floating whirlpools.
“It feels strangely ... familiar. Opening the fracture was like something I already knew, a memory I just had to tug on, drag it out of the pile in the cluttered storage closet.”
“I suspect the familiarity is tied to the terrible connection made on your first Lost Ship, a form of cross-contamination. Some being became aware of you: but while it downloaded part of your mind, you also become aware of it, and some of what it knew. If you contain the entity’s memories at a deep down level you can draw on but not quite see, like learning a skill from someone else, then it explains a lot. The metaphor makes sense to me, since I can download data and skills in a similar way, and immediately know a new language or how to construct black- and red-figure pottery.”
“Pottery, with no hands?”
“Well, apparently you are seeing stuff with no eyes.”
“Good point.”
“Plus, I do have hands.” Aegis took control of the suit, moving the powerful arms and dragging Opal’s enclosed limbs too. Aegis wiggled gauntlet fingers and bounced its elbows in a frivolous dance before giving control back to Opal.
Chasing Solace Page 25