“More importantly, it’s what Hideo Yutani wants.”
It was silent for a moment as the engineer pondered.
“If I refuse to sign off?”
She started to respond, hesitated, and tried something new, gambling that he wouldn’t call her bluff.
“Then the Walter project gets shut down for lack of funding, and you and your team will be dispersed throughout the company to work on other projects.” She offered a tight smile. “Less intellectually stimulating projects. Probably with the same financial compensation but far, far less opportunity to make breakthroughs in neurological engineering.” Her voice dropped to a murmur. “Then there’s that Nobel Prize possibility.” Her expression twisted. “‘Hypothetical,’ of course. All gone.”
Looking up from where he sat, his gaze burned into hers. If there was such a thing as a black laser, she thought…
“You are pressuring me, Ms. Harbison.”
She didn’t flinch. “Of course I am. What do you expect me to do when reason and logic have failed? Or do you think that Gilead and I aren’t the recipients of even greater pressure from those above us?”
Sitting back, he nodded slowly. “I admit I hadn’t considered that when taking into account your position.”
“Why should you?” She gestured at the three heads-up displays replete with diagrams and dialogue sufficiently arcane as to mute understanding by all but a few specialists. “You and your team have been focused on your part of the Walter project to the exclusion of everything else.” Rising, she moved toward him and put a hand on his shoulder. He didn’t quite cringe. “We’re all under a great deal of pressure to deliver, Loess. Every other department—from musculature build to optics to internal stabilization—has given their go-ahead for Walter to be commissioned. Yours is the only one that has not.” She removed her hand and the tenseness went out of him.
“You understand my position,” she continued. “Mine and Gilead’s. Pre-departure downloads aside, in order for a synthetic to integrate fully and properly with the onboard AI known as Mother, it needs to be sent up to the ship soon. Very soon. Everyone concerned wants this to happen. Gilead and I want it to happen, Captain Brandon wants it to happen, the media wants it to happen, the Covenant’s crew wants it to happen. Most importantly, Hideo Yutani wants it to happen.”
For all his seriousness, Loess Steinmetz wasn’t without humor.
“Why do I get the impression that regardless of what I say or do, ‘it’ is going to happen?” He covered his mouth and coughed delicately. “Sometimes I think I should have skipped engineering and joined my father’s medical practice in Frankenstein.”
Harbison was taken aback. “In where?”
He smiled at her startled response.
“Frankenstein. It’s a small town in the mountains west of Heidelberg.” He turned wistful. “A beautiful little place at the bottom of a deep, winding canyon. There is even a ruined castle on a crag overlooking the town and…” He stopped, then started anew. “Life’s path is filled with ironies. Do not let anyone tell you differently.”
She snapped herself back to the moment. “I put it to you, Loess. With the best will in the world. Will you, as department head, sign off on your segment of the Walter project, or will you risk it being shut down?” She made it sound as inevitable as possible. “You know that once your department is disbanded, we’ll find others to take over the work, and this first Walter will be sent up to the Covenant anyway?”
He eyed her shrewdly. “I am not certain you would risk that. Any subsequent failure of an improperly vetted synthetic could jeopardize the entire mission. In turn, that could put at risk the entire future of Weyland-Yutani.”
She did not dispute his appraisal. “All true, with the caveat that the report of any such failure, coming from deep space, would take so long to reach Earth that you, me, and Mr. Yutani himself could all be dead before anyone could react.” And, she added silently to herself, no Nobel Prize consideration for you, Loess Steinmetz.
A sudden new thought prompted her to add, “Is that what you think might have happened to the Prometheus mission? A failure of the David synthetic?”
He looked away. “We certainly have no way of knowing what happened to Peter Weyland and his ship. In deep space, all things are possible. It’s highly probable we will never know.” His eyes found hers again. “As the first of its kind, there were always ‘issues’ with David. That is what my team and I have been working overtime to try to resolve. We believe we have done so, but we are not yet a hundred percent sure.”
She pursed her lips again. “Would you say that you and your team are ninety-nine percent sure? Ninety-eight percent?” She waited for a response. Just when it seemed that none would be forthcoming, he replied. With obvious reluctance.
“Something like that. It pains me to say it, though.”
“Why? You’re an engineer, not a mathematician. You’re allowed a certain leeway.” Satisfied, she turned away from him and toward the office portal. “If you were building a bridge and I asked you if it would last a thousand years, and you told me you could only be sure it would last nine hundred and ninety-five, I would be quite happy with that.”
He mumbled a reply. “Unless you were the one driving on it in the year nine hundred and ninety-six.”
She felt she had coddled and cajoled him long enough.
“You’ll sign off on Walter?”
For a long moment she feared the entire meeting, as had many before it, had been for naught. Finally, he nodded, but without looking at her. His attention once again focused on the multiple heads-up displays.
“Give me and the team another week. I believe, I hope, we can finalize any remaining concerns in that time.”
“I’ve got confidence in you.” Standing in the open portal now, she looked back at him. Her tone was unyielding. “You’ve got twenty-four hours. You’re a smart man, Loess. A very smart man. Engineer it.”
* * *
The portal closed, leaving Steinmetz alone with his thoughts. In front of him, the triple heads-up display continued to gleam brightly; facts and figures and on one, a face. The face of Walter.
Beside it, the face of his predecessor, David.
Only a few seemingly minor issues yet to be resolved. They would be resolved, he told himself firmly. Based on what Harbison had told him, he had no choice.
The two faces gazing back at him were identical. Behind the faces, they were not. Small, small differences. Steinmetz’s right hand swept from his forehead across his skull and came to rest against the back of his neck.
It was fortunate, he thought. Fortunate for Harbison, for Gilead, for Captain Brandon and his crew, and the thousand-plus colonists who had consigned themselves and their future to an unknown, distant planet. Fortunate for them that Loess Steinmetz loved his job. He bent to it.
He would make Walter work.
* * *
Too much death. Too much dying.
He knew it was a vision dream, but he could not wake up. He never could. They always had to play themselves out first. Sleep was torment because he never knew when the visions would strike. Just as he never knew exactly where they came from, or why he was able to view them—if there was some purpose behind them or if some trick of the mind or genetics or the atmosphere or something that allowed him, of all people, to see them.
To suffer them endlessly.
Sometimes the inhabitants of the vision were so real, so near, that he was sure if he reached up and out he could touch them. It might be a victim, shredded, blood and bone and guts flying. Or it might be one of the killers, remorseless and horrific. He couldn’t choose because he had no control. He could no more determine what to do in vision than he could choose whether to dream one or not.
Subconsciously he knew there were others in the room with him. They were often there when he awoke. They were there to comfort him, to mop his brow and slow his breathing and monitor his vitals. They took notes and interpreted and made drawing
s and animations from what he called out. Though these were as accurate as the visitors could make them they could not—even at their most terrifying—equate to what he dreamed.
But the horror was enough to convince others, to recruit them to the cause, to persuade them that no sacrifice was too great to prevent the dream visions from becoming reality. They were brave, the recruits were, and dedicated.
Some were also a little insane, but that in no way diminished their effectiveness. It actually helped. When confronting terrors beyond human ken, a little imbalance helped to make them more tolerable.
XII
Duncan Fields was mad. Not angry mad, not hormonally mad, not even conjugally mad, for he had been single his entire life. No, he was truly, totally, thoroughly mad.
As in crazed.
Insane.
Either that, or he was a prophet. Or perhaps simply a clever manipulator of his fellow man. Opinion among the uncertain was much divided. In contrast, to his acolytes it didn’t really matter. They believed what he believed. Among themselves they shared one thought, one conviction, above all.
“Oh-tee-bee-dee.”
To a non-initiate it sounded almost childish, something to be whispered in play to a young child or accompanied by cheerful whistling on a summer day. To those who knew its meaning, the fragment of rhythmic doggerel was a matter of utmost seriousness. For all that, the followers of Fields would have insisted they were not fanatics.
Those who believed in his revelations looked less like the members of a religious cult than the fans who filled a sports stadium. They labored at ordinary jobs, worked at a variety of businesses and public institutions. There was nothing outwardly distinctive about their physical appearances, their clothing, their choices of music, or their diets. They came from all ages and genders. Most important of all, they believed in what they were fighting for.
The future. Of all humankind. Nothing less.
For a long time the Prophet had kept on the move from city to city, town to town, even shuttling between his island home and the continent. Once, long ago, he had been a paunchy adjuster for an insurance agency. Unmarried but with prospects, pleasant to look upon in a dumpy sort of way, he had cleaved to cultural standards in dress and speech.
The nightmares had changed him.
That they weren’t normal night dreams he believed from the beginning. Nightmares did not repeat themselves over and over again, day upon day, week after week. Not long after they commenced he began to fear sleep, but while his mind was strong, his body was weak. It needed rest. So Duncan Fields slept, and dreamed, and awoke screaming.
He tried therapy. He tried sedatives. He tried exotic herbs and soothing music, good herbs and questionable pharmaceuticals. Nothing prevented or mitigated the nightmares.
It took a while, but eventually he came to a sober if extraordinary conclusion. His nightmares must reflect a reality. There was no other explanation for their exceptional clarity, for their frequency of recurrence, for the exactitude of their imagery. What they portended frightened him. To be rid of them, a weaker man might have committed suicide.
Fields decided to fight back. Not only for the sake of his own future, but for that of his fellow human beings. Such admirable conviction didn’t change the fact that he was mad, however.
But he was convincing, as well. The horrors that were recorded and interpreted convinced more than a few hesitant recruits to join the organization. Some were geniuses who could give form to the fear, creating visuals that wielded at least some of the visceral terror. That they had tapped into Duncan’s psyche so effectively was nothing short of amazing. It was enough to make him believe in telepathy.
It was enough to influence a small army of converts. Those who were reluctant were sometimes ushered into his bedroom to hear his screams for themselves. Sometimes they had to be physically restrained by fellow converts, lest they themselves try to run in terror from the bedchamber.
Perhaps it was his ordinariness that helped him persuade so many others to join him in his crusade. Perhaps it was the fact that he sought nothing for himself. Not wealth, not property, not fame, not sexual gratification, not the unblemished adulation of a multitude of followers. His cause was entirely altruistic and his rallying cry as simple as could be imagined.
“Oh-tee-bee-dee.”
The building that served as the movement’s headquarters was as unprepossessing as its founder. Much of the ancient sheep farm located in southern Hampshire featured revamped original buildings and stone walls in the pastures. No one in the area thought it unusual that the current owners, whoever they might be, had converted it into an exclusive rest home, combined with a working farm. The designation and zoning allowed for the regular comings and goings of more visitors than would have been expected at an ordinary sheep ranch. So did the conversion and updating of old ranch buildings to accommodate the steady if unremarkable flow of visitors.
What could not be seen from the country road that led to the ranch were the “refurbishments” that had been made. Much of the work had been done underground. Hardened bunkers, food and energy storage, living facilities, and much more had been quietly excavated and made ready. Of particular priority were their engineering and laboratory facilities, where their work ran parallel to many other organizations—including Weyland-Yutani and the Jutou Combine. Converts had come from many walks of life, and many brought with them data that proved useful.
Should it become necessary to refuse entry to intruders, effective defenses had been carefully emplaced. While not as threatening as the horrors portrayed in the prophet’s dreams, they were sufficiently deadly in their own right. Extremism in the defense of the planet was no vice.
Not when the future of the species was at stake. Fields lamented what had to be done. It wasn’t the fault of others that they couldn’t see what he dreamed. He was determined to save them from themselves. His resolve, in contrast to his stature, was mighty. It had to be, given the intensity and the nature of what drove him.
His followers had constructed private quarters for him that were separate from the main building, but connected to it by an enclosed walkway. The passage was well-monitored by security. The Prophet had his privacy, yet was not isolated.
The separation was as much to protect the sanity of his acolytes as to offer him some solitude. Though the nightmares were the foundation of his movement, he never ceased to find them personally embarrassing, and chose to suffer them in seclusion. Only when they lasted particularly long or were unusually disturbing did he allow his followers to intervene.
* * *
The chorus of howls and screams that sounded over the speakers at three o’clock on a Tuesday morning were both unceasing and unsettling. On night duty, Earle from Site Monitoring was the first to respond. Satchel in hand, Bismala from Dispensary met him at the entrance to the covered concourse. Dina, her assistant, hauled an additional basket of medications and medical devices.
As they walked quickly toward the single structure at the terminus of the pathway, the doctor was already preparing a hypush.
Windows punched in the walls of the covered corridor offered a view of the Hampshire countryside. At night and on bad days, the pollution drifting down from Britain’s northern industrial cities could be thick enough to obscure the moonlight. Thankfully, the miasma that enveloped Greater London usually went in the other direction. Inhabitants of the French coast had long since resigned themselves to tolerating the permanent brown cloud.
At the far end of the concourse the watchman, doctor, and doctor’s assistant halted before a double door. The twin barrier was intended as much to keep sound in as it was unauthorized intruders out. Earle passed a hand over the integrated sensor, then leaned forward so a lens could scan his right retina. As he stepped aside, Bismala took his place and repeated the actions, followed lastly by the diminutive Dina. Accepting their identification, the outer door slid aside.
They stepped into an alcove where they were scanned again, th
is time by full-body instrumentation. That completed, the inner door opened and they strode quickly through the pleasantly decorated antechamber. By now, they were close enough to hear Fields’s screaming and moaning, even though the next door was closed.
“It sounds bad,” Dina offered, but she got no response.
Once inside the darkened bedchamber, Earle moved to a communications panel to assure his comrades in Security that he and the medical personnel had arrived. Having heard it all too many times before, he forced himself to ignore the screaming coming from the figure lying in the oversized bed nearby.
Laying her satchel down, Bismala sat on the side of the bed and took the loaded hypush from her assistant. The device’s internal light allowed her to double-check its contents.
He lay in the center of the bed—tossing, turning, and howling, kicking at unseen sights, his arms flailing at the empty night air. Though he was not yet fifty, his hair had turned completely white. His closed eyelids flickered wildly. Bismala didn’t know what he was seeing. No one did. It was enough for her and for the others that they were real to him.
She glanced at a monitoring device mounted in the wall to the side of the bed. Everything was recorded and available for later playback. In some ways, the recordings were more powerful than Fields’s waking presence. Freeze-framing the tormented expressions on his face yielded a profound effect, and had proved to be an effective recruitment tool.
Pressing the loaded hypush against the upper part of his right arm, she depressed the red button at one end. The pharmaceutical cocktail contained in the device passed immediately and painlessly into Fields’s body.
It took about a minute for the drugs to take effect.
The kicking and flailing slowed, then ceased. The sleeping man’s moans grew less distressed. Finally, they stopped. Bismala took a deep breath and turned to her companions.
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