by W D County
The storm passed. Stars appeared in a clear sky. He clung to a sense of hope as the dream faded. The Awareness moved on.
***
Laura Dubov dreamt of an endless dark gray ocean that stretched to the far horizon and plunged to depths beyond the reach of light. No sunlight penetrated the overcast sky. She treaded water and wondered why she bothered.
The edge of a rainbow sliced through the gray existence to touch the sea mere feet away. Descending upon the colored ribbon came the tesseract, glittering like diamonds in colors and patterns no earthly gem could match. It caught and held the eye as it came to rest above the still water.
What are you?
She regarded it with morbid detachment. Once upon a time the workings of the mind fascinated her. She would have wondered if this were a dream, a hallucination, or some “undigested piece of meat,” to quote Dickens. But few things mattered any more. I’m nothing, she thought. Let me sink beneath the waves. She closed her eyes and waited for oblivion.
“Oh, you’re definitely something,” said a male voice. She opened her eyes and saw Barry walking across the water toward her. He smiled. “You just need a reminder.”
From the corner of her eye she caught motion from the tesseract. A splash of salt water pelted her face. Something round drifted into her arms. A life preserver, attached to a rope that led to the tesseract. And on the hypercube—
John. Her John. He peered out an open cubic hatch. His hands held the rope of her life ring. He began pulling her toward him.
“I’m dreaming,” she said, suddenly terrified.
Barry strolled beside her as she moved through the water. “Why should dreams be any less real than your waking awareness?”
She bumped against an unyielding wall of the tesseract. The wall didn’t seem to exist for her husband, who tried in vain to pull her through. The rope could pass, but not one inch of her skin or clothing.
“It’s not yet your time,” Barry said.
Her husband disagreed. “Don’t listen to him. The mind is more powerful than the body. You know that. If you want to join me, nothing can stop you.”
“Oh, God.” She looked into John’s eyes and reached for him, willing her hand to go through the barrier. John smiled and nodded encouragement.
“No,” Barry said in a voice of authority. “That way lies death. There is another way.” The face of the hypercube where her husband resided rotated out of this universe. John vanished, the lifeline severed, and she sank into the ocean. Salt water stung her eyes and filled her mouth.
She thrashed, struggling to regain the surface. To wake up. The water turned to bed sheets. She sat bolt upright, fully awake and knowing she wasn’t alone. She turned on a table lamp, but the room appeared to be empty. The feeling of being watched persisted.
The Awareness hesitated, then moved on. Lingering at the periphery of her mind would not yield deeper understanding, not with the waters of thought muddied by Barry’s intrusion.
***
Zita Ferrari dreamt of fog. Thick and heavy as folds of an old blanket, yet light as mist from a child’s sigh. Its swirls tricked the eye, turning the world flat by hiding shadows and then going one better by stealing away colors until gray alone remained on the palette of a paint-by-number universe.
She wasn’t used to having somber dreams, but she relaxed into this one, reasoning that variety helped emphasize contrasts and therefore made happiness happier and colors more colorful. Eventually. Anyway, a distant light strove to penetrate the fog, so she made her way toward it. She expected it to be the tesseract, and so it was, but she reached it sooner than expected, as if it had been making its way toward her.
What are you?
As it turned slowly in midair, she admired the millions of interlocking parts, although there could be more than a million pieces, more than a billion, maybe even infinite, although that felt wrong because capturing infinite detail in a finite physical object would run short of space, even if you went down to the subatomic level and began overlapping quantum states. Then again, the tesseract possessed more than three spatial dimensions, and so the question remained as to whether the possibilities were endless or just very, very many. The taint fascinated her more than anything else ever had. It was the greatest puzzle in the world, maybe the universe.
The tesseract slowed as if inviting her to touch it. She started to reach for it, then sensed the object wanted her to do that, which made her afraid to touch it, because having wants implied intelligence, and she’d never encountered an intelligent inorganic object. Well, except for computers, but their intelligence wasn’t innate, it was built-in by intelligent biological creators, i.e., people, whereas intelligence in people was innate, a naturally emergent phenomenon according to many scientists, although many religious fundamentalists disputed the contention.
Some of the fractal pieces looked like shiny mirrors. She saw blurry reflections of herself at other places and ages. Memories? She stepped back warily. The images stopped trying to focus; instead they shifted to new patterns that formed new puzzles, puzzles within puzzles, each irresistibly alluring. She took another step back. The tesseract moved toward her. Invisible tendrils grasped at her mind. She spun and ran into the fog of undifferentiated subconsciousness. The tesseract followed.
She normally liked dreams, which in some ways were puzzles that revealed unsuspected connections of thoughts, memories, and feelings. She often directed how her dreams unfolded, but this one didn’t respond to her control, and it wasn’t at all fun, so she woke herself.
The nightmare shattered. The taint’s million billion confetti colors vanished, extinguished by the darkness of the room. Fuzzy bits of fragmented memories joined the cold embers of past dreams. Now completely awake, Zita let her mind wander through fields of bright, cheerful memories while her galloping heartbeat slowed to a canter, and her breathing eased from heavy gusts to gentle breezes. She hugged Shere Khan, her threadbare stuffed tiger, a wounded warrior with a patch over one eye because the button had fallen out years ago and she couldn’t bear the thought of sticking a needle in his eye to sew it back on.
An impulse urged her to dress and go to Miles again, but she resisted, much as she had resisted the desire to touch the taint, but for very different reasons. One, for all his macho exterior, Miles was afraid of something. Worse, he denied seeing what they both saw. She didn’t like cowards or liars, but an even more important reason prevented her going to his room: a frightened young lady visiting a strong, handsome, mysterious man in the middle of the night could lead to something she wasn’t ready to let happen. When he looked at her, she saw desire underneath his disdain. She needed to be careful around him. Not because he found her attractive, but because she didn’t want him to know the feeling was mutual.
The Awareness moved on, puzzled.
***
Miles Reardon slept. The stuff of which dreams are made sailed the gray sea of his subconscious but could find no place to land.
Chapter 12
I woke before dawn, though dawn had no meaning in this underworld facility. A few minutes of calisthenics cleared away the last remnants of sleep, followed by a jog through the corridors, empty and silent but for the sound of my breathing and the slap of my Reeboks on concrete. I kept telling myself I was the meanest, toughest SOB here, but the mantra didn’t take hold. Thoughts of Steampunk messed with my mind.
At 0700, I showered, donned my combat utility uniform, strapped on my gun, and headed to the vault. The monitors all showed Choirboy asleep on the bed—but the handcuffs dangled empty from the bedrail.
The messed-up part of my mind suddenly focused, remembering the glass shard. I sat down at the console and flipped up the cover for the button that would flood the vault with cyanide gas. But before bringing down death, destruction, and the probable end of my military career, I checked the digital access log. Someone had entered the vault access code just after 2100, but he hadn’t worn a name tag. The RFID reader recorded nothing, but it had to be either
Doc or Kingpin.
I cued the video recordings to find out. They showed Doc and Mopes entering the observation room. Doc let the shrink into the vault, where she proceeded to remove the patient’s handcuffs.
A long breath hissed through my teeth. The woman had nearly signed Choirboy’s death warrant by acting on her own. Doc pissed me off, too. He knew better.
***
I stormed into the mess hall ready to read Doc the riot act. Then I’d tear into Mopes. Kingpin would back me up. A boss needed to discipline subordinates who disobeyed orders. A quick scan of the room showed Kingpin wasn’t there. Why wait?
The table with Doc and the others seemed strangely subdued. The complete lack of conversation left the crunch of Steampunk eating granola louder than the clink of knives and forks poking at eggs and sausage.
“Doc, why the hell did you let Dubov enter the vault after hours?”
He looked up, startled. So did everyone else, pulled from their silent ponderings by my irate shout. Doc quickly regained his composure, and with it an attitude of his own. “I don’t take orders from you, Miles.”
I gave a start as Kingpin said, “You answer to me.” He’d snuck up behind me. Embarrassing.
“Ah, Gordon,” Doc said. “We might as well get this over with. Yes, Laura and I took the cuffs off the patient.”
I stepped aside as Kingpin loomed over Doc. “Why?” The boss managed to turn that one word into a landmine.
Mopes answered, “He’s a victim, yet we treat him as a prisoner. He deserves sympathy.”
Kingpin waved his hands like an umpire calling a runner out. “No. Victim or not, he’s a potential threat until we understand the phenomenon.”
“Taint,” said Steampunk between mouthfuls.
Kingpin turned to Doc. “Is the patient sedated?”
Doc shook his head. “No—”
“He takes solace in religion,” Mopes blurted. “I gave him a Bible. Showed him some basic human kindness.”
Kingpin’s brows nearly fused together as he glared at Doc and the shrink. “He’s suicidal and possibly homicidal. He must be restrained for his own good... and ours.”
I felt vindicated and hoped Kingpin would tear each of them a new asshole.
Mopes said, “Restraints will only impair his progress. What’s needed is mutual trust.”
Doc added, “There’s nothing in the room he can use to harm himself.”
Kingpin waved dismissively. “I don’t want to argue the matter now.” A forced smile replaced his scowl as my own smile turned upside down. “Before we go over today’s schedule, I’m happy to say that the special equipment you requested has arrived.” He reached into a pocket and pulled out a box the size of a pack of cigarettes. He handed it to Slick. “Zener cards. I put the second deck in your quarters.”
Slick managed to look pleased and annoyed simultaneously. Kingpin turned to Steampunk. “Zita, there’s a sketch pad and colored gel pens in your room.”
“You could have left it outside my door.”
“Sonja, additional magnets are available in the physics lab. Doc, a fresh white rat is in the biolab.”
Murmured thanks came in varying degrees of insincerity. No one appreciated Kingpin’s surprise invasion of their rooms. An alpha needs to establish dominance, but I had my doubts about whether Kingpin qualified as top dog.
Mopes said, “I’d like you to order six modified Pavloks. One for each of us.”
“What’s a Pavlok?” Doc asked.
Mopes raised her left hand to display her watch. “A tool for conditioning a response. This one is modified to allow shorter time intervals and deliver a higher voltage shock.”
“Tasers work just fine,” I said.
Mopes favored me with a brittle smile. “To a soldier, everything’s a weapon. The Pavlok is for shocking yourself. It’s useful for waking up from a dream or hypnotic trance.”
My temper rose. “Whatever. The cuffs need to stay on the patient. Yesterday you made a big deal of working as a team. Then you and Doc go off on your own and take off his cuffs. When I checked on the patient this morning, I thought he’d freed himself. I almost killed him. Don’t pull a stunt like this again without letting the rest of us know in advance.”
“Kill?” she said, eyebrow raised. “Barry was locked safely in the vault.”
“Maybe not for long.” All eyes turned to me. Shit. Me and my big mouth.
“What do you mean?” Mopes asked.
I looked to Steampunk for backup. She crunched, swallowed, and said, “Tell them.”
Now their faces pivoted between the two of us with suspicion writ large on each face. Steampunk frowned like an impatient drill instructor.
“Wasn’t sure what I saw at first,” I said, irritated that she’d kept the ball in my court. Her glare pushed me to go on. “When Fletcher slashed at his throat with the broken glass, he didn’t miss. The shard passed through him like a ghost.” Hauser would chew me a new asshole for not telling him that yesterday.
A second passed, and then Brainiac laughed. “Optical illusion. Trick of lighting. Happens all the time.” Derision emphasized her words. She turned to Slick. “Doesn’t it?”
Steampunk slammed her spoon on the table. “I saw it, too. And afterward, when he was on the floor, the shard was lodged in his tainted arm, yet it wasn’t bleeding. I moved the glass in and out of Barry’s hand without spilling any blood or leaving any wound because the taint protected him, changing his body somehow, maybe chemically, maybe accessing a new dimension, that’s what we need to find out. But we need to be careful. The taint is dangerous. We have no idea how it thinks or what kind of moral code it has or doesn’t have.”
“Is this some kind of joke?” Doc said. “I take blood and tissue samples all the time. He’s as real and solid as you or me.”
“He has an aura,” Slick said. “It senses danger and protects him.”
Brainiac grimaced. “There is no aura. The phenomenon is an optical effect.”
“Hallucination,” whispered Mopes.
I eased the combat knife from my leg sheath. “I can settle this discussion. Let’s go to the vault for a demonstration.”
They looked shocked at first, and then secondary responses kicked in. Mopes’s face contorted. “You want him dead! The man hasn’t done anything to you.”
Kingpin said, “Put the knife away.” He stared at me and then nodded as if to himself. “That’s why you considered killing the patient. The cuffs were off, and you thought he could pass through solid objects. Maybe escape the vault.”
I met his cold, calculating eyes with my own and nodded.
“Don’t kill the patient, Reardon. Not without my authorization.”
Mopes stood. “Can’t you see how you’re dehumanizing Barry? You won’t even use his name. It’s not Barry whose lost his humanity, it’s you. Both of you.” She fled from the room.
Brainiac said, “What happened to the... to poor Barry Fletcher... is a tragedy.” Although she said his name with deliberate reverence, the coldness never left her eyes. “But we cannot forget that the phenomenon killed three people and transformed Barry’s body into a potentially dangerous object. The patient’s life might well be forfeit in the more important need to understand and control the phenomenon.”
“Taint,” said Steampunk, an edge in her voice. “We agreed to use the word taint because we need to work as a team, and that agreement was our first act of teamwork. As a team we have to keep our word, it’s a bond that holds society together so we don’t all wallow in lies and deceit. Honesty is particularly important for a scientist, isn’t it, Sonja?” Her face turned to each of us in order. “And to a doctor? A soldier? A leader?”
Brainiac stared down her nose at Steampunk. “Very well, taint it is.” She promptly turned to Doc. “I’ll need your grayed clothing,” she said. “To study secondary effects.”
Doc said, “I’ll drop them off in Physics Lab 1.”
I tapped the blade of my knife on
the tabletop. “Mr. Maxwell, you just acknowledged that the taint is dangerous. Don’t ignore my concern about the patient being cut-proof.”
“Miles, you can’t even see the taint.”
“I can,” chirped Steampunk. “Better than anyone else. I don’t advocate Barry being hacked up by Miles’s machete, but some sort of experiment is necessary to demonstrate what happened. Maybe Doc could use a scalpel to make a cut and the TV cameras could record everything in HD so we can study it after and in addition to seeing firsthand how the taint responds to threats. Or would you rather lock me up like you threatened to do yesterday?”
Kingpin’s gaze flicked to me. I leaned back and kept my mouth shut.
The boss turned to Doc. “Can you make a cut and bandage it with minimal blood loss?”
“I won’t inflict needless harm to a patient.”
“Fine. I’ll have Miles make the cut.”
The tension lasted at least six heartbeats.
Slick said, “Your interpersonal skills are amazing, Gordon. With a bit more effort, I’m sure you could piss off everybody. Oh, never mind. You already have.”
Kingpin stayed focused on Doc, who swore, and then through gritted teeth said, “Fine. I’ll do it.”
Curiously, most of his anger seemed directed toward me. Tough shit. “The cuffs need to go back on,” I said. “On the untainted wrist.”
Doc said coldly, “Disease doesn’t make flesh permeable to metal. Or to glass.”
“Humor the sergeant,” Kingpin said. “Here’s the schedule, everyone. After the cutting experiment, you may each have a thirty-minute session with the patient, subject to color drain limits. Zita first, then Sonja. The patient gets an hour break, then meets with Nathan, followed by Laura.”
“What about Doc?” Slick asked.
“He’s already had more time than anyone else.” Kingpin looked to Doc. “But if you need more time, go in an hour after Laura. Anyone else that needs more time today, see me.”
Mopes asked, “Why am I last? I was last yesterday.”
“You need time to cool down.” Kingpin’s gaze panned faces around the table. “We’ll start at nine, after I’ve had breakfast. Take time to formulate ideas on the nature of the taint. Devise appropriate discerning tests.”