The Primus Labyrinth

by Scott Overton

  “If you can keep your eyes on the screen,” she said thickly, “you’ll see the path we had planned for the Primus to take . . . .” She punched a key and a jagged pattern of lines glowed brighter red. “And the way you actually went.” The second string of vessels glowed yellow.

  It was easy to see where it deviated from the first, and carried on for a significant distance before concluding at the same point: the bomb. It reminded Hunter of the mazes in puzzle books that a favorite aunt had occasionally bought him when he was a kid. There weren’t supposed to be two solutions.

  Tamiko turned to him again, her mouth set tightly. “How hard could it be, you asked? You made at least ten turns after going off course. Ten turns, apparently at random, and yet you still managed to reach the target. The odds against a flipped coin landing on heads ten times in a row are more than a thousand to one. This . . . this . . . .” She swept her hand toward the monitor. “I don’t know how to calculate it.”

  “It’s not as preposterous as you think,” he said. “Most of the time in there I only have one possible turning at a given moment. I can take it or leave it. It is like flipping a coin. That makes it long odds, sure, but not impossible.”

  “Ridiculous,” Tamiko snapped. “Each change of course provided dozens of completely new possibilities. Yet you beat those odds and managed to find the bomb. Luck! Do you actually expect me to believe that? How stupid do you think I am?”

  “Well then, what do you think happened?” He didn’t really expect an answer. He just didn’t know what else to say.

  “I’ve thought about that.” She reached over and cleared the display on the screen. “Since Devon told me not to say anything about the course deviation, and then pretended afterward that nothing had happened, it’s pretty clear. The two of you cooked up another course somehow, and followed that instead. What I can’t figure out is why he’d send me off on a wild goose chase with all the resources that went into the new nav system.”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake, Lucy. Kierkegaard wouldn’t do that to you. Neither would I. There has to be a logical explanation but I honestly don’t know what it is. Maybe you and I can figure it out together.” He raised his hands in a placatory gesture and said, “Have a drink with me. I could use one. Especially now.”

  “Why? So I can watch you smash some more glassware?”

  He shook his head, embarrassed that her already-poor opinion of him had sunk to a new low. “No, I . . . I don’t drink that much anymore.” And he wanted to believe it himself. “Just a beer or two. Wherever you want to go. I need a break from this place, and we . . . .we need to build some trust. We’re on the same side. Honest.”

  Her face was still dark with anger, but she finally nodded and walked from the room, flicking off the lights as she went. The object of her displeasure followed a few steps behind.

  The club was in a part of the base he hadn’t seen before. The clientele appeared to include more civilians than the other base watering holes. That would make sense. Lucy Tamiko had a low tolerance for the military type.

  She made no pretense of asking his preference, walking straight to a corner booth and saying nothing until after the waitress had taken her order for a martini. Hunter felt the urge to comment on her choice, but decided against it. Right then, she would take everything he said as implied criticism.

  While they waited for the drinks to arrive he thought hard to come up with some small talk that might lighten the mood.

  “Tamiko . . . it sounds Japanese, but you don’t look . . . .”

  “My father was Japanese, my mother was Filipino, and I was born in Canada.”

  “You’re Canadian? How did you get in on a secret project like this one?”

  “I imagine Devon had to pull a few strings, but it shouldn’t have been that hard. Most Americans don’t make much of a distinction between Americans and Canadians—they mainly figure we’re American-wannabees.”

  “Is it true?”

  “No. Oh there are a few who’d like us to become the fifty-first state. There are also Americans who choose to go north and live in Canada. But mostly we admire the good things you do, shake our heads at the bad things, soak up your culture, and congratulate ourselves that we don’t have your race and gun problems.”

  “Why did you come here, then?”

  She sighed. “Like a lot of others—about half of Hollywood, I think—I found there just weren’t enough opportunities in my field in my own country. So you go where the work is. America’s been good to me. I have no complaints.”

  He couldn’t decide where to go from there, but then the drinks arrived. Once the waitress was gone, his companion wasted no more time.

  “So why would you and Devon lead me on . . . keep me out of the loop? Tell the truth—nobody can hear us.”

  Hunter sighed as he leaned back in the chair, took a long sip of bourbon, and set his glass down firmly. “OK. Forget about me for the moment. Why in the world do you think Devon would do that to you? His job is nearly impossible as it is, without wasting the few resources we have.”

  “I don’t know why,” Tamiko hissed. “I only know that what you did isn’t explainable by luck, and until you offer me a better explanation . . . .”

  “There isn’t an explanation you’ll like any better. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I don’t understand it myself. Somehow I just . . . know where to go. I’ve been feeling that kind of thing more and more each time I go inside. I don’t know if it’s just that my brain is adapting to the VR equipment, or if something else is . . . guiding me.” Her face was taut—non-committal, but clearly skeptical. “I know that sounds ridiculous, but I truly can’t describe it any other way.”

  Would she accept that? She took a gulp of her drink and made a face.

  “Damn drink has too much vermouth. Well, at least I’m convinced that I’m not going to hear a more believable explanation from you tonight.” Her hand tapped the table irritably. “I need a smoke. Except I quit. You smoke?”

  “Nah, alcoholism is enough for me.”

  She didn’t smile, but she didn’t bite his head off, either. “Are you really an alcoholic?”

  “I don’t . . . think so,” he said. “I may have had a few too many the last while. Doc Bridges would probably tell you it’s a reaction to an accident I had a while ago. But in the oil rig business, it was just a given that you downed a few beers after your shift to replace all the sweat you lost. Maybe now it’s time to cut down. Not so much manual labor involved in my current job.” He smiled to himself, and thought he actually saw a softening in her face. Or had he just imagined it? “You date many alcoholics?” he asked.

  Her eyebrows shot up. “Don’t go thinking this is a date. I don’t date people I work with.”

  “Why not? A bad experience?”

  “That’s not a story I need to tell you.”

  “Just please tell me it didn’t involve someone on our team.”

  She gave a look of disgust. “Who did you think I’d be romancing? Skylar Tyson? Kenneth Gage? Or did you figure Lorelei and I had a little fling?”

  He laughed. “So what, then? No, let me guess . . . you were a graduate student, or an intern, and he was a professor. A May/September thing.”

  She glared at him. “I was a full faculty member, I’ll have you know. More than that, you don’t need to know. Anyway, it was a good thing. It made me realize that the academic environment wasn’t right for me. I needed to be in research. At the cutting edge.”

  “Well you made it there, in spades. But it seems to me you just admitted that dating a co-worker could be a good thing.” He smiled and took another sip of bourbon. She responded with a look of annoyance, then put the ball back in his court.

  “So why don’t you have a girlfriend waiting off-base to fill your spare time? Or do you?”

  “Nope.” He shook his head. “Not as of a few months ago, anyway. I figure it’s just as well.”

  “Wh
y? What happened?”

  He swallowed the last of his drink and ordered another for each of them.

  “Ever hear of a place called Stingray City?” he asked, watching the waitress walk away.

  “Stingrays . . . cars or fish? No, wait—I have heard of it. In the Cayman Islands, right?”

  “Yeah. It’s a shallow sand bar in the middle of a big lagoon on Grand Cayman. The stingrays gather there like pigeons in a park, waiting for people to feed them. Dozens and dozens of them, tame as anything. Charter groups have been going there for years. A guide feeds them scraps of squid while you stand in chest-deep water with mask and fins, watching. Touching. I mean these things swoop around you . . . between your legs, sometimes. One of them even gave me a hickey on my back—I must’ve rubbed against a bit of squid.”

  “Doesn’t anybody ever get stung?”

  “They say nobody ever has. Of course, you’re pretty careful about where you step, but they aren’t menacing. They’re fantastic to watch—some are about a foot-and-a-half across, others are twice that. Or more. It’s amazing.”

  “Except your lady friend didn’t like it.”

  “Hated it.” He nodded. “Freaked her right out. I couldn’t even get her to go back in the water for the rest of the trip. Then I made the mistake of reminding her about it a few weeks later.”

  “At a party? No . . . in the bedroom.”

  “Yeah, stupid move. I pretended I was a stingray, swooping around . . . . She went into hysterics and started throwing things at me.” He gave a sheepish laugh at the memory. “I think it was then that we got the idea maybe we weren’t the perfect match.” He took the second bourbon from the waitress, and took a long sip. The image in his mind was comical, but the memory was still painful.

  Tamiko shook her head, but couldn’t help smiling. “Of course you weren’t a good match. You’re a scuba diver, right? And a submersible pilot. Obviously you like to be out there, exploring on the edge. You needed somebody with the same curiosity as you, and a scientific mind.”

  “Yeah. That’s what I’ve been thinking lately, too.” He paused, looking at her eyes, gauging them. Then, “You know there’s a place . . . .”

  “Hunter! Tamiko!”

  They looked around for the source of the voice. It was Gage, approaching from a few tables away. He motioned with his arm.

  “Devon’s pouring champagne in the staff lounge. He sent me to find you. Come on!”

  Hunter looked at Tamiko with a twinge of regret, and imagined that he saw the same thing mirrored in her eyes. They quickly finished their drinks and followed their comrade.

  The rest of the project team was scattered around the room in comfortable chairs, glasses in hand. Clearly the others had consumed a few rounds before their arrival, and Gage hastened to the nearest bottle to make up for lost time.

  “There you are,” Kierkegaard welcomed them. “I thought it would do us all some good to have a bit of a celebration, now that we really have something to celebrate.” He poured them generous servings of the champagne, and they chose a couple of seats next to each other. Evidently their entrance had interrupted a friendly discussion that quickly resumed.

  “It’s the…audacity of what we’re doing that gets to me,” Tyson began. “Sometimes I just can’t accept the reality of it all.”

  “But what is reality?” Gage smiled. “That’s the crux, isn’t it? Look at Hunter. One minute he’s here in front of us, swilling champagne. The next, he’s parading around a human body, riding a machine that’s so small we can’t see it with the naked eye. Or at least his mind is. Isn’t that what counts? Which is the real Hunter, the big one, or the little one?” He laughed and gulped half a glass of wine. “What do you think, Hunter? Which is the real you?”

  The Primus pilot was caught completely off guard. The offhand remark was too close to the question that had begun to dominate his own mind.

  Bridges came to his rescue. “It’s the Tao. Universal oneness. Hunter is real in both places at the same time, because he exists in all places at all times. So does everything else.”

  Gage snorted. “Oriental mysticism, Truman?” He tossed back the remains of his glass and filled it again.

  “Just because they didn’t view the cosmos with modern scientific instruments doesn’t mean they didn’t see,” the psychologist replied. “An eighth-century Indian philosopher named Samkara said we’re all part of the One-Self, and the attributes that make us individuals are only like a jar filled with air. The jar makes it seem as if the air inside it is separate from the air outside, but it’s the same air. Only when we fully realize and accept our oneness with the One-Self are we eternally reunited with it. Indian mystics spend their lives trying to achieve that.” He swallowed some champagne. “Even F.H. Bradley, at Oxford in the late 1800’s, believed that everything that exists is part of a seamless whole, and only the whole can be considered ultimately real.”

  “I don’t think I buy that,” Tamiko objected. “That’s like saying I don’t have any individual choice. Determinism. I hate that idea.”

  “Not quite determinism.” Bridges shook his head. “I’m not saying that all of our actions are set in stone. You act according to your nature, but the way you’re meant to act as an integral part of the whole.”

  “I’d forgotten you were such a student of philosophy.” Kierkegaard raised a glass to their medical man. “I don’t believe we can come to a complete understanding of the things we’re doing by purely scientific means. And we have to remember that everything we do can have an effect on many other aspects of our world.” His face was solemn.

  “I can agree that there are a lot of connections in the universe,” Gage said. “Six degrees of separation, and all that. But it’s not all one big unit.”

  “But the closeness of those connections is critical,” Bridges insisted. “The philosopher Leibniz believed that each individual object or entity has a certain range of individual action, but affects every other entity so profoundly that we could learn the essential attributes of any one of them by really coming to understand the essence of any other. Even Alfred North Whitehead, at Harvard last century, talked about a nexus, meaning the interconnection or inter-relatedness of entities throughout the universe.”

  “I think you’ve had too much to drink, Doctor.” Tamiko laughed. “You’re starting to speak a language all your own.”

  “Not mine, that’s for sure.” Bridges smiled. “The words of many wise souls over centuries, as they tried to make sense out of what we experience.”

  “But we’re talking about virtual reality.” Skylar Tyson sat forward. “A person using Dr. Gage’s equipment sees and hears…maybe even feels things detected by the instruments of the ship, then the brain processes it into meaningful sensory information. The perception is like reality, but the person isn’t really there…in the bloodstream, I mean.”

  Bridges raised his glass of champagne, peering at the engineer through the bubbles in the amber liquid. “Perhaps the perception is everything,” he answered. “Whatever ultimate reality is, our only way of experiencing it at all is through our senses. We perceive things as real, so who’s to say they are not?”

  Kenneth Gage gave a wicked laugh, and then said loudly, turning to look at Hunter, “It’s like the old question: If you’re killed in a dream, are you really dead?”

  20

  The water was black...black as eternal solitude.

  The edge of the abyss, a place where the cocoon that gave him refuge would be crushed like a discarded paper cup.

  Amorphous behemoths battered against it in their fury, determined to repulse the intruder. Punish him for his presence: a defilement to be cleansed.

  He could feel the shift, the slide.

  And then the fall without end.

  He threw himself forward over his knees and gasped for air.

  His hands clutched at the sheets of the bed, desperately trying to hold onto reality and not
slip back into the dream. His eyes stared wildly into blackness until finally he fumbled for the bedside lamp.

  The familiar sights of his quarters nearly brought him to tears. His body shook.

  He thought, If you’re killed in a dream, are you really dead?

  # # #

  He awoke again before dawn, and couldn’t get back to sleep. Breakfast wouldn’t be available for a couple of hours. Even coffee would be hard to come by, unless someone nearby had been working through the night and had a pot on the go. Probably no one on his team—they’d still be sleeping off the effects of the champagne. It was strange to think that he’d likely had less to drink than any of them. Had he been trying to impress Lucy Tamiko? Or Truman Bridges?

  There was a coffee machine at the far end of the building, near the administrative offices. He pulled on the pants he’d worn the day before, and shuffled down the hall.

  The coffee was as bad as every other vending machine coffee he’d ever had, but it was hot. He sipped at it as he wandered back through the building. Then something caught his eye in one of the cubicles. It was a computer, left on overnight, with a screen saver of one of the aquariums at Sea World. Ripples of light and shade chased each other through the water, and once in a while a large shape would come into the foreground, speed past, and then disappear again. It was a killer whale, an orca, that teased the viewer by cavorting off in the distance, and then occasionally allowing itself to be seen up close. He’d never dived with one of those, only the occasional shark, and that not by choice.