The Primus Labyrinth

by Scott Overton

  “You’re suggesting we just leave him to his own devices and be grateful for the results we get?”

  The dark face smiled. “Remember the story of the Goose and the Golden Egg?”

  Now what?

  Probably time to link up with the computer again—check the navigational readouts and the status reports.

  Is there another world out there?

  Or is it just a dream?

  Where does the return path lie?

  Does Alice know the way out of Wonderland?

  Time to find out.

  How can the mind’s eye be refocused?

  The new navigation system. It required a shift of focus to be able to see the heads-up display. Like turning away from a movie screen to read the lettering on the popcorn box.

  There. Something’s happening.

  The view stretches, expands and distorts like the inside of an inflating bubble, then explodes into a spray of grainy pixels, coalescing at last into a pastel painting. An approximation of the truth: recognizable, yet far inferior!

  The resolution is on the lowest setting, to cope with Primus’ high speed. The sound. . . so muffled and indistinct. Like plunging into a fog. Worse—a newspaper photograph of a fog.

  The digital readings in the heads-up display are reassuring, though, projecting their numbers, bars, and graphs as a testimony to rationality.

  OK. That’s the first step. Feet are planted on solid bottom to wade up out of the surf.

  Picture the control room: the couch, the controls. . . picture Lucy Tamiko. Press the switch. . . .

  Blackness. Then a piercing dagger of light as the visor was stripped away.

  It was there. It was all there. Dorothy had returned from the Land of Oz. Auntie Em looked like a beautiful Asian woman with a look of worry on her face.

  Then anger.

  It was the real world, all right.

  # # #

  He collapsed into bed that night, thoroughly drained.

  Tamiko had torn a strip off him.

  As Primus was leaving the arch of the aorta, she’d spotted the VR indicator switched off, and assumed that he’d followed the correct course only by more of his damned unfathomable luck. A reckless gamble, and she wasn’t shy about saying so. His only escape from her wrath came when Primus approached the left renal artery, and his presence was needed.

  By the time Bridges demanded that he take another break, he’d found two bombs and neutralized them, but he had a nagging feeling there were others he’d missed. He’d resisted the powerful temptation to shut off the VR again. So far, Tamiko believed he’d used the kill switch while in the heart to prevent haptic feedback, but now she’d be watching for it, and that was an explanation he just wasn’t ready to give.

  Had he actually experienced another reality? Virtual Reality, no matter how sophisticated, was still basically only a projection, like watching a movie. Add a realistic representation of three dimensions, surround sound, and the extra wrinkle of a haptic interface, and it became easy to suspend one’s disbelief. But it was still only a simulation.

  Yet, if not by the testimony of the senses, how is reality measured?

  He’d never read the philosophers Bridges had mentioned. To Hunter, the simplest measure involved results. In the real world we affect our surroundings, and our surroundings affect us. He was certainly affecting inner space, wasn’t he? Destroying the bombs?

  No, strictly speaking, it was Primus doing that. He was only controlling Primus through a remote control hook-up from somewhere else.

  What about the other way around? Was inner space affecting him?

  There was the turbulence. . . but he had no bruises, or other physical damage. The battering might be only in his mind, but the haptic feedback was unquestionably a product of the virtual reality equipment itself.

  So there was no evidence that he, Hunter, was actually present in that other reality—only Primus was.

  Then what had he experienced?

  The electrodes in his VR helmet were designed to make his brain more susceptible to suggestion, more responsive to the simulation—Gage had told him that. But better responsiveness from his brain could not improve the data from the transmitting end. Unless his brain was suddenly able to interpret a whole spectrum of information it had found indecipherable before.

  None of this explained how he got the best result of all, and the first impression of true reality—by turning the VR equipment off.

  Bridges had said it days earlier: Hunter’s brain was making some kind of leap that was not in the design.

  What if the VR system created a new kind of link that, once forged, could eventually sustain itself? Was there a physical process that could explain that? Some kind of residual electrical field? A form of—what did they call it—quantum entanglement? He wished he knew more about quantum physics. At that level of matter there were all kinds of phenomena that turned the usual rules of science on their heads.

  His neurons were being electrically stimulated by the helmet. Could that somehow create a direct communication link between Primus and his own brain on an alternate plane of existence?

  A psychic link?

  He’d never, ever believed in crap like that. He’d once dumped a girl because he caught her phoning the Psychic Network.

  But this was something else. Not telepathy—he wasn’t communicating with anyone else’s mind. His brain was receiving information through some channel, some means, that he’d never been able to access before.

  Or had he? Was that what intuition was?

  Bridges might have an answer, but Hunter didn’t dare ask. His bad memories were still too fresh. He remembered Dr. Tanner, on the oil rig, who’d somehow forgotten their two years of friendship, and set the shrinks onto him. The disbelieving faces of his buddies on the crew. The suddenly frosty attitude of the bosses.

  No, he wasn’t ready to trust again.

  At least he could accept one solid conclusion: the universe inside the bloodstream was the reality of Primus, but not Hunter. Surely that was a comforting thought.

  Comforting enough that he could finally give in to his body’s demand for sleep.

  As part of him surrendered to unconsciousness, his subconscious brain continued to gnaw at the puzzle.

  After a time it came to its own conclusion, a simple one, given the evidence.

  In the world that was inner space, Hunter did not simply pilot Primus.

  He was Primus.

  26

  Gerard Mannis sat in the dark.

  He could no longer see the reports on his desk. He didn’t need to. He’d gone over them so many times they were burned into his memory. Some were original texts of the first communiqués from the terrorists. Others were decoded reports from the few field operatives he trusted. A handful were updates on the Project at Langley AFB. Those were the hardest to come by—at least, the unofficial ones were. The president received regular reports directly from Devon Kierkegaard, and Mannis had immediate access to those. The others, from his own contact within the Langley complex, arrived by a system of tortuous routes, a system as impenetrable as he could make it. And he trusted those to no one else, not even the president.

  It was unthinkable that the president could be behind the plot, but the security net around him was far from foolproof.

  The investigation into the sabotage of Mannis’s car had gone cold. He now drew on the pool of White House vehicles, picking one randomly, with specially-authorized and cleared technicians checking it first for tampering. Or bombs. They could not all be bulletproof, though. He had to hope that his would-be assassin, whoever it was, was not yet ready for open assault.

  The Langley messages were just as frustrating. Kierkegaard was clearly trying to be encouraging while refusing to promise what he could not deliver. Gone was the faint hope that the bombs were a hoax. They were real all right, and performed exactly as advertised; but they were being found and destroyed
. Success depended on all of them being eradicated before the enemy could find out it was being done.

  Mannis had serious misgivings about that one. Something in his gut told him that the perpetrators of this plan knew as much about the progress at Langley as he did. If so, the attack on their unsuspecting victim was about to escalate in a big way.

  And she was leaving the lab! How could the president allow that for the sake of a handful of state functions, no matter how important, when the project at Langley was her only possible source of help?

  No, that was unfair. It wasn’t as simple as that. She had insisted on attending the state banquet for the pope, and her absence would have been very hard to explain to the press. With an election looming, opposition members in the House were like vultures watching for the slightest hint of blood. The administration was already off balance from a burgeoning scandal over a senate appointment, and the second poor quarterly economic forecast in a row. These things she knew. She refused to let the president down.

  The president, in turn, refused to tell her the truth about the threat to her life. He had allowed others to mislead her, even to hint about the possibility of a serious disease, because that was the only way to explain away all the testing she had had to undergo. It hurt him deeply to go that far. He would not tell her more. Would not risk her trying to sacrifice herself for his sake. And, without revealing what he knew, he could not force her to remain at Langley.

  In truth, the chief executive had never really believed the project would be her salvation. At best he felt it might buy them some time to solve the crisis another way. He had hundreds of trained operatives scouring the world for anything that could lead them to the perpetrators. Naturally, the man would place his confidence in the tools that had served him well in the past.

  In the meantime, Mannis sat brooding. The latest messages from Langley were the most disturbing yet, even while sounding like good news. The team had suddenly achieved some real successes, but couldn’t explain how.

  Winning was good, but winning without knowing why was not to be trusted.

  This pilot, a man Kierkegaard had recruited out of the blue, had happened to be in the right place at the right time. A head case. A borderline alcoholic, maybe. Now he was performing miracles.

  Mannis didn’t believe in miracles.

  His secret contact at Langley AFB didn’t either, and was deeply suspicious.

  Did this Hunter know how to find the bombs because he had helped the people who’d planted them?

  Mannis slammed the desktop with his fist, a shocking explosion of sound that somehow served to clarify his thought.

  He gave himself two days—the two days she would be in Washington, away from Langley. Two days to learn everything he could about the project’s mysterious pilot. In that time he would either have Hunter replaced or killed. Or he would trust.

  Of one thing he was quite certain: if he made the wrong choice the game was lost.

  27

  The morning briefing was a shocker.

  Kierkegaard stood at the head of the table leaning on his hands long after everyone had settled into their seats. Finally he looked up.

  “You are an excellent team,” he began. “You’ve developed creative ways to tackle extraordinary challenges. I doubt if anyone could have done better. It is not your fault that we have fallen short.”

  Shock rustled through the room.

  “I’m not saying that we have failed. I’m saying that we will fail unless we can make our efforts much more efficient and effective. We’re falling badly behind while the time left to us is growing short.”

  “What’s happened?” Gage asked.

  “I don’t know the details myself. It makes no difference to our work.” A chart came up on the screen behind him. “So far we’ve been able to do little more than guess how many bombs are in our patient’s bloodstream based on the number of likely targets and assuming three or four bombs assigned to each of those. Our rate of success shows we’d require months to remove them all. We have little more than a week.”

  “But we’re getting better,” Tamiko protested, then looked embarrassed by the weakness of her words.

  “You’ve made astonishing improvements, Dr. Tamiko. It still won’t be enough. We have to make a significant change.” His head dipped for a moment, and then he looked each of them in the eyes. “Until now we have evaluated each mission and then planned for the next. From now on our planning process—location of the bombs, mapping, course charting—will be ongoing. The successful destruction of one bomb will begin the mission to the next.”

  Tamiko collapsed against the back of her chair. Gage’s assault on the tabletop probably bruised his hand.

  “Primus is still a prototype,” Tyson sputtered. “There’ve been few enough chances to check over its systems as it is. With no opportunity to spot potential troubles we could be caught off guard by a catastrophic failure.”

  “I won’t be able to give Hunter any ongoing guidance.” Tamiko’s face had lost color. “He’ll have to navigate entirely on his own.”

  “He’ll have your maps.”

  “Subjectively thousands of miles of bloodstream, with offshoots every few hundred yards.”

  “You’re forgetting something else, Devon,” Bridges said. “While the support team may be able to handle eighteen-hour days, each of those days will feel like weeks to our pilot.” He looked at Hunter. “He is not a machine.”

  “I have forgotten nothing,” Kierkegaard replied with a clenched jaw. His hard gaze travelled down the table. “Mr. Hunter?”

  Hunter couldn’t meet those eyes.

  “If this is supposed to be a vote of confidence in me, it’s misplaced. You could be trusting in blind luck.”

  “I put my trust in people, Mr. Hunter, and I have chosen the best. But the hand we’ve been dealt is as bad as it can be. We either face that and adapt to it, or we give up, and giving up is not an option for me.”

  There was nothing any of them could say to that. The meeting was over. Hunter, Tamiko, and Gage went to the control room.

  There was one advantage to the new plan: without Tamiko monitoring him it would be much easier for Hunter to shut off the VR and explore the new link without setting off alarm bells. Gage would likely be too busy to notice.

  There were still bombs to be found in the approaches to the left kidney. Hunter was sure of it, and this time no one questioned him.

  He’d left Primus parked in a fairly stable zone in the renal vein, just downstream from the organ itself. It was unthinkable to return to the entrance of the kidney through the maze of capillaries and lymphatic vessels surrounding it without Tamiko to guide him. He would have to take the long way around—through the heart and back again.

  At least now he knew it could be done, and that he could survive it. He knew the secret.

  At the first opportunity, he took a deep breath, focused his mind, and willed his psyche to remain within this pulsing, throbbing, mortal universe.

  Then he hit the kill switch.

  The transformation took his breath away. True reality coruscated like swelling fireworks across his view, overlapping billows of color and sharp relief, quickly obscuring the smeared, indistinct representation they replaced. It was beautiful beyond words. It was an inner landscape no other had ever seen in this way.

  He gasped as he found himself hurtling recklessly through the cavernous ocean of blood, teeming with thousands upon thousands of other travelers, many as small as Primus, and previously unseen by him. Others were gargantuan beyond his experience. The blood vessel was much smaller than the giant pulmonary artery in which he’d first witnessed this transformation. The sudden sensation of incredible speed knotted his stomach with vertigo.

  He clutched his handgrips fiercely, his heart racing. The human mind was ill equipped to grasp what was beyond the scope of human senses. The scale was too vast, with myriad flickering and darting molecules as numer
ous as any school of ocean fish, and living behemoths far greater in proportion than blue whales in the sea.

  As he calmed down, there was a moment of exultation, that he, of all people, should be a witness to this miracle. The sole audience for the spectacle of all time.

  And then the pendulum swung again, and his sense of wonder was instantly tempered by a more sobering thought.

  Audience, yes. Witness. Spectator—but also something more.

  Guardian. Savior.

  Because if he couldn’t destroy the bombs, this incredible inner cosmos was doomed. Every wave of blood would cease; every glistening cell would shrivel and die. The teeming tide that swirled around him would be stilled within moments, like the sudden death of a vast city, terrible in its finality and inevitable decay.

  It was a devastating thought. The full horror of it had never struck him before, not even when he’d caught glimpses of a living, breathing human being lying ill on a white-sheeted bed.

  He had to force the image from his mind before it paralyzed him.

  Concentrate on the task at hand. Check the instruments. Steer the ship.

  He turned his focus to the heads-up display. Nothing happened.

  Of course. The instruments belonged to that other existence—Virtual Reality instead of Truth.

  As he toggled the switch to return the computer feed, the panorama before him dissolved into a grainy blur. He shook his head, and his hands instinctively rose to his eyes to rub them. A futile gesture. He let them fall again.

  His disappointment was like a fist in the gut, but he needed the information the heads-up display provided. It was unthinkable to try navigating the entire bloodstream and the convoluted passageways of the inner organs by trusting to memory or intuition or pure dumb luck. He needed to know the status of the ship, too.

  But after seeing the wonders of this inner world with new eyes, how could he possibly give that up?

  He had to find a compromise. Could a person exist in two realities at once?