Ocean: The Awakening

by Brian Herbert

  He didn’t reply, just looked at her in shock.

  “I’m sorry, Grandfather.” She hurried away, intending to send for her things if necessary.

  Just before rounding the corner of the corridor, she looked back at the old man. All the anger seemed to have drained out of him. His shoulders were slumped and he looked deflated, as if the energy of his life had drained away. It saddened her that a part of her life was coming to an end, but she had to proceed with the changes.

  Later in the day, after work, she cleaned out what she wanted from her room and loaded the belongings into her car, including her laptop computer, and headed off for the next stage of her life.

  That evening, Alicia met Kimo at her new apartment. The indelible ink on his body and on her own legs and stomach was still clear, and she entered the names and other information into her laptop, while they laughed about the note-taking process they’d been forced to use. She also entered information from the earlier list that Kimo made on his own.

  When everything was in the computer, they kissed tenderly, each of them wearing names on their skin, but they had no time for passion now. They were anxious to find out if the names were real, so they hurried over to the small local library, which had a free wi-fi internet connection.

  They intended to go over the list and check the names with the help of Alicia’s computer—to the extent possible. Each name had a town and a country associated with it.

  “Your list is surprisingly detailed,” she said. “But is it right? That’s the big question, isn’t it?” They sat at a table at the rear of the small library, which was empty except for the elderly female librarian who organized books on the shelves.

  “Start with the girl at the window,” Kimo said.

  Alicia ran a search for the name Gwyneth McDaniel, then said, “Nothing on her. And there is no Kenson Hospital in any seaside town of Hampington. In fact, Hampington is inland, quite far from any seashore.”

  “Uh oh. This is not a good start.”

  Try someone else on the list,” Kimo said, pointing at the computer screen.

  “All right, I’ll check for Dr. Keith Chenoweth, in Providence, Rhode Island. Supposedly he’s a professor at a college in the area. Wait a minute, that’s not right. Your notes say ‘Keith’ is a woman, not a man. A woman named Keith?”

  Kimo shrugged. “Could be, I guess,” he said.

  She ran the check. “Nothing under that name in Rhode Island.”

  Then she tried five more names and locations, reporting no hits on any of them.

  Kimo smiled ruefully. “Oh well,” he said. “It was worth a try. Everything seemed so real in the dreams. I saw their faces clearly, even where they lived and worked.”

  “I believe you also said you heard them talking to one another in the dreams?” she asked.

  “In some cases.”

  “Calling each other by name?”

  He hesitated. “Yeah, a few times. But most of them didn’t talk at all. They were just there, doing their daily lives, their work.”

  “What about the ones that didn’t talk to each other? How did you get their names and locations?”

  “The information just came to me, out of the blue, I guess. When I woke up I thought back and envisioned each face again, and each time I did that, a name appeared in my mind that I’d already known somehow in the dream, along with a location and other information. Why are you asking?”

  “I’ll get to that. First, consider the fact that we have the names of two well-known people here—the environmental activist Napoli Mora and the actress Angela Gatsby—and you’re showing both of them living in the wrong cities and countries. I happen to know that Mora is Italian, living in the city of Venice, because I saw a news story on him a few weeks ago, and it showed his palatial Renaissance home, along with a local charitable foundation for sea life that he runs in that city, an operation that rescues injured animals and puts them back in the water when they’re healed. Mr. Mora does not live in Singapore as you reported. And Angela Gatsby lives in Beverly Hills, California—not in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Again, she’s received a lot of publicity about where she lives, because she’s very active with an anti-gill-netting group in the Los Angeles area.”

  “Both of them could have other homes.”

  “They could, though Gatsby doesn’t fly.” She narrowed her gaze, thinking. “Now, here’s where I’m going with this. Think hard, and tell me which names and locations you actually recall your dream-people mentioning—not the names that came to you some other way, but any actual conversations you heard.”

  He concentrated for several moments, trying to recall. Then: “I heard a doctor use the name Gwyneth McDaniel, referring to the girl … uh, wait a minute, maybe it was a slightly different last name; it wasn’t clear. I also heard a Professor Matthews referred to by name, as well as a man working in an aquarium named Roberto, and a fisheries expert named Pierre. I can’t think of any more. The other names just came to me.”

  “Let’s start by checking the four names you just gave me.”

  She ran through them, and located three that were involved in ocean-related activities—Nicola Pierre, Barton Matthews, and Roberto Julian. But the locations and professions did not match up with known information on the three. Looking over the list of information from other names on the list, she found locations and professions that seemed to be jumbled, because they matched correct information on the three names.

  Nicola Pierre was a Parisian tour-guide operator who specialized in trips to the Great Barrier Reef; Barton Matthews was an author who wrote about deep-sea geology; and Professor Roberto Julian of Universidad de Buenos Aires in Argentina was an instructor who specialized in extinct ocean species.

  The last name accounted for the Buenos Aires entry that earlier had been attributed to the actress, Angela Gatsby. Finding Beverly Hills next to another name, she moved it to Gatsby. Similarly, finding the city of Venice, Italy next to yet another name, she moved the location to apply to the environmental activist Napoli Mora.

  Continuing to check, Alicia found two more names in which everything matched except for the professional information: William Kennedy of Santa Cruz, California, and Kim Hoang of Shanghai, China. Then, moving information from other names, she matched known facts from the internet, and said, “We have two more complete matches, making seven in all. Kennedy runs a whale-rescue charity in Seattle, and Hoang is an ocean activist from Shanghai who has gotten in trouble with the Chinese government for being outspoken.”

  “So now we have seven names out of the list with correct information. What about the other two hundred and eighty?”

  “I’m going to try something.”

  She made a duplicate copy of the rest of the list. Then, on the duplicate she began shifting things around even more—combining first and last names in various combinations, changing the other information—and for each change she conducted a new search. In this process, she discovered that some names that she’d thought were first names were instead surnames, such as Keith. There was no professor named Keith Chenoweth, but there was a marine biologist named Nancy Keith.

  “Aha!” she said. “Another match. She continued, and found three more that matched with locations and biographical information.

  “Eleven so far.”

  “This is getting interesting.”

  Alicia kept mixing, searching in the internet, and matching, until finally she had one hundred and seventy-eight seemingly complete matches. The first name “Tatum” turned out to be a last name, and what had been thought to be a surname, Lincoln, actually turned out to be a first name. The entire process took more than four hours.

  The two of them stared at the remaining information; they needed one hundred and nine more match-ups, to complete the list of two hundred and eighty-seven.

  “This is going to take more time,” she said. “There could be spelling mistakes, or other errors—but let’s assume we have one hundred and seventy-eight bona-fide people
to contact. That’s something, anyway.”

  What about the girl in the mental hospital?” he asked. “Gwyneth. She was in my first vivid dream, and the only person who seemed to be receiving data from the sea that passed through my mind into hers. She’s also the only person who appeared in each of the three dreams. That sounds very important, but she has not been matched up with anything yet.”

  Alicia focused hard on the screen. Kimo had originally thought that Gwyneth was in a place called the Kenson Hospital. She noted now that the name Kenson had been matched up elsewhere, to an oceanographer named Macaulay Kenson in Halifax, Canada. Now she ran a series of new searches for hospitals bearing the remaining unmatched names and locations on the list. After three attempts she had a match, the Chelsea Hospital, in the village of Apperton, on the southwest coast of England.

  “It is a mental hospital,” she said, “so we might have another match. But we don’t know Gwyneth’s last name for sure. McDaniel might not be right.”

  “We could contact the hospital to see if she’s there,” Kimo suggested, “but first we need to come up with what we’re going to say about why we’re making any of the contacts on our list. And we need to discuss this with Moanna.”

  “We? Both of us, you mean?”

  “Sure. You said you’d like to meet her someday. Maybe this is the time to do it, and I know how to get you down there.”

  “I don’t want to go deep in the ocean yet. Maybe another time.”

  “All right.” He smiled. “The way down is unusual, and it would definitely require a leap of faith on your part.”

  She nodded, slowly, and didn’t say anything.

  “I’ll go alone, then.”

  “I think we’ve done enough for today,” Alicia said, looking at the list. “My brain is fried.”

  “So’s mine. Let’s go for a swim.”

  ***