Seventh

by Heath Pfaff

  Bright white light caused me to close my eyes the moment I managed to get them opened. The intensity of that glow burned after the darkness I'd grown accustomed to. I forced my eyelids apart again, and this time I fought the brightness, tears welling up in my eyes as I began blinking away the painful glare. As my eyes adjusted, I became aware of motion. I was moving, but there were still hands all over me. I blinked, attempting to clear the tears from my eyes, and slowly shapes began to take form. Human shapes. People. I was surrounded by people dressed in military medic outfits.

  "...like he's coming to." A female voice said from my left, and as I turned toward the voice I found myself gazing into a set of vivid blue eyes.

  "Jim Wright, Sir, can you hear me?" Another female voice, older, from the other side. I looked up into the brown eyes of a medic whose rank insignia told me she was senior staff. I nodded dumbly, in shock. What was happening? Was this a rescue party? What about the thing in my room? I was certain I could still feel the chill of its touch on my skin.

  "You can let him go. The stabilization chemicals are working for now, but stay alert." The chief medical officer ordered, and suddenly the hands that had been pinning me to what I thought was my cabin door released me, and I could see several other medical officers, a mix of men and women, stepping back away from me. I was lying on a mobile stretcher, and I could tell by the lights passing by over head that I was being taken somewhere rather quickly. Probably the medical bay.

  "Is the ship being repaired?" I asked, trying to understand what was happening.

  The medical staff looked at me in confusion for a moment, and then the chief medical officer spoke up.

  "James... do you prefer to be called Jim or James?" She spoke in a soothing tone.

  "James." I offered. Really I had no preference. Since starting my space fairing career most people just called me Wright, or Cadet Wright.

  "James, there was an incident in your section of the ship and you were exposed to raw deep space without the benefits of a stabilizing field. You seem physically unharmed, but your brain has been traumatized."

  "You're suffering from a severe case of DSD, James. Do you know what that is? Do you understand what that means?"

  I squinted my eyes for a second, trying to focus my thoughts. I knew the acronym. It was an important security detail. DSD. Dense Space Dementia. Navigable space was divided into seven dimensions. The first three were relative mass space, and the other four were dense space. Slipspace ships were able to pass through some of these different dimensions in order to speed up travel. Level One was standard space. Levels Two and Three were also physical realms of space, but compressed in such a way that passing through them was much faster. Of course, in levels Two and Three we still had to be careful not to set a course through a planet or a sun, because the collision would destroy a ship. That is where dense space came in, and why it had become the singular preferred method for interstellar travel.

  Once into dense space, normal physical constraints disappeared, and travel speed increased exponentially. Instead of being able to jump from one solar system to the next through only empty space, suddenly you could jump from one galaxy to the next, passing directly through super cluster cores without the worry of smashing into a black hole, or a pulsing nebula. Dense space travel was safer, and much faster. Though, as with all great technological leaps, there were hurdles to overcome.

  Slipspace ships with 4th+ capable cores required huge amounts of power to use, and an equal part of that power was divided between slipping through space dimensions, and in creating a very powerful energy shield that locked the inhabitants of the craft in a bubble of less-dense space. The human body and mind were prone to suffering distortions when directly exposed to dense space. The most common symptoms of those distortions had been dubbed ‘Dense Space Dementia’, or DSD. The cadet security manual said that those suffering from DSD should be treated as high-risk targets.

  DSD sufferers were violent, sociopathic, and psychopathic, often incapable of differentiating reality from fantasy, and prone to murderous rampages caused by a severe paranoid state. I groaned inwardly.

  "I'm crazy." Everything I'd experience since I'd woken up in my bunk had been an illusion crafted by my traumatized mind. I would say it was difficult to believe, but none of what had happened had really made any sense. My memories of the events in my room were crystal clear. Even my memories of the sensation of the chill that had crept through me, and the feel of my bunk as I'd laid in the dark. It was all so clear, and yet none of it had seemed possible. It was so obvious. I had been hallucinating.

  The doctor smiled. "We prefer to say that you've suffered trauma to your cognizance that is directly affecting your behavioral control. The important thing to know is that your condition is treatable. We've injected you with a chemical stabilizer and a host of nanites that are able to deliver those chemicals to very particular receptors in your brain for a short time. The result is that we're forcing your brain to send and receive information the way it's supposed to, despite having been rewired by your exposure to dense space."

  "Now this is only a temporary solution to the problem, Sir. We need your consent to perform a cellular rebuild of your neural pathways based on your most current full cerebral scan. Which is..." she glanced down at a small translucent tablet on her wrist. "...only one week old. This means you will lose all memories acquired since the time of that scan."

  I nodded shakily, trying to absorb the reality of the moment. "So I won't remember anything I've done for the last week, not even the stuff that has happened since the DSD started?"

  She put a comforting hand on my shoulder. "It will be like none of this ever happened. You'll feel absolutely fine, and there should be no complications with the procedure. Modern rebuilds have a 99.999% chance of success, and even in the event of complications, most are so insignificant that they don't impact daily life at all. In the history of the procedure, only six people have had catastrophic failure that resulted in death or impairment, and those were all during the early stages of the procedure, before nano rebuilds were as refined as they are today."

  I had the utmost faith in modern medicine. My father had been rebuilt after suffering injury during the Pandora Expanse War, and he'd been better than he had been before his close encounter with death. The medical benefits were the best reason for serving a run in the military. One hundred years of service, four treatments of Vigor, and then you had the next five- to six-hundred years to live out your life the way you wanted to, and the military med facilities would be open to you any time you needed them. Otherwise, you had to pay for Vigor treatments out of pocket, and not many people could hope to afford that. Seventy years of life without Vigor, or a hundred years of service for almost ten times that? The answer was simple for most people.

  "Do we have your consent to perform the procedure?" The doctor asked, and I knew she'd phrased it that way so that Odyssey would store a record of my answer in the ship's log. Medical consent for military covered procedures had to be recorded.

  "Yes." I answered, and a sense of relief flooded through me. Soon I would be alright, and I wouldn't even remember the madness I'd been involved since waking up in my bunk.

  "Good, now we're going to restrain you for the procedure, but I don't want you to panic. This is just in case you lapse back into DSD before the rebuild is complete. We don't want you to hurt yourself or anyone else."

  I nodded and the attending nurses went about fastening small black cuffs around my arms, legs and neck. I'd been cuffed before, for my Vigor treatments, so I was familiar with sensation of numbing relaxation that spread through my body as the restraints took effect. It felt like drifting into sleep, but somehow infinitely more comfortable. I even managed a slight smile. The stretcher I was on rounded a corner and we entered the medical facility.

  I couldn't see much from where I was laying, but I did momentarily glimpse another occupied stretcher with a restrained patient. The voices around me were becoming
blurry and difficult to follow. The full effects of the restraints were kicking in. When I woke back up again I would be fine.

  I closed my eyes.

  "James." A voice whispered close to my ear, and my eyes shot open. My vision was blurry, unfocused from the medical restraints, but I could just make out the outline of the doctor leaning over me.

  "I just want you to know, James, that I'm going to cut you apart while you're under. I'm going to use my laser scalpel to flay the flesh from your body, and then I'm going to wake you up while me and my assistants pull out your insides and look for the darkness you're hiding. Do you understand, Jimmy? We can smell it in your guts, and we want it."

  I tried to shake my head, to open my mouth in protest, but the inhibitors restraining my motion had settled into full effect. It must be the DSD. The chemical balancer they'd given me was wearing off. That's what I was seeing.

  "Oh, but you look worried? There is no point in worrying now. Just lay back and enjoy the experience. Just imagine the wonderful things we will do to you, and when we're done with you, we'll get your family next." A grin split the doctor’s face, contorting her features from the caring parental appearance I'd first associated with her, into some twisted caricature of what it had once been. It seemed as though her features had been gouged into a hunk of round flesh with an oil soaked scalpel. Black swallowed her eyes, red tears seeped from their glistening corners, and her mouth was a void torn across her face ending in jagged, torn flesh.

  She leaned in closer, until her face was just inches from my own. Up close I could see that her teeth were filed to needle sharp points, and at the center of her deep black eyes was a burning green light. "You think you understand what is happening, James Wright, but you can't begin to understand us. We will destroy everything you love so completely that you won't recognize the remnants."

  It has to be DSD.

  The darkness began to close in around my eyes, though I struggled to keep them open.

  It is just the DSD. I'm imagining this. I'll wake up and be alright.

  I couldn't hold onto the world any longer. It tumbled away from me, spiraling back and away until it was a speck of white light in the expanding pitch of my mind's eye. The emptiness flooded in.

  "...I freed them, you can't have them!" The words came from my mouth, but I felt like I was listening in on someone else speaking. My head was full of fog. My heart was racing in my chest. I was standing, alone, in the middle of a long corridor. The lights flickered up and down the hall, traveling in a pattern as though something were passing beneath them and blocking out their glow in the process.

  I took a step forward and staggered, nearly falling. My leg was heavy and felt numb. I forced myself to move again, and it was a little easier, but pins and needles exploded through my foot and up into my calf, as though the blood flow had been constricted for a short time. My other leg was no better, and my arms also felt numb and useless. I shuffled down the hallway a few steps, trying to clear my head and figure out where I was, and how I'd gotten there.

  "Odyssey, where am I?" I asked, and even my tongue felt numb and tired. The words were slurred. There was no answer. I rolled my tongue in my mouth and bit down on it lightly with my teeth. I could feel the pressure, and even a little bit of pain as I sunk my teeth down harder, so I wasn't completely numb. I stretched the muscles of my face a bit, and then tried again.

  "Odyssey, where am I?"

  "You are in corridor E13, near the comfort center."

  Memories of the medical bay came back to me and my heartbeat quickened again. "How did I get here, I thought I was in the medical bay?"

  "You arrived at this location by walking." Odyssey's voice almost seemed snide to me, as if it was implying, ‘How else would you have gotten here, idiot?’

  "No, I mean, what happened in the medical bay? Why am I here?"

  "There are no records of you having accessed the medical bay since your last routine examination." Odyssey replied confidently.

  I had no doubt that it was the DSD that was causing all of this, but which parts of what was happening were real, and which parts was my mind making up? Even if I hadn't actually been to the medical bay, and was never diagnosed by a doctor, it was clear that something was severely wrong with me. My reality was fragmented and confusing.

  I began to walk down the corridor in the direction of the comfort center. If nothing else, it was a peaceful place I could go to try and gather my wits. The entire area was designed to simulate an open park on Terra Prime, the home world originally called "Earth." Despite the fact that most humans were not born there and might never set foot on the planet's surface (myself included), there was something soothing about being surrounded by the ancient wilderness of that long abandoned world. The whole planet was a designated nature reserve now, and it took special permission to even be allowed visitation.

  Even thinking about the simulated smell of the wilderness and the open vistas full of green trees and sprawling fields brought some peace to my mind. I was, however, shaken from my momentary lapse into a better place by the sound of my own footsteps echoing down the corridor.

  To be more precise, it was the sound of a second set of footsteps that shattered my momentary ease. I didn't notice them immediately because they were nearly in synch with my own steps. Every so often, though, I would place my foot only to hear a second footfall, distant, a millisecond later. A chill ran up my back and I turned in place to look behind me.

  Far behind me, down the corridor which I had just traveled, stood the silhouetted figure of a man. He had stopped when I had and stood still, staring back at me up the hall. Perhaps I shouldn't have been startled. I was, after all, in one of the heaviest trafficked areas of the ship. The movie halls, gyms, and other recreational services were all along this corridor. Why, then, did my pulse quicken and a cold sweat form on my brow as I watched the other figure, still too far away to make out clearly. There was no sign that he was anything other than what he appeared.

  Why had he been following me? Why had he been matching his footfalls to my own? Paranoia was another sign of DSD. The doctor, which Odyssey insisted I had not actually seen, had said I had DSD.

  I stiffened my back and turned away from him, and began walking towards the comfort center again. I took another fifteen steps, changing my pace randomly, and I could hear the distant scuff of my follower's feet echoing my movements, but not perfectly. I turned to face him again. He was still the same distance away, and he didn't move a muscle as I turned again. I felt as though we were involved in some bizarre version of the childhood game of spotlight, where when I turned around the opposition had to stand immobile or else be called out of the match. We stood staring at each other down the corridor.

  "Is there something I can do for you, Sir?" I asked, addressing the other as a senior officer. As a cadet, almost everyone was senior to me anyway. It couldn't hurt to be formal.

  The other didn't reply, and he didn't move. I chewed at my lower lip for a second and took a deep breath before I forced myself to step in the direction of my pursuer. I would bring this confrontation to a head before my nerves got the better of me. Besides, I was trained in self-defense and hand-to-hand combat. I was top of my class in three different martial arts. There was no reason for me to be intimidated by one person.

  He stepped back as I moved towards him. His motion was oddly mechanical and ragged, as though he wasn't sure how to use his legs, or as if they didn't fit properly into his hips. It was disturbingly unnatural to watch, and I was suddenly overcome by an urge to run in the opposite direction as fast as my legs might carry me, despite my self confidence in my ability to fight. Was that the DSD? Was I having a paranoid reaction to a casual meeting with someone in a hall?

  "Oh, there you are." A female voice drifted down the hallway, coming from the silhouette.

  "Do I know you?" I spoke hesitantly. The instinct to escape was still coursing through my system, an intense rush of adrenaline fueling a near uncontrollable
panic. That the figure spoke did little to appease the terror I felt building up inside of me. Why couldn't I see her more clearly? She was not exactly close, but it felt like my eyes couldn't settle firmly on her shape.

  "I've been looking everywhere for you!" She said as she took a step in my direction, her leg twisting awkwardly at the knee as it moved forward.

  "Listen, I'm not feeling well, so maybe you should just stay where you are." I said, taking a step back. I was suddenly much less interested in confronting my follower. Years of hand-to-hand combat training swept away from me as if they were a fallen leaf caught on a strong breeze.

  "Oh, there you are." The female voice chimed down the hallway, exactly mimicking the way it had sounded the first time. It – and I was now thinking of it as something less than human - took another step in my direction, and this time there was a loud pop, and it looked like the knee of the figure's left leg caved in at the center, bending backwards grotesquely. "I've been looking for you everywhere."

  "Shit..." I whispered beneath my breath. "Stay away from me, I have DSD. I'm dangerous. I might hurt you without meaning to!" I yelled down the hall, but it had already taken another step, and this time it's right knee crunched backward and the humanoid figure fell down on all fours, its shoulders snapping and popping as its arms bent into a shape more appropriate for quadrupedal motion. "Listen, I don't want to..."

  I'm not sure what I'd intended to say, because my brain disconnected from my mouth as the woman down the hall sprinted towards me like a human spider scurrying along a windowsill.

  I turned and ran. DSD or not, I had no desire to meet up with the nightmare in the hallway. Even as I took off towards the comfort center I could hear the inhuman patter of my pursuer running me down. I pushed as hard as my legs would take me. My security training had put me in the gym a great deal and I was in excellent shape. Unfortunately, whatever was behind me was apparently in better shape. I could hear it growing closer, its bones grinding with its unnatural movements, slowly cutting down the distance between us.