‘I haven’t had much chance to look around,’ he admitted.
‘Good,’ Foxx replied. ‘Doctor Schmidt and I have been working on something for you.’
‘You have?’
Nathan watched as Foxx retrieved what looked like a metallic silver hair band from a glass cabinet on the wall and handed it to him.
‘What’s this?’
Foxx retrieved a second, identical device and motioned for Nathan to sit down on the gravity couch nearby. She held the device in her hands and directed a serious look at him.
‘I guess I don’t know if this was a good idea or not, but given all that you’ve been through we figured it might help.’
Nathan began to feel strangely nervous as he looked at the device in his hand.
‘Sit back in the couch and then put in on like this when you’re ready,’ Foxx said with a gentle smile.
Nathan watched as Foxx slipped the device over her eyes and rested back on the couch. To his surprise, the device lit up with a thin blue light around its circumference as Foxx seemed to fall silent beside him.
Nathan hesitated for a moment, and then his curiosity got the better of him and he leaned back on the couch and slipped the device over his eyes.
For a moment nothing happened, but then he heard a buzzing in his ears and a sensation of warmth and comfort washed over him like tropical water on a lush beach. Nathan felt himself let go, felt his eyes close, and suddenly he could see.
The experience almost jolted him because he could still feel that his eyes were closed and yet he could see a park beneath a hard blue sky, could feel a warm breeze on his face and hear cars driving nearby. The sound of an airliner climbing out from the nearby airport whined through the sky and Nathan sucked in a deep breath as he realized what he was witnessing and all thoughts and memories of his closed eyes and the apartment around him vanished.
‘I’m dreaming,’ he gasped.
‘It’s called lucid dreaming,’ Foxx said from beside him.
Nathan turned and saw her standing there wearing casual jeans, a T-shirt and sneakers. Behind her was a familiar street, houses standing like memories made real, the smell of the nearby river and wilderness. Nathan swallowed as tears welled in his eyes.
‘Aurora,’ he said.
Foxx nodded.
‘Your research with Schmidt into Ceyron’s connections to your father’s business gave us an avenue to building a virtual rendition of your past,’ she said. ‘There have been many virtual reality devices over the centuries but nothing beats the human brain itself. The device you put on generates a lucid dream, something that some people can do at will but most find extremely hard. Essentially, you’re awake within your own dream.’
Nathan shook his head in disbelief.
‘But I’m asleep, my eyes are closed, how can this be happening?’
‘When you think about it, your eyes are always closed when you’re dreaming,’ Foxx said, ‘so how can you see in normal dreams? Because the brain builds our understanding of the world around us, not our eyes. Did you know that the lens in our eyes sees the world inverted, like the reflection in a spoon? Our brains flip the image for us, not the eyes themselves. A lucid dreaming reality is as real as reality itself.’
Nathan slowly realized what Foxx had done, and he turned and saw a house standing right behind him. He recognized the fence, the windows, the tree on the front lawn with the swing but this time it was not overgrown, abandoned for centuries to be reclaimed by the wilderness, but alive and vibrant and right in goddamned front of him.
And then he heard the voice.
She came running out of the house, singing as she went, a little dress fluttering in the sunlight and a brilliant smile wide on her face as she ran down the garden with her arms outstretched toward him.
‘Amira.’
The name spilled from Nathan’s lips and his legs failed him as he dropped onto his knees on the hard asphalt of the road. Amira dashed through the gate of their home and out onto the street and threw herself against him. Nathan felt her arms wrap around his neck, smelled her hair and heard her laughter and her voice even above his own ragged cry of joy as he held her tightly to him and saw through blurred eyes his wife Angela walking toward them, smiling just as their daughter had been.
He barely heard Foxx’s voice from somewhere behind him.
‘You’ll never be far from them again. They’ll always be with you.’
*
New Chicago High School
It had taken Nathan some hours to emerge from the Lucidity Lens, as he had discovered it was called when Foxx had been there to welcome him back to reality. In truth, he hadn’t quite known whether to hug her or scream at her, for the knowledge that no matter how real the experience had felt; the homecoming, the tears, the laughter, the long evening meal in their garden and putting Amira to bed as though the intervening four hundred years had never occurred, it had none the less been an illusion, a fallacy. Foxx had put him right in her customary, no-nonsense style.
‘Would you rather be with them, or without them?’
Nathan had realized that the Lucidity Lens was just a better way of holding on to memories, of revisiting the past. He had learned that there was a law in place preventing anybody from using a lens for more than two hours per day: in the past, before the regulation, it had been known for people to retreat into their virtual world of choice and never return, eventually dying from starvation or dehydration and entirely unaware of their real body’s decline, so convinced was their brain that they were eating, drinking and living a normal and healthy life elsewhere. The Shiver drug had originally been a cheaper, black market replacement for the Lucidity Lens.
‘What are we doing here?’ Nathan asked as he looked up at the high school before him.
Foxx had taken him to the spaceport, from where they had caught a shuttle flight to New Chicago. She got out of the hire vehicle they’d picked up and moved to stand alongside him as he watched school kids streaming out of the school.
‘Schmidt’s work on your history uncovered more than just how to rebuild your home in your mind,’ she said. ‘The work on tracing the history of your father’s company after the Great Plague also revealed another lineage a little less seedy than Arwin Minter.’
‘A what?’ Nathan asked.
Foxx nodded toward somebody in the crowds, a teenage girl with long blond hair who walked amid a small group of friends.
‘A direct lineage,’ Foxx repeated. ‘You told me that you had no reason to live in this time, that there was no purpose to your being here, that the man you are died four hundred years ago. Well, not everything died, Nathan. You’re looking at your great, great, great granddaughter, and she needs you.’
Nathan stared at the girl as she walked and was immediately struck by the similarity between her and his own daughter, Amira. She was older, but there was something about her smile and her gait that reminded him of Amira.
‘What’s her name?’
‘Sula,’ Foxx replied. ‘She’s twelve years old, likes sport and history, ironically enough, and wants to be an officer in the fleet when she grows up.’
Nathan stared at her from afar, transfixed by the knowledge that his own bloodline had survived the plague and everything that had occurred over so many hundreds of years, and yet unlike Arwin Minter had not been corrupted.
‘Family?’ he asked.
‘Her mother,’ Foxx replied, sombre now. ‘Her father was a pilot in the fleet who died in battle against the Aleeyans eight years ago.’
Nathan felt a pinch of sympathy for the girl’s loss and he turned to Foxx.
‘This is what it’s all about? You showing me that lucidity lens, and now Sula. You want me to stay.’
Foxx reached out and grabbed his forearm.
‘You’re a good man, Nathan. A pain in the ass, but a good man. This is your world now and you’re not alone. You can do good work here.’
From her pocket, she retrieved the Police shiel
d that Ceyron had given him, and that he had left behind in the director general’s office, and she pressed it into his hand once more.
‘Ceyron’s offer was made only to keep you close at hand so that he could kill you when he got the chance. I’m making the offer with the blessing and support of the governor himself. Join the force and you’ll have a reason to live, to work, to do something here. You’re a good detective – you’d be wasted otherwise. And there’s the other obvious reason – Sula. We don’t know who else out there wants to see Ceyron’s deranged plans come to fruition. It’s not like he didn’t have any sympathizers. They targeted you, Nathan, and that means that in the future if they make the same connection we have then they might target Sula.’
Nathan watched as Sula disappeared around a corner with her friends, their laughter and chatter echoing through his mind as he thought for a moment and then looked down at the shield.
‘It’s shameless emotional blackmail of the most despicable order,’ he said to her.
Foxx smiled sweetly back at him and walked away.
‘I’ll see you for duty as soon as you’re ready.’
Nathan closed his hand around the shield, felt the cool metal against his palm, and then realized that he was smiling.
***
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dean Crawford is the author of eighteen novels, including the internationally published series of thrillers featuring Ethan Warner, a former United States Marine now employed by a government agency tasked with investigating unusual scientific phenomena. The novels have been Sunday Times paperback best-sellers and have gained the interest of major Hollywood production studios. He is also the enthusiastic author of many independently published Science Fiction novels.
Table of Contents
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