Dreaming in Smoke

by Tricia Sullivan

  Ganesh swallowed the mission plan before she could finish reading. Then it clutched her like a fist.

  DON’T TOUCH THAT. I’LL HAVE TO DISABLE OXYGEN FLOW IF YOU—

  Ganesh’s choking-off struck her as ominous, but she didn’t have time to ponder the AI’s threat. Its clock, floating across her visual field, had begun to slow in relation to her brainwaves, which she could detect even through the harp’s massacre of “On Green Dolphin Street.” This meant either time was playing hopscotch with physical law, or she was becoming overstimulated.

  KALYPSO, GET OUT OF THE CORE. YOU’RE DAMAGING ME.

  “I’m not in the Core!” Kalypso verbed frantically. “Take Marcsson out of Alien Life. Just take him out!”

  I FEEL SICK.

  “Marcsson, we’re leaving. Give me some cooperation or you’re going to get hurt.”

  There was no answer; she wasn’t even sure if Ganesh had transmitted her message. Kalypso focused her attention on Ganesh’s readouts. They were designed to look artificial so they would not be swallowed in the text of a Dream: they were meant to be her one reliable constant when all else was running wild. But now they slam-danced, whispering on her retinas and flashing into her auditory cortex.

  Time to panic.

  “Ganesh, I’m not kidding. Let me out. Stop. Abort. Ganesh!”

  Nothing.

  How could this be happening?

  The Dream was taking her over, and it was made of impossible things. She was in danger of losing whatever passed for consciousness in these parts. Her CNS wasn’t built for this. It creaked and popped with the strain. With an effort of will, she told herself to remember her body. But her body was so far away as to have become a kind of myth. She threw words at herself and hoped they would mean something.

  Move hand.

  Hand? Hand?

  Hand, move.

  She couldn’t feel her hand. Yet somehow it heard her and stirred, reached up to her head, grasped the interface and tugged it off.

  Gasping, darkness; blur of monitors everywhere; the faint hum of warm equipment. Outside the window of rem2ram Unit 5, station lights trawling a slow curve across the night. She was awake.

  “That’s it,” she muttered, waiting for her heart rate to subside. “I quit.”

  She rubbed her face, hands sliding over hairless scalp and down the back of her neck as she squinted at the display, which looked curiously flat now that it wasn’t imaged straight into her brain. Marcsson’s physiological status was described in detail, realtime. And it wasn’t promising. Among other things, Ganesh had made good on its threat to cut off oxygen to the Dreamtank.

  “Ganesh!” The AI was unresponsive in all modes, even when she touched its skin at a sensory point. From some disused bin of memory she got the whiff that there were manual procedures she was supposed to be following. She couldn’t recall precisely what they were, but she extricated herself from her station and darted across the unit to the Dreamtank.

  It lay there like a huge seed, the lights of the chemical Works outside the window playing across its battered and scratched exterior. Thirty-six T’nane years ago it had arrived on the ship from Earth, carrying one of fifty Earthborn colonists in a controlled coma. Once the Earthborn had disassembled the ship and built First, the tanks had been recycled and the Dreamer technology was born. Ganesh, the ship’s AI, possessed neural links with the tanks because of the need to communicate with the human crew during the crossing. It was this interface which now bound Azamat Marcsson to Alien Life, one of Ganesh’s most sophisticated Dream runs.

  Kalypso popped the lid seals. The water in the tank was undisturbed. Marcsson looked strangely peaceful, strangely . . . dead? Her skin crawled. In her memory the dream-harp plucked its ill-conceived interpretation of Miles playing “My Man’s Gone Now.”

  In a sepulchral voice, Ganesh declared: DANGER. ENGAGING EMERGENCY SHUTDOWN. DANGER.

  Kalypso closed her eyes, indulging in a second or two of ostriching.

  Let’s pretend this isn’t happening. Mmm, that’s better.

  ENGAGING EMERGENCY SHUTDOWN.

  The screens all went blank. She shot to her feet.

  “What’s happening to him?” she shouted at Ganesh. Furious, she pounded on the AI’s skin at a nerve point. “You can’t just shut down. Bring him out!”

  ALIEN LIFE HAS EXPLODED. THERE IS A CORE RUPTURE. I WARNED YOU BUT YOU DIDN’T LISTEN.

  She flung herself on her knees beside the tank. She heard herself pant, “He’s not dead, he’s not dead,” but it was unclear whether she was stating a fact or just praying. She couldn’t find Marcsson’s vitals. Even on the monitor patched directly to the tank, there was so much noise that she had to punch in laterally from another Dreamer cell before she could get control of the readout.

  She let her breath go.

  His vital signs were miraculously OK—there must have been some residual oxygen in the tank—but the brainwaves were all over the place. His cortex looked like a Japanese fireworks show.

  Think, Kalypso. First order of business is to keep the doze alive. Now, let’s try —

  Without warning, Marcsson sat up and ripped the interface from his head. Kalypso jumped back; the movement reminded her of a mummy rising from a coffin. She gave a little laugh of relief.

  “I’m so glad you’re all right. We’ve run into a—”

  He surged out of the water in one movement, planted a hand in the middle of her chest, and shoved her aside. Kalypso caught hold of a stanchion for balance and yelped.

  “Hey! Take it easy!”

  Tendrils of broken nerve cable trailing from his spine, he crossed the unit in three strides. He tripped over the edge of the tank and cracked his head on the pump casing before careering through Kalypso’s workstation and toward the door.

  “Ganesh! I need a medical team here now! He’s—”

  Marcsson had reached the closed hatch but instead of opening it he spun, hurling his full weight at the window only to be repelled, the glass singing and the blur of outside lights flashing for a second in his panicked eyes as he went down.

  “—he’s berking, Ganesh! He’s big, and he’s—”

  The impact had obviously stunned the scientist, because he got to his feet unsteadily and stood gaping at his own palms with a sort of horrified disbelief. Blood dripped from his nose and then, diluted in the fluid clinging to his skin, divided into half a dozen rust-colored rivers to traverse his chest. Kalypso eased out into his line of vision from behind the stanchion she’d been flung against, displaying her hands in a show of peace.

  “. . . berking. OK, Azamat.” She tried to modulate her voice to soothe, but it cracked. “You’re all right. Take it easy, my friend. Just stand still for a minute, right? Everything’s going to be fine.”

  Ganesh, Ganesh. Things were too quiet. Someone — some human—ought to have called her by now to see what was wrong. She raised her voice so the radio backup would pick her up.

  “Hello? This is Deed in Unit 5. I need a medic and a witch doctor stat, people!”

  Nothing.

  “I’m not jok-ing,” she sang. Her voice cracked. “Hello?”

  Marcsson removed his attention from his hands and fixed it on her. The gray coronas of his irises were all but eclipsed by pupils. She began to worry about the possibility of concussion.

  “That’s good, yeah. Why don’t you relax for a minute, until the medics get here?”

  If the medics got here. Air wasn’t circulating, and the room had already grown warm and humid. The only light in the unit came from the Works, a snarl of bio-phosphorescence outside. She didn’t know what to do. It was unthinkable that Ganesh should fall silent. The AI inhabited every part of the station, almost as if it were alive. Once more she rubbed vainly at Ganesh’s nearest sensor point. It was inert; and radio backup didn’t even kick in.

  She checked herself to make sure she wasn’t still Dreaming; no such luck. Something was wrong with Ganesh — that must explain the AI’s stran
ge accusations about the Core. Poor old Marcsson must have gotten caught in a Ganesh hiccup. But it was one hell of a spasm if coms were down entirely.

  “OK, let’s—”

  Marcsson sprang out of his stupor. He roared past her, hit the far wall of the unit—avoiding the pump this time — and began trying to climb. Again and again he threw himself at the wall and slid down, each movement punctuated by desperate breathing. In the interest of self-preservation, she stayed put, wincing as Marcsson berked. The wall behind the tank was black, spangled with the faintest suggestion of light-catching dust: a void but for the ghosts of distant galaxies on the threshold of visibility. When he hurled his pale form against it he made no mark, but its darkness seemed to paint itself into the contours of his body in the guise of shadow.

  Suddenly he gave a cry of pain and collapsed into a ball at the edge of the tank. He looked into the water, and then at the interface still clutched in one band. Curiously.

  “Uh . . . stay away from Ganesh, Azamat, please . . .”

  She didn’t expect him to take any notice, but his head came up and again the eyes riveted her. In them she felt like some unexplained phenomenon, which was the height of irony under the circumstances.

  “Ganesh!” She had remembered that when the AI shut down a module, it always assigned another node of the system to fill in. Always.

  But not this time.

  He coughed, still breathing hard. Two ragged scarlet flames stained his cheekbones from within. The blood from his nose had already begun to turn black. He got to his feet. Unobtrusively she slipped her hand into the medkit strapped to the back of her belt. She found the zzz by feel, slipping it on her finger with care before removing the safety. It was a delicate business; all too easy to knock yourself out with one of these.

  He was working himself up to something. She could feel it. She licked her lips and brought the armed hand around, trying to hold it naturally without touching herself with the zzz. She fought the urge to giggle: a part of her mind was stubbornly insisting that none of this was happening. It was much too absurd. .

  Marcsson uncoiled and glided toward her, but at the last second she lost her nerve and evaded him just when she should have moved in. They circled each other, crouched like jungle fighters in some ritual display. The water on his skin shook where it caught the light: he was trembling. Encouraged by this sign of fear, she moved closer. She only needed a small piece of him to activate the zzz.

  He reached out, and when his fingers grazed her arm she realized she’d miscalculated. It wasn’t fear or fatigue that made him shake. He was oscillating. His entire body was charged. His eyes leaped at her, shining much too brightly. There was nothing in them that she understood. Nothing in the mouth, either, to suggest any possibility of a common language.

  Whatever thing guarded the boundaries of Kalypso stood on tiptoe and paid attention. She had forgotten about the zzz; she jerked her arm away from his touch as though burned and retreated, gasping—but it was too late. He rushed her. She was flung bodily through the air, hearing Marcsson’s breath discharge at the point of impact, smelling the acridity of his adrenalined flesh.

  She had just enough time to think: you son of a bitch. Then she hit the floor. It hurt. His skin was strangely cold. She felt a kind of release at the contact. It made no sense. How could violence not be bad — especially when it was directed at her? Did it put her in some left of center psych box, that she thought this violence seemed kind of good? Because she was exhilarated. The force, the weight, the momentum, the necessary surrender — none of these things were what actually excited her. These qualities happened to be present and so became associated with the feeling that swept over her as Azamat Marcsson unceremoniously smashed her against the tiles; but they were not the source of it. What was the source of it?

  All she had to do was get the zzz into contact with him and it would be over; but he’d twisted her arm back against the floor and wedged a knee into her solar plexus so she couldn’t get her breath. She heard herself hissing with effort. Spit flew from her mouth. She wriggled, struggling to free the hand with the zzz.

  Something gave way, and the next thing she knew he was off her. The zzz was gone: she must have got him.

  She scrambled away along the smooth floor, slipping in the water and blood he’d spread around the Dreamer unit. Her left hand was stinging and throbbing, probably sprained. He didn’t come after her, but waited dumbly, his face slack. She started counting to ten. He should go down by six.

  Three. She watched his body waver and elongate. Four. There was a buzzing in her extremities — must be those damned mathematical— five—bees again, she thought—but there are no Dreams where she’s going now. Six.

  THE GIRL WHO

  CRIED SHEEP

  “THERE WAS A CORE BREACH HERE. For sure.”

  “Tehar, I’m telling you there’s no way to get into the Core from these modules.”

  “There has to be. Look at the evidence for yourself.”

  “What? You’re the witch doctor.”

  “Exactly. But I have about twenty more important systems to go over, so I need this tank opened up and every pathway examined and documented. I’ll check back with you later and review the results.”

  “What about her?”

  “Is she breathing?”

  “Think so.”

  “Leave her. I’ll deal with her later.”

  Oh, thanks very much, Tehar, Kalypso wanted to say, but when she tried to speak only a bubble of saliva emerged from her mouth, then subsided.

  Some time passed. Her head cleared; she could hear other people moving around the unit. Their voices were urgent.

  “See what I mean? This whole branch has been clipped from the luma side.”

  “Impossible. The backwash sub would have prevented—”

  “But the backwash was detoured through met and converted-”

  “Doesn’t matter because—hey! You call this a railroad yard or what? Look at that flowerspan.”

  “Don’t touch it. Audio might have got crossed with tact. This remind you of anything?”

  “Yeah. Soup.”

  Witchdoctorspeak. Evidently she’d been dragged out of the way, because she was lying with her face only a few centimeters from a wall.

  “Get up, mon petit chou,” Tehar said in her ear. His accent was appalling. He peeled her off the floor, huffing: he wasn’t much bigger than Kalypso, and between the two of them they just might make one Azamat Marcsson.

  “I should have known I’d find you in the middle of this.” He draped her lax arm over his shoulders and lurched to his feet. “Can you speak?”

  She swung her head from side to side. She was monumentally embarrassed about the zzz and also slightly turned on at the idea of being handled by Tehar when she was completely unable to resist. She counted on her black skin to hide the fact that she was blushing. Tehar dragged her through the hatch of the Dreamer unit and along a lateral crawlway, eventually hoisting her into a vertical tube and bracing her in place. She guessed by his labored breathing that this was no easy task.

  “It’s not a drill, you know. Ganesh is down,” Tehar said, nodding at the walls of the tube. They were made of luma, an indigenous biological structure formed by T’nane’s micro-organisms and electro-magnetically “groomed” by Ganesh. Not only could luma be made to store and transmit data magnetically, but it behaved like a plastic substance, enabling the developing AI to stretch itself out in size and processing power from a small interstellar ship to a self-sustaining colonial outpost. under normal circumstances, flickers of light would be visible within the translucent luma, indicating that Ganesh was sending internal messages through the transit tubes. Now they were dark and still.

  Tehar had paused to set up his radio and adjust his handgrips, stretching himself out along the “up” side of the tubular crawlway. The “Down” side was slick enough to permit speeds of up to 40 kph, but the “Up” side was hard work. Tehar’s expression told her he
wasn’t looking forward to hauling her ass up the crawl, but it was either that or slide along the tube until eventually gravity deposited them in the Gardens beneath the main station.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with old G,” he added. “It could be a flaw in the luma interface, or it could be that one of the older modules has finally blown. There are some parts of the Core that can’t be replaced with the resources on this planet.”

  That sounded alarming. The Core controlled Ganesh’s most basic, root programming: the stuff that dated back to the AI’s inception on Earth. However Ganesh might evolve and grow, the Core was supposed to remain stable and immune to being overwritten. Yet Tehar seemed calm enough as he clipped her to the harness on his surface suit and with a heave of muscle began to climb. He was panting in no time. She tried to stretch out an arm to help, but it only flopped uselessly. That was zzz for you.

  “We lost a couple gliders,” he gasped. “Without . . .guidance they can’t. . . navigate in the dark. I don’t. . . know who yet—shit!”

  A kamikaze scream had sounded out somewhere in the tube above them; Tehar wrenched her to the side and into a passing recess. A red-clad witch doctor in full surface gear zoomed past, fully extended in the luge position.

  Tehar gave a snapping motion with his head and said, “Where you going, Ashki?”

  She watched his face as he listened to the radio response, taking the opportunity to try flexing various muscle groups. She wasn’t particularly successful.

  “How many clusters are disabled? Yeah. Is anyone in the infirmary? No, I didn’t. How many injured? Well, I still think rem2ram is our best—uh-huh. Mmm. Ten minutes.” He sighed. “It’s going to be a hell of a day. I wish I was going with you.”

  This last was directed at Kalypso. She tried to smile. He resumed climbing.

  She managed a questioning moan then, and he flashed a smile over his shoulder.