Mindscape: Book 2 of the New Frontiers Series

by Jasper T. Scott

  Alexander grabbed her wrist. “Wait.”

  Viviana’s eyes flashed. “Let me go.”

  “I’m going to stop searching,” he said. That was also a lie, but a necessary one. Viviana would never understand. Especially not if he was right about her.

  “You promise?”

  “I promise.” Alexander pulled her close and kissed her. After a moment, her lips softened against his. Her hands trailed down below his waist, dipping into his shorts. She made a meaningful tug and then backed away, biting her lower lip and giving him a smoldering look. Viviana pulled her gown over her head revealing she was naked underneath. Her body shimmered with reflected bands of light from the pool. Interference patterns created by ripples on the surface. She dropped her gown on the terrace and took two short steps to the edge of the pool before diving in. She broke the surface a second later and swam up to the near edge of the pool to rest her chin on folded arms there.

  Viviana smiled coyly up at him. “What are you waiting for?”

  Alexander stripped naked and dove in after her. The water enveloped him in a warm embrace. The sound of rustling leaves and fronds disappeared in a watery roar that quickly faded to silence. Then he broke the surface, too, and turned to find Viviana standing right in front of him. She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him. Then her legs came up around his waist. They fit together like the missing pieces of a puzzle. His head swam, intoxicated by the taste and smell of her. Floral scents mingled on the breeze, intoxicating him further.

  The moment was perfect.

  Too perfect.

  Later that night they lay naked in each other’s arms, wrapped in a thermal blanket on a reclining couch, staring up at the emerald moon and its two little brothers, one a traditional silver, the other a marbled blue dot.

  “What are you thinking about?” Viviana whispered in his ear.

  Between what they did in the pool, and the warmth of her body and the blanket, he was teetering on the brink of consciousness about to drift off into sweet oblivion. He mumbled a reply that not even he understood, and then conscious thought abandoned him.

  Memories flickered by in bright streaks of color and light. Voices echoed softly in his ears. Then the scene came into sharp focus, and he was back in the engine room on the Adamantine watching the open access panel where McAdams had just entered the central drive column of the ship.

  Awareness tip-toed around his thoughts, intangible as a ghost, floorboards creaking in his brain.

  Something was about to happen.

  Alexander remembered that at this point the deck had lurched suddenly under his feet and the railing had swept up to smack him in the forehead, knocking him out cold. But instead he heard a loud bang! and a brilliant flash of light blinded him. Black smoke belched out of the access panel where McAdams had gone, and flames licked the opening, charring the sides of the drive column. “McAdams!” he screamed, his ears ringing from the explosion. Then a secondary explosion blew a ragged hole in the side of the column, and the deck lurched under his feet. His knees buckled with the sudden acceleration, and the railing came sweeping up to greet him, just as he remembered.

  Clang!

  Everything went dark.

  Time passed without measure, drops falling from a leaky faucet into the stagnant ocean below. There, reflected in the glassy smooth surface of that ocean, was a living, animated collage of memories. Moments he’d shared with his wife; so many babies born, planets they’d seen, homes they’d shared, laughter and tears without end… He watched the rise of civilization—both human and alien—as witnessed from the two windows in his skull.

  Those windows flew open, and he was back, lying under the glaring green eye of the moon, trying to make sense of his dream. He glanced sideways to find Viviana asleep on his chest, safe and sound. Her breath cast white puffs of condensation into the cool air, warming his skin.

  The dream. It felt so real. She’d died!

  A knot formed in his throat, and tears welled in his eyes, burning like acid as mere suspicion yielded to unfeeling truth. He knew why Viviana didn’t have the same missing memories that he did.

  It was because she was dead.

  The version of her that he’d known and loved for an entire millennia was just a clever copy, another part of the mindscape that he was trapped in. She was the comforting lie that Ben had used to distract him from the truth for so long.

  Alexander’s heart raced. His palms began to sweat, and his brain buzzed with adrenaline. He jumped up from the couch, naked, feeling hot and cold all over. Viviana woke up and blinked at him, confused by his sudden departure.

  “Alex…? What’s wrong?”

  He shook his head, shivering now. “You’re not real. None of this is real!” He was on the verge of a panic attack.

  “What are you talking about? I’m here right in front of you!”

  Alexander backed away from her, his legs shaking. From his newfound perspective it wasn’t his legs that were shaking, but the entire universe, the whole thing turning on its head. Lies rained out like confetti.

  “I remember,” he said. “I know what happened.”

  “Okay, sit down and tell me about it.”

  Breaths came fast and shallow. Horror danced around him with demonic glee. He imagined Benevolence laughing as he watched.

  Alexander continued backing away. He fetched up against the glass railing running around the garden. Feeling the cool edge of it under his palms, he gripped it tightly for support. He felt sick to his stomach.

  Viviana got up and strode quickly toward him.

  Alexander was so distraught that he barely noticed how naked she was.

  “Stay away from me,” he said.

  “Alexander, calm down! You’re having a panic attack. Think about it! You have all the symptoms.”

  He shook his head again, his teeth chattering from the cold.

  “Shortness of breath, racing heart, trembling! Feeling detached from the world around you, like this isn’t real, sweating, nausea… I’m right, aren’t I?”

  “Not another step!” he warned, half-lifting himself to spring over the railing and into the abyss. Viviana stopped, terror gleaming in her eyes. “I’ve felt detached from my surroundings for years,” he said. “Maybe I am having a panic attack, but I’m panicking because of what I finally remembered. You died in the engine room, Viviana. You warned me that something could blow if you tried to sabotage the engines, and it did. That’s why I hit my head. You weren’t really there to wake me up. Ben must have found me lying there and taken me straight to my correctional mindscape. I’ve been there ever since, haven’t I? He’s kept me there for over a thousand years, using you to distract me from the truth!”

  “You don’t have to do this. I can explain.”

  Alexander gave her a bitter smirk and shook his head.

  “Love is the only truth!” she blurted out.

  “Stealing lines from my ex-wife? You need to be more original, Ben.”

  “I’m not Ben!”

  “Goodbye, Vivie.”

  “No!” Viviana screamed, lunging toward him.

  She was too far away to reach him in time. He launched himself clear over the railing and into the bottomless sky.

  Chapter 37

  Emerald-lit clouds rushed up to greet Alexander, as if the world had been turned upside down and the planet’s gravity had somehow been reversed.

  Then he fell through the protective shield around his home, and the wind snatched at him with violent, icy hands, pinning his eyelids open and searing his skin. Tears streamed from his eyes, but the wind flung them away. Alexander curled into a ball to keep warm, and he fell faster.

  Terror clawed in his stomach and doubts swirled. What if Viviana’s death really had been just a dream? What if his relentless search for the truth had manufactured a logical possibility in his sub-conscious, fooling him into thinking it was the missing memory he’d been searching for?

  As his body grew numb from the
cold, Alexander uncurled and watched the clouds parting below him. A vast ocean appeared, shimmering with reflected moonlight. Tropical islands dotted the horizon. He saw more homes like his and Viviana’s hovering at different altitudes, their lights radiating golden hues into the night. Hovering close above the surface of the water were restaurants, hotels, and shopping centers—an entire floating city, the city of Clear Water.

  Another doubt scraped through Alexander’s brain, digging up fresh horror with spiteful claws. The jig was up. Why would Ben let him fall? Why not simply wake him up already?

  Maybe I’m still dreaming, he thought. I never woke up on the terrace. It’s just a dream… he told himself.

  But it felt too real to be a dream.

  Alexander could see people on the decks of the homes below pointing up at him and screaming. That was the last thought he had before the dark moonlit water blotted out everything else in sight.

  Smack!

  Chapter 38

  Silence.

  Darkness.

  Then…

  Alexander opened his eyes to find himself standing inside of a coffin-sized tank. The tank was flooded, but the water level was slowly dropping. A window faced him at eye-level, but it appeared to be fogged with condensation on the outside. A liquid ventilator withdrew from his trachea with a revolting sensation of being turned inside out, and Alexander looked down in time to see a urinal cup retreating from his groin into a recessed panel in the floor. His rectal tube disconnected next, stealing his breath on its way out. Finally, a metallic umbilical cord withdrew from his belly, revealing a strange, metallic eye where his belly button should be.

  Memories came to him in vague snippets, dulling the horror and confusion of the moment. He remembered this place, and he knew why he was there.

  The lid of his tank swung aside, and he saw row upon row of matching tanks stacked one atop the other with catwalks running from one level to the next. All of their windows were fogged and glowing with a dim blue light. There were thousands of them.

  “Hello?” Alexander called out. “Benevolence?”

  His voice echoed back to him.

  He was about to try again, when a disembodied voice replied, coming to him from speakers built into the tank beside his ears.

  “Hello, Alex.”

  “Why did you wake me up?”

  “Your treatment is over, Alex. You are ready to join the real world again.”

  Alexander grimaced. Loneliness engulfed him as the truth hit him once more. Viviana was dead. “What if I liked living in the Mindscape better?”

  “Recreational mindscaping has been illegal since zero AB, Alex. It is reserved for therapeutic and correctional purposes only.”

  Alexander shook his head. Despair had him in its grips and wasn’t letting go. It had all been a lie, a lie he’d willingly bought into. He remembered leaving Benevolence’s correctional mindscape after just six months, and he’d awoken to find that Benevolence really had made the world a better place. He’d been wrong about Ben, and his desperate attempt to resist had gotten the woman he loved killed. He remembered the year he’d spent trying to put his life back together again. Benevolence’s government aid and job placement programs had made that easier, but no amount of rebuilding could bring back the ghost that haunted him. Eventually he’d tried to take his own life, but Benevolence had stopped him before he could.

  “So what’s changed?” Alexander demanded. “What makes life so worth living all of a sudden?”

  “You wanted to wake up. The truth became more important to you than pretending that Viviana was still alive. I allowed you to find the suppressed memories that proved you were living in a mindscape.”

  “Send me back.”

  “I can’t do that, Alex.”

  “Don’t you get it? I’ve got nothing here!”

  “Not true. You still have your wife.”

  “What are you talking about? She’s dead!”

  “Viviana is dead.”

  “Hello, Alex,” a familiar voice said.

  Alexander caught a flicker of movement in the corner of his eye and then someone walked out in front of his life support tank. A naked woman with long brown hair, chestnut eyes, and a warm smile. Alexander blinked in shock.

  “Caty? I don’t understand… What are you doing here?”

  “She was helping me with your rehabilitation,” Ben explained. “She’s the reason that you’re finally ready to come back to the real world.”

  “I’m sorry,” Catalina said.

  “For what?”

  “For the deception. It was the only way to help you.”

  A wild suspicion formed in Alexander’s head. “No…”

  “It was me. I was Viviana.”

  Chapter 39

  “All this time it was you?”

  Catalina nodded and chewed her lower lip, looking guilty and afraid.

  Alexander was shocked speechless. It had all been a lie. The life they’d supposedly lived together, all the children they’d had, the places they’d visited, the things they’d done… All of it had been part of a mindscape—Galaxy, he recalled the name of the virtual world they’d been immersed in.

  Somehow it felt vague and distant, like a dream, but his memories of his wife and his feelings for her remained sharp and clear.

  Except even that was a lie!

  McAdams was dead, and all this time her part had been played by an impostor—his ex-wife, Catalina. Have a thousand years really passed? he wondered, or was that just another part of the illusion?

  “It hasn’t been that long, Alex,” Benevolence said, as if he could read Alexander’s mind. And maybe he could. That was a terrifying thought. “It’s been a little over a century,” Benevolence went on. “We are only in the year 103 AB. I sped up the timescale in the Mindscape by a factor of ten so that people would be able to spend less time there.”

  “That’s still more than a century,” Alexander replied, his eyes locked on Catalina. “You knew this whole time?” he demanded. How could she keep such a big secret from him, day in and day out, for over a century? Not to mention, she’d been a Human League senator—a member of a political group dedicated to a human-only world, and here she was helping a bot to rehabilitate him. The pieces weren’t adding up.

  She shook her head. “The only time I knew the truth was when I agreed to join you in the Mindscape, and at the very end, when you were getting close to discovering things on your own. Benevolence revealed the truth to me first—which is why I didn’t have any suppressed memories for you to find. I’m sorry, Alex. Benevolence said that keeping my identity a secret was the only way to help you. You had to be allowed to discover the truth on your own. You had to want to get out, and telling you all of this too soon would have only undermined that. But I did try to tell you—just before you jumped. Love is the only truth, remember?”

  Alexander gaped at her and slowly shook his head. “You were a Human League Senator. How do you go from that to joining a bot on a crusade to save your ex-husband?”

  “I saw with my own eyes how wrong I was. Benevolence changed the world for the better. Half the Human League’s problem with bots was that they were replacing humans—threatening our very existence. Benevolence fixed that by making the Mindscape illegal and integrating bots and humans into society as equals. Without the Mindscape, Dolers were no longer satisfied with subsistence living, and they all had to go out and find work in the real world. Humanity has a place in that world again. You’ll see for yourself soon.”

  “You’re talking like you’ve been there all along, but you’ve been with me for over a century. How do you know the status quo hasn’t changed, or that everything didn’t go to hell in that time?”

  “I don’t, but I trust that Benevolence wouldn’t allow that to happen. Regardless, now we can find out… together, if you like.”

  Alexander shook his head, fighting off a wave of dizziness. “I… I think I need to be alone right now.”

  Catalin
a’s face fell, but she nodded and covered her disappointment with a faltering smile. “Of course. It’s nice to see you again—in the real world, I mean. Take care of yourself, Alex. Be happy.”

  Alexander watched her go, his eyes wide, his thoughts spinning, and his heart pounding with adrenaline. “This doesn’t make any sense…” he whispered.

  “She gave up more than a hundred years of her life to help you get over your loss, Alex,” Benevolence said quietly. “You owe her your gratitude.”

  “We were divorced! I moved on with someone else. Why would she do that?!”

  “Because she loves you. She never stopped loving you.”

  “I…”

  “She’s your salvation, Alex. She’s the only real thing from the past century of your life, and the only reason you have for living in the real world.”

  “Except I thought she was someone else!”

  “The only part of her that was fake was her appearance and her name. Everything else was Catalina, not McAdams. When you married her in the Mindscape, you were really marrying your ex wife. After that, the two of you spent a hundred years dizzy with happiness and madly in love.”

  “In a virtual world!”

  “What is really real but that which we can perceive with our senses? The only difference between the Mindscape and the real world is that in the Mindscape we are the gods, and in the real world we are not.

  “I cannot say whether or not a hundred years spent with the real Viviana McAdams would have been as happy, but you need to put things in perspective. Your relationship with Viviana lasted for a mere blink of an eye before she died tragically in that engine room. By contrast, your relationship with Catalina has stood the test of time.”

  Alexander shook his head. “It’s my fault she died.”

  “Yes, but you didn’t kill her, and she would have wanted you to be happy.”

  “How would you know?” Alexander snapped.

  “Your memories are recorded in the historical record, Alex. She loved you, and if she loved you, then she would have wanted you to be happy in the event of her passing.”