This Alien Shore (12 page)

Read This Alien Shore Online

Authors: C.S. Friedman

BOOK: This Alien Shore
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A pause. The girl moans softly, and her fists loosen slightly. Some memory has been awakened within her brain ... but not the one they need.
“Negative on 327-A, ” the unseen Shea reports.
“Move on to the next sequence. ”
Another pause. There is the sound of machinery humming—
—And the young girl twists in her chair, flinging her hands up over her head. With a strangled cry she starts to rise from her seat, then falls heavily to the floor. Screams start issuing from her throat, more animal terror than any human sound. The bruises on her face have suddenly become bright red, and blaze with painful heat.
One of the women starts to move toward the girl, hesitates, looks at the leader for direction. After a moment he nods, and she kneels down by the girl's side, gently trying to soothe her. It can't be done, of course. The headset is stimulating her memory center directly, there are no kind words or gentle touches that will make the memories fade.
The man watches them for a moment, then signals to an unseen technician. The humming sound fades, then shuts off. The girl remains rigid for a moment longer, thin arms poised as if to protect her from falling rubble—how long that instant of memory must seem, how utterly fearsome, how hopeless! —and then, with a whimper, she weakens, collapses. The woman by her side gathers her up in her arms, and for a moment she is no more than a child, bruised and sobbing.
“All right, ” the leader says quietly. Despite what they are doing, even he can have compassion. “That's enough for today. Sensuzi—” Again he glances off-screen, “—I want those memories fully mapped by Friday. Can you do that?”
“Yes sir. ”
“Then we move into phase two next week. ” He looks at his coworkers, one by one, sharp gaze reading what is in their hearts. “It won't be pretty, ” he warns. “But you all knew that when you signed on. If any of you have any doubts about what we're doing—or why we're doing it—now's the time to speak up. I don't want any problems once we've started. ”
He waits. They say nothing. At last he nods.
“All right, then. ” He nods toward the woman on the floor, who gently begins to peel the contacts from the trembling girl. “I'll see you all Monday, eight A.M. prompt. And if you have any doubts before then, just remember. . . ” He reaches down and pets the girl's sweat-dampened hair, not with true tenderness, but with possessiveness, “. . . this is Earth's future we're working for. ”
DREAMSCAPE 2.10000 LOADING
RUN
The girl strains against the restraints, screaming obscenities. Her eyes blaze with rage, and spittle sprays her captors with each breath.
“No fucking way!” she screams. Harsh sounds from a young girl's throat; the voice seems almost too coarse to be her own. “I'm not helping you do shit! You understand that? You fucking mudders can take your project and—”
The hiss of a trank gun interrupts her tirade. The girl starts, then mouths air silently, as if suddenly robbed of the capacity to control sound. Then, with a short sigh, she slumps into a deep and silent sleep.
The leader watches her for a while, then shakes his head in frustration.
“That one, ” he says quietly, “will not be useful. ”
DREAMSCAPE 2.20000 LOADING
RUN
The girl's eyes are wide and fearful. “Who are you?” she gasps. “Where am I?” And then with a shiver: “Why is it dark?”
He looks at the light fixture, blazing with illumination, and then at the girl again. And he shakes his head, slowly.
DREAMSCAPE 2.30000 LOADING
RUN
The girl is calm, almost unnaturally so; when she speaks, her tone is even and mature, the voice of an adult in a child's body. “You think we don't know what you're trying to do, don't you? But we do, all of us. Jamisia's the only one who doesn't understand. And Zanny, of course, but he's a child, we're taking care of him. ” She tries to raise her arms, but they are strapped down to the sidepieces of her chair. She glances down at them with brief concern, then shrugs. “How barbaric. But what more should we expect? You don't even know what you're doing, do you? Just bumping around in the dark, hoping for a lucky break... you don't even understand your own work. ”
“Tell us about it, ” the team leader prompts quietly. He and his colleagues are as still as hunting animals waiting for their prey to stir; in the silence between words it is possible to hear their breathing, quick and hungry. “Talk to us about our work. ”
But the girl's head has fallen back, and her eyes shut, and she trembles. There is no answer, nor any indication that she had even heard the question. Then, slowly, her eyes open again. She looks about, clearly startled, and seems confused to discover herself restrained. At last she looks directly at the team leader, and it is possible to see her soul through her eyes: very young, disoriented, frightened.
“Where am I?” Jamisia whispers.
DREAMSCAPE 3.00000 LOADING
RUN
The setting appears to be the same as in her first dreamscape, but this time it is sheathed in fog. It's difficult for her to see more than ten feet in any direction; all details fade into mist, faint shadows of undefined shapes stirring just beyond the borders of sight. Her tutor is with her, but even he seems unclear, insubstantial. She feels that if she touched him, her hand would pass right through his flesh.
“There's more, ” he says quietly. “Do you want to see it?”
She whispers it, hardly able to voice the words: “What's happening? Why is everything so ... strange?”
“You're fighting the dreamscape, Jamie. You're afraid of what it will show you. ”
She wraps her arms around herself, shivering, and breathes, “Is that possible? Changing a dream program? I thought you said it wasn't. . . . ”
“For most people, no. For you . . .” He manages a smile, but the expression seems forced. “We don't really know what your true capacity is, Jamie. Perhaps it includes this. ”
Figures are beginning to appear in the mist. Mere shadows at first, that take on form and solidity as they approach. A teenage boy in a torn black jacket, utility knife clipped to his belt. A woman in conservative dress, her expression harsh and disapproving. A disheveled young girl with matted blonde hair, whose eyes dart about the clearing with the desperate anxiety of a caged animal.
“Recognize them?” he asks softly.
There's a girl about her own age, but darker skinned, with sleek black hair; her eyes blaze with a cold fire that might be anger, or hate. There's a stocky older girl who scratches nervously at the flesh of one arm, hard enough to draw blood. Jamisia wishes she didn't know who they were. She wishes this were only a bad dream, whose substance she could ignore. But it's a program, her tutor's program, and as such it's meant to teach her ... and she knows those faces. God, how she knows them! Faces out of horror, culled from the depths of her nightmares, her fears ...
... her mirror.
“No, ” she whispers. Taking a step backward, as her brain finally registers the terrible connection. “No!”
“It's an adaptive mechanism, ” her tutor says quietly. His voice is soft but his eyes are fixed on her with unnerving intensity: studying, dissecting her reaction. “A common disturbance in earlier ages, now made rare by the advances of science. We catch the warning signs in its earliest stages, address the traumatic cause, offer the brain other avenues for healing ... and true fragmentation is prevented. ”
She whispers it: “Fragmentation?”
“You know what he means, ” one of the female figures says sharply. The dark-skinned girl. “Don't pretend you're stupider than you are. ”
The tutor glares at her, as if in warning, then turns back to Jamisia. “They used to call it other things: multiplicity, for one. But their understanding of the phenomenon was primitive at best—”
“Fuck this shit!” the black-clad boy snaps. He walks past the tutor, shoving in his direction as if to push him out of the way—but his hand passes through him like a ghost's—and then takes up a position opposite Jamie, hands on hips, dark eyes challenging. “What he's trying to say is that we were once part of you, just pieces of the whole. Only the great god Shido decided to give us lives of our own, and taught us how to protect ourselves. So right now all we've got in common with you is that we're stuck in the same fucking body, which at its best—”
“Derik, please!” It's the stocky girl speaking. There are scars all over her arms, Jamie sees through tear-filled eyes, some nearly healed, a few fresh. “You know that isn't true. ” She fixes her gaze on Jamisia, and for a moment the restless scratching motion ceases. “Yes, we were all part of you once. And Shido gave us separate voices, and encouraged our differences, and taught us that if we ever became part of you again, it would be the same as death. So we're not going to be tricked into going away, Jamisia, like I guess some of our kind used to in the past—”
“We won't fucking lay down and die for you!” Derik explodes. “Because that's what would happen, all the ‘cures' they used to use just killed off the ones like us—”
“Reintegration, ” the tutor begins.
“Bullshit!”
The tutor moves ahead of him, quickly, cutting short any further tirade. “I'm sorry, Jamie. I would have stopped it if I could. But by the time I'd been brought onto the project there were already five of them active, and they'd been conditioned to view your healing as their death—”
“Damn right!” the dark-skinned girl mutters angrily.
“Why?” Jamisia begs. Her throat is so tight with fear she can hardly force the words out. “Why would Shido do something like this? I don't understand. ”
It seems to her that her tutor hesitates. Consulting his programming? “It was an experiment,” he says at last. “Few people were told exactly what the whole of it was about, only the part they were meant to facilitate. Very secretive, Jamie. Very illegal. To take a child still in the grips of trauma and deny her the benefit of medical science, to encourage her soul to divide, and divide again—”
“Tell her about the other one, ” the dark-skinned girl demands; there's challenge in her voice. “Show her the one they wanted!”
“Who is that?” Jamisia's voice, like her body, is shaking violently; she can barely get the sounds out. “What does she mean?”
There is a pause. Then several of the figures move aside, making a path for her between them. She looks at her tutor for guidance; his expression is grim, but he nods ever so slightly. At your own risk, his eyes seem to say. She moves forward, slowly. The fog is thinning, responding to her need for discovery. Figures are resolving in the mist, trees and stones and a few more human forms—
—and he lies on the ground before her, his body curled into a knot so tight that she can see muscles in his thin arms and legs shaking from the strain of it. His skin is pale and covered with bruises, his eyes bloodshot and tear-filled, and spittle drools down one side of his mouth, stained with blood from where he bit his own lip. His gaze ... that is a thing of pure terror, as if the mere sight of her—of any living creature—is a torture too terrible to bear.
Then the fog closes in about him again, mercifully shielding him from her sight: her own mind, shutting out the vision.
She whispers it: “What is he?”
“Someone they hurt, ” the dark girl says sharply. Another voice, more gentle, adds, “What you might have been, Jamisia. What we all might have been, if Shido had willed it. ”
She looks at her tutor, her expression pleading.
“I don't know the details, ” he says softly. “They gave me my part to play and didn't tell me much else. But what you saw ... ” He nods back to where the terrifying figure lies, now sheathed in concealing mist. “They wanted him, Jamisia, they wanted him very badly. They were struggling to give him an independent voice when the station was attacked. Maybe if they'd succeeded, I could tell you more. ”
He steps forward and takes her shoulders in his hands—gently, so gently, like the father-substitute she remembers and loves—and he says to her, in a voice that is infinitely tender, “It. doesn't matter now, Jamie. You know that, don't you? Whatever Shido wanted, it didn't get. And you're free now. It's time for you to make your own life. ”
She can barely manage to whisper it: “What about them?”
He looks at the figures gathered about—all of them his students, his charges—and says quietly, “I'd hoped that without Shido pushing you, the fragmentation would eventually heal, but clearly it won't. The fact that this program is running means one of these selves has made an overture to you, and now you need to respond. You need to accept this, Jamie ... whatever it takes. ”
“Overture ... ” She's trying to fit all the pieces together, but they're coming too fast. “When?”
“In the conduit. ” The owner of this voice looks not unlike Jamisia herself, but her body is generously curved where Jamisia's is not, and she is dressed in an agressively tight-fitting jumpskin. Her eyes—a bright green, arresting—sparkle as she asks, “Forgotten already?”
She remembers that moment in the conduit, with Justin—remembers, and understands at last. A hot flush rises to her face.

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