Mind Warp, page 8
‘There it is,’ says Belle, pointing ahead at the cluster of low buildings that form the main complex of the lab zone.
Minutes later we’re entering the underground lab. Dextra is there, stooped over one of the life-pods. And beside her, seated at a table and staring into its holo-panel, I’m surprised to see Cronos. He looks weary. There are dark shadows beneath his eyes and his tunic is stained with gunk-juice and scorch marks.
When he notices us, he smiles. ‘York, Belle,’ he says, ‘you did well.’
He nods towards the schematic of the Mid Deck glowing in the air in front of him.
‘Transporters 1 and 2 are secured,’ he says. ‘We isolated and decommissioned all the contaminated droids. And we’ve identified and sealed off the ventilation ducts that they used to transmit those sonic sound waves, but . . .’ He sighs and wipes a hand over his grimy forehead. ‘But I’m more convinced than ever that all this was just a preliminary assault,’ he tells us. ‘The zoids were simply testing our defences. The next attack will be the real thing—’
‘The life-pods have been repaired,’ Dextra breaks in, turning and looking at Belle, then at me. ‘You can return to the Core now. But Cronos is right,’ she says. ‘The zoids will be back. And if you don’t find the glitch before they overrun the Mid Deck, I can’t promise you’ll have bodies to return to.’
I shudder when I think of those zombified humans stumbling out of the transporters.
Belle steps forward. ‘We have to return through the memory banks all the way to the Launch Times,’ she announces. ‘That way we can follow Samuel Marston, owner of the bad Mark unit, right through his life until we find what triggered the glitch.’
She turns to me and takes my hand.
‘But I have to warn you, York,’ Belle tells me. ‘To get that far back as fast as possible, we will have to freefall through the fractal maze.’
I have no idea what that means – and I’m not sure I like the sound of it.
‘If that’s the only way,’ I say, attempting a smile.
The others are watching us.
‘Belle nods. ‘It is,’ she says.
I’m nervous. There’s no point trying to hide it.
Dextra’s told me that, in the event of another zoid attack on the Mid Deck, my mind might not be able to return to my body. Belle’s warned me about this so-called fractal maze we have to take. Hot swarf! As though the first journey back into the memory bank wasn’t weird and dangerous and frightening enough, now this!
So I’m lying here in the black pod, eyes closed, waiting for the lid to be shut. And I’m scared.
Of course, I’m putting on a brave face. When Dextra asks if I’m all right, I tell her I’m just fine. But the monitors I’m hooked up to tell a different story.
‘Heartbeat fast. Blood pressure raised. Perspiration levels high,’ Dextra intones. ‘York,’ she says, ‘you can’t go down into the memory banks in this state. I could give you something to calm you down, but—’
‘No,’ says Belle, her voice coming from the pod next to mine. ‘York’s mind must be clear if we’re to navigate the memory banks successfully.’
‘But with levels of stress this high,’ says Dextra, ‘you might not even get that far . . .’
‘We cannot not go,’ says Belle.
‘Belle’s right,’ Cronos chips in. ‘There is no alternative.’
‘I don’t advise it,’ says Dextra firmly.
I listen to them arguing over me. I don’t know what to do or say. Of course I must return to the memory banks. But if my mental state means that I’ll be useless there, then what’s the point? And I’m wondering whether there’s anything I can do to calm myself down, when I feel something tickle my ear.
I reach up and scratch it. The tickling continues, and I hear a kind of soft slurping noise. My eyes snap open – to see a small furry face pressed into mine.
‘Caliph!’ I exclaim.
The little skeeter jumps onto my chest, then leans down and licks my nose. I reach up, not caring whether I dislodge the sensors from my skin. It is so good to see him again.
‘How’ve you been, eh, Caliph, boy?’ I ask him, ruffling the fur behind his ears and stroking his back till he chitters and purrs with pleasure.
The last time I saw him was just before I went down into the memory banks the first time. He was sitting up on Dextra’s shoulders.
‘You’re looking good,’ I say, as the little critter squirms about in my hands. ‘Dextra’s been looking after you, has she?’
I look up, to see that the others are staring down at me, smiles on their faces. Even Belle’s.
‘I feel a bit better now,’ I say sheepishly.
‘So I can see,’ says Dextra happily, her wings smoothly folded at her shoulders. She gestures towards the monitor screens. ‘And all ready to go. Come on, Caliph,’ she says, reaching down and taking him from me. ‘I’ll keep looking after him,’ she reassures me.
‘I know you will,’ I say. ‘I’ll be back before you know it,’ I tell Caliph. ‘Be a good boy.’
And the little skeeter jumps up onto Dextra’s shoulders between her wings, where he chirrups back at me like he’s understood.
Cronos stands up from the table and crosses the lab to the pods.
‘Good luck,’ he says as he closes first Belle’s pod, then mine.
As the lids click into place, I close my eyes again. I’m feeling different now, excited rather than daunted by the task that lies ahead.
What will it be like to freefall down a fractal maze?
It’s not like before, that’s for certain. Not at all.
The other times there was white-out and then suddenly I was somewhere else. A place I recognized. But not this time. No. This time I’m just falling and falling and falling . . .
Belle’s beside me.
There’s nothing for my mind to hold on to. No ladder. No rungs.
We’re inside this long glowing white tunnel that’s twisting and turning in the air as we plummet. It’s like being inside a whirlwind, the air warm and whistling. My head’s spinning and my stomach’s clenched.
So this is what it means to be in blind freefall.
Suddenly the white turns to green. Countless ribbons of luminous light pour through the air in an endless waterfall of digital flow. Data in shimmering constellations.
It’s like some fantastically complicated series of equations. And we’re in the middle of them.
Tube-surfing’s fast, but this is so much faster. And weirder. It feels like everything around us is expanding at a fantastic rate, creating pulsing eddies and spinning spirals, and great bulging spheres that grow and grow, then bud and burst out in new directions. The eddies and spirals repeat and repeat, and the spheres bud and burst, bud and burst, over and over again.
It’s fantastically beautiful. Colours shimmer like oil on water. Shapes bend and fold.
I look down.
Belle has all but disappeared. It’s as though the swirling fractals have soaked into her body, and instead of seeing her, all I can see is a Belle-shaped outline in the multicoloured patterns.
I hold a hand up in front of my face. And it’s the same. Just an outline, falling through the dazzling, pulsing, flashing display . . .
Hot swarf!
For a moment panic starts to rise within me. I have nothing to hold on to. No sense of space. No sense of time. I feel totally lost – a random thought in an infinite maze of data . . .
But then I feel a hand close around mine. Belle’s hand. I hear her voice.
‘Hold on, York,’ she tells me. ‘Don’t let go . . .’
Even as I hear these words though, I feel my grip on this virtual hand start to loosen. My thought-generated fingers begin to slip, one imagined finger at a time . . .
‘Don’t let go . . .’
The fractal maze convulses around me as I fall through it. Without Belle’s hand, I would be lost. Utterly lost.
A black hole opens up below us and light pours into it like water down a plughole. I look down at the swirling vortex, terrified by the thought of getting sucked inside. But Belle has other ideas. I suddenly feel her hand tug mine, and we disappear down into it.
I’m in a large hangar-like construction with a curved visiglass wall at each end. Beyond these walls, floating in space, are hundreds of engineers, hard at work. Close by, three robots are holding a great semicircular section of metal steady, while a man dressed in an orange spacesuit and visiglass helmet rivets it into place. Beyond them a gang of humans and robots are assembling what I guess must be the great nuclear-fusion engine.
I’m looking out at the construction of the Biosphere.
‘This is back before Year Zero,’ I hear Belle say.
I turn. She’s there beside me in this holographic recording of the past, stored deep in the memory banks of the Core.
‘So we made it through the fractal maze,’ I say.
‘We did. Your mind is strong, York,’ she tells me. ‘Stronger than I’d dared hope.’
I smile. It’s good to have her by my side.
‘We don’t have much time,’ she goes on. ‘We need to find Marston. But as usual you’ll have to be careful not to cause ripples that the virus scanners can pick up.’
I look round, taking in the construction work. Apart from a rib-like series of curved beams, the Biosphere is little more than the Inner Core right now, and even that hasn’t been completed. On the far right of this orbiting building site is a docked space-jet, with a line of robots unloading parts from the hold. And heading in our direction, their vapour trails making them look like shooting stars, are two more of the space-jets, towing vast bundles of urilium scaffolding behind them.
It’s awesome. All of it.
Suddenly my gaze falls on a figure in a green-and-white jumpsuit. He’s standing on a raised steel platform at the end of the hangar. I recognize his gaunt face at once.
‘There! There!’ I exclaim.
Marston’s head is down, and he’s working on some kind of palm-computer that’s glowing in his hand.
‘Well done, York,’ says Belle. ‘I’m going to try and put a digi-marker on him,’ she tells me. ‘But first you need to be connected to me.’
She puts a holo-band around my wrist. I see she is also wearing one. They glow white as they sync.
‘Think of these as portable mind-ladders,’ she tells me. ‘We’ve got to be ready to move quickly through the memory banks because every time-jump we make will cause a ripple in the data-stream.’
As I watch her, Belle’s eyes glaze over, her head falls forward and she glows green for a moment. Over on the ledge Marston himself pulses the same shade of green. Then, as the glow fades from both of them, Belle looks up at me.
‘That should do it,’ she says.
And not a moment too soon, because just then a virus-scanner zoid appears. It comes speeding towards us, the infinity symbol above its head shining brightly.
The band at my wrist glows white. Belle takes my hand once more, her grip ferociously tight.
The scene in front of us dissolves into a pixelated blur. A moment later the scrambled images come back together and the scene sharpens into focus.
‘Launch Year Zero,’ Belle says.
We’re at the centre of a broad, wedge-shaped room on the viewing deck of the Biosphere, surrounded by hundreds of people. The atmosphere is one of almost uncontrolled excitement.
Belle lets go of my hand. The pair of us scan the place, trying to take it all in.
The floor is terraced, and above our heads the ceiling panels glow milky white. Three of the walls have sliding doors set into them, which keep opening and closing as more and more people pour into the already crammed room. The fourth wall is a huge tinted visiglass window. A jostling crowd of men and women are pressed up against it, staring out.
The place is brand spanking new. Everything is polished and shiny. The air smells of fresh polysynth and nyoprene and hot electric wiring. Gleaming workstations with computer decks and holo-screens are set up in rows, ten to a terrace. There’s a person seated at every one, operating the controls – and with another nine or ten people clustered around each of them, watching, pointing, chattering noisily.
Raised above them all is a master control pod, where two men are sitting side by side in reclining moulded seats. There’s a glimmer of green coming from one of them.
‘Marston,’ says Belle.
I nod. And I recognize the man next to him as well. It’s Atherton, the chief engineer. Alive and well.
Their holo-screen has a time display on it – a row of zeroes that haven’t even started moving yet.
‘Activate departure protocol,’ Atherton says into the microphone unit clamped to his collar, and his voice is amplified throughout the viewing deck.
Everyone takes a sharp breath. Computer operatives leap into action.
It’s time.
Belle grabs my hand and we pick our way through the crowd, taking care not to walk through anything or anyone.
‘Prepare life-support transfer,’ Atherton instructs as we reach the viewing window.
There’s another flurry of activity all around us. A babble of voices. People are holding hands, smiles on their faces and eyes unblinking as they stare ahead through the tinted visiglass screen. Belle and I slip between them, till the two of us are right at the front, with a perfect view outside.
And I gasp.
Below me is the planet Earth. The Biosphere is in orbit above it.
It’s nothing like the pictures of Earth that I saw in the vid-streams when I was a boy. This is no blue-and-green planet. It’s grey and brown. The sea is like a vast expanse of rusty corrugated iron; while the land is dark and dead, apart from the huge fires that are burning out of control, destroying the last of the forests and turning the immense cities to smoking rubble.
‘Engage thrust rockets.’
There are people down there, I realize. For though the Great War has wiped out huge swathes of the population, and the Pestilence still more, millions, possibly billions still remain. And a painful lump forms in my throat that I cannot swallow away, as I think of what it must be like being one of them, looking up at the Biosphere, as the chosen ones from Earth are about to depart and leave them to their terrible fate.
‘Commence countdown,’ Atherton announces calmly, and his hand passes over a holo-dial set into the arm of his chair.
‘Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . .’
A mechanical voice starts counting, only to be drowned out by the human voices that join in. Hundreds of them. Loud, and getting louder.
‘Six! . . . Five! . . . Four! . . .’
I hear the roar of the engines starting up. And through the floor I sense a deep vibrating rumble rise from the centre of the Biosphere, this great man-made planet that carries with it the future of humanity.
‘Three! . . . Two! . . .’
Most of the faces I see are laughing and smiling. But there are others who feel as I do. Distraught. Frightened. Maybe their loved ones are already dead. Maybe they’ve been forced to leave them behind. Tears are streaming down their faces, and their bodies shake as they sob.
‘ONE! . . .’
But it’s too late now. Everything is ready. Years of preparation have been completed, and the time has come for the Biosphere to leave the dying Earth and set off across the galaxies on a journey to a new planet.
The time display in front of Marston starts moving, showing the passing of the first seconds on board the newly launched Biosphere.
Year 0. 00-00. 00:00:01 . . . 00:00:02 . . . 03 . . .
‘DEPART EARTH’S ORBIT!’
All at once, the sound of the engine rises in pitch, the spaceship trembles and as the Biosphere accelerates. On the other side of the visiglass window, the Earth shrinks at incredible speed as we leave its orbit and rocket out into the blackness beyond. Seconds later it’s the size of a gunkball. Seconds after that, a rusty rivet.
Then it’s gone.
People are laughing and crying and hugging one another.
‘We’re on our way!’ they’re shouting.
‘Farewell, Earth!’
I turn to Belle. She is staring over at Marston, and I notice that the Mark unit is now standing beside him. It’s time to follow the two of them, to find out exactly when the glitch in the robot’s protocol occurred.
The holo-band around my wrist glows white. Belle takes my hand once more.
‘Ready, York?’ she says.
‘Ready,’ I say.
Launch Year 12. Samuel Marston is thirty-eight years old.
As the green glow of the digi-marker fades, I see he is biting into a peach. His dumpy personal-help robot has just picked it from the tree growing in the hydroponic grow-trough beside them.
‘Life is good,’ Marston mutters, wiping the juice from his mouth.
The robot pulls a recliner across the floor and positions it behind Marston.
‘If you would like to sit down, sir,’ it says, its voice mechanical but friendly.
Marston does so, and sighs. ‘Very good,’ he says.
A young woman walks past, a sleek robot attendant gliding after her. She pauses beside the recliner.
‘Relaxing, Mission Commander?’ she asks, and her pale blue eyes sparkle. ‘That’s a Robotic Assist-Level Personal Help, if I’m not mistaken.’
‘A Mark 1,’ says Marston, nodding.
‘It’s so Launch Year Zero,’ she says.
‘He,’ Marston corrects her.
‘I’ve upgraded to a far superior model,’ she tells him. ‘And you should too. A man of your importance.’
Marston climbs to his feet, the half-eaten peach in his hand. He gives it back to his robot, who offers him a rather grubby-looking towel in return.
‘Mark 1 here and I go back a long way,’ Marston says. ‘Of course he’s not the brightest diode in the motherboard. Are you, Mark?’
