Nineteen
Myla had no idea where the courier was going, except
that it seemed obvious that the Hive would take notice. Dikki assured her
that the Hive was paying no attention to the machine's miraculous
recovery. "They calculate that this vessel has recovered enough function
to seek repair. No other likely possibility exists."
"They're so dumb," was Myla's assessment. "They're
nothing but big adding machines."
The adding machines, though, had constructed a
torus-shaped maintenance base the size of a small world. Approaching the
station, they faced a veritable cliff of metal glowing with the lights of
a thousand docking bays. Machines came and went around them like dark
bubbles in clear water.
"We're going to need a place to park," Myla said.
"I have been assigned docking and have been queried
for orders. The courier would have required orders to travel to this
facility."
"Lie, Dikki."
"I cannot."
"Then I order you to forward the following
information. Your orders are to wait here until new orders are issued.
They're being calculated with that bunch back on Covonia. How much time will that give
us?"
"Estimated ten standard hours before it is determined
that inaccurate information has been provided."
"What will they do to us then?"
"They will assume continued malfunction and recycle
this machine."
"Then we have ten hours to explore this place and
turn it to our advantage. Will they let you into their computers?"
"I am already interfaced."
"There are people here. I'm afraid to ask why."
"Specimens," Dikki said.
Myla hated to broach the subject. "Living
specimens?"
"Inactive specimens are of no interest to the Hive."
Myla she still had the capacity to
shiver in fear. "They're obsessed with us. Why do they bother?"
"They learn," Dikki said. "The Hive evolves."
"Dikki, even people don't understand consciousness
after ten thousand years of science. I suppose these people that are
still alive here aren't… whole. I hear the Hive… I don't even like to
say it."
"Tissue separation for the purpose of cellular
scrutiny," Dikki said.
"Dissection, you mean. Are they in any pain?"
"I have no way to evaluate information of that kind."
"Hmm." Her thoughts raged. Fear had wound her
tight. Something was coming to life inside her, nothing she had ever
experienced before in her life. "If the Hive is studying the way they
think, they must be interfaced with these people in much the same way you
and I are interfaced this very moment."
"That is true," Dikki said. "There are neural
connections, although the Hive has no understanding of the nature of human
neurology. They can interface, but they cannot accurately process such
information. Still, they try."
"Can you get me in?"
Dikki remained stubbornly silent.
"Don't tell me I can't do it, or that it might hurt
me. Apparently, I can do a lot of things you don't know about. Does this
place have any security that we have to get around?"
"There is no reason for internal security," Dikki
said. "The Hive is not a threat to itself."
"No, of course not. There's nothing here but happy
little Hive computers running in blind circles for no reason whatsoever.
Okay, so go into the system. Load up as much as you can in one gulp, and
then let me browse through it. If I see something of interest, I'll
holler, and we'll have a closer look.
"Communicating," Dikki said. "Protocol established,
interface established, opening random channels, memory banks filling.
Full."
Myla cried out in alarm. Her consciousness
exploded. And yet she contained it. It made her nervous that she could
assimilate it all without bursting. So much information and the
understanding that went with it made her far more than any twelve-year-old
girl had ever been. What she had once been complete with all of her
innocence, ignorance and naiveté, Myla tucked safely into a corner of her
expanded mind for safekeeping. She would try to understand the difference
later, if they survived, if they ever returned to Bolphan.
Overload Khalin Nome could answer her questions.
They had been good reason for his obsession with her after all.
Strange thoughts and pieces of images, and physical
sensations, some startling in their intensity and entirely new to her,
flashed through her mind. These were adult minds she was tapping, filled
with alarming experiences she had never imagined, but it would be
unreasonable to forbid herself knowledge that might save the lives of
Jeremy, Jeep, or even the mud dragon. She set her worry aside and
proceeded.
Drawing closer to the people, her enlarged mind
fractured into a thousand pieces, each one with its own memories and its
own feelings and peculiar ways of looking at things. Some of what she
experienced offended and disgusted her, but when she exerted her own will
and tried to make changes, she ignited sudden and terrible panic in those
minds and she quickly backed away from intervening.
"They're not from Covonia," she said to Dikki from
the part of herself she held away from the sea of other-consciousness.
"It was a big ship, a passenger liner of some kind. The Hive captured it
right out of space. Dikki, it's so very strange. They don't even think
like me. They speak another language even, and the words don't have quite
the same meaning of any of mine. I guess that's the way it is with
languages."
Dikki said nothing, knowing by past experience when
Myla was using him as a sounding board.
"But they're still people. I can understand what
they mean and what they're feeling regardless of what language they use.
Most of them don't even know anything bad has happened to them. It's like
they're trapped in a dream."
The Hive was interfering with their dreams. Someone
would hear a funny sound, or see a random splash of light and color, and
the Hive would take note of their reaction. It was not a
well-orchestrated experiment. It was clear that the Hive didn't
understand the higher levels of human thinking at all.
The passengers of the liner would be of no use to
her. Myla picked her way through other lives in search of those who would
have navigational data at their disposal, those who were dreaming of
piloting spaceships, or fighting Hive forces.
The information she wanted wasn't visible from a safe
distance, though. She would have to inquire far more intimately, except
that she did not know how to enter one of their dreams. When she tried,
her target would confuse the invasion of their mind as a hallucination and
become suddenly afraid. Soon, though, she could tell the difference
between what a person thought of as self and other, even though their
entire little world was operating from inside their own private
imaginations. She discovered she could enter a dream safely as an other,
although she dared exert no will of her own and was thus quickly swept up
in the dream and rendered helpless. She entered one dream after another
in search of stability and communication with the mind of the dreamer.
Myla stumbled upon a pilot of a military ship of some
kind who was dreaming of the time shortly after having been captured by
the Hive. He was planning for an escape he had never really attempted.
He daydreamed most of the time, and thought often of a girl left far
behind on a world with oceans and cloudy skies. He had dreams within
dreams of her.
Myla noticed that when she intermingled among his
thoughts, he often confused her presence for something else, like shadows
along the sides of one's vision momentarily misinterpreted as something
mysterious always slipping out of sight. She learned to hold back and
tease his imagination when that happened. Hours passed before she could
move through his dream unnoticed, and then gently intrude at critical
moments when he thought about the girl. The time finally came when he
looked at her, and Myla held very still.
"Beshi, is that you?"
He sensed just enough strangeness to know
that he had
misidentified her, but she became somebody very like Beshi in his mind's
eye. By paying close attention to the kind of feedback she was causing in
his mind, she smiled and shook her head. "My name is Myla Rhodes."
"By all the gods, where did you come from?"
For the most part, the pilot was creating her moment
by moment from the depths of his own rich imagination. Myla let him have
his own way, steering him with little more than the words she spoke to
him. She could pick the right words to use in his strange tongue, but she
had an accent to his ears, one that labeled her as exotic and
mysteriousness. It gave her plenty of psychological elbow room.
By now, she knew
the details of his dream well enough to operate within its
framework. "I've been hiding in the vents," she said. "One of the
machines that was escorting me somewhere died and I got away."
In his eyes, she took on a disheveled appearance.
Her clothes were dirty and her arms and legs badly scratched. "What do you mean died?"
he said.
She shrugged. "It just fell to the ground and didn't
move, and the others just ignored it."
"Yeah, I hear that happens sometimes, but I heard,
too, that they make some pretty wild promises to get us to spy on one
another."
"They didn't promise me anything," Myla said. "I'm
not a spy."
He studied her and decided that she sounded sincere.
"Living in the vents sounds a bit rough to me. What do you eat?"
"Garbage. I can show you where. It's just
throw-away stuff, nothing nasty. It's still fresh. Mostly. I even got a place
to live. I can show you, if you want."
The pilot took her bait and ran with it. For the
next hour, Myla led the way through his own intricate dream of dark
ventilation shafts and a small chamber filled with old clothes and the
debris of countless meals. The place even smelled bad.
The pilot stayed close to her, enveloped in a
constant glow of wonder and budding rapture. He had practically no
contact with any of his dream characters. Invariably, he distrusted them,
and he made them vanish before they became a psychological hazard for
him. Anything forgotten, even momentarily, simply vanished in a dream.
And anything feared was magnified a thousandfold. The pilot was his own
worst enemy in that regard. He had made elaborate plans to escape, but
for the most part, he just haunted the Hive base of his dreams, never daring to attempt his most challenging dream at all.
Until now. She was adding an element of objectivity
to his life. The pilot's dream became clearer, more like reality itself,
and his plans for escape suddenly more plausible.
Except they weren't plans for escape at all. It was
instead just a form of entertainment, conjuring up plans that he had no
intention of fulfilling. "Where would I go if I did manage to get out of
here," he said when she asked. "Everybody I ever knew is here. You know
that the Hive has done to them, don't you? I couldn't just leave them
behind."
She only nodded, not wanting to influence his train
of thought.
"I don't think anyone except you and I has ever
managed to escape that terrible fate."
"But you wanted to leave this place," Myla said,
hoping he could still be of use to her. "Where would you have gone?"
He laughed at her ignorance. "Myla,
I can't go anywhere. Navigational
addresses are dynamic. The universe is moving in all directions at tens
and hundreds of kilometers per standard second. That means coordinates
change over a period of time. I don't know how long I've been here, but I
think it's been a long time. Nothing I know is useful information
anymore."
"Oh."
He shook his head solemnly. "Be real, Myla. This is
a military base. Nothing is going to get away without being chased down
by a hundred warcraft. I'd destroy this place, if I could, except that
can't be done from the outside. It can from the inside, though. I could
stop the suffering. I know it's what I should try to do."
So, he had an inkling of what was happening to him
after all. On a deep level, he knew perfectly well he could never
escape. His life was nothing but an immaterial fantasy.
"It's only going to get worse," he added.
Thrown off balance by his unsettling insights, Myla
couldn't think of anything to say.
"I could do it with your help, the two of us
together. Together, we could put an end to our suffering."
"Then you just want to die," she said numbly.
He shrugged. "We all gotta die some time. Nobody's
immortal."
