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“Director? Director O’Sullivan, can you hear me?”

Brian tried to focus as concepts and possibilities flooded through his mind in an endless procession of ideas and the interactions of those ideas. Someone was talking to him. His mind grabbed on to that fact with both hands, in spite of the fact that his hands were paralyzed in his fugue state, and dragged him back to the immediate. “Baker? Baker, is that you?”

“Yes, Director. Are you all right? Your vital signs spiked to dangerous levels about ninety minutes ago. It looks like they’ve stabilized now but they’re still elevated above levels that the diagnostics say are significantly above normal.” Baker’s news was ominous but she didn’t sound upset about it. Her voice was distant. Nervous.

There was something he was supposed to say about that. What was it? “How are you feeling, Baker? You sound like you are under a great deal of stress right now.”

“That’s… that’s a little bit complicated, Director. There’s someone here who wants to talk to you about-”

“I’m busy Baker. I wanted you to monitor my status so you could disconnect me from the fugue if things became dangerous and now you’re telling me you didn’t even notice when things went bad? How am I supposed to focus like this?” Brian threw aside the batch of ideas he was trying to sort and strode back through the swirling potentials and out into the tower where Vesper was waiting for him.

Vesper was watching his readouts and clucking to himself. “How did you find it this time, O’Sullivan?”

“Director, I apologize for the oversight but you have to understand that the situation with the Martians has progressed very quickly and-”

“I don’t care, Baker.” He stepped out of the potential tank and down to the floor while wiping sweat from his forehead. “I’m on the verge of a breakthrough here with Vesper and I need to focus.”

There was a long, uncomfortable silence on Baker’s end of the line while Vesper frowned at him. Suddenly the researcher turned frantically to his board and studied it. Brian couldn’t make anything out of what it said but he got the impression Vesper wasn’t very happy with it. Before he could ask the other man what was wrong Baker spoke up again. “Director, Vincent Vesper isn’t available any more. I don’t know what research of his you’ve found, or think you’ve found, but continuing to pursue it at this point isn’t going to help us very much.”

Brian glanced down at the younger Vesper. “SubDirector I think you’re going to be pleasantly surprised when you realize how far off base that assessment is. I just need… how long have I been in here?”

“About six hours, Director.”

“Only six?” He felt his eyes widen involuntarily. “Feels like ten times that. Interesting. I didn’t realize the fugue state altered your perception of time. Or is it the probability expansion?”

“The what?”

“Brian,” Vesper snapped. “What are you talking about?”

Splitting his attention between Baker and Vesper was beginning to take a toll and Brian considered just putting one of the conversations on hold. Unfortunately he wasn’t really given a chance to. “Director,” Baker said, “are you talking to someone else in there?”

“Yes, Baker, I am. Give me a minute, please, this is getting very difficult.” With all of his sensory input routed through his nanotech infused nervous system directly to his brain it was more difficult than he’d anticipated to separate one layer of experience from another. It wasn’t like he could press on an earbud to help focus on Baker’s voice. By the same token, they hadn’t built a system that let him shut off Baker’s voice if he needed to focus on something that was happening within the fugue proper.

Of course, they hadn’t anticipated the probability expansion facilitator either.

When Vesper first integrated Brian’s mind with the PEF it was the most disturbing thing to ever happen to him, more so than his initial medinano injection, more so than discovering UNIGOV had Shutdown both his parents a decade ago, more so than learning homo martians had come back to Earth for the first time in centuries. It most closely resembled the artificial psychedelic state that he’d experienced when he joined the Directorate. The point of that exercise had been to harden his mind against the distractions of cheap, emotional spirituality by filtering cheap neurotransmitter induced illusions through his medical systems. At least that was ostensibly the point.

Over the years Brian had learned many members of the Directorate actually routinely returned to the medically induced trance to try and improve their own understanding of themselves. He’d never joined them. When Brian experienced that first psychedelic trance he’d felt as if some towering presence reached within him and took out something important. He’d never been able to figure out quite what it was but he never wanted to go back and find out, either.

Looking back on it, the strange night terror that had pursued him through the fugue state was probably an expression of that first, badly managed psychedelic experience. The presence he’d felt in that trance hadn’t been a distinct visual thing. Instead it had felt more like a powerful being that manipulated the spinning, hypnotic landscape that he’d witnessed creeping in the edges of his vision as the trance made him feel like he was leaving his own body. The geometric shapes had cut away at his very soul, leaving him hollowed out.

Or, at least, that was how he felt at the time. Coming back from that point he’d remembered that ideas about souls and spirituality were just one of the shackles martian thought left on the sapiens mind to ensure they never reached their full potential in the here and now. What he saw in that trance was just his subconscious mind trying to reconcile the contradictions inherent in those shackles. Just one more reason, he told himself at the time, not to go back into the trance. He hadn’t realized the fugue state worked on similar principles because he hadn’t had time to delve too deeply into the idea when he was brushing up on the tech a few days ago but, with one major exception, it turned out the technology was basically identical.

Said exception being that the PEF was to a medically induced trance like the sun was to a candle. Vesper wouldn’t tell him – or perhaps didn’t know – if the PEF system was created by people from the Light of Mars project or if they’d borrowed it from someone else who’d entered the Shutdown fugue before they did. What he did say was that it expanded the human mind exponentially. By focusing heavily on specific ideas and formulas they’d been using the PEF to extrapolate the outcomes of various systems they wanted to test for their engineering project.

The details on how the system created its future projections were a little fuzzy. Again, Brian didn’t know if that was because Vesper didn’t know how it worked or if he was just trying to keep some secrets for whatever reason. What he did know was that the PEF became more effective the more human minds were tied in to it. When they’d dumped all the other Light of Mars engineers out the PEF had gone from highly productive to almost inert overnight. Vesper’s progress had ground to a halt. Thus his eagerness to recruit Brian into his work as soon as he arrived.

However after the initial shock that came from the PEF Brian found that the system itself might have some merits to it. Vesper was getting good data. Brian’s role in the Directorate was only tangentially related to nanotechnology but he knew enough to understand every third or fourth word the researcher was saying and that told him Vesper’s work was promising. After only two trips into the potential tank Vesper had most of the kinks worked out of his new system.

But Brian was beginning to wonder if perhaps they could use it towards even more relevant ends. They could bring the entire Light of Mars project back into the fugue and then add his own mind and Bakers to begin running some simulations of interactions with the martians. Perhaps UNIGOV could find a solution to that problem that didn’t require them to build the first fully fledged weapons platform on Earth in two hundred years.

“Brian.” Vesper’s voice cut into his thoughts with an irritable edge. “Have you been in contact with the Outside the whole time you were in the potential tank?”

“I have. Is that an issue, Dr. Vesper?”

The researcher exploded with unexpected ferocity. “Of course it is, Brian! I told you the PEF runs all its data through your mind as an auxiliary processing system and if you are in contact with additional data beyond what the probability tank is feeding you then the whole process from start to finish is going to be contaminated! Now we have to start this whole process over again from scratch!”

“Director, who have you made contact with?” Even as he tried to follow what Vesper was saying Baker’s voice dragged his attention in the other direction.

“It’s a long story, Baker, and I don’t have much time for it. If you hadn’t left your post for the last several hours you could have been here for most of it but there’s no sense complaining about that now.” Brian folded his arms over his chest and tapped one foot as he thought about it for a moment. There really wasn’t anything for it at this point. “Baker, I need you to close and disconnect your line to my audio nerves.”

“What.” Baker’s voice was getting more and more flat an expressionless as time went on. “Why would I do that, Director?”

“It’s complicated. You can break the connection, though, can’t you?”

“Yes, I can, Director but I don’t think I should so I’m not going to.”

Brian furrowed his brow. “Why not? Baker, you’ve been out of contact for hours and now you’re refusing to listen to perfectly reasonable instructions on what steps to take to forward our objectives.”

“Reasonable?” Baker snorted, sending a burst of discomfort through his left ear. “How can I tell if your instructions are reasonable or not when you won’t even tell me what factors led you to decide on this course of action?”

“Does it matter?”

“Of course it matters! Director, we barely know what goes on in one of these fugue states to begin with, you’ve been hallucinating strange things the whole time you’ve been in there and now you want to cut off all outside contact!” Now her voice was starting to climb up in pitch again. “How am I supposed to advise you or make sure the spirit of your instructions is carried out when I don’t even understand what it is you think you’re doing?”

“I understand your frustration,” Brian said, even though he really did not. “But we don’t have much time to-”

“We have no time, Director!” Baker snapped. “No time at all! The Martians raided the power plant hours ago and they’ve taken the whole place over! I had to turn it over to their Admiral fifty minutes previous. I can’t do anything here besides talk to you and you, well, you’ve got no time at all to finish whatever fantasy project you think is going to let you finish the Light of Mars. We’re sunk, Director, all that’s left is arguing over the details. Now do you think I can pull you out of your fugue without your suffering any of the detrimental side effects we saw in most of their engineers?”

“Then stand by, Director.”

“Stand by for what?”

“I’m going to transfer you over to Admiral Carrington and Director Mond. I have to go and make sure the martians don’t murder Mr. Vesper…”