Tag Archives: fiction

Hour of Epiphanies

Posted by natechen on

Lottery numbers were the logical place to start. They were completely random, with astronomical odds, the Powerball folks still used a purely mechanical device to generate them so he couldn’t be accused of tampering with them electronically and the drawing was streamed live at a specific time and place. All Sam had to do was sit down at his work table five minutes before things kicked off, cue up the stream on his tablet and flick on the power to the relay.

In theory, anyway. But more than two hours before the drawing was supposed to take place Sam was up to his elbows in the relay’s power source, running another diagnostic in what his brain told him was part of an obsessive need to control but his gut told him was definitely, 100% absolutely necessary for the test.

He’d always had problems with indigestion.

Pure math was not his thing but after leaving grad school at MIT under a cloud he’d been determined to prove… well, something. Contrary to popular belief high concept, theoretical scientists were ruled by emotion just as much as other people. Some of them even knew how to deal with those emotions. Sam King prided himself on channeling them into his work. And so, anxiety drove him to rebuild the tachyon relay a fifth time and like it.

Twenty minutes before the drawing he was done.

With nothing better to do he switched the relay on and pulled up the Powerball app on his phone. It was hard to believe that people of the modern era, with all the education and what not it prided itself on, people were still drawn to such wasteful forms of gambling but, just this once, Same was grateful that the lottery had kept up with the times. It made this experiment really easy to run. All he had to do was push the appropriate lottery button and see what the winning numbers were, then activate the – highly modified – phone in the relay and pull up the same screen.

The numbers listed didn’t match.

Sam frantically checked the relay’s phone and confirmed it was working. There were still fifteen minutes until the drawing. “Not possible,” Sam muttered, checking the relay again. “It shouldn’t have that much range.”

After ten minutes of frantic shuffling of notes and double checking calculations he came back to the conclusion that everything was working properly. The two phones still displayed different sets of winning numbers. Sam pulled up the browser on his laptop and flipped over to the bookmarked page that would let him livestream the drawing. Four minutes to go.

The hosts were chattering about something or another but Sam tuned them out and ran over everything one more time. Then double checked his wifi router, to make sure the stream wouldn’t cut out. Two and a half minutes. There was nothing to do but drain his mug of tea, sit down in a chair, hug his knees to his chest and wait. By some heroic exertion of will he managed to keep himself from rocking back and forth while humming. He hadn’t gone that far down the nutty professor route.

Though, to be fair, he’d never been a professor.

Envy and discontent welled up in him, as it did countless times every day. As he did whenever that happened he forced it down by mindlessly running through simple differential equations and almost missed the drawing. It was only the fact that the hosts had stopped talking that yanked him out of his reverie. The small plastic ball with the first number on it was already bouncing down to the deposit. Sam leaned forward and held his breath.

Five minutes later the drawing was done. The numbers matched the display on his relay. Sam King had successfully predicted the future.

——–

Natalie jerked around, the sound of rushing waters in her ears. Pivoting frantically, she tried to place herself. Most of the world was dark, lit only by small patches of light that seemed to drift in the distance, far out of reach. Nothing nearby was illuminated but she had a sensation of floating.

The last bit gave it away, it was familiar enough. She was dreaming.

Dreaming was nothing new for her, she’d had horrible nightmares for years, to the point of insomnia, until therapy helped her learn to assert herself and dream in a lucid state. She inhaled deeply and phantom water streamed into her nose and mouth, settling in her lungs and stomach. But it wasn’t real, she told herself, and exhaled it back out steadily. She wanted to see.

Darkness took flight all around her, leaving her standing on a rough surface that was probably some kind of coral or clinging sea thing. It looked like she was in some kind of shallow depression in the side of a sheer cliff while over her head the seafloor rose up in some kind of ridges. Straight ahead there was nothing but open water as far as her subconscious had created the world. With a shrug she decided to go exploring and pushed herself off into the water, drifting away from the cliffside. She’d gotten far enough to catch a glimpse of some kind of stone wall rising up from the top of the cliff when a voice rose up through the water, loud enough that she felt it with her entire body.

“Natalie. The world bends. So few are left who hear our voice.”

She stopped her drift through the murky water and looked around frantically. Dreams of drowning in the ocean were nothing new for her – even though she’d never seen a body of water larger than a retention pond – but dreams with dialog were another story. “Who-?”

“You must find the cause.”

“Yeah, how am I-”

“You shall feel our power in your bones. Think with the minds of the ancients. Hear with our wisdom. See with our eyes. You shall be everything you have ever desired to be. Wield the power to set things right.”

The depression she’d just left spasmed, then split open to reveal an angry yellow eye with a black vertical pupil as tall as her three story apartment building. Natalie’s mouth opened but she couldn’t scream – the weight of the water was suddenly too much and crushed all the strength from her.

“Go, Natalie. More depends on you than you know.”

She jolted awake, fighting against phantoms, and found herself panting and tangled in cords and sheets. As calm returned she realized she was in a hospital bed, attached to monitors. The door burst open and a nurse hustled in, already shushing her and trying to straighten out the mess she’d made of things. “W-why am I…”

Natalie trailed off, trying to remember why she might be in a hospital. The nurse guessed the question anyway. “You’ve been asleep for the past two days. Your parents brought you to the ER when you wouldn’t wake up.”

That hadn’t happened before. “Two days?”

The nurse nodded. “That’s right, honey.”

Her mind worked to process that, then blurted out the first thing that came to mind. “I missed my math test.”

——–

As tempting as it was to just win the lottery a couple of times and retire, Sam knew that would immediately get him in trouble and the ability to predict the future was too good to waste on something like that. He wasn’t quite sure what practical implications it had just yet but, before thinking too much about that, he needed to prove it worked in as many different ways as he could.

The concept was simple. He’d built a relay that used tachyon particles to talk to itself in the past. The cost in power was pretty high, he was going to have a killer electrical bill that month, and at first it had only been able to talk to itself half an hour in the past. Not super useful.

But after a week of tinkering he’d managed to run the relay for about an hour and pull up news reports from two days in the future on it. Then the relay had blown a capacitor and was going to need serious retooling. Sam figured it was time to give it an overhaul, think about how to improve it for presentation to the scientific community. But first things came first. He’d read several news stories from yesterday twice. Once on the relay, once when they happened. So far everything had been pretty accurate. Which made today kind of tricky.

He had to go to work to pay his bills and the costs of another build of the relay. Problem was the worksite was supposed to blow up that morning. He climbed out of the car and looked over the bustling site. A huge scaffolding and gantry system supported a 3d concrete printer, laying out the shell of a planned commercial suite intended to hold six offices for dentists, optometrists and the like. Most of the place was printed already and contractors were bustling through the dried sections, running utilities and whatever else happened in there once the printing was done. The big concrete printer was still whirring away on the third floor.

The report said the explosion came in the area of the concrete printer, which was crazy. As one of the four techs who programmed, set up and supervised the printer when it was in motion Sam knew it wasn’t the kind of thing that could explode and take out half a building. Still, he didn’t have any reason to doubt the report he’d read, either. Other than the fact that it came from the future.

Sometimes new technology was more trouble than it was worth. Sam set out to find his supervisor.

As it turned out Clark was at his truck, drinking coffee and listening to the architect drone on about something or other and nodding at the right times. Clark had made foreman for his diplomatic approach to contractor/employer relationships. He usually didn’t talk when they told him what they wanted, then ignored how they wanted him to do it and made sure the job got done right. He was a better boss than some Sam had worked for in academia. Certainly more patient. Clark put up with almost ten minutes of lecture before the architect moved on. Clark let him get a good ten feet away before snorting, shaking his head and walking over to Sam.

“Morning, King.” The foreman was not a man fond of given names. “Anything I can help you with?”

Frivolity wasn’t something Clark like in any form and Sam had a feeling that mentioning news from the future wasn’t going to get him anywhere in this situation so he decided on a more practical tactic. “Do you have the last safety and maintenance inspection report on the printer? It was acting a little funny yesterday and I was hoping to see if I could find the cause.”

Or at least a reason to shut it off and keep it from killing four people when it exploded.

“Sure.” Clark went to his truck and pulled open the back door on the cab, rummaging for his box where he kept those kinds of papers. Sam rolled onto the balls of his feet, impatient. The news had said the explosion was early in the morning, although it hadn’t given an exact time. And he’d run every safety check he could think of on the thing yesterday, no telling how that might have altered the variables since he last checked the future’s news. But he still didn’t want to waste time.

He was so preoccupied with the question of what might go wrong with the printer that he didn’t notice the girl until she was standing right next to him.

“You shouldn’t have looked.”

Sam jerked out of his musings at her voice. She was short, maybe five foot, and young. At a guess, he’s have said thirteen, although she might have been fourteen. Wavy brown hair framed a solemn face and hard brown eyes. Sam frowned. “Honey, you shouldn’t be here. This place is dangerous. What-”

“You’ve seen something you shouldn’t have.” The girl pulled a weird piece of white plastic off of her belt. It looked a bit like a pinwheel. “You shouldn’t have looked.”

Sam felt the hair on the back of his neck standing on end. Something was off about this. “What are you doing here, young lady?”

“The world is bent,” she said. “I have to make it right.”

It took a moment for him to realize it wasn’t just the hair on the back of his neck standing up. All of it was. Then a bolt of light struck the girl and he was knocked back with a deafening crack.

Out of Water – Chapter Four

Posted by natechen on

Lauren and Herrigan had gotten half way out the door of the Third Ward offices when Lieutenant Holly Newcastle, Australian Army, caught up with them.

Herrigan managed to suppress a disgusted sound. Not because he disliked the Lieutenant or had really wanted to go somewhere alone with one of the Australians but because the young woman – more of a girl in his mind – kind of creeped him out. In spite of a month plus of reminding himself that a lot of the ideas trenchmen had about the surface were based on hyperbole and out of date information there were some things he hadn’t gotten past. An intense dislike of professional armies was one of them.

Oscar had pointed out the irony of that coming from someone who was a Deputy Justice and a militia officer and so, technically, in the same line of work. But in Herrigan’s mind fighting wasn’t his job, it was something he did to keep his job. In theory, fighting was Newcastle’s job.

“Lauren?” Holly poked her head past Lauren’s shoulder, a quizzical look on her face. “Are you going somewhere? Ambassador Sudbury doesn’t want any of us wandering alone.”

She sounded more like a schoolmarm than a soldier to Herrigan’s admittedly untrained ear. Lauren didn’t seem to mind because she smiled back and said, “Herrigan just thought we should take a break and grab some refreshments. We’ll be back in a little while.”

“Forty five minutes, tops.” Herrigan put in.

“What kind of refreshments?” Holly asked, clearly skeptical.

“Well.” Lauren gave him a questioning look and said, “If there’s any kind of civilization left down here hard liquor will at least be on the menu.”

“Guaranteed.”

Holly clasped her hands together and said, “Take me with you! If I have to listen to one more word about the complexities of getting all your stupid Chiefs in one place and I’m sober, someone’s going to get shot.”

“Wait.” Herrigan’s brow furrowed. “Who gave you your gun back?”

“My sidearm hasn’t been returned yet. That’s another thing that bugs me.”

It wasn’t going to get fixed any time soon, that he was pretty sure of. But mentioning the fact probably wasn’t going to be helpful so Herrigan ignored the issue of arming her for the moment and considered her request. Ultimately, he didn’t see what it could hurt. “Well,” he said, “you’re probably not getting your gun back until you’re sober again but I’m not one to take booze from someone who has to deal with the Chiefs. Let’s go.”

——–

The sign said that the bar’s name was Orpheus. Holly gave Herrigan a skeptical look. “Orpheus?”

“Third Ward’s very own roving bar,” He said with a grin.

It was Lauren’s turn to look skeptical. “Does it move places?”

“It did in the past.” Herrigan waved at the circular hub room they stood in, ringed with what she guessed were store fronts and other public buildings. “This plaza only opened a couple of years ago. Before that, Orpheus was located one floor up. Whenever the Ward built a layer down into the Trench then the owner would buy up a business plot there and move shop. Orpheus is always as close to the underworld as it can get.”

Holly snorted. “Figures. Randal mentioned that one of the other Chief Executives was named Dante and from Inferno Ward. Are all the naming conventions down here so cheerful?”

“Most of ’em. It fits a place like this, don’t you think? Besides, Inferno Ward is where the Geothermal plant is, so it fits.” Herrigan stepped forward to open the door for them, then turned back and said, “By the way, until we can officially announce that we have Australian visitors to the public you might want to save those kind of questions for when we’re alone.”

Lauren took a quick glance around. Fortunately the plaza was fairly empty at the moment and she didn’t think anyone had overheard. “Good point. Lead the way, oh native guide.”

They pushed through the doors of the bar and in to the dimly lit interior. So far she’d mostly experienced the inside of a salvage sub and the docks and stairwells of the colony itself but even that small sampling had been kind of alien.  But pubs were apparently a universal constant. Orpheus was just a big room with booths, tables and a bar along the side wall. There were a few new wrinkles. Alcatraz itself wasn’t as humid as Erin’s Dream had been but humidity was still higher than she was used to and the near ubiquitous Spanish lace dangled from a number of supports throughout the room.

The people there were about what she’d come to expect from the trenchmen, dozens of men with close cropped or shaved heads, women with bobbed hair, all dressed in brightly colored jackets of various lengths. Between the unusual colors the people wore and the plant life trenchmen scattered everywhere the room felt a bit like a tropical rainforest that had somehow gotten lost and wandered down to the bottom of the ocean.

Herrigan led them to the side of the room, towards the bar. They’d gotten most of the way there when a loud, clearly inebriated voice called, “Hey, Harry! Over here!”

Towards the back of the room an arm clad in bright blue was waving lazily. Lauren vaguely recognized some of the people at the table as faces of the crew they’d come in with, although she probably couldn’t have put names to faces. Herrigan muttered something under his breath and said, “Be right back. I need a word with them.”

Lauren and Holly shared an amused glance as Herrigan hustled away, leaving them by the bar. Almost at the same moment a tall, gangly fellow stepped over to them and asked, “What’ll it be, ladies? Any preferences? Or did Cartwright promise you a drink from his stash?”

“Harry said he’d let us sample some of the best drinks in the Ward,” Lauren said, hoping to avoid ordering anything by name.

“The stash it is,” the barkeep replied. He pulled out a fairly normal looking glass bottle and set it on the counter, followed by three shot glasses. “You’re welcome to sit here at the bar until he gets back to you, or his favorite table’s open if you’d like some privacy.”

“Thanks,” Holly said as she took the bottle and headed towards the table he’d pointed out. As they got away from the bar she dropped her voice and asked, “How often do you think he brings ladies here for privacy? That sounded like a pretty practiced spiel to me.”

Lauren shrugged and made a noncommittal noise as she looked the bottle over. The label announced the drink was Selkie, which she’d never heard of, and it was mostly full. As soon as they got to Herrigan’s table, a booth near the back corner of the room, they poured half a glass in each glass and studied the result.

Holly turned her glass slowly in one hand, then carefully sniffed at the beverage and pulled a face. “It’s… I don’t know.”

The liquid sloshed in the glass but didn’t cling like wine or brandy would. Lauren didn’t smell much from it either, beyond a vague hint of the sea that could easily have come from the room around her. “It’s green.”

“Yeah.” Holly nodded. “Green.”

“It’s Selkie. Distilled seaweed and other flavors.” Herrigan slid into the booth on the other side and scooped up the third glass, downing its contents in a single gulp. With a grimace he set the shot glass down and refilled it, then looked at the ladies. “Not going to try?”

Apparently unable to back down from the challenge, Holly downed her glass with equal speed, then nearly fumbled it onto the floor as she half-choked swallowing. Curious, Lauren took a much more restrained sip of her own drink. It didn’t burn like some well aged whiskies she’d had but it tasted a lot more like grass than she cared to think about. “Must be an acquired taste.”

“I think all booze is, to be fair.” Herrigan downed a second glass but didn’t refill it. “We brewed with what we could spare, back in the day.”

Holly wiped her eyes and swallowed hard, then smoothed the front of her shirt and exhaled sharply. “It’s certainly unique.”

Herrigan smirked. “Suits its makers.”

She bristled at that and pulled herself up a bit in her chair. “Mr. Cartwright, could I ask you a question?”

He shrugged. “Sure, why not? I’m probably not going to give you the best answer, but if you wanted that I’m sure you’d have asked Sam or Randal.”

For a moment Holly paused to gather her thoughts, perking Lauren’s interest. The lieutenant wasn’t an airhead but she didn’t give the impression of a deep thinker, either, and Lauren couldn’t figure out what in the last few minutes could have prompted such a serious attitude from her. Finally Holly looked Herrigan in the eye and said, “Why -”

And all the lights in the bar went dark.

Out of Water: Chapter Three

Posted by natechen on

“Seriously, Sam?” Herrigan flopped down in one of the chairs in his cousin’s office and started to put his feet up on the desk.

Sam caught one ankle on his way around the desk and shoved Herrigan’s feet back towards the floor. “What’s the matter, Harry?”

Herrigan threw a glance at the doorway, which by longstanding Trench tradition had no door in the spirit of not dealing behind closed doors, in the direction of Randal’s office just down the hall. “Kind of feel like there might be better things to be doing with our time. Like maybe keeping an eye on the first ever foreign delegation to our colony?”

“That’s just it. This isn’t a colony, it’s a prison.” Sam’s legs claimed the space where Herrigan’s had been headed a second ago. “Think about it. How to run this place internally has been a point of contention since the inmates started running the asylum. We can’t take ourselves seriously enough to run a coherent government, how can we expect Australia to take us any more seriously knowing that?”

“If they can’t take us seriously that’s the Aussie’s problem, not ours.” Herrigan kept his voice pitched so hopefully he couldn’t be heard down the hall. More than a dozen years on subs had taught him to control his voice in a controlled space so he was sure he couldn’t be overheard normally but he still wasn’t sure what to expect of the delegation. The crew’s consensus from time spent in New Darwin was that the surface was ten to twenty years ahead in terms of miniaturized infotech, he was willing to bet the delegation had listening and recording devices the trenchmen hadn’t even spotted yet. “Anyways, so far as I know the whole colony doesn’t have to negotiate with them. Just one Ward. Preferably ours.”

Sam raised his eyes towards the ceiling in silent supplication. Herrigan wasn’t sure if it was for patience or his quick and accidental death. Or maybe the patience to wait for the accident. “Did it ever occur to you that they could just blow us up instead?”

“They wouldn’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.” Herrigan favored his cousin with a dangerously toothy grin. “Sam, did you ever realize that Erin McClain was an Alcatraz native?”

“Yes…” Sam waved for him to get to the point.

Herrigan leaned forward, his grin dissolving into impatience. “Sam. Have you forgotten that twenty years ago we still used scrap metal to shore up barely functional underwater mines that only met our building needs on a good day? Without Erin McClain we wouldn’t be able to grow ceramics out of seawater. Or if we could they probably wouldn’t be up to resisting pressure at this depth.”

“I get it, Harry, everyone’s heard of Erin McClain. She’s a celebrity down here, saved us from-” The pieces clicked into place with an almost audible snap. “Australia doesn’t know how to make magnetically aligned ceramics.”

“To be precise, no surface nation knows how to make magnetically aligned ceramics.” Sam leaned back in his chair like a cat that got the cream. “McClain building techniques are ten times as strong and four times as cheap as concrete equivalents, and a lot lighter to boot. Even if McClain Tech chooses to build stuff here and ship it to the surface instead of selling the tech to firms on the surface they’ll make a mint, new construction on the surface will get a lot cheaper and no one will want their supplies to the new wonder bricks cut off.”

“McClain ceramics don’t come in bricks. You know that, right?”

“My point is, if we show them what we have to offer reasonable people will see that cooperation is a better way to get it than violence.” Herrigan jerked a thumb in the direction of Harold’s office and the delegation. “As far as we can tell, they’re reasonable people.”

Sam laughed. “Reasonable people don’t round up the folks who disagree with them and toss them on the bottom of the ocean.”

“The good old U.S. of A. did that, not Australia, and they don’t even exist anymore. Place is broken into two countries now and they’re too busy with each other to bother with us.” Herrigan climbed to his feet and started towards the door, pausing to look over his shoulder. “Relax, Sam. Oscar and I hashed this over a lot and the crew put it to a vote, if we didn’t have confidence in this we would have left them on the surface.”

Sam let him get all the way to the door before he said, “That won’t hold up for long, Harry.”

The other man paused in the doorway and turned back. “Beg pardon?”

“That’s a really good song and dance routine you just ran now.” Sam mimed applause. “It might even fly with most people. But try it with a Chief, especially one from another Ward, and they’ll know you’re blowing smoke. That’s an issue but not the biggest one. You went up, Harry. We don’t have many laws down here, compared to the societies that we left behind at least. But not contacting the surface until the Chief Executives say it’s okay? That’s a big one. Someone’s going to call you on it, Herrigan. Not me, probably not Randal. But sooner or later, someone will. Be ready.”

——-

Lauren stepped out of the Chief Executive’s office feeling more than a little exhausted. On top of a new place and a new culture there were a bunch of new security and secrecy protocols in place. Randal wasn’t sure what people would make of outsiders suddenly showing up in their very insular community so he wanted to take things slow. Ambassador Sudbury was okay with that, and Lauren thought she probably would be too. But before she decided she just wanted a break from it all.

Once upon a time she’d thought there was a lot of fuss in being assistant harbormaster.  Now she was sure it wasn’t anything compared to being a diplomat.

She headed aimlessly down the hall out into the reception area for the office suite where Randal and the other leaders of Third Ward had their offices. To her surprise, she found Herrigan leaning against the receptionist’s desk, staring pensively into the distance. “So that’s where you got to.”

Herrigan glanced up. “Yeah, I’m still here. Sam just had a few things he wanted to has out with me.”

She leaned on the desk space beside him, glad that the secretary had been called into Randal’s office so they wouldn’t be interfering with her job. “Randal did mention you were a ‘Deputy Justice’ and would be our escort in town.”

He pinched the brightly colored fabric of his jacket sleeve. “I wear the yellow for a reason, it’s true. But before any of that gets started I need a drink.” He shot her a grin. “Want to come along and absorb some local culture?”

“Sure.” She answered his grin with one of her own. “Sounds like a great way to kick things off.”

Out of Water: Chapter Two

Posted by natechen on

I forgot to mention last week – for those interested in reading about the previous adventures of Erin’s Dream and her crew you can find them here: 

Emergency Surface

Code Red – Part One

Code Red – Part Two

Now on with the story!

Herrigan drummed his fingers on his console, hoping his nerves didn’t show. Of course, the Aussie group probably didn’t know him, or docking procedures, well enough to tell how much nerves was typical for the situation but he couldn’t help but feel very transparent at the moment. But not telling the Australians about the Trench’s buried communications network had been his idea. So had assigning Tank to go out in a salvage sub to connect and disconnect Erin’s Dream from the network during the approach run instead of doing it himself like usual. That didn’t mean he liked the results.

Part of it was the usual feeling of worry over having his dive crews out when he wasn’t with them. Tank was a good salvage driver but he wasn’t the best pilot on the boat. But with Herrigan on the bridge to create an illusion of normalcy and Drip, the boat’s other top Waldo driver, out of commission until he could get a solid psychiatric evaluation Tank was the best qualified for the job on board. Mostly, he just missed seeing the city as they came in.

Third Ward clung to the side of the Trench, well below the early construction that had been put up when Alcatraz was still officially a penal colony but not quite as deep as the geothermal plant Second Ward had built to serve as the colony’s primary power source as it grew larger. On approach in a Waldo salvage sub you could see almost the entire colony glowing softly in the dark, like a jewel half-buried in the ocean’s shifting sediments. It was beautiful and a little wistful and, for Herrigan, the sight was synonymous with homecoming. As much as he loved Eddie, her bridge wasn’t even on the outer hull and she wasn’t equipped with external cameras so that would be one sight he would miss out on this time.

On the other hand, he did get to hear Ambassador Sudbury negotiating with the Chief Executive as they made the half-hour trip down the trench, through the perimeter minefields and into Alcatraz home waters.

Alcatraz may have originally been populated by hardline political groups but that didn’t mean that the colony had fostered political niceties and the clash between Sudbury, who’d struck Herrigan as deliberately obtuse when they’d first met, and Holman, who had the typical blunt spoken nature of most Alcatraz executives, had been… informative. The two were still on the line, hammering out the details of how and when Sudbury would meet with Third Ward’s Operations staff.

Lauren had been doing her best to eavesdrop on the conversation but, since the ambassador was wearing Oscar’s headset, there wasn’t any way for her to hear both sides. Finally she’d given up and left Sudbury and Hathoway debating details by the captain’s station and moved the few feet back to his console. Gwen looked up long enough to give her a friendly nod but kept her attention on her screens.

“I don’t get it,” Lauren said, her attention still mostly on the ambassador. “How can you run a colony as complex as and experimental as this without a central governing body?”

“We got one. Sudbury’s talking to the head of it right now.” He leaned back in his chair as much as it would allow, which wasn’t very much. Eddie wasn’t built with comfort first in mind. “Thing is he wants to talk to all the Chiefs. That’s gonna take time. They don’t like talking to each other much. Getting all of them to agree to talk to a total stranger is going to be worse than herding cats.”

“Do you even have cats?”

“My niece has a cat plushie. I bought it for her fifth birthday.”

Lauren gave him a patronizing smile. “You must have been uncle of the year.”

“Don’t knock plushies. They’re good for lots of uncle points down here.” Herrigan spared a quick glance for his board and then went back to the conversation at hand. “Thing is, Alcatraz isn’t really a nation, per se. It’s more like a county with a bunch of small, bickering cities scattered around in it and no county council to mediate.”

“That’s the part I don’t get. How could you be around for so long and not put some sort of council in place?”

“Never needed one. After the U.S. abandoned Ellis platform and left us to our own devices the districts – which is what we had before separate Wards were built – were release valves for all the differing viewpoints that had been jammed into one place. People gravitated to the district they were most comfortable in and didn’t want anyone telling them they had to do work with the other districts if they didn’t want to. So no one ever tried to get them to work together.” Herrigan paused for a moment as his status board lit up to let him know Tank was safely back on board. He cleared the message and glanced over at the ambassador, who was now talking about something with Oscar. Tank had to have disconnected Erin’s Dream from the network before he docked so apparently plans were now in place. Hopefully Oscar would clue him in on what they were before they happened.

“So basically Alcatraz has no central government because you’re a bunch of stubborn crooks?” Lauren asked.

Herrigan just shrugged. “And isolated from the outside world something fierce, but yeah, basically.”

“Why do you people even worry about protecting this place again?”

He grinned. “Give us a second to get docked and you can see for yourself.”

——–

Lauren followed Harry and the rest of the bridge crew back through the ship’s living section and into what the trenchmen called “the launching dock.” Really it was just a large hold where the six miniature submarines the crew used to cut up salvage sat when they weren’t in use. The massive hydraulic lifts that dropped the subs into sea locks for launching loomed almost all the way up to the catwalks they walked on, giving the room a dreamlike quality, almost like a forest of iron. As they moved towards the exit hatch Lauren caught a whiff of sea brine, which didn’t make any sense because the subs hadn’t been launched since before Erin’s Dream made port in New Darwin.

Of course the whole ship was as humid as a rain forest so it could have been her imagination. Either way, thoughts about humidity and strange smells left her entirely when she climbed out onto Eddie’s top side and got her first look at the port.

Erin’s Dream was a cramped, damp, gray place, built for pure functionality. Not an inch of space was wasted and the only decoration in sight was the garishly bright colors of the jackets the crew wore. Oscar had warned the group that the rest of Alcatraz wasn’t built like the sub but Lauren hadn’t been prepared for just how different it would be. After all the time aboard the dull, claustrophobic ship her brain had a hard time focusing on any one thing so it locked on to the first thing that got its attention. The docks were green.

Or rather, she realized as they clanked across the gangplank to the dock, the piers were built out of some kind of clear plexiglass that allowed light from the ceiling far above to filter down into the gently waving mass of seaweed in the water below. The docks appeared to be much the same except fernlike plants rose up in mounds about chest high, probably contained in planters of some kind and laid out to create lines of traffic. Every so often a lamp pole rose up out of the ferns, the pole and the cross piece near the top covered in a hardy green moss that hung like Spanish lace. Trenchmen moved up and down the docks everywhere, their brightly colored clothes giving the entire place a tropical air.

“Remarkable,” Sudbury said, sounding just as amazed at the docks as Lauren felt. “Are all your docks like this?”

“Docks and most of the other common areas. Now in First Ward,” Oscar gestured vaguely at the ceiling in what Lauren guessed was the general direction of the ward in question, “they used to mandate this kind of stuff everywhere. Most places still have it, although industrial zones cleared it out real quick once they could.”

Hathoway snorted. “I’ve never heard of a place that liked gardening so much they made green thumbs a legal requirement.”

“They just liked breathing,” Herrigan said, sounding a little testy. “Population was outstripping mechanical oxygen supply at the time so we bred an organic supply.”

And just like that the wonder of the situation was gone. Lauren shook herself to get her mind back in the game and said, “Sorry, Harry. We’re just impressed, is all. We’ll try and keep gawking down but you have to admit that we’re kind of fish out of water, here.”

“No. You’re not.” He said it very decisively.

Oscar jumped in as Herrigan seemed to have said his piece. “It’s probably for the best if you don’t use any idioms about water down here. They probably all mean something different than what you’re used to. Let’s get up to the lockmaster’s and you can meet the Chiefs.”

The Australians dutifully followed their native guides, Lauren wondering the whole way what other unexpected landmines they might stumble over on their way.

Out of Water: Chapter One

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The hull of Erin’s Dream groaned as the tired salvage sub sank down below the edge of the Marianas Trench. Lauren Cochran watched as the ship’s salvage commander, Herrigan Cartwright, wiped the condensation off the shoulder of his bright yellow jacket and threw it on the floor. It was a practiced, unconscious movement, one she’d realized was something between a dismissal and a curse. Barely two feet to his right the ship’s XO, Gwen Bolton, mimicked the gesture. Apparently the ship’s crew didn’t like the noise any better than she did. Lauren knew Erin’s Dream had suffered a hull breach before making port in New Darwin but the repairs had all been cleared by safety inspectors before it headed out to sea again.

Of course none of those inspectors had been told its final destination was a half forgotten prison colony built near the bottom of the deepest chasm in the world.

With eight people crammed into a space that couldn’t be more than twelve by twelve, plus the control consoles and station chairs, the bridge was cramped and tense. Given the distant attitude the crew had shown them so far she wasn’t sure why the small Australian delegation had been invited to watch the ship make port at Stalag, the Third Ward of a prison colony turned self governing state calling itself Alcatraz. For that matter, she wasn’t entirely sure why she had been sent with the delegation at all. She was an assistant harbormaster, not a diplomat. Her only qualification was the amount of time she’d spent around the crew since they got into port and even on that count she was sure Ambassador Sudbury had her beat. He’d spent a lot of time with the ship’s owners during the weeks it was laid up for repairs.

“All engines stopped,” the XO announced. “How’s her back, Graham?”

“Hull looks fine,” Gwen’s brother replied from the ops station, “but give her a second to get her feet under her. It’s been a while since Eddie was this deep.”

Herrigan pulled a headset out from under his console and put it on. “I’ll call in and let the lockmaster know we’re coming.”

“Lockmaster?” Sudbury asked.

Captain Duffy leaned back from his work station to give the ambassador his full attention. “He’s somewhere between a harbor master and an engineer in charge of keeping the sea locks in working order so subs can get in and out of the Ward.”

“Did you rename everything in your society?” The grumpy man asking was the Sergeant in charge of the small Australian army detachment – really just two people – sent along to keep Lauren and the Ambassador safe. Most people seemed content to attribute his generally surly attitude to the fact that he felt dangerously understaffed for his responsibilities.

“We didn’t rename anything. We just didn’t feel any need to borrow from existing surface societies when inventing entirely new things.” Herrigan was the one exception to the spirit of good will Lauren had noticed, perhaps because he was kind of the opposite of Sergeant Hathoway. Both men had spent a fair portion of the trip watching each other suspiciously and not talking much. He was friendly enough with the rest of the delegation but something about Hathoway seemed to rub him the wrong way.

“What happened to calling in?” Gwen muttered.

Ambassador Sudbury stepped in to break up the tension. “I thought your subs maintained radio silence as a way to stay hidden.”

“Once we’re in the trench we have relays that let us talk to Alcatraz without risk of detection,” the captain said. “Without real time contact we’d have a hard time navigating the hazards between us and home.”

Lauren suppressed a shudder. “What kind of hazards do you have down this deep? Predators?”

Gwen laughed at that. “Nothing big enough to hurt Eddie, even with the bad shape she’s in. There isn’t enough for something that big to eat, assuming we weren’t past it’s crush depth. We have smaller fish, crustaceans and jellyfish running around but nothing like monster sharks or kraken or stuff like that. Most of the dangerous stuff comes from us.”

“What kind of trash do you leave laying around down here?” Lauren asked. “I thought Alcatraz sent out salvage subs because it couldn’t afford to leave stuff lying around.”

“It’s not trash,” Herrigan said. “It’s other things.”

Before Hathoway could ask what he meant Herrigan keyed his headset and said, “Hello, Alcatraz control. This is the Erin’s Dream, requesting an approach lane and permission to dock from Third Ward’s lockmaster.”

——–

“I told you your cousin would be fine.” Randal hopped down stairs two at a time trying to keep up with Sam as his friend clattered down towards the lock levels at full tilt.

“I wasn’t worried about him. Herrigan’s tough as nails. But Aunt Martha practically went gray this month and the family’s been hopping trying to keep her spirits up. He shouldn’t be worrying his mother like that.” Sam shot Randal a look over his shoulder. “This is personal business, Chief. Don’t you have other things to be doing? Like getting a campaign in order?”

Randal chuffed a laugh out in between deep breaths, trying not to show how much the pace was taking out of him. “I’ve spent four and a half years of my life as the Third Ward chief executive, that’s long enough thank you. Not sure why I wanted to be a politician in a colony full of stubborn political prisoners, it’s worse than wrangling cats.”

“You’ve never seen a cat before. We don’t have them here. How would you know?” Sam was sounding a bit winded himself, although at nearly ten years Randal’s senior he had a decent excuse.

“I’ll concede the point if you’ll quit trying to talk me into running for office again.” After six flights of stairs, going down or not, both men were glad to reach the door that let them in to the control room that overlooked the main sealock control center. Half a dozen faces swivled to look at the two with curious expressions. Randal grinned. “Quarterly inspection, folks. We’re here to make sure you’re parking the boats right.”

The lockmaster grunted and went back to his console. “Interested in one boat in particular, I’ll bet.” He waved absently towards one of the other technicians. “I think Frank’s on the line with Erin’s Dream right now.”

As the two men approached Frank’s station he hit a key on his control screen that switched his audio from his headset to speakers. “-coming in for final approach and requesting docking instructions.”

Herrigan’s voice came over the speaker and Randal saw Sam smile out of the corner of his eye. In spite of what he said Randal knew the Cartwrights were a close family and had been worried as Harry’s ship got more and more overdue. “Eddie’s two months overdue, Cartwright,” Frank said, pulling up the current docking assignments on his screen. “Her usual berth’s taken. Get your ship in sooner if you want her resting easy, I’ll have to see what I can scrounge for you. Guess you got a full hold of scrap after all that time out there, at least.”

There line was quiet for nearly a minute, long enough for Sam and Randal to exchange curious looks, before Herrigan’s voice came back. “Some scrap, control. Also, perishables.”

The sealock controller sat back in his seat and scratches at his head. “Perishables? Did you find an intact medical shipment or something?”

“No. It’s foodstuffs. Mostly vegetables. A few head of livestock. And four passengers.”

Sam leaned forward and cleared the docking assignments from Frank’s screen, leaving him looking at the sonar profile for Erin’s Dream, as if that would give him some kind of insight into what was going on. “Where did he pick up that kind of stuff?”

Frank’s thoughts must have been running along the same line because he said, “How did any of that stuff survive salvage depth? It’s well past crush depth for any of it.”

“We picked it up in Australia. Long story. Look, the four passengers are a diplomatic envoy from Canberra and they want taken to our leaders or something. Have the lockmaster call the Chief Executive up and let him know what’s going on then find us somewhere to park and order a repair crew. Eddie needs her hull looked at.”

Frank switched off his headset and gave Randal a questioning look. Randal looked around and realized that everyone else in the room was mirroring it. A huge mess had just landed in his lap. There weren’t rules for receiving diplomats, no one had ever really anticipated it being a necessity. He wasn’t even sure the other Chiefs would be able to agree on a way to deal with foreign negotiations, they had a hard enough time agreeing amongst themselves. And given that everyone in the room had just heard that contact with the surface had been reestablished keeping that little fact under wraps was now a pipe dream. For a moment Randal stood stock still, trying to juggle variables and figure out what they should do next.

Naturally, the first thing he asked was, “Think they brought any cats with that livestock?”

The Antisocial Network – Chapter Sixteen

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“I hate hospitals. How did you stand being in here so long?”

Rachada shrugged. “When you’re comatose it doesn’t bother you as much. Besides, my dad is a surgeon. I got used to hospitals a long time ago.”

“Rough break.” Eric paced around the room, which admittedly was bigger than most hospital rooms he’d been in, trying to ignore the prickly feeling of illness he always got when he visited a sickbed. “What did the doctors say?”

“Clean bill of health.” She tapped the side of her head. “It was all up here and the CAT scans didn’t find anything wrong. They’re going to do another MRI later to see if there are any signs of nerve damage but I doubt that I would have regain consciousness so quickly after you corrected the nerve blockage if there was. I owe you a favor.”

“I wouldn’t have known how to fix it if Vent hadn’t shown me. You probably could have done it yourself if you knew how.”

“But you’re the one who went out of your way to find out how to reverse it and make sure I got the solution.” Rachada smiled and settled herself into a more comfortable sitting position on the bed. “I think that makes you the one I owe the favor to.”

Eric flung himself into one of the rooms overstuffed chairs as if sitting more emphatically would make him more comfortable there. “If that’s the way you feel.”

“I guess that’s settled then.” Rachada folded her hands in her lap and gave him a searching look. “Eric, how sure are you that you’ve really prevented the Network from launching another brainworm?”

“Preventing it from ever happening again is probably impossible. After all, he’s still a smart guy and he’s got a lot telepaths backing him up. So it could happen again, but not any time soon. You guys,” Eric gestured around to encompass Rachada’s coworkers scattered through the rest of the building, “need to look into a way to eradicate dangerous brainworms if you want to make them impractical as a weapon in the future.”

Rachada gave him a curious look. “I thought you said the First Telepath didn’t intend his brainworm as destructive.”

“He didn’t. But that doesn’t mean that someone else couldn’t build one that way. And if he builds another one odds are it’ll wind up just as dangerous as the first one.”

She treated Eric to another one of her small, mysterious smiles. “Are you sure you don’t want to work for the FBI? Dr. Thorwald is pretty sure he’s going to get a full taskforce funded in the next month and we could certainly use the help.”

For a moment Eric seemed to think about it, glancing around the room from under half-lidded eyes. “I don’t think so. It doesn’t seem like my kind of thing.”

“Going back to the theater, then?”

“No.” The answer came immediately that time. “I’m not even sure it’s possible for a telepath to do live theater ethically. There’s so many things you do on stage that wind up leaking into headspace. Maybe some day Vent and I can work out some way to safeguard against it but in the mean time… I’d rather not worry about mesmerizing the audience in the wrong way. And I’d rather not have to fight the temptation to psychic my through an audition.”

“This is why you belong in the FBI, Eric. You’re worrying about the right things.” She sighed. “But if you don’t want to stay and work at least try to stay in touch.”

Eric pushed himself up out of the chair and stepped over to the side of the bed. “Count on it, Cherrywood. I’m pretty sure the FBI didn’t hound me into jail because of you so if there’s any owing favors going on it’s from me to you.” He patted her on the hand and smiled. “Stay safe. Make your parents proud.”

“Thanks. And I’ll pray your parents will have understanding . Unless you’re planning to study medicine? The law?”

Eric laughed. “I’m thinking of becoming the first Doctor of Telepathy.”

“That will do the trick, I’m sure.”

He slipped out of Rachada’s room, burying himself in layers of anonymity. No one Eric passed in the halls gave him a second glance save for the tall, white haired man with the intense beard who’s name tag proclaimed him to be Rachada’s direct superior. But Dr. Thorwald didn’t do more than glance at Eric as they passed, a brief moment of confusion that passed as the two men parted ways.

The FBI probably needed to think up a way to deal with people who could just walk in and out of their buildings at will, too. Of course, the trick wouldn’t have worked if he hadn’t gotten into the building with other employees but that hadn’t been too difficult. And he clearly wasn’t the only one who’d pulled it off.

At first he wasn’t sure what was waiting for him in the small lobby outside the building’s medical ward wasn’t a meme. It had all the trappings of the First Telepath, the worn flannel shirt, near-skeletal proportions and distant odor of stale booze, but he was looking through a magazine when Eric approached. When the First tossed it down on a nearby table it made a realistic thump and the other magazines on the table fluttered in response. The magazine was real enough, so there must have been a real hand underneath. And, once he was looking for it, he could pick up on the gentle way the First Teep was nudging people’s attention away from them.

“Hello, Echoes.”

“FT.” Eric had settled on Vent’s way of talking about the First as the least pretentious. “To what do I owe this honor?”

“I know you took something from me.” Eric backed slowly away as the First advanced, radiating hostility. “I want it back.”

Eric placed himself strategically next to a wall with a door to one side and a hallway to the other . “Sorry, FT. I know a good way to forget things and what I got from you wasn’t worth remembering.”

The tension in the air slipped a bit, then redoubled. “Not worth remembering? I am the Network, Echoes. You’re very name means imitation, who are you to judge me?”

“The funny thing about echoes is they don’t have to explain themselves to other people. An echo is a reflection of you.” Eric gave the First a cocky grin he wasn’t really feeling. “You made me because you thought it was fair to look into other people’s minds without permission. Why complain when your echo does it to you?”

The First Telepath hesitated, a wary feeling tinging his memetic projection. “Return what’s mine, Echoes, or the Network will be closed to you.”

“Fine. Take your Network, I don’t really care.” The brass ring popped out of his right hand, spinning quietly and ready to scrounge for thoughts again. “Just keep in mind that if you cause trouble I can keep digging through your head until we sort out what your real problem is. I’m not a shrink like Rachada or Vent, so I’m not about to do it for charity or money, but if it’s what it takes to get you off my back I’m sure we can work something out.”

They stood for a moment, the tension teetering on the brink of something nasty, then the First Telepath turned away. “Fine. Do as you want, Echoes. But whatever you’re hoping to accomplish, without the Network there’s no way it will work out.”

Eric watched the other man leave, people nervously moving to the sides of the hallway as he stalked away, avoiding his radiating anger even as he kept them from fully noticing he was there. Once the coast was clear Eric went out by the back entrance, just in case Tails or Hugo had tagged along with the First as backup. He didn’t want another brush with them. Maybe the First Telepath was right. Maybe he couldn’t accomplish what he wanted without them.

But for the time being he didn’t have anything he wanted to do. And that was okay with him. It was time to go home, get his bearing and work out a plan.

Then maybe he would talk to Vent. After all, there had to be some use for his new talents. It was just a matter of finding them.

The Antisocial Network – Chapter Fifteen

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After a experiencing short term memory loss in an entirely new way – all while under attack by a semisentient mental disorder – getting thrown off the top of a building wasn’t quite as upsetting as Eric would have expected. Some part of his brain had figured out that he wasn’t really in that much danger here. Hubris, possibly, since all the experts seemed to think things happening in headspace could still hurt him, but it was a gamble he was willing to take. The building rushed by at an incredible speed and most of Eric’s attention was drawn to the man who was holding him but Eric was able to see around the First Telepath just enough to see their reflection in the windows of the building just beyond.

Or rather, their lack of a reflection.

The blurred silhouette of a diving bird was the only thing Eric could see in the glass as they rushed downwards. For a second he was confused but then he remembered what Vent had said about his personal headspace being based on what his body was seeing and manic grin split his face. “A bird. We’re seeing through the eyes of a bird. That’s so cool!”

“Perceptive, aren’t we?” The First’s eyes narrowed. “And remarkably possessed. Let’s find your limits, shall we?”

There was a wrenching sensation and suddenly Eric found himself flat on the ground. Everything looked big for some reason and the First Telepath was little more than a receding sensation in the back of his mind. He looked around in confusion, then panic hit him for some reason. He looked up on instinct just in time to see the falcon swoop down, talons outstretched, and grab him.

There were some really uncomfortable sensations that compounded his already throbbing headache and then he was back in empty headspace with the First Teep approaching him in a rather unfriendly manner. Head in one hand Eric asked, “What happened?”

“You just enjoyed a rat getting eaten by a peregrine falcon. I apologize if you found it unpleasant but you were the one who intruded here.” The First picked Eric up by the scruff of the neck, pulling his shirt tight under his arms. Eric had just started wondering if he could make his shirt vanish, since his meme was really just a projection or something, when the other man clamped one hand to his head and pushed.

Not in the literal sense, of course. Like most of the things Eric had experienced since becoming a telepath the sensation seemed to start at the back of his head near the joint with the neck but it quickly spread to encompass his entire skull. Headspace blurred again and suddenly Eric found his life flashing in front of his eyes. From the way the First Telepath watched the proceedings he could apparently see it too.

Most of the scenes that flashed by were from the last few years as he tried to go from being a med school student to a working actor. There were a lot of glimpses of life back stage – although more often as stage crew than an actor. Scattered throughout were the occasional quiet, forceful discussion that passed for an argument with his parents about how he was misusing his gifts. Those would eventual stop the First got to memories from the last year, after he’d stopped talking to them.

Not that Eric really wanted a total stranger poking through his memories, no matter how depressed they were likely to make him. He tried to push back but couldn’t find the strength to make any headway. He tried kicking at the other meme’s legs but that didn’t help any either. In a last ditch effort he grabbed at the First Telepath’s head and tried to dig into his memories.

At first he couldn’t make any headway, every attempt to push into the mind behind the First Teep’s meme was easily pushed back. But as Eric got a firmer grip on his opposition he heard a click and a whir and the metal ring from the rogue brainworm emerged from his hand and wrapped itself around the other meme’s arm.

The smell of stale beer and cigarettes, a constant undercurrent through the entire encounter, suddenly became so strong Eric could taste it. Headspace wavered and bent, his own memories fading and morphing into an unfamiliar office. Men in police uniforms hustled past the door as two men argued in a way that would have been considered downright uncivilized in the Han household.

Hours spent in a police cruiser before the promotion to detective. Weeks trying to crack cases obstructed just because people wouldn’t trust the cops enough to talk to them. A wild gunshot from a strung out drug dealer. Physical therapy. Psychiatrists.

A long descent into alcohol and nicotine. Nearly loosing his job. Antidepressants.

And then the breakthrough. The ability to read minds. A hundred ideas for new ways to do his job. But just one person who could read minds wouldn’t be enough. He’d need more. Lots and lots of mind readers who would help him out. Like snitches. An information network that would let him get any information, find any person, crack any case just by skimming other people’s thoughts.

And then there was Vent with his nifty brainworms and-

With a jolt Eric came back to himself. For a few seconds – or maybe hours – he’d lost himself in the flood of memories. But with Vent came memories of the brainworm and, with a sharp snapping sensation, Eric found himself holding the metal band again. There was a weird tangle of brass wires and delicate looking pipes wrapped up in the center of it.

Headspace around them had turned blank once more and the First Telepath was sitting on his haunches, his meme staring aimlessly off into the distance. Eric turned over the mess in his hands and got glimpses of the First building a brainworm and discussing the details with Vent. The First Teep’s meme twitched once and Eric took it as his cue to exit. It was time to get back to his own body.

And he was away, as quick as thought.

The Antisocial Network – Chapter Fourteen

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Vent tilted his head from one side to the other, immediately prompting images of Stallone in the Rocky films to run through Eric’s mind. For a split second Vent’s meme wavered like it had back in his mother’s mind, whetting Eric’s curiosity about what had happened there, but he pushed the question into the back of his mind along with the Stallone impression he’d nearly started into and waited to see what Vent was going to do. Vent, for his part, didn’t seem to notice, or at least didn’t comment on, the brief distortion.

Instead he exhaled slowly, something Eric understood more than heard, since their meme’s didn’t have lungs or mouths, and suddenly headspace around them began folding like the world seen through a kaleidoscope. There was a sensation of stale beer and old cigarettes, again more an impression than a real smell or taste, then they were suddenly on the edge of a new patch of headspace.

A pair of memes was there to meet them. One sported familiar pigtails and a giant hammer. The other was impossibly thin and tall, like a hairless specter in a worn plaid shirt. Neither one felt particularly welcoming. At a guess Eric figured the new meme was Hugo and, given the very abrupt way they’d met and parted, Eric wasn’t counting them as friendly by default. He lapsed into his default defensive mental routine, wrapping himself in the layers of anonymity, trying to become the most unremarkable, featureless meme he could.

Vent straightened up and grasped at the lapels of his coat like a man about to take the podium but Hugo got the first word in. “What’s this thing, Vent?” Hugo swept around Eric and he got the sensation of being watched. “Brought a new toy for the First to look at? I’m not sure he wants to talk to you, though.” Hugo drifted over to Vent – literally, his legs didn’t move and there was no real floor for his feet to rest on. “Want me to take it to him? I’m sure he’ll get back to you if he’s interested in your new project.”

A pressure at the back of Eric’s mind nudged him towards the center of the headspace up ahead.  Vent stepped up between Hugo and Tails, pulling their attention towards him, and said, “Unfortunately I’m not here to pitch a project to the First Telepath. Frankly I’m not any more interested in collaborating with him than he is with me, I think the days of fruitful cooperation between us is over. Particularly given the work he’s done recently. Very counterproductive.”

“I beg your pardon? You never bothered to listen to what he was trying to do when you were here, how can you possibly know what would help or hurt it?” Tails sounded personally offended, not surprising given how defensive she’d been about telepathy when they first met. Hugo didn’t say anything in reply but Eric did feel the attention from Hugo move over to Vent.

And just like that the three of them were clustered in a circle, Vent holding forth about their recent run-in with FT’s custom built brainworm, and no one was paying attention to Eric. He drifted away from them and towards the center of the headspace, doing his best to keep the smell of sour booze and cheap tobacco in mind. It only took a few seconds for the headspace to shift from blank space to a dizzying view of the top of a building. Eric wasn’t very good with skylines but he was willing to bet he was back in Chicago.

As Eric looked around trying to get a handle on exactly where he was the sharp wind brought a strong whiff of cigarette smoke to his nose. A quick sweep of the rooftop and he spotted another meme on the opposite corner of the roof, looking down at the city below. Eric hesitated, not sure what to say, and settled on something straight to the point. “Hello?”

The other meme turned around slowly, almost like it didn’t want to know what it would find. Eric noted that it was the first meme he’d seen that looked… formal. Even Vent’s steampunk getup had more of an outlandish look than anything. This meme, and Eric was willing to bet just about anything it was the First Teep, was dressed in a very humdrum suit and tie and it held a burning cigarette between two fingers. “Who are you?”

It was the obvious question but Eric found that he didn’t have a considered answer on hand. He went with the option Vent had suggested to him. “Call me Echoes. Are you the First Teep?”

“That’s what they call me.” The coal on the end of his cigarette brightened for a moment, then a cloud of smoke puffed into existence by the meme’s head and drifted off. “I don’t remember hearing of any telepath going by Echoes. And believe me, I hear about most of them.”

“Probably true.” Although with Rachada and who knew how many others working for the government, Eric was willing to bet he didn’t know about them all. “I’ve been doing the whole teep thing for less than a week.”

There was a sudden sharp prick on Eric’s awareness, like a focusing of attention. “Is that so? Hugo mentioned a new guy coming in and leaving right away just a few days ago. He didn’t call you Echoes, though.”

“The name is kind of a new thing.” Eric cast about for what to say next. The last few hours had unfolded kind of fast and, in retrospect, he really could have done with a little more planning before plunging right into the heart of things. “Not what I wanted to talk about.”

“I don’t have a job for you at the moment.”

“Not looking for a job, either.” That did prompt him to wonder if Hugo and Tails go paid for the work they did for the Network and, if so, where the money to do it came from. “The truth is, I’m a telepath because of a brainworm you sent out a while back.”

The First nodded, tapping his cigarette absently and leaving a scattering of ash as he walked over to Eric. “No surprise there. You’re hardly the first.”

“Look, I’m not going to argue whether it’s good to have a mindless thing running around, handing out telepathy to people at random.” Eric shrugged, doing his best to stand up in front of the First Telepath’s increasing scrutiny. “The big problem right now is that the thing stopped working right.”

The First tilted his head in curiosity. “Stopped working?” He tossed the cigarette down and ground it out. “How so?”

“It was driving some of the people it infected crazy. And, as someone that experienced it first hand, it was a lot more disturbing than I think it needed to be.” Eric took a few steps away, trying to maintain a more comfortable distance. “I can’t give you the full specifics but Vent’s nearby, talking with-”

“Vent.” He covered the distance to Eric in two quick steps. “You were working with Vent? No wonder.”

That didn’t sound good. Eric backpedaled further. “Look, I get that you two don’t seem to be on the best terms but-”

The First Telepath grabbed Eric’s meme and suddenly the two of them hopped up and off the rooftop into a dizzying dive towards the ground below.

The Antisocial Network – Chapter Thirteen

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Eric caught a glimpse of sensible women’s shoes coming towards him before the brainworm collapsed into scrap metal and buried him underneath. The pressure on him was immense for another second or two then there was a strange popping sensation and Eric found himself in empty headspace with the metal ring still clenched in his hands. He took a few steadying breaths as the beginning of a migraine built behind his sinuses. Sensory deprivation was starting to sound more and more like a perk of working in headspace rather than a drawback.

His abused cranium was really starting to protest when a door appeared, swung open and Vent stepped through, his ten year old form shifting back into the familiar Victorian persona. Eric spared a brief glance for the door, which was’t attached to any thing and vanished as soon as it swung shut behind behind the other meme. Vent hurried over to him, his meme visibly relaxing as he looked Eric over, patting him down as if to ensure everything was still there.

“Relax, Vent, I’m fine.” Eric gently pushed Vent’s hands away.

“Do you feel dizzy? Is there any sensation returning to your limbs?” Vent continued to look him over but kept his hands to himself. “Are you experiencing any synesthesia?”

“Any wha- no, never mind. I just have a headache.” Eric pinched the bridge of his nose and exhaled, it was a lot less therapeutic when he wasn’t inside his own head. “Is that normal?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never heard of someone’s meme being forgotten while they were in someone else’s headspace. I guess it just bounces back to running in your own head? It’s not like your memes were ever dependent on someone else’s mind.” Vent’s voice trailed off in the same way Eric’s father’s did when he was deep in thought.

Not that Eric was sure what he was thinking about it. Now that he wasn’t under the threat of brainworm attack the idea that someone else’s bad memory could pose a danger to him seemed silly, even with telepathy in the mix. Eric decided to investigate the ring he’d gotten from the worm instead. It seemed like a featureless circle of metal until he ran his fingertips along the inside of the ring. Then it suddenly sprouted teeth and wrapped tightly around his hand.

“Gah!” Eric yelled, trying to work his fingers out from under the ring.

“Ah!” Vent snapped out of his reverie and crowded in to help.

Neither one managed to get a grip on it before it vanished under the skin. Both of them stared at Eric’s hand for a moment. With exaggerated calm Eric looked at Vent and asked, “What happened?”

“Well…”

“This is another thing you’ve never heard of happening before, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Yes, it is.” Vent produced the tools he’d used earlier to examine the brainworm. “But if you don’t mind, we can take a look and try and figure it out now.”

Eric rolled his eyes. “Fine. Take a look.”

Ten minutes of uncomfortable poking and prodding later, Vent tucked his tools away and humphed.

“Humph what?” Eric asked.

“You know how a telepath wakes up, right?”

“The nontelepath,” Eric put out one hand flat, “synchronizes with the telepath.” He put his other hand under the first hand. “Then the telepath slowly cranks the nontelepath up to speed,” he pushed his top hand up with the bottom, “and you have two telepaths.”

“Pretty much. As near as I can tell, what happened that the part of the brainworm that took care of the synchronization just synchronized with you.” He ran one hand along his jaw sheepishly. “But I’m not sure what happens now. I think the rest of the process was handled by other parts of the brainworm so there’s nothing left there for it to do.”

Eric rubbed his hand uncomfortably. “Right. Well, I guess that’s one problem dealt with. But it kind of leaves a bigger issue, don’t you think?”

Vent shot him a look as he adjusted a new top hat on his meme’s head. “What’s that?”

“You said the First Teep knew everything he needs to make more brainworms.” Eric gestured broadly to encompass everything that happened in the last half hour. “And I can’t image that we won’t end up right back here if he does.”

“That’s true…” Vent struck a thoughtful pose. “At the same time what do you suppose we do about it?”

Eric threw his hands in the air. “Well you’re the expert, right? Couldn’t you convince him that the thing is dangerous?”

“He wouldn’t believe us.” Vent shrugged. “It wasn’t dangerous when he first built it.”

“But it became dangerous over time. It took you five minutes to figure that out, couldn’t you explain it to him?”

Vent looked away and didn’t answer. Eric grunted in disgust. “Is there some reason he wouldn’t believe you?”

“We might not have parted on the best of terms.” Vent heaved a sigh and looked back. “Fine. We’ll go talk to FT. Maybe he’ll be in a mood to listen to sense this time.”

The Antisocial Network – Chapter Twelve

Posted by natechen on

Eric and Vent broke through the featureless headspace and found themselves in a living room straight out of a Normal Rockwell painting. A quick look around revealed that they were standing in front of the front door, looking at a small but well furnished room with a tan colored sofa along the opposite wall. An round table with a lamp and vase on it sat immediately to their left, beyond it was a door to what looked like a dining room.  A closed door to the right of the sofa led to the back of the house, a curio cabinet full of knickknack was the only feature on the wall to the right.

There wasn’t anything that struck Eric as particularly useful against a rampaging brainworm. He gave Vent a curious look. “Where are we?”

Vent’s meme removed his top hat in a respectful fashion. “The mind of an Alzheimer’s patient.”

“Alzheimer’s.” Eric cast about for the word. “That’s the condition where you forget everything, right?”

“No.” Vent strode across the quiet room, absently running one hand along the top of the cabinet. “Alzheimer’s is a state of permanent short term memory loss. People will remember events from ten or twenty years ago just fine but won’t be able to retain memories of things that happened a few days, a few hours or, in extreme cases, a few minutes ago.”

Eric picked the vase up off the table at his side, turning the thing over in his hands and marveling at how tacky it looked. That was pretty much the only sensation he got off of it, there was no feeling of porcelain or any sense of weight to the object. He put it back on the table and, without his touching it in any way, it scooted a few inches to one side, stopping exactly where he’d picked it up. Eric suppressed a shudder. “Weird.”

“The human mind is incredible. It can completely recover from any kind of intrusion as long as it can forget.” Vent strode across the room, his meme losing coherency for a moment, wavering between the snappily dressed, pseudo-Victorian Eric was used to and a much smaller figure, half Vent’s normal height at a guess, with sloppy hair and poorly fitting clothes. “If you could duplicate Alzheimer’s in a controlled fashion you could cure any mental disorder.”

The vase may not have had much in the way of weight but it sure shattered nicely against the side of the table when Eric swung it. The pieces actually froze in mid air before most of them even hit the ground, flying back upward and reassembling on the table as if nothing had happened. “So they call stasis a cure now?”

Vent gave him a nasty look over his shoulder, the shifting, protean aspect he wore at the moment making it even more sinister than the blank disapproval of the typical meme. “Don’t draw attention, Echoes. You don’t belong here.”

“What?”

“As long as we’re in the subconscious we can’t get forgotten, not really. But if you catch the attention of the conscious mind and you can’t fit into the memories that are here you’re on the road to oblivion.” Vent’s meme tossed it’s hat on the floor. For a moment it sat there and then it crumpled flat, into a ball, then finally a tiny point of darkness before disappearing entirely. “I don’t know what that will do to your mind or body and frankly I don’t want to find out.”

“Point taken.” Eric moved to the rough center of the room, staying as far as possible from the furniture and anything else he might disturb and get unwanted attention.

Vent’s meme had settled on an actual size and shape, no longer the imposing Victorian scientist but instead a tennish year old boy in an oversized shirt and shorts. Large blue eyes stared out from under a fringe of blonde hair and he had a nose that would probably be strong and handsome someday but for the moment was just comical. Eric stared but Vent didn’t seem to notice. “Now listen, because that brainworm could be here any second.”

“Wait,” Eric hissed, trying to keep his meme’s ‘voice’ quiet since he wasn’t sure whether that would attract attention or now. “You’re going to dump the brainworm in the middle of a mentally unstable person’s brain?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. There’s nothing more stable than an Alzheimer’s patient’s mind. They’re basically in stasis, you said it yourself. If a brainworm comes in here it will have to be processed by the conscious mind, but this mind can’t hold thoughts together long enough to make anything of something as complicated as a brainworm. Long before it can do lasting damage it will be entirely forgotten.” Vent made a poofing motion with one hand. “The problem is, the worm’s coming here for you. If it finds you odds are you’ll be noticed along with it, so you run the same risk of being forgotten as it does.”

Before Eric could ask the obvious question the door to the house shook with the sound of something heavy crashing into it. Eric and Vent both jumped and slowly backed away from the door. “Okay, Vent, how do I do this without getting myself forgotten?”

Vent pointed frantically towards the kitchen. “Hide. Without interacting with the headspace too much.” Vent turned and scampered towards the other door, his now-boyish voice shrill as he started yelling, “Mom! Mom, there’s someone at the door!”

The door thumped again and this time the sound of splintering wood came along with it. Eric backed into the kitchen and crouched down behind a cabinet, his attention still focused on the door, which sported a spiderweb of cracks. The damage was already vanishing when the door took a third hit and it fell apart completely.

It didn’t look much like when they’d first found it. Any vestiges of its pseudo-Vent appearance had fallen away to be replaced with a clattering, whirling mass of wires and pistons that bore more resemblance to a headless buffalo than a worm. In spite of his efforts at hiding the brainworm made a beeline for Eric, who backpedaled through the kitchen and banged into a table he hadn’t noticed. With the brainworm smashing through the kitchen doorfram and concern for staying hidden now in the wind Eric turned and grabbed the first thing that came to hand, a chair set at the table, and threw it threw it at the brainworm. Naturally the worm didn’t pay it any attention.

There was a door out of the kitchen in to the back of the house and Eric did his best to drag the table across the doorway as he continued his frantic retreat. The brainworm crashed through the remaining chairs in the dining room and stomped the table into twigs with a single bounding leap.

The table did make the brainworm stumble, a dozen leglike pistons churning as it tried to force its way through the door frame. As it twisted one way Eric tried to push through the gap on the other side but the flailing hooks and wires caught his arm and yanked him up short. A second later Eric was trapped under the brainworm, trying to deflect the churning limbs that threatened to crush him.

Over the noise he caught fragments of a feminine voice yelling, “What is going on, Harold?”

If there was an answer Eric missed it as a piston slammed him down into the floor hard enough to splinter it. Which made him kind of glad he couldn’t feel anything that was happening to him. The sudden change in altitude put Eric in a perfect position to see the table remnants vanish. Not good.

Eric made a frantic scramble for freedom but he suddenly felt much heavier than a moment ago. The brainworm creaked and groaned, trying to pull itself along on legs that were starting to bend and buckle under its own weight. As it got closer to Eric its center of mass split open and it extended the metal crown of teeth it had put on his head the last time they’d met.

Eric managed to get his hands on it and pushed back as hard as he could. But that left him sinking deeper into the floor as the pressure to restore the house to normal crushed ever harder.