The stink inside the spacesuit was horribly reminiscent of rotting flesh; I hoped that it really was the suit that was stinking and not me — or, to be strictly accurate, not “not me.”
“Madoc?” whispered a voice in my ear. “Are you awake, Madoc?”
The voice was strangely familiar, although it was slightly distorted by the telephone link. I knew I’d heard it before, and often, but I couldn’t put a name to it, partly because some mysterious instinct was telling me that its presence in my nightmare was not merely impossible but somehow insulting.
“Madoc?” the voice repeated. “Can you hear me? It’s Damon, Madoc. Just give me a sign.”
Damon!I understood, suddenly, why this supposed experience was impossible, and insulting. Or was it? Was this my realawakening? Was this the way things had always been, and always would be?
No, I decided, while knowing perfectly well that it was not a matter for decision. It couldn’t be real. This had to be a dream of some kind: a Virtual Experience.
“Damon?” I croaked. That surprised me, because I hadn’t formed any conscious intention to say the name aloud. I hadn’t expected the not mepart of me to be able to speak at all — but when it did, I had to wonder whether it was the mepart of me that might be a mute prisoner in alien flesh.
“Madoc! Thank God. They got to you, Madoc. I’m sorry — we had no idea. Can you hear me?”
“Where…am…I?” Again I hadn’t made any conscious effort to formulate the words, although it was only natural that I would want to know. My voice sounded hollow, distant and spectral: not mine at all, although definitely mine in the sense that it certainly wasn’t anybody else’s.
“You’re in a level-6 biocontainment facility in one of Conrad’s old labs. We didn’t have any choice, Madoc. We tried to flush the stuff they pumped into you, but we couldn’t get it all. It’s gone too deep — wormed its way into the marrow of your bones and into the glial cells of your brain. We can’t get the rest without doing irreparable damage to your own tissues. We may not have long before the whole system begins to regenerate itself, Madoc. Maybe days, maybe only hours — we just don’t know.”
“What?”
By now, it was as if I were a mere observer watching myself speak. I didn’t understand what the hell was going on — and neither did the “not me” that I was watching.
“We don’t even know if the effect was what they intended,” Damon Hart’s voice went on, relentlessly. “Maybe it’s all screwed up. Maybe they wanted to screw you up. On the other hand, maybe they just figured that you’d be a convenient subject for a trial run. Either way, Madoc, I’ll make sure that they pay. You can depend on that. All their precious cant about war without casualties, struggle without suffering…I’ll find the bastard responsible for this, and I’ll settle the debt in pounds of flesh, blood included. Trust me, Madoc.”
The other me tried again. “What…?”
I couldn’t get any more out than the single word. It hurt too much. The stench was unbearable — not that that mattered to either of me, as there was no possible way of avoiding it.
“We pulled the tiger’s tail once too often, Madoc,” Damon said. “After all they’ve said, all I’ve given them…they don’t want the likes of us at their precious table. They want every last thing we’ve got, but they want it all for themselves. They don’t really want usat all. Not Conrad, not Eveline, not me — not even the people at Ahasuerus. At the end of the day, all they care about is their property, and hanging on to it.
“I’m sorry I got you into this, Madoc, but I didn’t understand the dirty kind of war this is, and I underestimated the measure of the men we’re fighting. We’re trying to figure out exactly what kind of IT they injected into you, but it’s a hideously complicated suite and there are half a dozen bot species we’ve never seen before. Unless and until we can get into their databases it’s going to be a long job — maybe years. Maybe the reason they did it to you is that you’re the only man we have who had a better-than-even chance of hacking into their deepest secrets. They’re trying to take us out, Madoc — fucking you over is just the start. But you have to hang in there until we can figure out how to bring you all the way back.”
The other me tried for a third time, throwing in a little variety just for the sake of it. “Who…?”
I seemed to be gagging on the unclean air, but I supposed that had to be an illusion.
“I don’t know,” Damon cut me off. “Not exactly. I don’t think even PicoCon’s solid, let alone the PicoCon/OmicronA cartel. The wonder is that they paused long enough in their attempts to stab one another in the back to come after us. But I’ll find out — you can bet your life on that. Look, Madoc, there’s no easy way to say this: it’s going to be rough. We can’t fight the stuff now, and I’m not willing to take the risk of leaving you at the mercy of whatever plans the rogue IT might have. It can’t be a crude killer, or you’d have been dead before we found you, but that doesn’t mean that it won’t be fatal. The way it’s gone to ground in your brain strongly suggests that it’s intended to fuck with your mind. It may be a further development of that VE-generating IT they hit me with, but if it is then it’s a lot more ambitious than version one. I think they might be going for the big one: absolute mind control; total robotization. If so, we have to find a way of countering the threat.
“So here’s the deal. We’re going to put you in SusAn. Not just an artificial coma — we’ll have to take you all the way down to six degrees Absolute. We’re going to stop this thing in its tracks until we know how to deal with it, and we’re not going to bring you out until we’re certain that we can make you as good as new. Trust me on this, Madoc — we’ll get you back eventually, but it’ll take time. It may be that the stuff will mess with your head while you’re on the way down, and again when you’re on the way back up, but you have to hold on. You have to remember this conversation if you can, and know what’s really happening to you.
“This is real, Madoc: you can be sure of that. We’ll come back for you. Remember that: however bad it gets, I’ll be coming for you. I’ll pull you through. Trust me.”
I tried to lift my arm, but I couldn’t. It was trapped in the sleeve of the biocontainment suit, and the sleeve was rigid — and it wasn’t really myarm at all. I was a spectator here, a passenger in my own memory. Except that it couldn’t really be a memory, because if it had been, I wouldn’t have been a passenger in it. It was a Virtual Experience of some sort — but that didn’t necessarily mean that it wasn’t true.
My whole head hurt, except for my nose, and even my nose was itching now.
It was absurd to think that I could be aware of a mere itch against the background of so much pain and stink, but I was. Did that, I wondered, make this bizarre experience more likely to be true or less likely? Either way, the other me seemed to be on the brink of losing my will to live.
This time, I tried to formulate an intention to talk. It seemed to work, although I couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t mere coincidence — but it didn’t matter anyway, because the first consonant got stuck in a grinding stammer: “C…?”
I was trying to say “Christine,” but I couldn’t be certain that the other me wasn’t trying to form a different set of syllables beginning with the same consonant.
“Take your time, Madoc.” Damon said, a trifle inconsistently.
“C…”
I heard someone else speak, their lips too far away from the microphone that Damon was using for their words to be audible. I tried hard to concentrate on the business of thinking, not so much because it might make it easier to talk as in the faint hope that it might help me stop my other self wanting to die.