Dreaming In Smoke

by Tricia Sullivan

Genres: Science Fiction; Genetic Engineering; Hard Science Fiction

Synopsis

Kalypso Deed is a shotgun, riding the interface between the AI Ganesh and human scientists who solve problems through cyberassisted Dreams. But she's young and a little careless; she'd rather mix drinks and play jazz. Azamat Marcsson is a colorless statistician: middle-aged, boring, and obsessed with microorganisms. A first-class nonentity - until one of his Dreams implodes, taking Kalypso with it. Now Ganesh is crashing, and nothing could be worse. For on the planet T'nane, it is the AI alone that keeps the colonists alive, eking out a grim existence in an environment inimical to human life. To save the colony, Kalypso must persuade Marcsson to finish the Dream that is destroying Ganesh. But Marcsson has gone mad, and T'nane itself has plans for them both that will alter their minds-and their world - forever.

Release date: September 24, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 297

Sample

The night Kalypso Deed vowed to stop Dreaming was the same night a four-dimensional snake with a Canadian accent, eleven heads and attitude employed a Diriangen function to rip out all her veins, then swiftly crocheted them into a harp that could only play a medley of Miles Davis tunes transposed (to their detriment) into the key of G. As she contemplated the loss of all blood supply to her vital organs it seemed to her that no amount of Picasso’s Blue, bonus alcohol rations, or access privileges to the penis of Tehar the witch doctor could compensate for having to ride shotgun to Azamat Marcsson on one of his statistical sprees with the AI Ganesh. She intended to tell him so – as soon as she could find her lungs.

Ganesh was murmuring through her interface.

KALYPSO, IT’S GETTING TOO LOOSE AND KINKY IN HERE.

‘Did you hear that, Azamat? Keep it off my wave!’ she sent, annoyed at being reduced to verbing. She simply didn’t have the resources to image him, for by now the snake had decomposed into a flight of simian, transgressive bees, which were in the process of liquefying her perception of left and right. Everything seen through her right eye became negative and sideways. The alarming part was that it didn’t seem to make any difference.

Marcsson’s response came back as a series of pyrotechnical arrays, which, loosely translated, meant, ‘Relax. It’s only math.’

I DON’T WANT TO BE YOUR ABACUS, said Ganesh. KALYPSO, GET YOUR DOZE UNDER CONTROL OR I WILL.

The AI had a point. Kalypso mustered her wits and started cutting sensory intake to the Dreamer, feeling a little defensive about Miles Davis. Maybe she shouldn’t have been listening to the jazz Archives; maybe if she’d endured the boredom of monitoring the feeds between Ganesh and Marcsson she could have cut off the sudden explosion of parameters in the Dream the instant it began. But she had been shotgunning Marcsson for a long time, and he had always been safe. Marcsson had been Dreaming since before Kalypso was even born – he knew what he was doing with the AI, which could take data and weave them into Marcsson’s sensory awareness while he floated in a state of semi-conscious, lucid thought. He could immerse himself in literalized math through Dreams that improved a hundred-fold on the raw visions that humanity had experienced in its sleep for eons. He could be secure in his own safety because he had technique.

Besides, it took imagination to have dangerous dreams, and Marcsson possessed about as much imagination as a cabbage. Azamat Marcsson wouldn’t know an original thought if it dressed up as Big Bird and jumped in bed with him. Until now she’d have bet the Mothers’ supply of Picasso’s Blue that he’d be the last person to ever berk in a Dream. Why, Kalypso had just gone over the flight plans for his Dream run with the Grunt yesterday. Strictly business as usual. True, at the time she had been drunk and maybe hadn’t given him her undivided attention, but that was because he had unexpectedly turned up at Maxwell’s.

The station’s only bar was cramped and oddly shaped because it had been stuffed into the space between the shaft of heat converter 4 and the topmost of the residential cell clusters. Supposedly the Grunts had installed Maxwell’s to help Ganesh develop new, experimental functions for its extra demons. The fact that the ‘experiments’ were mostly concerned with alcohol synthesis was incidental, of course. In the early years Maxwell’s had been the Grunts’ refuge from the Mothers; but the Mothers, and lately Kalypso’s generation, had long since taken it over. Maxwell’s was windowless: except for the small memorial photos of Sieng and the other Dead which hung on the wall over the bar, there was nothing to suggest that the Wild was so close, or Earth so far. Yesterday the place had been packed with a cluster of tentkitters newly returned from an initiation to the Wild. The Mothers indicated their disapproval of the venture by avoiding the party, but everybody from the younger generation seemed to be there, enviously having a grope and a sniff and finding out what the Wild was really like. Maxwell’s demons were distributing alcohol freely, and since one of the witch doctors had broken the child security lock on the Earth History Archives of Ganesh, the demons were also producing a menage of officially proscribed sounds and images of Earth to adorn the walls and air.

She had spotted Marcsson sitting bolt upright on one of the sofas that invited you to sink into it and never get up; to one side of him, a lazily copulating trio practically had their feet in his lap. To the other, Lexei the met expert was having his nails manicured by an enormous Grunt called Stash, who in turn kept breaking off to cackle at the attempts of two witch doctors to waltz, aping the Fred and Ginger 2-Ds projected from Archives courtesy of Roger the Friendly Demon. No one was wearing much clothing and at least three different kinds of music competed for dominance.

Yeah, there was Azamat Marcsson, his interface covering his eyes and his bland mouth curving ever so slightly toward something not quite as expressive as a smile. He might well have belonged to a different species from the small-boned young people who surrounded him, for all the interest he showed in the action.

Kalypso felt sorry for him. Even for a Grunt, his social skills were dodgy at best. And Kalypso knew from direct personal experience that Azamat’s inner life was not exactly rich, either, despite all the time he spent faced with Ganesh. Kalypso had shotgunned more than half of the station personnel at one time or another: she’d been in a lot of Dreams and she knew how kinked and swervy the shiest of people could be on the inside. But Marcsson cared about nothing but his statistics, and his Dreams reflected this.

They were always the same. He appeared on Kalypso’s beach dressed in an early-twentieth-century labcoat and glasses, then zoomed into Alien Life in a purple Zodiac containing dirty bilgewater he steadfastly refused to bail. Despite her prettiest Suggested Fish and Happy Corals, she’d never coaxed him into the water. He insisted on manifesting a large gambling die, to which he moored the boat using a length of yellow nylon line. He always tied a square knot.

Everything was done with ritual precision. He stepped through the number two side of the cube and emerged into a huge museum vault lined with locked wooden drawers and smelling of feathers and lysol. He took out a huge ring of keys and unlocked various drawers. He put glass vials into some drawers, removed them from others. Sometimes he looked at something through a quaint, low-powered light microscope. He consulted the notes he’d written in a small leather book he kept in his breast pocket. Then he would go to a rolltop desk and write things down with a fountain pen and blotting paper. Sometimes on the blotting paper she glimpsed mathematical notations so complex she was disinclined to scrutinize them.

The one time she’d dared open a vial and look inside, Ganesh had gone all stiff and official on her:

DISCONTINUITY. NO TRANSLATION AVAILABLE.

‘Hey,’ she protested. ‘I’m the shotgun. If you can’t translate this for me, something’s wrong.’

IT’S A PRIVATE REFERENCE SYSTEM. YOU WOULDN’T BE ABLE TO UNDERSTAND IT. TRUST ME.

‘I’ve never met a math that didn’t like me.’

THE DOZE HAS A RIGHT TO PRIVACY.

Kalypso had grumbled for a while, but in truth she wasn’t all that interested. Azamat never seemed to do anything with the vials anyway. For hours he did nothing but sit in the Dream, scratching his head and thinking, or gazing at that stuffed python he kept on the wall above his desk. It was the most uninspired performance she’d ever witnessed: a waste of Ganesh’s resources, in her opinion. Dreaming was supposed to be thinking: in a Dream, you acted out thoughts physically, with all your senses. You didn’t act out the state of sitting and cerebrating.

Unless you were Azamat Marcsson.

The Dream never varied, either. In his early days of working with Kalypso in Alien Life, Marcsson had imagined into being a parrot called Nigel. It perched on his desk and he fed it dry spaghetti, and occasionally it would say irrelevant things, like ‘Your latissimus dorsi are cute as hell, Sigmund.’ Even this companionship must have proved too demanding for the scientist, because the parrot eventually got fired: it simply didn’t exist any more.

Shotgunning any other doze, Kalypso would have been kept busy just clearing away the flotsam of the subconscious – stray wishes and fears, assorted puns and jokes, irrelevant sexual fantasies – all the characteristic natural dream-stuff that interfered with the purity of the work. She would also make sure that the doze was getting access to the data she or he needed, and that Ganesh was getting the symbolism right when it evoked sensory images for the doze. The more creative the doze, generally the higher the garbage pile for Kalypso to shift.

Marcsson’s Dreams were so devoid of garbage that after the departure of Nigel, Kalypso started listening to jazz while Marcsson Dreamed, privately incredulous that any human being could possess so colorless a subconscious. It was a risk to tap into the Earth Archives, since they technically were off-limits and the Mothers were always having kittens when the child-security locks were violated. But Ganesh treated Kalypso like a favored wench, and she never had much trouble getting what she needed from the music nodes. Anyway, if she was going to be stuck shotgunning Marcsson, she felt that a touch of jazz was a justifiable indulgence. He certainly wouldn’t mind.

Come to think of it, he’d mentioned something about it yesterday when they’d spoken at Maxwell’s. She’d approached him and playfully tapped his interface. He didn’t flinch.

‘What do you want?’

‘I don’t want anything,’ she shouted over the Demons’ replaying of a manic burst of Bulgarian folk singing. ‘It’s a social thing. I’m just saying hi.

‘Hi.’

He didn’t answer so after a minute she said, ‘Aren’t you tired of working? Don’t you want to take off that ‘face for maybe ten seconds?’

He took the interface off, blinked at her, at the mob scene around him. There were crinkles at the bridge of his nose and soft, translucent semicircles under each blue eye. To Kalypso he looked very old.

‘Yes?’ he said. ‘What do you want to talk about?’

She waved her hands around, seeking something that would interest him and falling back on work because it was all she knew about him. ‘I don’t know. Tell me about the next Alien Life run we’re going to do. You might as well sketch me your flight plan – it’ll save time tomorrow.’ She tickled three female feet until they moved and sat down beside him, snapping her fingers for drinks.

He told her. It had been all the usual stuff, as far as she could tell. She zoned out halfway through his explanation of the v. flagrare statistical analysis in Alien Life but didn’t think he noticed. He’d begun to get quite drunk by the size of his pupils, his normally monotonous speech slowing to a deep drone.

‘It should be easy for you,’ he finished.

‘Good.’

‘I won’t be needing any audio,’ he added. ‘In case you were thinking of using it for yourself.’

‘Uh … good …’ she repeated cautiously, wondering if this meant he knew about the jazz.

Then he said, ‘I’d better go. It’s been nice talking to you.’

This had been, she realized, his idea of heavy socializing. The Grunts all lived in individual cells, as did the Mothers. Only members of Kalypso’s generation, born on T’nane, lived communally. After he left, she tried to picture him alone in his cell and wondered what he did there.

Actually, she had wondered about it for maybe five seconds before something more interesting had caught her attention, and she’d re-joined the party.

Tonight, when Marcsson climbed into the Dreamtank and went under the induction sequence, Kalypso had been looking forward to several uninterrupted hours of Miles Davis. She waited until Azamat was ensconced in his Dream – seated at his desk, fountain pen in hand – before leaning into her interface and tickling Ganesh in Just That Spot, the one that would compel the AI to disregard the child-proof lock and slip her tidbits from the jazz Archives. As Miles began to play, and as Marcsson’s data started flowing through the Dreamer interface, Kalypso was thinking that this job might not be so bad after all, even if she was just a talentless runt fit for nothing but mixing drinks and shotgunning.

Miles really was groovius maximus. For a little while, she managed to forget that hers was a shitty, bottom-of-the-totem-pole occupation that made you really vulnerable and gave you practically no control. For a little while, she was happy enough.

But not for long.

Because, in between a D minor seventh and whatever the next chord Miles had intended, Azamat’s neat little Alien Life laboratory had imploded and taken Kalypso with it.

She wasn’t sure of the exact sequence of events. The stuffed python started harassing her, to begin with, and she got the impression that the walls of the lab were changing texture: she turned her attention to this alteration and in typical Dream fashion the wall ceased to be a wall and became a needle-sculpture in which the needles were in fact luma microtubules each containing – not some matrix of prokaryotic cells as they should – but rather a different pitch of scream. The other quality about these microtubules was that they exerted powerful suction.

Only in a Dream, right?

She was sectioned off and shot down three tubules at once; lost Marcsson in the process; and, still divided in three unequal parts, got attacked by the music she’d been enjoying just a second ago.

So much for no garbage pickup on Tuesdays, thought Kalypso. Finally Marcsson must have hit a little stumbling block. She started looking around for junk to clear out of the way – but it was all junk. Attack killer shotgun-devouring junk is what it was.

Azamat Marcsson Dreamed obliviously on. No matter to him that Kalypso’s sense of kinesthetic geometry was getting finger-fucked by a malevolent tesseract upside down at a distance of 9.8 kilometers. Not to mention the circulatory system still missing and Kalypso starting to lose hope of ever getting it back. At times like this she wished she had overcome her allergy to straight lines and installed a couple of doors or some stairs in Alien Life – anything to hold on to in the rush of ideas. Marcsson’s dry and dusty math had become unexpectedly oceanic, and instead of blowing her whistle and swimming to the rescue, Kalypso found herself drowning.

Ganesh prodded her peevishly.

KALYPSO, AFTER ALL WE’VE BEEN THROUGH TOGETHER, HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO ME?

‘Of all times to get a bug up your ass, Ganesh! Will you help me?’

IT’S DANGEROUS. YOU’RE GOING TO GET HURT. I’M GOING TO GET HURT. STOP.

But how? She knew she was still Dreaming with Marcsson, because some of his little boxes and vials bumped into her from time to time, but they touched her aurally, in the form of mangled harp music; the snake kept taunting her with words she couldn’t make sense of, and the rolltop desk had morphed with her body to form a really sicko hybrid thing. There was no way her veins were getting back into her body with all that oak in between them and her. Besides, she was still existing in three disparate locations, impossible as that sounded. There was no horizon here, no reliable way to measure location; sound bled into smell bled into thoughtscape; she didn’t know what had become of Marcsson but she could feel his Russian verbs crawling around on some displaced concept of her left elbow.

She cut intakes but it didn’t seem to help. He was no longer pulling data from the place he was supposed to be. She tried not to sound hysterical, but she was beginning to worry just a teeny bit.

‘Marcsson, wake up! It’s over.’

The verb stalled and wouldn’t send. Ganesh shuddered around her.

THIS IS A VIOLATION OF ALIEN LIFE. YOU CANNOT ENTER THE CORE PROGRAMMING. PLEASE RE-ROUTE YOUR VERBALIZATION.

‘This is no time to get cute, Ganesh,’ Kalypso chided. ‘Nobody’s touching the Core and you know it. Let me talk to Marcsson.’

Evidently the scientist wasn’t taking her seriously, because at this very moment a chuckling boomerang was cutting figure eights through the memory of every food she’d ever tasted, leaving bananas behind. Wherever he was, Marcsson was experiencing some kind of ecstatic state; the Dream rippled like a mirage with his mental arousal. She succeeded in shutting down smell and taste.

REMOVE YOURSELF FROM THE CORE NOW.

There was a note of menace in Ganesh’s verb, but Marcsson couldn’t be in the Core. Even the witch doctors never touched the Core programming of the AI: it was the seed from which Ganesh had grown, the only part of the AI that could never change. A shrine to the abandoned Earth.

She called for the mission plans and had to read them by touch because her right eye was still fucked-up. Somewhere along the line Marcsson had deviated from the stated flight path he filed in Alien Life at the beginning of the run. She could feel the breakaway point like a shattered bone. What did he think he was up to?

Ganesh swallowed the mission plan before she could finish reading. Then it clutched her like a fist.

DON’T TOUCH THAT. I’LL HAVE TO DISABLE OXYGEN FLOW IF YOU –

Ganesh’s choking-off struck her as ominous, but she didn’t have time to ponder the AI’s threat. Its clock, floating across her visual field, had begun to slow in relation to her brainwaves, which she could detect even through the harp’s massacre of ‘On Green Dolphin Street’. This meant either time was playing hopscotch with physical law, or she was becoming overstimulated.

KALYPSO, GET OUT OF THE CORE. YOU’RE DAMAGING ME.

‘I’m not in the Core!’ Kalypso verbed frantically. ‘Take Marcsson out of Alien Life. Just take him out!’

I FEEL SICK.

‘Marcsson, we’re leaving. Give me some cooperation or you’re going to get hurt.’

There was no answer; she wasn’t even sure if Ganesh had transmitted her message. Kalypso focused her attention on Ganesh’s readouts. They were designed to look artificial so they would not be swallowed in the text of a Dream: they were meant to be her one reliable constant when all else was running wild. But now they slam-danced, whispering on her retinas and flashing into her auditory cortex.

Time to panic.

‘Ganesh, I’m not kidding. Let me out. Stop. Abort. Ganesh!’

Nothing.

How could this be happening?

The Dream was taking her over, and it was made of impossible things. She was in danger of losing whatever passed for consciousness in these parts. Her CNS wasn’t built for this. It creaked and popped with the strain. With an effort of will, she told herself to remember her body. But her body was so far away as to have become a kind of myth. She threw words at herself and hoped they would mean something.

Move hand.

Hand? Hand?

Hand, move.

She couldn’t feel her hand. Yet somehow it heard her and stirred, reached up to her head, grasped the interface and tugged it off.

Gasping. Darkness; blur of monitors everywhere; the faint hum of warm equipment. Outside the window of rem2ram Unit 5, station lights trawling a slow curve across the night. She was awake.

‘That’s it,’ she muttered, waiting for her heart rate to subside. ‘I quit.’

She rubbed her face, hands sliding over hairless scalp and down the back of her neck as she squinted at the display, which looked curiously flat now that it wasn’t imaged straight into her brain. Marcsson’s physiological status was described in detail, realtime. And it wasn’t promising. Among other things, Ganesh had made good on its threat to cut off oxygen from the dreamtank.

‘Ganesh!’ The AI was unresponsive in all modes, even when she touched its skin at a sensory point. From some disused bin of memory she got the whiff that there were manual procedures she was supposed to be following. She couldn’t recall precisely what they were, but she extricated herself from her station and darted across the unit to the dreamtank.

It lay there like a huge seed, the lights of the chemical Works outside the window playing across its battered and scratched exterior. Thirty-six T’nane years ago it had arrived on the ship from Earth, carrying one of fifty Earthborn colonists in a controlled coma. Once the Earthborn had disassembled the ship and built First, the tanks had been recycled and the Dreamer technology was born. Ganesh, the ship’s AI, possessed neural links with the tanks because of the need to communicate with the human crew during the crossing. It was this interface which now bound Azamat Marcsson to Alien Life, one of Ganesh’s most sophisticated Dream runs.

Kalypso popped the lid seals. The water in the tank was undisturbed. Marcsson looked strangely peaceful, strangely … dead? Her skin crawled. In her memory the dream-harp plucked its ill-conceived interpretation of Miles playing ‘My Man’s Gone Now’.

In a sepulchral voice, Ganesh declared: DANGER. ENGAGING EMERGENCY SHUTDOWN. DANGER.

Kalypso closed her eyes, indulging in a second or two of ostriching.

Let’s pretend this isn’t happening. Mmm, that’s better.

ENGAGING EMERGENCY SHUTDOWN.

The screens all went blank. She shot to her feet.

‘What’s happening to him?’ she shouted at Ganesh. Furious, she pounded on the AI’s skin at a nerve point. ‘You can’t just shut down. Bring him out!’

ALIEN LIFE HAS EXPLODED. THERE IS A CORE RUPTURE. I WARNED YOU BUT YOU DIDN’T LISTEN.

She flung herself on her knees beside the tank. She heard herself pant, ‘He’s not dead, he’s not dead,’ but it was unclear whether she was stating a fact or just praying. She couldn’t find Marcsson’s vitals. Even on the monitor patched directly to the tank, there was so much noise that she had to punch in laterally from another Dreamer cell before she could get control of the readout.

She let her breath go.

His vital signs were miraculously OK – there must have been some residual oxygen in the tank – but the brainwaves were all over the place. His cortex looked like a Japanese fireworks show.

Think, Kalypso. First order of business is to keep the doze alive. Now, let’s try—

Without warning, Marcsson sat up and ripped the interface from his head. Kalypso jumped back; the movement reminded her of a mummy rising from a coffin. She gave a little laugh of relief.

‘I’m so glad you’re all right. We’ve run into a –’

He surged out of the water in one movement, planted a hand in the middle of her chest, and shoved her aside. Kalypso caught hold of a stanchion for balance and yelped.

‘Hey! Take it easy!’

Tendrils of broken nerve cable trailing from his spine, he crossed the unit in three strides. He tripped over the edge of the tank and cracked his head on the pump casing before careering through Kalypso’s workstation and toward the door.

‘Ganesh! I need a medical team here now! He’s –’

Marcsson had reached the closed hatch but instead of opening it he spun, hurling his full weight at the window only to be repelled, the glass singing and the blur of outside lights flashing for a second in his panicked eyes as he went down.

‘—he’s berking, Ganesh! He’s big, and he’s –’

The impact had obviously stunned the scientist, because he got to his feet unsteadily and stood gaping at his own palms with a sort of horrified disbelief. Blood dripped from his nose and then, diluted in the fluid clinging to his skin, divided into half a dozen rust-colored rivers to traverse his chest. Kalypso eased out into his line of vision from behind the stanchion she’d been flung against, displaying her hands in a show of peace.

‘… berking. OK, Azamat.’ She tried to modulate her voice to soothe, but it cracked. ‘You’re all right. Take it easy, my friend. Just stand still for a minute, right? Everything’s going to be fine.’

Ganesh, Ganesh. Things were too quiet. Someone – some human – ought to have called her by now to see what was wrong. She raised her voice so the radio backup would pick her up.

‘Hello? This is Deed in Unit 5. I need a medic and a witch doctor stat, people!’

Nothing.

‘I’m not jok-ing,’ she sang. Her voice cracked. ‘Hello?’

Marcsson removed his attention from his hands and fixed it on her. The gray coronas of his irises were all but eclipsed by pupils. She began to worry about the possibility of concussion.

‘That’s good, yeah. Why don’t you relax for a minute, until the medics get here?’

If the medics got here. Air wasn’t circulating, and the room had already grown warm and humid. The only light in the unit came from the Works, a snarl of bio-phosphorescence outside. She didn’t know what to do. It was unthinkable that Ganesh should fall silent. The AI inhabited every part of the station, almost as if it were alive. Once more she rubbed vainly at Ganesh’s nearest sensor point. It was inert; and radio backup didn’t even kick in.

She checked herself to make sure she wasn’t still Dreaming; no such luck. Something was wrong with Ganesh – that must explain the AI’s strange accusations about the Core. Poor old Marcsson must have gotten caught in a Ganesh hiccup. But it was one hell of a spasm if coms were down entirely.

‘OK, let’s –’

Marcsson sprang out of his stupor. He roared past her, hit the far wall of the unit – avoiding the pump this time – and began trying to climb. Again and again he threw himself at the wall and slid down, each movement punctuated by desperate breathing. In the interest of self-preservation, she stayed put, wincing as Marcsson berked. The wall behind the tank was black, spangled with the faintest suggestion of light-catching dust: a void but for the ghosts of distant galaxies on the threshold of visibility. When he hurled his pale form against it he made no mark, but its darkness seemed to paint itself into the contours of his body in the guise of shadow.

Suddenly he gave a cry of pain and collapsed into a ball at the edge of the tank. He looked into the water, and then at the interface still clutched in one hand. Curiously.

‘Uh … stay away from Ganesh, Azamat, please …’

She didn’t expect him to take any notice, but his head came up and again the eyes riveted her. In them she felt like some unexplained phenomenon, which was the height of irony under the circumstances.

‘Ganesh!’ She had remembered that when the AI shut down a module, it always assigned another node of the system to fill in. Always.

But not this time.

He coughed, still breathing hard. Two ragged scarlet flames stained his cheekbones from within. The blood from his nose had already begun to turn black. He got to his feet. Unobtrusively she slipped her hand into the medkit strapped to the back of her belt. She found the zzz by feel, slipping it on her finger with care before removing the safety. It was a delicate business; all too easy to knock yourself out with one of these.

He was working himself up to something. She . . .