Doctor Who_ Corpse Marker - Chris Boucher [35]
In the general euphoria the flux variations and the tiny power surges went =remarked. They were within the error margins of testing limits. No one on the tech team recognised that they were dreams. Robots did not dream. When the robot SASV1 started dreaming it all stopped going according to plan.
Poul had spent a long time and a great deal of his not very hard-earned money turning his apartment into a surveillance-free, robot-proof fortress in which he could feel totally secure. When he was planning it he had debated whether to cut off all electronic connections with the outside world on the principle that such connections were potentially two-way, but he had fmally decided against it. Even he did not want to be that isolated. There was no doubt in his mind though that they used his newslink and entertainment screens to spy on him, and that his comm unit was a direct and open line to whoever they were.
It was an ongoing technological struggle to keep ahead of them and to foil the plot against him. He had bought top-of-the-range surveillance scanning locators, the best jamming devices and every modification and upgrade to them that came on the market.
He had also invested in a number of pseudo-science devices that he knew were of suspect value: power-charged crystals, negative induction loops, field polarity reversers and the like, but when he had found himself considering a wire-mesh skullcap with deployable antennae he realised that there might be an element of obsession in what he was doing.
After that he confined himself to proven security technologies and stuck to the comforting routines of access point multiple locking and re-locking, of the intruder checks and spy sweeps which he carried out morning and night, coming and going, before sleep and after waking.
Waking now from an exhausted, robot-haunted sleep, he stumbled through the necessary routines. The locks were untampered with. All the small telltales and traps - the threads and dust and fragments of paper - were undisturbed. The intruder alarms were untripped and there were no power surges from eavesdropper tags.
Nothing had changed. Nothing had tried to get in while he was asleep. And none of it gave him the slightest comfort. He had felt safe when he got back. He remembered the relief of it.
Where had that gone? Where had the relief gone? Why didn’t he feel safe here any more?
He hesitated, standing in the middle of the main room, wondering what to do. He would go and do the checks again, he decided. Maybe he had missed something, maybe he knew he had missed something but he just didn’t realise it. If he checked it all again then he would feel properly safe.
He hesitated. What was the point of checking it all again?
What would be the point of checking any of it? He sat down on the massage lounger. Ander Poul I have been sent to kill you. He couldn’t shake it. The face, the voice, the horror. He couldn’t clean it from his mind. Ander Poul I have been sent to kill you. What was that about? If he’d dreamed it then it was more or less tolerable. Explainable anyway. His dreams had been in dark chaos for...for ever. But if it was real then why wasn’t he attacked, why wasn’t he dead? So it wasn’t real. But if it wasn’t real, why did it feel so real? Were they doing something to his mind? Yes that must be what it was. While he was asleep they were beaming it into his mind. That must be what it was.
Perhaps that mesh skullcap wasn’t such a bad idea...
He snorted a sudden, short, breathy laugh. That must be what it was. He was losing his mind - that must be what it was.
They warned him about the paranoid fantasies. They told him he was prey to paranoid fantasies. They told him and he believed them because they were the people who knew. Besides, what choice did he have when it was probably them who were plotting against him? Old joke. Old fear. Real, not real, it was all the same and he couldn’t clean it from his mind.
He needed