Engineman - Eric Brown [115]
Seconds passed and Mirren became increasingly unaware of his physical self as his senses, one by one, abdicated their responsibility of relaying an outside reality to his disconnected sensorium. He was blind and deaf, his sense of touch diminished. Soon all awareness of his corporeal self fled as his consciousness teetered on the edge of the vastness of the nada-continuum. He knew then the infinite wonder of the immanence which underlay the everyday universe. Rapture sluiced through him in a glorious tide of joy.
He fluxed.
The period spent in flux was a timeless duration for Enginemen. Robbed of their senses, they had no awareness of the passage of time. A shift spent pushing a 'ship between the stars might have been over in an instant, or an eternity. Only when they detanked, anything from six to ten hours later, were they able to recollect the instant of the flux and relive the experience of pushing.
Then, Mirren became aware that something was wrong. At first, for a split second, he assumed he was defluxing. But that entailed a gradual return of sensory awareness, a final teetering on the edge of the vastness. Very definitely Mirren had no sensory awareness - no sense of sight or touch, hearing, taste or smell.
He was suddenly aware of an anomalous phenomenon. Deep within his head, on the very periphery of his consciousness, there was a voice, calling to him.
He willed himself to concentrate. The communication became stronger, a definite presence; he was tempted to call it a voice, though it was more a thought.
It was calling his name.
-- Ralph, Ralph...
He found he could reply by thinking the words: Who are you?"
-- Ralph, it's me, Caspar.
Mirren was shaken to the core. His mind raced. Caspar Fekete? But that was impossible! He could only assume he was dreaming. The notion that the voice in his head had an external source was too staggering to contemplate.
He thought: Caspar?
-- Can you... hear me, Ralph? The link is very weak. I can only just make you out...
Then Mirren knew he was not hallucinating - or whatever one did when imagining sounds. The voice in his head was real. His initial shock was overcome by cautious wonder, though at the same time the sceptic in him would not acknowledge the import of this communication. It went against everything in which he believed. And yet that deep, buried part of him, terrified at the thought of his premature death, cried out for Fekete's communiqué to be what he thought it was.
I can hear you - what the hell-? His thoughts became a chaotic scramble of questions.
-- I'm dead, Ralph. They got me in my flier eight hours ago-
You're in the continuum, Mirren thought in disbelief. You've transcended?
Even as he said this he was so overcome by the marvel of the concept that he hardly thought to ask himself why, on his many shifts in the past, he had not been contacted by the souls, or whatever, of the people he had known in life.
Then Mirren was aware of what might have been a chuckle, like a subtle itch, within his head.
-- No, Ralph. I have not transcended - though in a manner of speaking I have. That is, I am not part of the nada-continuum or Nirvana or whatever they call it.
Disappointment coursed through Mirren.
Then what?
-- Upon my bodily demise, an encoded personality analogue was removed from my occipital console. In simple terms, a recording of my identity, of my thoughts and memories, hopes and desires, a simulacrum of my very self - if, like me, you believe that the mind is the seat of everything that makes us human. Over the years my company developed a means by