Synthesis - James Swallow [108]
Now there was nothing. She was dislocated, just an intelligence drifting through a nonspace, a mind without matter. Vale tried to draw on the last few sensations she had experienced, there in the sickbay. The dull pressure on her skull as the machine worked on her, the oddly cold feeling where Ree had numbed her with a pain-blocker field, the dull buzzing that echoed through her frame as the protoplaser penetrated her scalp, the smell that she imagined was the odor of melted bone.
The pain. The brief moment of heart-stopping agony when the neural interface went active. That was the clearest, a raking slash of burning needles across her sensorium. She recalled reading once that the human brain had no pain receptors in it, but wherever that moment of torture had come from, it felt real enough to her.
Far away, in the world of meat and bone and every other real thing, Vale’s body was lying on a biobed in the Titan’s sickbay, Ree and Ogawa standing over her with chiming tricorders and worried expressions, Deanna Troi brushing her mind with her empathy touch, all of them hoping she would come back alive. The distance to that place, to that reality, seemed vast. Christine felt the pressure of wrongness all around her, threatening to crush her, an ominous sense that here no organic mind was meant to tread. This was a place more foreign to her than any alien world.
She was seeing light and shape now but nothing that could be defined as form. But how could she see without eyes? How could she process any visual input? How was this happening? How? How?
“You are becoming agitated,” said a voice. “Please modulate your emotional state. Your present behavior is making it difficult to coalesce your pattern.”
“White-Blue?” Did I say that out loud, or did I just think I did? “Where are you?
“This will be difficult for you to adjust to,” said the Sentry. “Do not resist or attempt to impose your own framework of understanding. Try to maintain a neutral emotive state. If you become distressed, it will not be possible for me to conceal your neural signal within my own. Interrogative: Do you understand, Commander Vale?”
“Yes,” she managed. The forms around her were gaining definition. Walls of smoke fluttered back and forth, transforming in shape and dimension. Beneath them, a haze of color and light pulsed and moved. It reminded her of the surface of a star, a seething mass of heat and energy. Elsewhere, angular panes of glassy ice drifted in lazy orbits, becoming screens that showed flash-fast torrents of images or alien machine code, then evaporating into dancing motes.
“You are perceiving the dataspace through a false visual interface,” continued the machine. “I have erected this filter to allow you to grasp the interactions occurring here. Your mind will complete the circuit, processing the input into a form that you can comprehend.” The voice came from a mass of roiling light close by, a shape that resembled a dodecahedron wreathed in azure glows. White-Blue’s virtual self was a parent world and Vale a moon in the shadow of its dark side. All she could determine of herself was a pale, indistinct shape, a moving drift of white dust like blizzard snow.
Vale felt giddy and a little sick, which was strange when she realized that she wasn’t aware of her stomach or her sense of balance. I’m being carried into the virtual environment, in White-Blue’s slipstream. Far ahead, where the dataspace took on the shape of a vast torus, other objects shimmered and vibrated with the passage of pure data, too indistinct for her to make out in detail.
She took a moment to center herself, calling on old training techniques she had learned from the martial