The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [135]
“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 my arm 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.
“I don’t understand, Madoc,” Damon said, with the ostentatious patience that the sane always take care to display while they talk to the slightly mad.
I knew then that I had no chance at all of forcing my other self to pronounce anything as complicated as Christine Caine’s name. I wondered whether I might just manage Tyre, or Vesta, or even Proteus, but I knew there was no point in trying. Christine Caine was one of the only two names I had on the tip of my tongue that would make any sense at all to Damon Hart.
Except, of course, that it wouldn’t. Nothing that the me that wasn’t not me could say to Damon, if I could say anything at all, would make the slightest sense, because nothing did make the slightest sense. He and I, though not he and not me, were in a world beyond logic, babes in a trackless wilderness.
This, I realized, was what I had forgotten. This was how I’d come to be frozen down. This was how I’d booked my ticket for the Omega Expedition. It wasn’t real, but it was true. Somehow, even though I hadn’t been able to recover the memory itself, I’d contrived to obtain a photocopy, a VE reproduction.
This, at last, was the truth. I might have reached it by unorthodox means, but I had reached it in the end.
Damon Hart had put me away to save me from a fate worse than death. Maybe he had forgotten me in the course of the next two centuries and maybe he hadn’t, but in the beginning, he’d been trying to save me. Even if he had forgotten me, in the end, he’d forgotten me because there was nothing he could do for me, because he had no way to save me from the rogue IT that was still lurking in my brain and my bones.
If I had been betrayed — and I had — I had been betrayed by circumstance,