The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [86]
“Are we shooting back yet?” I asked.
“I am unarmed,” said the AI, in a sudden burst of confidentiality. I could almost have imagined that it was as over-awed by possibility as I was, and that intimidation was making it plaintive.
“Is there nothing you can do?” I asked.
“Nothing,” it admitted.
“It’s a show, isn’t it?” I said, firmly. “It’s just a silly melodrama, intended to confuse us. Where are we going, really? Titan? Earth?”
I knew that the AI wasn’t going to admit anything, no matter how accurate my guesses were, but I was hoping that it might somehow give itself away.
In the event, all it said was: “I don’t know.”
It sounded just about pathetic enough to be true, although I told myself sternly that it was still unbelievable.
The stars in the background became suddenly brighter again, but it was too late. The void was closing around us, and the stars were confined within a shrinking circle. The utter darkness of that vile mouth was swallowing us up, as if it were indeed some kind of space warp that could take us farther away from home than we could ever imagine.
“I know what’s going on,” I said to the AI, defiantly. “I may be a mere mortal, but I’m not an idiot. You can’t make me —”
That was it. I didn’t feel dizzy and I had no other plausible indication of being anasthetized. It was as if I were simply switched off, like a program interrupted in the running by a sudden power cut — but I had already given up my suspicion that I really was nothing but a sim runing in cyberspace. Perhaps paradoxically, the harder I had tried to insist that everything else was fake, the more securely I had fallen into the trap of believing that I, at least, was real.
Part Two
Worlds In Parallel
Twenty-One
Normal Conditions
I woke up again lying on my back in pitch darkness. My awakening was troubled by the uncatchable fragments of decaying dreams and the harassment of many discomforts. My head was throbbing; my kidneys were aching; my stomach was queasy.
I had had worse hangovers, but not for a thousand years. I felt awful. I knew that I shouldn’t feel as awful as I felt, because I knew that I shouldn’t be able to feel as awful as I felt, and that made the fact doubly disturbing. I felt as if my insides had gone to war to settle their positional disputes, and that the conflict had inflicted considerable damage on all of its participants. It might not have been so bad had I still been weightless, but gravity had returned with a vengeance. I weighed more now than I had before I stepped into the pod that had carried me to the Titanian spaceship.
If a pod had carried me to the Titanian spaceship.
If, in fact, I had ever been in Excelsior at all.
Now that I weighed the same as I had throughout my first lifetime I had to ask myself whether it was believable that I’d ever left Earth at all. I had to wonder whether Excelsior, Davida Berenike Columella, Christine Caine, and Adam Zimmerman might have been aspects of an improbable illusion, and whether I might now be waking up for real. I had to face the possibility that all the necessary questions were going to have to be asked all over again.
Paranoia assured me that I could only feel as bad as I did if this were real, and everything else had been false.
The darkness didn’t become any less absolute as the bleary eyes I had forced open attempted vainly to adjust to it. I reached up to touch my face with my right hand. My fingertips and my chin felt familiar — far too familiar, in fact. I didn’t seem to be wearing a smartsuit and I had a week’s worth of beard growth.
I touched my chest then, and found that I was wearing a shirt: a dead shirt. Even in 2202 I wouldn’t have been seen dead in a dead shirt. I only had to flex my leg muscles to confirm that I was also wearing lightweight trousers, and that I was sandwiched between a single sheet and a lumpy mattress.
Shit, I thought. First a thousand years forward in time, then a couple of hundred years back. The way I felt told me that any IT I might be wearing was no ultrasophisticated