Meshner freezes, clutching for the controls he knows are there. His fingertips come back to him with a riot of sensory overload, a complexity of tactile data he simply lacks the equipment to decode. The approximate shape of his console is in there somewhere, camouflaged within the tumult.
The ocean waves crash, same as before, exactly the same, cycling: a broken stub of memory recorded in too many colours, missing channels of data he would need before any of it felt real. It looks like corrupted recordings, ancient video data, flickering and phasing, repeating over and over.
Not now!
And, at the same time: Is this it? Has the fight shaken this loose? Have we succeeded at last? And yet this doesn’t feel . . . first person. He is Meshner, the Human. This isn’t what he was hunting for, in trying to graft Portiid Understandings into his implant and his Human brain. He feels as though he is watching the information from the outside, through some sort of third party mediation.
With that thought he can move his point of perspective – he has no physical body, or rather his body is not here, all its sensory data and proprioception locked in another room. And surely Fabian cannot just go wandering through his own memories like this; he would be locked to the perspective he – or his ancestor – had occupied when the Understanding was first encoded. So how can he, Meshner, take apart and analyse the sensory data in this way? I’m modelling it, extrapolating a whole from Fabian’s limited perspective. Which means that probably half of what he experiences is his own invention, but fascinating nonetheless. If he wasn’t about to die in – of all the stupid things – a space battle he would be exhilarated by this development.
He turns around and sees Fabian there, the same Fabian he knows, looking out at that sunset. Why did the spider choose this moment? The Portiid – or some past Portiid whose likeness was lost but whom Meshner has reconstructed as modern-day Fabian – had loved this sunset, this seascape, enough. Perhaps that was all.
You cannot interrogate this, the spider tells him, the usual dance of feet and waving palps, and yet the meaning is crystal clear in Meshner’s mind. This is all your own conjecture, building on reconstructed data in virtual space.
‘Then who am I talking to?’ he demands, and the spider stamps out, Work it out yourself. I’m busy.
The means of communication is unfamiliar, the sharp tone less so. ‘Kern?’ Or some limited sub-system of hers?
Make yourself useful, it instructs him, and he has a sudden sense of wider space beyond this looping moment.
It occurs to him that this could go very badly if he lets himself get trapped in the same five seconds of Fabian’s recollection forever. And yet how is this even still present in his brain?
It isn’t, idiot. His own sharpness now, his own thoughts, not Kern’s. But it’s still in your implant. Like Kern said, it’s a virtual space. The implant is a potent computing tool built to translate and model memory data, after all. Now, at the worst moment, he has finally accessed that space, except he didn’t ask to and potentially cannot escape from it.
Even as he thinks it, another part of his brain seizes on a lifeline, the only thing here that comes from outside other than his own lost consciousness. He is linked to the ship, to Kern. The implant gives him access to her somehow, far beyond a crewmember’s regular comms. He feels dizzy for a moment at the thought that he is participating in a neural link with a computer, something nobody had done before without Old Empire technology, and not terribly successfully even then.
He follows the breadcrumbs of Kern’s link and abruptly the sunset turns off, leaving him in dimness. Before him is a spider, huge beyond the dreams of Portiids, save that of course he views it from the low-slung perspective of Fabian. Meshner’s mind floods with raw emotional input, some of it translated into base urges he can name: fear and desire inextricably linked, the ragged raw edge of excitement, desperation, a dread of failure. Other information batters at his brain looking for somewhere to roost, square-peg emotions ramming themselves at the round holes of his mind, trying to make themselves known. He asked for something that would be unmistakably arachnid, and surely this matches his specifications: Portiids doing Portiid things to one another, incomprehensible, alien. The Understanding he has been given is visually simple, but that is just a thin skin riding on a great sea of experiential data. And I will drown unless I get clear.
Again he follows the link of Kern until he finds himself in another place.
Space.
A frozen moment. He stands in the void (although he is not standing, not really, but his viewpoint suggests a presence and he goes with it; otherwise madness awaits), gazing down on the stretched silvery shimmer of the Lightfoot, looking buckled as it is caught midway through shifting its hull profile to cushion against another high-speed manoeuvre. Now the image pulls out: there are the enemy fighters, tiny spheres within a net of thrust and weapons systems. One is just erupting open into loose matter as Kern’s lasers finally pinpoint it, the firing solution courtesy of Portia and Viola having predicted the next way it would jink. Beyond are the larger vessels, their formation now a cluttered mess, their own weapons systems quite busy. And the Lightfoot is coming back that way, because that is the best path to avoid the worst of the fighter barrage.
‘This is intolerable,’ a sharp female voice tells him, and he flinches with an instinct still held over from the Portiid historical male deference to the female.
Kern manifests herself in space on the far side of the Lightfoot, her chosen scale making the ships seem like toys floating at the level of her waist. Meshner sees a tall, severe woman, grey hair tied back, wearing an ornate one-piece garment that might perhaps be what Old Empire shipsuits looked like, back when such things were more than tatters and dust. He wonders how authentic the simulacra is, because surely Avrana Kern does not really hold an accurate self-image after so many millennia?
‘You are occupying too much space,’ she snaps at him, for all that she has a virtual body twice the size of the largest alien ship and he has a notional point of view that could dance upon the head of a pin. ‘You are draining my resources. Who or what are you?’ Without a half-second’s pause she seems to catch up with that fragment of herself he encountered a moment before, ‘Meshner Osten Oslam, the self-made lab animal,’ and he reflects that answering her own questions is probably a large part of her stock in trade these days. ‘Why are you here?’
He stammers out that she led him here, but perhaps that part that left the breadcrumbs is only a subroutine that Kern herself disowns. He has a sense that somewhere, somehow, a kind of communication is being attempted, but it isn’t reaching Kern. She stalks about the sluggishly-moving display, simultaneously looking at all the spaceborne vessels and at him, giving everything her full attention all the time. Parts of his brain grind against each other trying to force this ersatz visual stimulus to conform to the laws of physical space.
Which it needn’t, he reminds himself. So: and he calls up information, arraying it in virtual space just as he did when testing out the implant the first time he awoke with it. For a split second he is back with the sunset and the ocean but then Kern bodily yanks him back to the battle map, the little dart of the Lightfoot; to the spreading formation of enemy ships (and his mind is processing, processing, still trying to do its job now he has this spectacular visual representation of the sky outside, and something has snagged his attention that surely Kern has already seen . . .).