“Pellucid…?” Montrose whispered the name, and then winced at the note of absurd hope in his voice.
“Ah,” said Del Azarchel, standing from his chair. “At last the Cowhand wakes. Physically, we are near Jupiter. Mentally, we are occupying the same logic diamond, which has grown to fill most of the ship, occupied by a kenosis, a downloaded version, of Tellus. You slept for over twelve months.”
“Is this real?” Montrose either asked aloud or thought silently. The dream image was cartoonish and flat. At the same time, Montrose was aware of another level of his mind, the level where the dream-images were being compiled.
Another dream-image came: he saw a mansion of many rooms and corridors, wings and colonnaded walks, enclosed sunny courtyards where mirror-basined fountains lofted plumes of foam to sprinkle ranks and hedges and mazes of rosebush, while above rose towers and observatories. But the walls and floors were of clear glass. To either side were library stacks of books, tomes, librums, scrolls, grimoires, enchiridions, over which monks toiled with pen and ink. The stacks descended stair beneath stair and ladder beneath ladder into a subterranean vastness. Through floors like clouds he could see in the lower basements where hidden and antic gnomes were toiling; and torture chambers where men with his big-nosed gargoyle face screamed. Meanwhile, in the towers above, other men, also wearing his face, paced the balconies and counted the stars, and all the towers were wrapped in opium smoke that issued from athanors and alchemical furnaces.
The mansion was his mind; the torture chambers his buried guilt and fear; the workshops of gnomes were the subconscious processes usurping all his attention, the attempts of the mind to encode the jarring maelstrom of raw sense data into images and forms his emotions and his reason could comprehend.
“The question of reality is often over-pondered,” said Del Azarchel heavily, his voice coming from another scene. “I have erected a sensorium to accommodate your virtual sense impressions, until such time, assuming you can manage it, you pass beyond the need for concrete visualizations. But wait—you are not seeing what I am presenting? The virtual brainwave patterns of your virtual brain show you are still in REM sleep.”
One of the gnomes handed him an alarm clock. It was another image, a reminder of the time when he heard a fire alarm or screaming maiden in a dream, and woke to find himself clubbing his alarm clock with the folding baton he slept with under his pillow. (That was before he learned to sleep with his alarm clock parked across the room.) The gnome was merely an image meant to show him the situation: the virtual reality Del Azarchel offered was being interpreted or misinterpreted through the subconscious layers of his mind.
It was a simple matter to turn like a swimmer in the ocean of his thoughts and crash through to the surface. He drew a breath and found the air was missing. Del Azarchel was not running any false sensations of the mouth and nose, or even of the body at all. The simulation was merely a set of screens containing various information. One of them was a cartoon image of Del Azarchel’s facial expressions. Another showed several viewpoints around the ship, including his body in one medical coffin and Del Azarchel’s resting in another.
Montrose turned to thank the gnome, but it explained that it was merely a dream image as well. “I am not quite awake yet. Where am I? Are there two of me, or one? Is that me?”
The version of his mind in the ship’s brain made a cartoon arm to point at the image he saw of himself in the medical coffin. His mind seemed to have no location.
Of course, minds never really had location, but Montrose was comfortable with imagining himself an inch or two behind his own eyes, staring out as if through windows. Now, he had no sense of front or back, up or down. It made him seasick. Then he saw that his inner ear was a virtual simulation, a set of numbers describing the motions of his nervous system and connected glands and organs, so he could shut off the neural sensation of dizziness.
“You are still half-asleep,” said Del Azarchel, with the hint of an impatient sigh, but also, from another aural channel, the hint of a dry chuckle of amusement. Not being limited to one voice box, he could make any noises he wished to communicate anything he wished. “I would shock you awake, but Tellus will not allow me.”
Montrose saw the interface controlling his coffin, saw the neural and chemical balances, and ordered the coffin to inject him with just enough of a stimulant to wake him.
But wait—how could he be there when he was here? There was a copy of his mind in the ship’s brain, but a biological copy still inside his skull in his head in his coffin. Then he saw the thick helmet of golden-red logic crystal surrounding his now-bald head, and saw the bones of his skull had been replaced by a substance transparent to various useful frequencies, even if it were opaque to normal vision. He saw the continual information flow passing from the smaller human brain into the larger virtual brain. At the moment, both brains were synchronized.
In his present state, it seemed a long time for the biological nervous system to react to the stimulant. He saw his eyes open in the coffin. He also saw—with those eyes—nothing but darkness. He waved his hand at the internal coffin controls to bring up the inside lights, but before the nerve impulse traveled from brain to hand, he realized it was easier merely to retool various areas of the crystal hemisphere now crowning his head to light-sensitive appliances. His vision was more precise and covered more bands of the electromagnetic spectrum than his eyes, and also encountered the odd sensation of looking at the inside of the coffin in front of his nose, to either side of his ears, above the top of his head, as well as inspecting the surface of the hard pillow on which his head rested.
Rested? The coffin was in a small inflatable bay clinging to the inside of the main carousel, which was under power, and spinning him and the room about roughly half a gravity. The human body was not designed to rest and recuperate in free fall, despite the clever modifications made to Elder bodies. Someone had thoughtfully moved him to a chamber with weight.
Montrose climbed out of the coffin, put a bag to his mouth and nose, and spewed up the fluid in his lungs and stomach.
“I slept for a year?” Montrose said aloud.
“That is what sleep is for, I suppose,” Montrose answered himself using speakers built into the overhead. For a moment, he was confused, because again he was watching himself from the outside, through medical sensors and pinpoint cameras on the bulkhead.
Had he been talking to himself, or was this a case of the two halves of himself talking to each other?
Through the crystal floor of the imaginary mansion of his mind or minds, he could see the information feeds writing the subconscious and conscious memories from the point of view of the extended computer-self, Extrose, into his biological brain using the same nerve signals a normal human brain uses to modify itself, and also writing the memories of his biological point of view into the computerized cell-by-cell simulation of his brain occupying a locationless address inside the vast logic diamond now occupying the axis.
He had three choices. First, he could sever the connection between himself and his ghost in the computer. The drawback to that was the divarication which drove so many Hermeticists mad. The biological brain acted as a governor or correcting censor. Second, he could maintain the connection through the nerve jack and brain umbilicus. This would limit him to this chamber, and, with extension cords, to other locations on the carousel. Third, he could try to maintain contact between his selves by means of signals sent to and from the living helmet grown into his skull. The drawback to that was waste heat: too much signal concentration would fry his biological brain. It would get hot wherever he went.
Then the thought came again. How could I have been so stupid?
He saw a thousand clues of a thousand memories.
The mind of Montrose was differently organized than it had been. The subconscious activity was clear to him, at least down to a certain level. He saw what the dreams meant. The image of Del Azarchel and Tellus straightening up from their talk in the gentleman’s lounge was merely a visualization of the thousand clues from computer logs and waste heat patterns in the ship’s logic crystal showing that the two had been talking while he slept, occupying a mind-to-mind communion for the months while the Emancipation sailed from Earth to the outer system and Jupiter. Talking behind his back.