Roger Allen - The Shattered Sphere

“So he isn’t dead. Why aren’t you trying to wake him up?”

Selby swore under her breath, and turned in her chair, so she was facing half away from Larry and Marcia.

Marcia looked to Selby, and shook her head sadly. She stepped away from Larry and went to the access hatch window. She stood there, with her back to him, as she spoke, looking out into the endless caverns of the Lunar Wheel’s domain. “Because,” she said, “he’s more use to us the way he is.”

“ What ?” Larry jumped to his feet. “What the hell gives you the right to—”

“Nothing gives me the right!” Marcia spun around, looked him straight in the eye, her face set and determined. “But this discovery gives us the chance . We are in a war , Larry. The last battle we fought ended five years ago, with our enemy’s forces wiped out here in the Solar System and the Earth held hostage. Call that one a draw, because both sides lost a lot more than they won. God knows what battles Earth has fought on its own since then.

“But we here in the Solar System have been losing ground every day since that fight. You know that. The Moon is the strongest of all the surviving worlds, but things here just keep getting a little worse every day. We took too much damage, too many casualties, to be fully self-sufficient. Always more power cuts and shortages and rationing and making-do without. Perhaps some day we’ll get down to a low enough level that things will stabilize—or perhaps we’ll just keep going down and down without ever noticing when it’s too late. I don’t want things to end up that way. I want to fight back.”

“Against who?” Larry asked. “Lucian?”

“No, of course not,” she said, lowering her voice, the moment of anger gone. Her hands were trembling, and she folded her arms tight against her body to hide it. “Against the Charonians. Against the Sphere and the bloody Multisystem that’s got Earth. But what’s left of Lucian Dreyfuss just might be the best weapon we’ve ever had against them.”

Larry looked from one woman to the other. “What kind of weapon is a man who might as well be dead? What can he do for you?”

“Maybe, just maybe, he can get us information,” Selby said in a very quiet voice. “Information straight from the dead horse’s mouth.”

“God damn it, stop babbling in riddles. Tell me what you’re talking about!”

“The Wheel, that’s what we’re talking about,” Selby said. “All the data that’s locked up in the Wheel. Half my skills are in information retrieval. Marcia and I have both spent five years working on ways to get through to the Wheel’s Heritage Memory. It ought to contain the accumulated memory of all the previous generations of Charonians.”

“The Wheel is dead,” Larry said. “How could its memory be intact?”

“It’s not dead , it’s off . Yes, what we would regard as the living portions of it are so badly damaged as to be irreparable, but the Wheel was almost entirely electronic and mechanical. The machine portion is only turned off, so to speak. The trouble is, we haven’t been able to find the switch. Until now.”

“Go on,” Larry said, deeply suspicious. “What’s different now?”

“Lucian is different,” Marcia said. “I told you we were detecting brain activity in a body that hasn’t had any metabolic activity in five years. His brain should have died, suffered irreversible harm, four minutes after his heart stopped pumping blood, five years ago. But it didn’t. Somehow it is being sustained, and we are reasonably certain that reason has to do with the neural links attached to his head.”

“The tendrils.”

“Exactly, more or less,” Selby said. She polished off the rest of her drink in one swig. “We can detect a lot of—activity—in the links. Of what sort, we don’t know. Perhaps the Wheel was in the midst of taking down a copy of everything in Lucian’s brain at the moment the Wheel died, and the connection stayed open. We just don’t know, to echo the bloody chorus of the day. But the activity is repetitive, as if he is thinking the same thing over and over again, in extreme slow motion. The basic theory is that whatever was on his mind at the time they put him in there is still on his mind.

“But we have established that the connections through those— well, I suppose tendrils is as good a word as any—that those connections are two-way. Information going both ways , to and from Lucian, to and from the Wheel. Somehow, in some way, whatever part of Lucian’s brain that is functional is in conversation with the Charonians.”

“We’ve studied those tendrils very carefully,” Marcia said, struggling to keep her voice steady, trying not to think about what they were asking this man to do. She forced herself to look Larry Chao straight in the eye. “We know exactly where the tendrils are positioned. One of them seems to be linked straight into Broca’s area— one of the key speech centers in the brain. Another seems to connect into the optic nerve. We think we can hook into it. If Lucian Dreyfuss is still there, and sane, to at least some degree, we can take advantage of that, using off-the-shelf medical technology to reconnect sight and hearing. We should be able to tap into the tendrils, and pump sight and sound stimuli right to him. That part is standard virtual reality stuff. The technology is doable—but the psychology is tricky.”

“What psychology?” Larry asked.

“Lucian Dreyfuss was kidnapped by monsters,” Selby said. “He was then put into suspended animation, and is now exhibiting brain activity. It seems reasonable that he has had low-level brain activity for all that time. He has been in a place of darkness and terror, paralyzed, unable to move or breathe or speak, for five years. His time sense should have slowed with everything else, and that might have saved him, made that five years seem like a few hours or days or weeks. If he is in some analog of REM sleep, it might seem to be nothing more than a bad dream to him. Or it might not. He might have spent five years in a living nightmare.”

“We must assume that he is insane,” Marcia said, “or at the very least in a very tenuous mental state.”

“But?” Larry asked. “It sounds like there is a but in all this.”

“ But we think that we should be able to revive him to some degree, if we can reach him.” She swallowed hard and forced herself to say the rest of it. “Our best shot would be contact with someone who knows him. We think someone who knew Lucian—someone Lucian knew—might be able to get through to him. That person could then guide him into the Wheel’s Heritage Memory. Lucian would then be able to tell us… tell us any number of things. But it will have to be someone that Lucian knew, and trusted. Someone he won’t be afraid of when he appears in a nightmare.”

Larry looked from one woman to the other, neither of them willing to return his gaze. “What the hell are you saying?” he demanded.

“Bloody hell,” Selby said, emptying the dregs of the bottle into her glass. “It’s perfectly simple, love. We were just wondering if you’d mind terribly much being hooked up to some ghoulish hardware, with all sorts of clever little wires coming out of it and stuck into those tendrils coming out of Lucian. We’d use a virtual reality system to insert you into his sight and hearing, and then you could have a lovely, lovely chat with him.”

She lifted her glass and emptied it in one swallow before looking at him, her face haggard and drawn. “We’d like you to help us violate your friend’s corpse,” she said, all the masks and playfulness gone, nothing left in her voice but loathing and disgust. “Doesn’t that sound like fun?”