A World Called Ocean Read online

  Probably, she was sure, she could have explained them away, claimed they were personal. Under normal circumstances, they would have had no real interest in looking at them.

  But they had come from Ocean, under circumstances which made Alis behave with deep caution. And with all the trouble over her sister …

  Aside from the brief and uncomfortable interview with Pyotr, however, she and her luggage had been entirely left alone. No-one had even asked to take a look, which would have surprised her under any circumstances. The antipathy of the Oceanics towards outsiders was well known, even back on Earth. The placing of the offworlders on the tiny island of St Brubaker had been the result—so she had been told—of a tug of war of negotiation between the colonists and the Collective’s Recontact branch. They could stay—even the Oceanics were realistic enough to know they could not resist the Collective’s combined military might—but only in comparative isolation.

  She picked up one of the books and touched it to her tongue, then took it out again. She had already eaten one or two of the books back on Earth, but the implant hadn’t been in long, and they made little sense. Brief, tantalising glimpses of faces, too vague or smudged to be made out; cartoon emotions that beat at her senses. Perhaps now it would be different; perhaps now the implant had grown sufficiently into her cortex that she could understand what was hidden in the books she had been given.

  They called them memory books, or chemical books, and they constituted one of the greatest mysteries of the Cetis. But there was more to them than a mere chemical interaction.

  Something more lay in there, something almost mystical in nature that couldn’t be explained, like so much Ceti technology. What she held in her hands had been manufactured—after a fashion—by human hands; or rather, the process of manufacture had been rediscovered by humans and used for their own purposes, probably in some top secret military R&D lab at the height of the green wars.

  Of course, it couldn’t work unless you had the implants. That much had been discovered through simple trial and error. The implants were also pure Ceti tech, tiny objects with no discernible internal mechanisms, some kind of complex nanocyte that grew like wildfire under the right circumstances—meaning, inside a brain.

  She put the book back in her mouth and bit into it, feeling it dissolve rapidly on her tongue. She swallowed, the cinnamon-like smell filling her nostrils.

  She sat down on the edge of her bunk and thought about all those things they had told her about what it was like to experience a memory book. Like becoming someone else; or so they said. It hadn’t been like that for her yet. Perhaps this time.

  She reached above the bunk and pulled down a shutter, blocking out the bright sunlight slanting in through the single window. She remembered the letter, the one that had come through from Ocean not long before her graduation, along with the tiny parcel of books hidden inside an ornately carved salt shaker.

  She had brought the letter with her. She thought about getting it out again, but it was too late; the little room was beginning to take on a distinctly unreal element, a plasticity that seemed to simultaneously numb and excite her senses.

  She closed her eyes.

  Looked down at her old man’s hands. A sense of disorientation gripped her and for a moment she panicked, opening her eyes again. The little room came back, the bunk solid and real under her, but in her sudden disorientation it seemed as if the room were the illusion.

  Get a grip, she told herself. They told you it would be like this time and time again. They knew what they were talking about. Stop acting like a novice. Ride with it.

  She closed her eyes and she became someone else. She Remembered. It was like nothing she had ever experienced, nothing she had ever imagined it was possible to experience. She suddenly realised how paltry and ridiculous the comparison with interacs was. This wasn’t mere illusion; this was—being.

  Her hands—no, his hands—were old and gnarled, the veins raised blue ridges across the flesh. It was like she was really there, really was this other person.

  And, in a peculiar sense, she was. She wondered for the first time if there was any truth in the myths, that you could lose yourself in the mind of another person, become trapped in their thoughts and never come back out.

  He stood on a high promontory, and the sun baked the ground beneath his sandalled feet. The promontory was at the edge of an island, the landscape falling away below him. Alis didn’t know which island, but she knew it was somewhere on Ocean.

  Mental images flashed through her mind, and for a moment she thought perhaps there was a name, a snatch of half-heard syllables, but then it was gone, buried under a sudden barrage of conflicting emotions; sharp-edged fury, ice-cold anger, and under it all a numbing sadness like a still current at the heart of him.

  Him … she tried to think who he was, but the vision started to fade, the room about her beginning to become real again. She concentrated, forcing herself to relax, not to let her own thoughts cloud the sensory impressions the book brought to her. She blanked herself, settled back, and suddenly she was back, in that other place.

  His bones hurt when he moved. There was a sound like someone chuckling, but he felt no fear at the sound. Something terrible lay at the centre of him, and it seemed to Alis that she could almost glimpse it through curtains, like some mediaeval side-show grotesque barely visible by candlelight in its cage.

  He stepped towards the edge of the cliff. It fell away to a small rocky shore, waves rising up over pebbles and lichen before falling away again in a shower of spume.

  For a moment she thought he might jump, but something in his thoughts reassured her that he had no such intention. He was trapped, and was seeking a route of escape. From the clifftop? Was someone following him?

  Then he turned and looked behind him. She was surprised to see there were trees growing there, the stiff-trunked seaweed-things that grew across St Brubaker, obscuring the rest of the island from his sight.

  A thought stirred within him; something about a flower. She caught a fleeting mental glimpse of something with diamond-shaped petals, coloured a vivid, bruised purple, and then it was gone. It felt important; there was the feeling that the man who had recorded these memories had attached great significance to the flower.

  And then the revelation came. He thought of himself, and out of the abyss of his mind, his name came floating up.

  Alexander Fulhaus.

  The shock of realisation made her open her eyes. The two scenes were superimposed briefly, then the room around her began to take precedence over the artificially induced memories. She closed her eyes again quickly, not wanting to waste one moment of the book.

  She was back on the island. Fulhaus had started walking. The implications of the existence of such a book were enormous. Unless the book was some kind of a fake.

  But that made even less sense. Who could fake a memory book? They’d tried putting people under hypnosis to try and alter their perceptions while they were Remembering, but it never seemed to work. Apart from that, nobody even really understood how the technology functioned. One more mystery from the Cetis to make the Greens nervous back home or here on Ocean.

  But if this book she was experiencing really was a recording of the memories of Alexander Fulhaus, then it might a deadly political weapon. It could wipe the floor with anything the Greens believed in back on Earth. It would make a mockery of one of the most powerful political movements of the past few centuries.

  If it was true. If it was real. She thought of her sister Lian; wondered where on the whole great expanse of Ocean she was, what she had gotten herself into. How could she have known what was in these books? She didn’t have the requisite cortex implant that would render her capable of ingesting the memories contained within a memory book. Perhaps someone had told her what was in them.

  She was losing the book again. She blanked her own thoughts, sank farther back into Fulhaus’s mind …

  Alis’s consciousness slid under and around the experiences of the book like an eel slipping through clear blue waves. The sensations—the touch of a breeze to his forehead, the touch of the sunlight upon the back of his neck—were astonishing in their lucidity.

  She felt something like near-religious awe come upon her; and for the first time she had an inkling of what the Greens talked about. It didn’t make sense that a package of chemicals, no matter how complex their molecular structure, could recreate such a panorama of sight and sound and feeling, even if it did require interaction with a cortex implant to work. This was something beyond human understanding. There was something else at work here. Something invisible, something they hadn’t found yet.

  Back home, there were cults that worshipped the Cetis as gods. Maybe they weren’t far off the mark. Faced with the experience of being inside the mind of a man who was supposed to have been dead for at least two centuries, she couldn’t help but feel a little sympathy for their point of view.

  She relaxed, and let the book slide over her mind’s eye again.

  Fulhaus turned, his mind suddenly filled with dread. At first all she could see were the seaweed-trees, but then it seemed as if there were voices, calling to each other, on the very periphery of his hearing. Shouts.

  Someone coming for him?

  His eyesight wasn’t so good, and the farthest away details were a little blurred. Now he was looking at something a long way away, out on the ocean surface, but he couldn’t quite make it out. He looked down, and she caught a glimpse of the rest of him. Crinkled cotton-like trousers over open-toed sandals, the toes brown and stubby. Thin arms like sticks poking out of long sleeves, some material dyed yellow and lightly embroidered. He fumbled in the pocket of his trousers, and her/his hand brushed against something as it found and retrieved a pair of
spectacles.

  Alis felt herself start and realised his hand had brushed against his genitals. She was experiencing the sensations of a man’s body. The experience was unnerving, rather than anything pleasant or even vaguely provocative or sexual.

  He put the spectacles—dirty, wire-rimmed—on the end of his nose and peered back out to sea.

  And then she saw it, through his eyes.

  It was anchored far out from the shore, miles out, because its bottom sank so far down that to come any closer would risk running aground. Traces of early morning mist, rapidly fading under the onslaught of the rising alien sun, drifted by its colossal hull. Perhaps two miles in length, another mile in width.

  The upper decks glittered with the diamond sprinkle of the lights of human habitation, an entire floating city following the warm ocean currents of the equator and the nomadic shoals of fish that it and the descendants of the first colonists survived on. It was a Ship, a single, gigantic living organism carrying thousands on and inside it.

  His old man’s hand lifted and shaded his brow, to see better. She was grateful for the motion, transfixed as she was by the vision.

  Alis was not unfamiliar with the whole concept of an Oceanic Ship. They were one of the great wonders of the third millennium. She had seen videotapes, cube recordings, interac documentaries dealing with them. She had been disappointed at not being able to see one immediately upon her arrival.

  It was truly awe-inspiring, beyond anything that she had ever experienced, and it seemed in that moment that her decision to come to Ocean was completely and wholly justified. She was an Observer, she was meant to record sensory documents of life throughout the Collective. Permanent holistic and sensory testimonials to what life was like in a particular place, a particular time.

  Then she felt a sudden sense of separation, and a numbness spread through him. No—through her, she realised; and the vision of the Ship started to fade, to blur and distort, fading into the darkness behind her eyelids. The experience was over, and she was back in her quarters, alone, in another time, staring at the narrow bed and the wardrobe. She lay back on the bunk and stared up at the ceiling for an hour, motionless, a welter of thoughts and emotions passing through her.

  Then, she reached down and picked up another book. Bit into it, tasted the liquid within, and swallowed.

  * * *

  Catalogue No: 17200D (educ/internal)

  Description: Memory Book (chemical composition type 5, 4 of 6 in sequence)

  Created: January 17th, 2345

  Author: Observer Jenny Tielo, Reykjavik Institute

  Notes: This book is one of a sequence created by the Observer Jenny Tielo, who was also an artist of the Millennial-Cyclic school. This book represents part of a sequence created partly as a typical historical document, but also as an artistic statement.

  the smell of spilt gasoline

  bright light, hurting the eyes—people laughing, a quantum battery sitting connected to a garage generator—men, barely visible in the dim light of an industrial assembly hold, standing around a heater, breath steaming in the cold air as they slap their arms against their bodies

  flash of snowy wastes, cold Reykjavik streets, long grey krill ships ploughing through North Atlantic waters

  feeling of despondency; a small cube playing in the corner, pushing pictures onto the retina—

  focus; on news report—fifteen years out of date

  News announcer, in clothes more than a decade out of fashion—talking with a physicist (Dr Barnett, the name sliding past)—voices talking—

  “So Dr Barnett, when did the breakthrough come about?” (says the newsman, his manner smooth and professional)

  (flash of cynicism; memory of watching the same interview, as a young girl)

  “Not a single breakthrough; a series of experiments, many of them nothing more than simple trial and error. It’s not really that spectacular. It’s taken thousands of researchers, if not tens of thousands, and more than two centuries to come to an understanding of the Singularity. Why it destroyed itself—why it exploded after serving us well for thirty years—we’ll probably never know.”

  (Thought of implant, deep within her own skull, now part of her—brief flash of personal ambiguity towards Ceti tech—sympathies with Greens when younger—hint of sadness at loss of youth—glances at quantum battery; a gift from the Cetis—

  “But this is an enormous thing to happen, Dr Barnett. The re-establishment of the Singularity. Does this mean a repeat of the events of two hundred years ago?”

  “If you mean the continued expansion of the human race to wherever the Cetis left their way stations, then yes. There are a dozen human colonies scattered across the galaxy we have been out of contact with for two centuries. It will take time to return to them, but return we will. We are fortunate to be alive in a great time.”

  “There are some who might not agree, Doctor, some of the colonists amongst them. Ocean, in particular, was colonised by people of a certain religious bent—”

  “Misfits, like these so-called Greens. We have a duty to their descendants to re-establish contact.”

  “Are you certain they’ll be glad to see us?”

  A shrug—“Reasonably certain.”

  Chapter Seven

  The walls were covered in pictures of her brain. Yet another doctor—this one was called Cheikria, with smooth ebony skin darker than night—showed them to her, tracing the growth of the implant through her brain.

  “They send these through with you when you come through from the Singularity. In case you were wondering,” he said. “These later ones are since you arrival here.” He pointed to one of these; backlit, a section of her skull showing the fine tracery of capillaries, the rough bumps and wrinkles of the outer surface of her brain. There was a white dot, at the base of her skull. Fine, irregular white lines radiated out from it, gathering in knots at various points throughout her brain.

  “I appreciate being shown this, doctor, but I’ve already seen pictures like this. They tell you everything the implant does long before you get a chance to get one put in.”

  He shrugged. “I appreciate that, but there are other reasons for showing you this. We have to make sure you appreciate what’s happening inside you.” He emphasised words with his finger, pointing at her head.

  You want to make sure I’m not going crazy because something alien is growing inside my brain, she thought sourly. They probably had men waiting outside the office with big white nets every time a new Observer got sent in for a check-up. Just in case anything went wrong. Not that it ever did, of course.

  He saw the look on her face and smiled for the first time, genuinely, it seemed to her. “I know, every Observer I ever met hates going through this. But this is something we don’t entirely understand as yet. Just because nothing’s gone wrong yet doesn’t mean it won’t eventually.”

  “I appreciate that. I just get so tired of it.”

  He shook his head, still smiling. “Tell you what. I’ll spare you the rest of it. I’ve got a bunch of Oceanics to take care of over in Hope. I, uh, run a free clinic over there. They don’t get much access to current medical know-how. I’ll just give you this and it’ll give me more time to take care of matters over there. Okay?”

  He reached down to his desk and picked up a small holocube, handed it to her. He pressed the little switch on the side and a tiny hologram of her head popped up. She took it from him and studied it, turning the little dial on the underside of the cube. Her skin seemed to peel away, then her skull, and she looked at her brain, the spinal cord drifting off into nothing. She turned it around, studying it. There was a fine tracery of silver all over it, densest at the rear of the brain mass.

  “If you look here,” he said, pointing to where the implant had been placed under the base of her skull, “you’ll see where it’s deeply entrenched itself in the reticular activating system.”

  “Which is closely tied in to our capacity for consciousness. I know. It still doesn’t mean we really have any idea how it works.”

  “I guess not,” he said, not noticing her impatience, or pretending not to. “Unless you’re of a religious bent. Like the Gaean Principle, or someone like that.”