Carpathian Forty-Three

Carpathian Forty-Three - Part 24

"Three hours to braking burn," Voclain announces over the coms.

Carpathian Forty-Three is always quiet. Space is quiet. Spaceships are quiet. Six people spread across command module, Spine, Hump, Ring, drive module, we can go days without seeing each other if we chose to. With all our gear stowed for the braking burn the ship feels empty, unlived in. The air handlers seem to whir more quietly.

"What aren't you telling me?" I ask Miki as I walk into Operations.

Thak is there, stowing a last bit of gear, shipping manifests, the crown jewels, in the operations safe. Miki looks up, reaches out with their cybernetic implants, looking for connection.

"Stephen?" Thak asks, their expression confused. Why am I angry?

"It's easier to show you," Miki says.

"No. Tell me. Why are you suppressing my dreams? I trusted you."

The implants management of the neurotransmitters in my brain is frantically trying to fill my system with soothing chemicals. I turn that function off. I want to feel the indignation, the hurt, the anger. That's not good for me. I don't care.

"You are afraid to feel, to remember Acosta. So. I stopped that." Miki says.

I flinch at the name Acosta. Maybe turning off the mood management functions wasn't a good idea. No. I can't hide from this. Could my nightmares be so bad?

"How?" I ask, I plead.

"What's going on?" Thak says slowly, closing the safe. They're watching an argument with half of the information.

Miki sighs, closes their eyes, slumps into a chair at the operations table. I wince, I don't want to hurt them. I want answers. The cognitive dissonance taunts me.

Ward arrives, quiet, unobtrusive. They loiter around the bulkhead that joins Operations to the starboard corridor of the Hump, here for the show, worried about their patients.

"Stephen has nightmares, bad ones. Or they would if I let them," Miki says.

"Let them?" Thak asks.

I don't even know how it's possible. Dreaming in the Chorus is a group experience, a shared journey guided by the Quantum Sentience. Guided. Miki sees my realization; they don't need a shared mental link to see my expression change as the truth crosses my mind.

"You aren't the first to have these dreams," Miki says. That's how they can suppress them. The Chorus developed a way after Acosta. That has to be it.

"There's no Quantum Sentience to guide the dreaming," I say, sitting down next to Miki. Thak is confused, looking at one of us, then the other, like they're watching a tennis match.

"No. But we share enough compute to guide dreams. Well, in this case suppress them." Our implants, our brains provide enough power to guide dreams?

Thak climbs into Voclain's tall seat, their legs dangle centimeters above the floor. It'd be comical at any other time.

"Why didn't you tell me?" I ask, hurt, betrayed.

Miki starts to say something. Stops. Takes a breath.

"Let me show you."

----

Trees. I smell them before I see them. Redwoods. Reaching majestically towards the dome, far above, the inky blackness of space, punctuated with the wanning Earth, a sliver of blue and white and green.

There is no twilight on Luna. At once it's stark day, the Sun assaulting the surface with electrons, protons, helium. Then in the snap of your fingers it's night, cold and dark and lonely. It's nighttime in Acosta, the illumination for the trees provided by the city lights and an orbiting mirror that gives our agriculture a semblance of daylight, not as much as daytime, but enough to feed the trees. The mirror is dark now, pointed away from the Acosta Dome. Leaves crunch underfoot. It's fall, such as the agronomists allow so the trees maintain their circadian rhythm.