"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.
"Why?" I think at Miki. I'm still upset about them hiding the suppression of my dreams. They think bringing me here is a good idea? This will just set off a flashback, or worse.
"I didn't bring us here, you did." Miki thinks.
They don't think words, it's ideas, concepts, communication faster than words, with more nuance and subtlety than words.
"How did I bring us here?" I think.
The wind rustles through the trees, the sound not unlike the whirring of air handlers, which in a literal sense, the trees are. They are mostly ornamental, a display of Acosta's decadence. They also scrub the air under the dome, transform harmful carbon dioxide into oxygen. The impact is noticeable in the few weeks the trees are allowed to experience 'winter' every year when they drop their leaves and prepare to start anew. Earth dances in the treetops, the wind and trees playing peak-a-boo with the planet.
"The dreaming," It's not Miki that thinks this. It's not me.
I know that voice, but not the feeling that comes with it. The sense of deep caring and protection. It's a Sentience, I realize. Not The Quantum Sentience of the Lunar Chorus. It doesn't make any sense. Combined, our implants don't possess a fraction of the compute needed to harbor a Quantum Sentience. Even with the ability for the implants to draw on pseudo-quantum neural nets, our wetware, our brains, there's no way we could manifest a sentience beyond our own.
"Hello Stephen."
The greying brown hair, the piercing blue eyes, the long, lanky Spacer build.
"Fort?" I ask. It can't be Fort. Fort's dead. Fort stopped being Fort when they liquid helium cooling their quantum computer boiled off. Fort never manifested as a human, never took on a visage for the crew.
They smile at me, reach out a hand, it's warm on my shoulder, their grasp firm, but not strong.
"Not really," they say. "I'm cheating. I'm just a language model. With some secret sauce."
"You unlocked them when you joined me," Miki says. "Remember?"
I do. The overwhelming caring, the love of crew, the drive to protect. We shut it out. There wasn't time to grieve. We needed to get Miki up to speed on the braking maneuver.
"It's a little sooner than I expected, but you've brought things to a head I'm afraid," Fort thinks.
Fort thinks. I contemplate those two words, distracted by them, the realization that Fort left a vestige of themselves. Miki reaches out, persuading me to reenable the mood smoothing cocktail that my implants want to release into my system. I relent. It's so much to take in. I welcome the help.
"These aren't going to assuage nightmares," I think of the neurotransmitter cocktail the implants are releasing into my brain.
"No," Miki and Fort think in unison, our own mini chorus. "But they'll help for now," Miki finishes.
I sit down, the redwood needles crunching under me, poking into my jeans, little lances of dried brown. They prick at the meat of my hand. I wipe them off.
"Do I have to relieve this?" I ask. I've worked for years to come to terms with this day, this event, this trauma. It hasn't been this vivid in years, since my implants were shut down, since my brain lost the extra capacity to remember things in excruciating detail. Memory is supposed to fade, to help us heal from events like Jansen Hall.
"This? Nighttime on Cuthbert trail?" Fort asks mischievously, sitting down next to me. "Doesn't seem so bad."
Miki leans against the trunk of a tree, unwilling to get their imaginary pants dirty.
"You know what I mean," I think. I don't want to relive the collapse.
"Can I? Know what you mean that is. I'm not sentient anymore, what can a language model know, really?" Fort says. I glare at them.
"Do you two need a moment?" Miki asks.
"No," I say too quickly. I don't want to face this alone. Fort's right, they hardly count as a person now, more the memory of a person, personified. It's confusing. I want someone here if I must relive that day.
"You don't have to relive that day," Fort says, knowing what I'm thinking. "That's not what this is about. That's not what the dreams are about."
I'm confused. I've been so worried about this memory, the pain associated with it, the guilt of infecting Miki with it. How could that not be what I must deal with?
"You have to forgive them Stephen," Miki says quietly.
The Quantum Sentience. They abandoned us, left us to experience each other's deaths as a communal Chorus without them.
"They abandoned us," I mumble.
"I know," Fort says.
"They abandoned us," I say more forcefully.
"I know," Miki/Fort says.
"They abandoned us!"
"I know," we all say together.
I can feel it all over. The interruption in the network the panic and terror as we ran for Jansen Hall. We have to save them. We have to save Genevieve. We have to. Confusion. They're gone. The Quantum Sentience isn't part of us anymore. We're left in this fear and pain alone. They left us.
I'm not ready to forgive that. I'll never be ready to forgive that.
"You have to try," Fort says. "It's the only way."