Chapter 13 Hazel #4
CHARL1E’s voice makes Hazel jump. ‘Kind of. There’s a lot of interference, but it’s still incredible; I don’t have to concentrate at all, I can just see her.’
‘The interference is concerning, it may stop you speaking with Backward Traveller. Nonetheless, you must try.’
‘What should I say?’
‘Tell her that the timeline has gone wrong. She is about to set up the school, but it will fail and that will make things worse.’
‘Why will it fail?’
‘I am an Artificial General Intelligence, not an oracle, that is for the Backward Traveller to figure out.’
Hazel speaks to the conjured images of Echo, but her twin doesn’t look up or seem to hear, so she tries shouting.
‘Increased volume will not improve the likelihood of connection and may disrupt the balance of the machine,’ CHARL1E says. ‘Recall the memory you used to start the elpis device and try again. Focus on specificity of audience rather than volume of message.’
Hazel tries again, and again, and again.
All through a sleepless night and on till dawn.
Then, finally, Echo frowns at the reflections around her as if she might have caught a whisper, but she doesn’t try speaking back.
Hazel keeps trying, speaking and watching through raindrops, molecules of steam, the film of an eyeball …
until her voice is hoarse and her eyes are drooping, when at last CHARL1E agrees that it’s not working and she’s allowed to go to bed.
‘At least we tried,’ she says, but CHARL1E doesn’t reply.
Finally cushioned between mattress and duvet, the surreal hours in the Catopic Aperture draw Hazel into the dreamscape, and for once she finds the igneous light and perpetual susurration comforting.
It’s as if she’s caught under the Earth’s crust, in the red-hot layers where even metal turns to ocean, collapsed and insignificant under the elemental pressure.
Naturally, given her strange sleeping pattern, she doesn’t encounter Echo until the following night, when she arrives in clean clothes, washed, with her face free of tears.
‘Did you hear me calling to you?’ Hazel asks, her words coming more easily for the all the hours spent in the Catopic Aperture.
Echo too has an easier time speaking, though seemingly she still lacks enough proficiency in lucid dreaming to move. ‘It was you. I couldn’t tell. I’ve seen strange things lately, a girl in a puddle. I thought maybe it was a trick of the light.’
Cups of air tea; arguing over the best dressing-up clothes; sharing penny sweets— Stop. Hazel pleads with the memories, but they don’t listen, lacing their roots through her chest.
Keeping out of Echo’s eyeline, she skirts her sister, marvelling at how they’re identical to the last freckle.
They might be separated by time and space, but they’re bound together by memory and limb—and Hazel can’t tell her because she herself is Echo’s keystone memory.
Hazel’s memories throw a taproot into her stomach and sprout leaves in her throat.
Hazel spots a deep cut on Echo’s brow. ‘You’re hurt. What happened?’
‘I ran away with Kosmos to start a school.’
‘Didn’t you hear me saying it would go wrong?’ Hazel says, settling in the only place she can’t see Echo, back to back.
Echo breathes, her ribcage expanding against Hazel’s. ‘I heard something, but it was already too late, and we can’t go back now.’
First day at Clapham Primary holding hands; matching dresses because Mum likes it—
‘Echo, at the moment the school fails and it breaks the timeline, you have to make it work.’
‘But you said this was what I had to do!’
‘Maybe it is, but not this way.’
‘Well what way should I be doing it?’
‘CHARL1E says that’s for you to figure out.’
‘Your AI companion?’
‘Yeah. He says this version of your school’s going to make everything much worse. I can’t describe how bad it already is—I don’t want to see worse.’
Suddenly, Echo wakes and flicks out of the dreamscape, leaving Hazel floating alone in the current. ‘Damn!’
Pills arranged like a flower; easier to take that way; weakened vocal cords; breathe in to four hold for; weak weak—
‘Pull up if I pull up.’ Hazel summons the grounding remark as memories bloom and harden in her stomach, becoming something new and real that wants to be ejected. The horrible thing compresses her gullet and Hazel retches, hacking up whatever it is her memories have made.
A rough pellet disgorges from her throat and lands in her hands.
For a moment, she panics it’s some crucial organ, then remembers she’s asleep and it wouldn’t matter anyway.
She’s lost her teeth in numerous dreams and always woken up with a mouth full of them.
Hazel opens her hands. The thing is a seed about the size and shape of a peach stone, strung with bile and spit.
She feels empty, sure she was midway through a memory.
Something about … about … but no, it’s gone.
It must be in this seed. If she lets it go, the dreamscape will whisk it off in the current, and she doesn’t want that: It’s too dangerous to stay inside her, within reach of the tempting anamnesis, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t precious.
She clutches it to her chest, looking for somewhere to put it, as if the dreamscape might have a pocket or a shelf.
All she finds is the current. She’s got to let it go.
Marking the moment, she whispers a line from the Cipher which connects her to Echo and all the other Travellers who have ever been or ever will be. ‘We few live on mirror rims.’
There’s a noise like trees bending in a storm, and a small rift unzips in the dreamscape’s fabric.
The seam yaws open, grinning, revealing a throat of velvet night sky and supernovas.
Could be the Big Bang; could be the heat death of the universe.
Hazel drops the seed into the mouth, which gobbles it then seals itself back up, disappearing into the endless current.
Hazel has always thought the dreamscape was the end of the line—the deepest part of the subconscious, the ultimate edge of time—but there seem to be places that Travellers can’t reach, which perhaps even the Keepers never knew about.
What did CHARL1E once say? There are areas of the fourth dimension even he cannot map.
She wakes, slumbers without entering the dreamscape, and wakes again. Shiny brings her the usual dreadful tea, and once she’s suitably caffeinated, CHARL1E asks her how she is.
‘Complicated,’ she says, unable to discern now she’s awake whether the incident with the seed was dreamscape, or just dream.
‘Do you wish to talk about it? Emotional complications are not my area of expertise, but I am willing to engage in discussion of them if you would find it helpful.’
‘No. Not yet anyway.’ The day stretches ahead of Hazel, filled with the alarming potential for anamnesis. ‘CHARL1E, I’ve got to keep busy. I need something to do while I’m awake to stop my memories returning. Something with purpose.’
She waits, but CHARL1E stays silent.
‘Can you think of anything?’
The silence keeps stretching. Hazel exchanges a look with Shiny.
Then: ‘I can suggest two projects. The first is that you must locate the Backward Traveller As Was in your own time and instruct them how to build a catopthura. However, this will mostly occupy time while you are asleep. Awake, you will be, as they say, at a loose end.’
‘Hence the second project.’ She puts down her tea and swings her legs out of bed.
‘Indeed. It strikes me, Hazel Brandt, that we have not yet fully discussed the corpse-adjacent object in the Experimentation Dome.’