Chapter 32
I dreamed of Amy. We were making love—she was on top of me, our hips locked together.
I looked up and her face was missing, her skin transformed to a living liquid.
The hairless skin, with moles and pores but no features, churned down the front of her skull to fold into her neck and come back out of her scalp, just below her hairline.
Endlessly repeating, like the paper on a belt sander.
Faceless, her too-strong hips held me in place even as I tried to yell, tried to struggle away.
She leaned down, and the skin shifted, turning a pearlescent violet.
Eyelids split apart in the sliding skin, pulling wide, revealing perfect black mirrors.
They reflected my own sweating and terrified face.
I woke with a start, heart pounding, sitting up in the darkness of the strange room around me. I lay there, staring at the ceiling, until my heart settled and my skin grew clammy with drying sweat. I didn’t think I could get back to sleep, but I was still exhausted. My eyelids drooped.
Raven’s disembodied voice dragged me awake again. “Master Treder.”
I pulled my eyes open with effort and sat up, groggy and disoriented. “Yes.”
“It is ninety minutes before your next transit point.” I couldn’t tell where its voice came from.
I dropped my chin to my chest. My eyes were lead bearings in my head, my eyelids lined with sandpaper. The earpiece with Lyle’s consciousness sat on the side table next to me.
“There is a shower in the adjoining room. The hotel has provided you with an extensive breakfast.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
I thought about flopping down and going back to sleep, consequences be damned. Instead, I forced myself up and into the bathroom.
The shower was familiar enough that I was able to figure out the controls, and I felt mildly better afterward, although my head continued to pound.
I put on the loose pants and sweatshirt Anjari had given me so many years ago but left the survival suit in a crumpled pile on the chair in the bedroom.
I hooked the earpiece over my ear again. “Lyle?”
“Still here,” he said.
“You still want to try moving into that bracelet-suit thing?”
“I haven’t changed my mind after sleeping on it, if that’s what you mean.”
“Do you sleep?”
“No. Just an expression.”
“Right.”
I found Raven sitting at a table in the common room area of the suite. The table was filled with steaming plates of food. I sat across from the tall avatar and started piling my plate full of whatever looked vaguely appetizing.
“How did you sleep?” Raven asked.
“Okay.” I forced the food down, one bite at a time, not really tasting it.
There was a momentary silence, the only sounds coming from my silverware on the plate in front of me.
“If you will forgive me,” Raven said.
“Yes?”
“You seem displeased this morning. Is everything all right?”
“Peachy.”
“Peachy. You are being ironic. You are not all right.”
I set the fork down. “No, I’m not all right.
I’m about to get thrown forward in time, again, for the twentieth or so time, into who knows what bizarre future.
” I rubbed my chin, now smoothly shaven with the razor I’d found in the bathroom.
“I’ll get chased by mutant zombies or burned at the stake as a witch or have to talk to a bunch of excited historians about how wrong they all are, and, twenty-four hours later, I get to do it all over again. ”
Raven watched me.
“I’m tired,” I said. “I’m very tired.”
“I understand. It is, if I may attempt a historical saying you may recognize, a hard road you travel.”
“It is that.”
“I don’t see any other options for you.”
“You could tell the Overmind to wave its magic wand and change me. Turn my bones into titanium. Put implants in my brain. Harden my skin and make me stronger.”
“The Central Overmind might accommodate you if you were to make this request.”
“Really?”
“It is your body. Your domain. But there are considerable risks.”
I looked at the food, cooling and congealing into an unrecognizable mass. “I might stop traveling through time.”
Raven was silent for a moment, long enough for me to look up and meet its black eyes.
“It is a possibility. But, as the Overmind indicated last night, there may be a greater possibility the augmentations would be removed during your next transit. Or, equally, you would be deemed no longer yourself and obliterated on principle.”
I looked out the window. It was still dark, but the crystalline spires were lit from within, shining with pearlescent, multicolored radiance. It was beautiful. “Obliterated on principle.” I tasted the words on my tongue. “That might not be such a bad thing.”
“Dad,” Lyle said. “Really?”
“Do you truly wish to die, Scott Treder?”
I looked back. Raven’s tone had shifted again. “Overmind?”
“Yes. Do you wish to die?”
I hesitated. Shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Then, if I may be so bold, you do not.”
“How the fuck would you know what I want?”
Raven’s purple lips cracked into a delicate smile.
It made me sit back. “I am very smart. But beyond that, I believe you recognize the gravity of your situation. You are a unique case in the history of humanity. What is happening to you is too cleverly orchestrated to be random. There is a purpose, which may become your purpose. And this purpose could be the most important ever given to a human being.”
I knew it was manipulating me. Using my conversation with Vorsch against me. “And what purpose would that be?”
“I do not know, of course.”
I held Raven’s black, mirrored eyes for as long as I could, then looked away, toward the innocuous brown box still sitting where I’d left it the night before. “All right.” I opened the top flap of the wooden box and pulled the bracelet free of its velvet surroundings. “I just slip it on, right?”
“Yes.”
“Lyle?”
“Let’s do it, Dad. Before we run out of time.”
I hesitated. Then I put my right hand through the bracelet loop.
It settled against my skin below the sleeve of the sweatshirt.
For a moment nothing happened. Then the silver material melted apart, sliding along my skin in both directions.
It covered my hand first, then moved up my arm, under the sweatshirt.
The sensation was like dipping my arm into a warm bath—not unpleasant, but a little bizarre since I was standing in the middle of a hotel room.
I felt the warmth spread across my chest, abdomen, and neck, finally around my head.
I shut my eyes as it enveloped my face. I held my breath.
I was Neo in the first Matrix movie. I just hoped I wasn’t about to have an induced heart attack.
The earpiece was forced off. It fell to the bed.
“You may open your eyes and breathe normally,” a synthetic voice said in my ear.
It took me a few heartbeats to work up the courage, but I did as it asked.
There was no sign either my eyes or mouth were covered.
I saw perfectly well, and breathing felt normal.
Warmth spread to my toes. I looked down, and I could see my own skin again.
There was only a very small blur on the edges of my fingers and the backs of my hands. The suit had gone translucent.
“Lyle? You okay…? Lyle?”
“Whoa,” Lyle said, his voice in both of my ears, stereophonic. It was much clearer than it had been with the earpiece, like he was standing right next to me. “This is great. Okay, I admit it. I was a pseudo-SI before.”
“So, you’re okay?”
“Better than okay. It’s like—I can’t even say. It’s like seeing in black-and-white your whole life, then waking up to the world in full color. The capabilities I have now are astonishing. Incredible.”
“The suit is among the most advanced pieces of technology ever devised,” the Overmind said. “With it, your son’s consciousness should be able to keep you safe from nearly any known form of attack, physical or otherwise, as well as keep you alive in some of the harshest environments imaginable.”
“Great. Those mutant zombies won’t stand a chance now.”
“You may tailor the external appearance to suit any style of clothing. Right now, as you are already wearing some clothing, I preset the suit to be transparent to human-visible light wavelengths. Is there another style you would prefer?”
“Uh, no, not right now.”
“Your SI companion can alter your appearance at a later point.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
The avatar stood. “We should take you to ground level.” Its voice was still that of the Overmind. “For your transit forward.”
“Yeah, okay. Let’s go.”
Fifteen minutes later, we stood on the circular outcropping of wavy grass where I’d first entered this time.
Fourteen hundred years earlier, it had been just outside a history museum.
Raven—still inhabited by the Overmind—stood next to me as we looked over the ocean.
Waves brushed against the rocks below the grassy land, splashing and receding.
Behind us, morning rays speared between the spires and towers of the city.
“Why me, do you think?” I asked. The headache pulsed behind my eyes.
“I cannot guess,” the Overmind said.
“Well, whatever the reason, I hope it’s a damn good one.”
“Yes. As do I.” It held its right hand out. I looked at it for a moment, then grasped the slender hand. I felt the latent strength hidden in the slim frame. Mirrored black eyes regarded me.
“Good luck, Scott Treder. Perhaps we will meet again.”
“I’ll look you up.”
“If I am able, I will have an avatar or its functional equivalent waiting for you twenty-eight hundred years from now, when you emerge from your next transit.”
I let the avatar’s hand go. Took one small step back. “Thank you.”
“Your son’s emulation SI will take care of you.” The avatar raised its hand. “Goodbye.”
“Good…”
The world slipped sideways, and righted itself in a blink.
“… bye.”