The Dream Cloud, page 3
part #2 of Akropolis Series
It didn’t seem to add up. Her father wouldn’t have shown her the first launch if it had been a weapon. He had been a pacifist, a benevolent man attempting to solve the genetic riddle that would save them all. Perhaps the previous objects were not weapons then, but there was no doubt that this one was.
Claire let the binder drop from her numb fingertips. It banged against the wall and knocked some of the dust away to reveal words she hadn’t noticed before. She reached down and began to wipe them clear, then gasped in surprise when she read the faded words: EMERGENCY MAINTENANCE HATCH.
Behind the binder was a small metallic handhold that had been obscured. Her fingers clawed at it and found purchase in the form of a small flip latch. She yanked on it and heard a click. A panel in the wall popped open and clattered to the ground at her feet. Behind it was a crawlspace swathed in darkness.
Dropping to her knees she stuck her head into the opening. It wasn’t completely dark as she had assumed. What little light there was came from electrical components that were lit up along the interior walls. Overhead were metal trays filled with dozens of blue cables leading off into the distance. There was no assurance that it led to some sort of escape, but it was certainly better than retracing her steps.
Before she could reconsider, Claire stood up and hit the button for the blast shield again. After making certain it was coming back down she grabbed the panel that had dropped to the floor and crawled into the emergency maintenance hatch, latching it shut behind her. She yanked for a few seconds to make certain it was snug then turned and began to crawl on hands and knees towards what she hoped was a better chance for escape.
The Cloud
“What is this place?” Quentin asked, his gaze meandering across the banks of monitors and servers lining the walls.
Giant tanks of liquid nitrogen were pumping the liquid into a central glass chamber that sat in the middle of the room like some sort of cryogenic tube.
“What?” his father said, looking up from a hose he was attaching to one of the tanks
With the oversized goggles and large rubber gloves he looked a bit like the mad scientists of old Quentin had read about in books.
“This place!” he shouted, laughing at the same time. “What happened to your lab?”
The last time Quentin had visited the bowels of the Pantheon, his father’s work area didn’t resemble a giant freezer. It had been replete with dozens of miniature 3D printing machines and computers with virtual interactive holographic projectors. Griffin was, after all, the head of the QUBIT program, in charge of all updates including new design specs and the individual quantum processing chips that made life as a synthetic possible.
His father stood up and walked towards Quentin, peeling off the huge gloves as he stepped over the large hoses and wires scattered across the floor.
“This is my lab; one of them anyways.”
“How many do you have?”
Griffin scrunched up his face for a moment.
“Three, just counting the personal ones. I oversee a few more and have some assistants in charge of the rest.”
He peeled off the novelty sized goggles and swept the area with his arm.
“I call this was one The Fridge. Appropriate, isn’t it?” he said with a grin.
Quentin couldn’t help but grin back. His father always seemed to revert to a state of adolescence when in his natural environment, or perhaps it was just his passion bubbling through. It was a welcome break from the stern and brooding personage he exhibited as of late when he was home.
“What is all of this stuff? What are you doing here?” he asked, folding his arms across his chest, the cold starting to seep through his shirt.
If he had known this was their destination, he would have brought a coat.
“This is how we’re going to find your mystery girl.”
“Isn’t there some sort of database we can use instead?”
Griffin frowned.
“Yes, and with your description I’m certain we could find her after perusing a few thousand profiles. Or you could draw a picture and we could go to the ASF headquarters and convince them to check the citizen registry.”
“I don’t think I could draw that well,” Quentin confessed.
“Then let’s try this out,” his father said with a wink, gesturing for him to follow.
They walked over to where the servers lined the wall. There was a large singular curved screen attached to a processing dot on the desk. Beside that was a resin mold in the shape of a human head, like an open helmet with several nodes on the inside attached to wires that ran to the processing dot.
“What’s that?”
“That’s the interface.”
“The interface to what?”
“Oh…why, the Cloud of course.”
His father picked up the helmet and tapped a little button in the back. A soft green glow started to emanate along the outside contours.
“This is a neurotransmitter device, as well as a few other things that wouldn’t make much sense to you right now. Suffice it to say, this is a bit like our virtual interactive devices, except for one major difference; instead of the device projecting images to you, it is your brain that will project the images onto the screen, based on your own memories stored in the Cloud.”
Quentin took the helmet from his father’s outstretched hands and turned the device over to inspect it. It was incredibly light, fragile almost, and it was surprisingly warm.
“How does it do that?”
“Well, that’s where it gets a bit complicated. If you were focused more on quantum mechanics in class you would be better equipped to understand the basics. As is, I’ll give you the abridged version.”
Quentin presented a sardonic smile.
“I would appreciate that. Although it seems like you’re kind of showing off.”
His father chuckled.
“Ok, maybe a little,” he confessed. “But it’s quite something. Until this point the images downloaded during previous experiments have been random memories, but after some tinkering, I believe you can now be selective in your memory retrieval from the Cloud.”
“So I put this thing on my head, think about Claire, and she’ll pop up on this screen?”
“Direct from the Cloud,” his father said, nodding enthusiastically. “Then it’ll only be a few seconds for the database to track her down.”
“Does this mean you can access anyone’s memories from the Cloud?” Quentin asked, perturbed by the thought.
His father was shaking his head.
“No, the system needs a conduit, and even then a person can access only their quantum profile.”
“It seems awfully excessive just for memory retrieval. QUBITs can access their own internal memory system for instant recollection if they so choose.”
“That’s true to an extent,” Griffin interjected. “Sometimes there is data corruption during the downloading process or a particular synthetic might have been a product of a wipe. There is another application as well, the original intention for the Cloud interface.”
“And what is that?”
Griffin cleared his throat a bit uncomfortably.
“Well, that is not really something I can discuss with you. I mean, it requires a certain clearance level.”
One of Quentin’s eyebrows peaked.
“Like this place probably does.”
Griffin opened his mouth to reply then snapped it shut.
“Hmm…that’s a good point. Ok, but you know of course that this is strictly not to be shared, nor will I answer follow up questions for specificity.”
“You really know how to take the fun out of things, Dad,” Quentin said sarcastically.
His father’s face twitched a bit, seemingly in avoidance of some greater expression.
“Your mother used to say that sometimes when I was being too serious.”
Quentin didn’t know what to say. What little he remembered of his mother came from the last year of her life. There were good memories, but they were faded and surreal. What he mostly recalled was the sickness, the trips to the clinic, the days when he couldn’t leave the bed, the darkness that clung to every corner in every room in the house, as if death were stalking from the shadows.
“I didn’t know,” he finally said, after the silence seemed to stretch out for too long.
Griffin placed a hand on his son’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze.
“It’s good to be reminded sometimes,” he said with a smile. “As for the Cloud interface, its original intent and goal is to provide extended periods of REM that will hopefully prevent neural degeneration during long-term stasis.”
“Long-term stasis?” Quentin repeated. “For what?”
His father held up a silencing finger.
“That would be asking for specificities. Now, how about you strap this thing to your head and we fire it up and see if it works the way we want it to?”
Quentin nodded, pulling the helmet over his head and adjusting it until it felt somewhat comfortable then sitting down in the chair his father pulled out from the desk.
Griffin pushed a button on the processor dot.
“It’ll just be a few seconds,” he said as the curved screen in front of them powered on, displaying a strange blue swirl like the bird’s eye view of a cyclone.
“Is there a reason it has to be so cold in her, Dad?” Quentin asked, starting to shiver.
Fiddling with the nodes on Quentin’s head, his father slung a thumb over his shoulder.
“It’s the cryonics unit. While we mostly depend upon the Cloud and the QUBITs for another chance at life, it is imperative that we preserve the DNA of our race for future…um, endeavors.”
He glanced down at Quentin, and seeing his son’s clueless gaze, he continued in stride.
“I’m basically trying to make it more self-contained. Damn electrical components keep freezing on me. Good news is the servers work better so there shouldn’t be any trouble with the Cloud connection. There, that should do it. Here, put this on.”
Griffin handed him a pair of black goggles with a long strap. Quentin took them and pressed them against his face, as his father gently affixed the strap over the helmet device, careful not to knock loose the nodes he had just finished adjusting.
“Ok, look at the screen.”
Quentin did, noticing that the pair of goggles was a sort of holo-projector, making the blue swirl on the screen leap out at him.
“What do I do now?”
“Touch the Cloud.”
Quentin reached out with his hand and tapped the middle of the blue swirl. As he did, the eye of the cyclone rushed up to meet him, thrusting him into the middle of the storm. He was suddenly surrounded by thousands, maybe millions, of what looked like electrical highways with an infinite number of connections, pulses spreading out in all directions at once while other pulses simultaneously came in. Every couple of seconds there would be bursts like miniature explosions going off close by as well as in the furthest reaches of his view.
“What is this?” he asked breathlessly.
“It’s the Quantum Cloud. At least, that’s how our eyes perceive it.”
“It’s…it’s beautiful.”
“I want you to focus now,” his father said by his ear. “Think about our house, your bedroom, your dresser. Think about the mirror you have on the dresser. Picture yourself standing in front of it.”
Quentin did so, gasping as he was suddenly propelled forward through the Cloud with a speed that was almost blinding. His view rocked from left to right, up and down, as if he were attached to one of those electrical highways blazing across the expanse. And just as suddenly as it started, it was over, everything coming to a halt so quickly he put his hands up reflexively.
There was a single pulsating orb that took up most of his vision, a blue supernova that almost seemed to breathe. He reached out slowly and tapped the center with his pointer finger.
The blue orb came towards him and slowly enveloped him in its soothing aura. He felt relaxed, serene almost. He barely noticed his father’s voice continue on. It was almost as if he were speaking from very far away.
“What do you see?”
There was nothing at first, but the blue aura started to fade like a morning fog, revealing the front of his house, the porch, the sidewalk leading up to it. His vision was bouncing and unsteady; he realized it was because he was viewing the world, his memories, through his own eyes.
“I see home,” he said in a whisper.
“Good,” his father replied. “Now, I want you to think of the girl…think of Claire. Think of that first time you saw her standing on the pier of the Bay.”
Quentin blinked and this time there was no transition. He was instantly sitting on the edge of the pier, staring out at the water and the light twinkling off of it.
“Are you thinking about jumping in or just enjoying the view?”
“Huh?” he heard himself respond.
His head turned and there she was. He did not realize until that moment how much he had missed her. His heart ached and he wanted to reach out to her, grasp her hands, pull her close, wrap his arms around her, but he was just a witness here and nothing more.
“Got it,” his father said from that faraway place. “I’m powering it down now.”
He heard his father say the words and would have spent the last couple of seconds fixated upon her features, except a sudden glint pulled his gaze away. There, across the bay near the far end, the water’s crest reflected the light from above, and riding the edge between sky and sea was a piece of his dream, a hazy yet sleek looking whale with a rippling sale protruding from its back.
The memory was cut off abruptly, the blue haze suddenly all around him; it started to fade little by little until he was staring out through the goggles at the screen, a cropped square still life capture of Claire smiling back at him.
Quentin pushed the goggles up onto the interface helmet up and leaned forward.
“That’s her,” he said simply, the confused vision of the sailboat already fading into the Ether.
“Akropolis,” his father said. “Perform a search on this citizen.”
Immediately the picture of Claire moved over to the side as the computer accessed the Akropolis database then scrolled through profile pics too fast for their eyes to focus on even a single image. A few seconds later and a surprising, unexpected thing happened.
The computer displayed a single caption that was alarming.
NO RESULTS FOUND
“What?” Quentin responded, confused. “I don’t understand. H-how can that be possible?”
He turned to his father, who was staring hard at the picture on the screen, as if he might recognize the image.
No results found. It didn’t make sense. There must be a glitch in the system or perhaps his memory was flawed. What did his father say about data corruption during the downloading process?
The sailboat.
That hadn’t been real. He didn’t see that the day he met Claire. There were no sailboats in Akropolis. There had only been one…that day…that day at the beach…
Quentin felt light-headed all of a sudden. The edges of his peripheral vision were starting to blur. He had a sudden vision of the sailboat again, only this time it was interwoven with a succession of confusing images that flashed so quickly he couldn’t tell what he saw.
“Dad?” he said.
He tried to reach out for his father’s shoulder with his hand, except it felt heavy, impossibly heavy and leaden, so that he could barely lift it a few inches despite the earnest signal his brain was sending.
“Dad…Dad, something’s going on.”
There was no blur in his vision when his eyes opened. He was staring at a ceiling adorned with little blue whirls that gave the artistic impression of wind blowing. It was soothing and relaxing, not that he had any need not to be, yet there was a feeling of trepidation that was creeping at the edges of his mind, a tattered tail of fear that trailed the border of his consciousness.
Confusion set in. Where was he? How….how did he arrive here?
Quentin blinked a few times as if it would give him clarity. Failing that, he attempted to move his head but his body felt detached. Again, he willed his head to loll to the side but nothing happened; nary a twitch.
“He’s conscious,” a voice said at his side, and he felt a wave of relief buoy him up.
“Dad?” he croaked.
His voice worked. There was that at least. He didn’t feel his lips or tongue move but the fact that the parts were still there provided some relief.
What about the rest of me?
“Mom?”
“We’re here,” she replied.
They appeared in his vision then, one on either side of him, seemingly hovering in mid-air. His mother’s face was tear-stained, eyes blurred and squinted. She was clutching a small hand in both of hers, pressed against her chest. It took him a moment to realize it was his.
Quentin’s eyes slid over to his father, whose stare was unblinking and intense. It was the kind of look he got when he was hovering over the computer in his workshop, wrestling with some dilemma that garnered more than its fair share of brain cells.
“Dad? I…I can’t move,” Quentin said, his voice breaking on the last word.
His father’s face crumpled then, tears starting to cascade unbidden down his cheeks.
“It’s okay, son,” he reassured him in a hoarse voice, reaching out with his hand to stroke Quentin’s head. “You’re going to be fine. You’re going to be just fine.”
“Mom?” Quentin turned back to her.
His mother nodded but couldn’t speak as moans started to escape from between her lips, interspersed with sharp gasps of breath that almost contained a squeak near the end. She covered her mouth with a hand but could not stem the flow. If it wasn’t for the smile he could see through the gaps in her fingers he would have mistaken her expression for grief instead of relief.
