Existence

Sensory recovery came in scattered bits.

First, a smattering of dream images. Nightmare flashes about being chased, or else giving chase to something dangerous, across a landscape of burning glass. At least, that was how her mind pictured a piling-on of agonies. Regret. Physical anguish. Failure. More anguish. Shame. And more agony, still.

When the murk finally began to clear, consciousness only made matters worse. Everything was black, except for occasional crimson flashes. And those had to be erupting directly out of pain-the random firings of an abused nervous system.

Her ears also appeared to be useless. There was no real sound, other than a low, irritating humming that would not go away.

Only one conduit to the external world still appeared to be functioning.

The voice. It had been hectoring her dreams, she recalled. A nag that could not be answered and would not go away. Only now, at least, she understood the words.

“Tor? Are you awake? We’re getting no signal from your specs. But there’s a carrier wave from your tooth-implant. Can you give us a tap?”

After a pause, the message repeated.

And then again.

So, it was playing on automatic. She must have been unconscious for a long time.

“Tor? Are you awake? We’re getting no signal from your specs. But there’s a carrier wave from your tooth-implant. Can you give us a tap?”

There was an almost overwhelming temptation to do nothing. Every signal that she sent to muscles, commanding them to move, only increased the grinding, searing pain. Passivity seemed to be the lesson being taught right now. Just lie there, or else suffer even more. Lie and wait. Maybe die.

Also, Tor wasn’t sure she liked the group mind anymore.

“Tor? Are you awake? We’re getting no signal from your specs. But there’s a carrier wave from your tooth-implant. Can you give us a tap?”

On the other hand, passivity seemed to have one major drawback. It gave pain an ally.

Boredom. Yet another way to torment her. Especially her.

To hell with that.

With an effort that grated, she managed to slide her jaw enough to bring the two left canine teeth together in a tap, and then two more. The recording continued a few moments-long enough for Tor to fear that it hadn’t worked. She was cut off, isolated, alone in darkness.

But the group participants must have been away, doing their own things. Jobs, families, watching the news. After about twenty seconds, though, the voice returned, eager and live.

“Tor!

“We are so glad you’re awake.”

Muddled by dull agony, she found it hard at first to focus even a thought. But she managed to drag one canine in a circle around the other. Universal symbolic code for “question mark.”

‹?›

The message got through.

“Tor, you are inside a life-sustainment tube. Rescue workers found you in the wreckage about twelve minutes ago, but it’s taking some time to haul you out. They should have you aboard a medi-chopper in another three minutes, maybe four.

“We’ll inform the docs that you are conscious. They’ll probably insert a communications shunt sometime after you reach hospital.”

Three rapid taps.

‹NO›

The voice had a bedside manner.

“Now Tor, be good and let the pros do their jobs. The emergency is over and we amateurs have to step back, right?

“Anyway, you’ll get the very best of care. You’re a hero! Spoiled a reffer plot and saved a couple of hundred passengers. You should hear what MediaCorp is crowing about their ‘ace field correspondent.’ They even backdated your promotion a few days.

“Everyone wants you now, Tor,” the voice finished, resonating her inner ear without any sign of double entendre. But surely individual members felt what she felt, right then.

Irony-the other bright compensation that Pandora found in the bottom of her infamous Box. At times, irony could be more comforting than hope.

Tor was unable to chuckle, so her tooth did a down-slide and then back.

‹!›

The Voice seemed to understand and agree.

“Yeah.

“Anyway, we figure you’d like an update. Tap inside if you want details about your condition. Outside for a summary of external events.”

Tor bit down emphatically on the outer surface of her lower canine.

“Gotcha. Here goes.

“It turns out that the scheme was partly to create a garish zep disaster. But they chiefly aimed to achieve a distraction.

“By colliding the Spirit with a cargo freighter in a huge explosion, with lots of casualties, they hoped not only to close down the zep port for months, but also to create a suddenly lethal fireball that would draw attention from the protective and emergency services. All eyes and sensors would shift for a brief time. Wariness would steeply decline in other directions.

“They thereupon planned to swoop into the Naval Research Center with a swarm attack by hyperlight flyers. Like the O’Hare Incident but with some nasty twists. We don’t have details yet. Some of them are still under wraps. But it looks pretty awful, at first sight.

“Anyway, as events turned out, our ad hoc efforts aboard the Spirit managed to expel almost half of the stockpiled gases early and in an uncoordinated fashion. Several of the biggest cells got emptied, creating gaps. So there was never a single, unified detonation when the enemy finally pulled their trigger. Just a sporadic fire. That kept the dirigible frame intact, enabling the tug to reel it down to less than a hundred meters.

“Where the escape chutes mostly worked. Nearly all passengers got away without injury, Tor. And the zep port was untouched.”

Trying to picture it in her mind’s eye-perhaps the only eye she had left-took some effort. She was used to so many modern visualization aides that mere words and imagination seemed rather crude. A cartoony image of the Spirit, her vast upper bulge aflame, slanted steeply groundward as the doughty Umberto Nobile desperately pulled the airship toward relative safety. And then, slender tubes of active plastic snaking down, offering slide-paths for the tourist families and other civilians.

The real event must have been quite a sight.

Her mind roiled with questions. What about the rest of the passengers?

What fraction were injured, or died?

How about people down below, on the nearby highway?

Was there an attack on the Artifact Conference, after all?

So many questions. But till doctors installed a shunt, there would be no way to send anything more sophisticated than these awful yes-no clicks. And some punctuation marks. Normally, equipped with a tru-vu, a pair of touch-tooth implants would let her scroll rapidly through menu choices, or type on a virtual screen. Now, she could neither see nor subvocalize.

So, she thought about the problem. Information could in-load at the rate of spoken speech. Outloading was a matter of clicking two teeth together.

Perhaps it was the effect of drugs, injected by the paramedics, but Tor found herself thinking with increasing detachment, as if viewing her situation through a distant lens. Abstract appraisal suggested a solution, reverting to a much older tradition of communication.