Kara held out an imaginary hand.
> Good to meet you.
<< Hi, babe. A woman’s voice, full of laughter.
> Merry Christmas?
<< We got rid of the trifeca system years ago. Who wants to go through life sounding like an alphabet?
> Why Salome?
<< Know the legend, babe?
> Myth.
<< Not Mithus? Miz?
> There will be no punning! Yes, I know.
<< Bad ass, well sexy woman, fucking over the schmuck who said no.
Kara wondered if AIs had some form of mental sex – or simply relied on their humans to do it for them.
> Do not answer, either of you! And it’s Kara, not babe.
As she left the control room, Kara heard the faint sound of two AIs giggling like children. But that could be all in her mind.
* * *
She found Marc as they’d left him, strapped in to the bed, eyes now closed, breathing slowly. The med-aid hummed reassuringly. Marc’s vital functions were fine, his heartbeat slow but strong. He could breathe unaided. The small piece of doorframe was still in his hand. There was a faint smell of disinfectant. She wiped the spittle from his mouth, kissed his forehead and sat down and held his hand.
“Where the fuck are you, Keislack?”
Marc’s eyes flickered open.
Netherspace stared out at Kara.
Her initial reaction was to look away. Instead, she forced herself to stare back, hoping to understand what had happened to him... and if Marc Keislack could be saved.
She got an answer, an empath’s answer in which emotion dominated logical thought, analogue controlling digital.
Marc’s body was here. But until Marc’s essence had finished whatever it was doing in netherspace and/or the universe, she could only wipe his face and hold his hand... and believe that he would return.
Just another woman waiting for her bloody man.
Except he wasn’t her man, not in that sense.
He was her friend and part of the team that would destroy the pre-cog attempt to control all sentient life, everywhere. The friendship was more important.
* * *
When Marc’s body had first crashed out of netherspace he’d been aware of a dark, cold place. A hard floor beneath his naked body. He’d tried to move but could manage no more than the faintest tremble. Gradually he’d felt his mind being drawn back into netherspace. For now he was aware his body was safe and looked after. He had no idea by whom or where. Or how he would finally get home.
There was no more awareness of the primal entity he’d glimpsed and longed to see... to be with. He was being carried by the unpredictable currents of netherspace, drifting wherever they chose to take him. Yet netherspace wasn’t aware, as far as he knew. It couldn’t make choices, any more than a slime mould can. Drifting wherever the mathematics underpinning that bizarre, non-Euclidian realm dictated that he went. He had no vision, hearing or sense of touch. He was a man wandering around an art gallery full of works that baffled him but which for whatever reason he needed to understand.
No sight, no sound, nothing to touch, but he thought there would be a smell tingling in his nostrils, if he had any, and similar at the back of his non-existent tongue. A high-pitched lemon scent. Real phenomena detected by imaginary organs because the real organs couldn’t cope.
High-pitched lemon. Metaphor or synaesthesia? His senses cross-pollinating each other? Someone called Scriabin had been synaesthesic, experienced sound as colours, colours as sound, and that had resulted in Prometheus, the Mystic Chord. Someone else called Kandinsky had tried to meld mathematics and colour and form. How did he know this? Was it important?
Value judgements implied emotion.
He did know that emotion was dangerous in netherspace. It could attract entities that might destroy him.
Was curiosity an emotion? Or was it something that characterised intelligence?
Maybe curiosity was all there was. Maybe after he’d faded away his curiosity would remain, like the Cheshire Cat’s grin. Marc wondered what a Cheshire Cat was, and where he’d heard about it.
Time didn’t seem to exist in netherspace and, despite the name, neither did space. Instead, things seemed to just wash through him, filling him for an uncountable eternity with sensations for which he had no names, tumbling him over and over like flotsam in the middle of a vast and dark ocean.
Flotsam and jetsam. Nooks and crannies. Bits and bobs. For what might have been nanoseconds or might alternatively have been geological epochs he pondered the vagaries of language. Why all these different ways of saying the same thing? And yet, wasn’t that where the art was? Having fifty words for rain meant you could be subtle in your choice, using shades of meaning and implication the way an artist used hues of colour and a musician used timbre and volume. That was the underlying difference between art and science. An equation had no subtlety.
His was an existence of maybe, why me? Perhaps the memories that weren’t his memories belonged to other entities, awarenesses, consciousnesses in netherspace, drifting in the same way that he was, crossing paths with him, intersecting with him. Intrigued, he tried to reach out with his mind, seek them out deliberately. Like babies learning how to manipulate hands and feet to interact with toys and mobiles and mothers, he kept flexing different mental muscles. And as he did that he was aware – knowledge only – of a pulsing of energies, some reaching out to him in what could be a deliberate way.
He suddenly recoiled. A sheer atavistic revulsion, a mental survival mechanism. The opposite of curiosity – a deep need not to know what it was.
Never to know what it was.
Boojum.
The word sprang into his mind.
Boojum. Kara. Tatia. Is that what boojums are called?
He took a deep mental breath. He knew exactly who Kara and Tatia were. The memories, however, were stored in part of his brain that was in retreat from netherspace. Didn’t want to know. Didn’t belong here.
Boojums are...
... created from
... copied from
netherspace and whatever aware, living thing entered
