Chapter 3: I Know What It Takes to Move On

Rennan did not want to admit that Siri was dead. He did not want to know that she had been shot down in Theremin Station by an agent of the corporations. It was not possible—he had seen her after that. It was from afar, but it definitely had been her. Without a doubt. The dreams he had, they were not all of the past. Some were of the future. For example, he had not yet met Colin Mirthin. He had not yet been to Psyclon Station. In his dream, he had felt familiar in that bar with the thyers. He had called that “his” bar. He had even had a fleeting memory of sleeping with the thyer dancer there, as frightening as that thougth could have been. Did his future self understand hwo dangerous that was? Of course he did—what was he thinking? Given the assumption of couse that his future self knew better. What if he had lost his memory and gotten himself into trouble?

It was one thing to look at past mistakes, and to know that there is nothing that could be done at this point to prevent that from happening. It was another thing entirely to know that something had not happened yet, and that particular something was a really big mistake, but he could not think of anything he could do to fix it. He was not even sure when it would happen, or even if it was some glimpse of the future. Time and therefore fate had strange ways of twisting and changing—what he saw could always change to something different with next to no effort. He sorely hoped that fate would change its course, and soon.

His white prison became more and more unbearable. He had stopped keeping track of his days there. He was never sure how long he would sleep. They had disabled the date and time functions on his hologram. According to it, it was still 5:10pm on November the fourth. As far as he know, it could possibly be. Maybe they had stuck him in some pocket in the fabric of reality where time was more of an illusion than usual. It was not outside of the realm of possibility, he supposed, not any more than a white room without a door that healed itself.

He was upset that Siri would leave him, fully intending for her note to preoccupy him long enough to get away. The embarrassing thing was that it had worked. He was not sure what he had expected from it, but he had eventually worked it out, and was devastated. He was okay with being called a fool. But he had loved Siri more than life itself. Her departure came without an discernable warning. Just the note, and then nothing concrete ever again.

He needed to find her. He needed to find out what happened to her. She was all he had left. And then, once he knew where she was, he needed to get out and find her in person.

He checked the feed on his apartment again. Still nothing. The wind blew the flag into and out of view.

There was no way she would be found by just a simple holopad search. She was too smart for that. As much as he hated to admit it, the dreams were the only way to figure out where she was. He laid down, and stuck the needle back in his arm. The drug immediately entered his bloodstream and coursed through his veins. He felt his eyelids becoming heavy, falling closed. Sleep overtook him like a wave on a beach, and he was tossed into the tumbling oblivion of his extended subconscious.

Chapter 2: Convenience in this Savior

Siri stood at the train station, waiting for the next train to come in. The air was cold, a lot colder than she had originally expected it to be. She was glad that she had wrapped her thick scarf around her neck before she had left the apartment. She tightened her grip on the suitcase that was in her hand as she remembered the letter she had left for Rennan. It was all in a language he could not read, which would give her a little more time. He would feast upon the puzzle like he feasted upon his beloved roast beef. Basically the gist of it was that she was leaving him to go somewhere more politically stable than where he was now.

“TRAIN NUMBER 413 TO THEREMIN STATION IS NOW ARRIVING ON PLATFORM FIVE. PLEASE STAND BEHIND THE ORANGE LINE. THE TRAIN IS THREE MINUTES BEHIND SCHEDULE. I REPEAT: TRAIN NUMBER 413 TO THEREMIN STATION IS NOW ARRIVING ON PLATFORM FIVE.” The announcer’s voice was one which travelled everywhere. It was always the same voice. It used to be a comfort, a constant in a world of radical variables. Now, Siri found it unsettling. She felt like the announcer was watching her through the ever-present, ever-vigilant surveillance cameras.

The clean lines of the train bounded into the station and halted with a hiss. The doors slid open silently and she stepped on, with a group of other strangers she hoped she would never see again, for their own safety. The doors slid shut after an exceedingly short period of time, and the train took off smoothly down its monorail track toward Theremin Station.

Siri realized she may have made a mistake by allowing herself to get into a sealed tube to escape. There was no way out if they came for her here. There were many innocent bystanders if she needed to pull the las-pistol out of her suitcase. But there was no other way to get across the inlet other than to swim, and it was far too cold outside for that now. She tucked a fallen lock of her black hair out of her eyes and covered her face more with the large white scarf.

The train moved along the rail at a fast pace. The other people in the car with her sat silently. One gentleman read the news on his holotab. An elderly woman rested her eyes. A thyer was typing fervently at something that apparently only existed to her. There was nothing there that pointed to any potential unrest on the train to Theremin Station.

They arrived there about twenty minutes later. Theremin Station was a gleaming and bustling hub of travel and commerce in the city of Faldon. Everyone in the station moved at a very brisk pace—except for the oliphs, who moved as fast as their large bodies would allow, which was not quite as fast as everybody else in the station.

Siri stepped onto the platform and immediately turned left. She walked for a few strides before she felt something poke the back of her head. It was cold and relatively square in shape. A male voice spoke to her quietly: “Don’t move. I want you to turn around very slowly and do not scream.”

Rennan woke up, yanked the needle from his arm, and screamed. He did not like dreaming about Siri. She was the only one whose head he could not get inside of. She was the only one whose motive he knew nothing of. Why did they make him dream of her? What piece of the puzzle did she become?

“WHY?” he cried.

Chapter 1: Go, Now, Into the World

Rennan Praecjer sat at his bar, drinking a glass of something strong and pungent. It was not technically his bar, but it was that sometimes in his mind. It was his place of refuge when the day got too hard, his only sanctuary of relaxation on the entire Psyclon station. He took a sip of the drink and felt it burn down his throat. He wanted it to wash away all of his hard feelings and remove the stress from the day. He desperately wanted it to remove the memories of her from his mind, but he knew that was almost wishing for too much.

The softly pulsating blue and violet lights from underneath the plexi of the bar followed the timing of the slowly pulsing bass in the music. A thyer in a tight dress swayed beside him. He was not sure if she was just having a good time or actually worked at the bar—sometimes he could tell, often times he could not. Her dress was almost too tight; he could see every curve of her body, and every contraction of muscle in her deep blue skin. Her hair was tied back into a loose bun at the base of her neck. He took another sip of his water and felt her eyes drift over him. Her eyes were the standard thyer scarlet, the irises mesmerizing. He knew that if he stared into them for too long her would become almost a thrall if she desired it. Goddamn psychics, he thought bitterly. He looked away before he felt any more uncomfortable.

The glass sliding doors of the bar hissed open and a man in a suit sauntered in. He spotted Rennan and slid into the seat next to him. The man was wearing a very expensive suit, Rennan added in his mind. Something made on Earth, he figured. And a fedora to boot. “What are you all dressed up for?” he asked. “Day of the Souls was yesterday. We don’t dress up around here unless it’s for that, man.”

“Fuck off,” the man said bitterly. He ordered a rum and cola and the drink was delivered to him very quickly by the thyer behind the counter. She gave him a wink.

“Why are you sitting next to me? I don’t like you already. You’re in my personal space.”

“Because I was sent here to find you. You are the best intel man in the station, aren’t you?”

Rennan scoffed into his waning drink. “Whoever told you that doesn’t have faith in my expertise. I’m the best intel man in this fucking quadrant, if not the entirety of civilized space.”

“That’s exactly what I wanted to hear. My name is Colin Mirthin. My business is in jeopardy. I need you to get any intel you can find on it and bring it back to me, please.”

“So now we’re being polite to each other? What’s your angle? I don’t like you.”

“You’ve already said that. Are you drunk, Praecjer?”

“Maybe a little bit, yeah. It’s my day off. Throw me a bone here.”

“Should we talk some other time? Or I can find another intel man that’s just as good as you.”

Rennan shot him a glare. That comment had set him off. “You WON’T find another intel man as good as I am, I promise you that. I’m totally capable of hearing what you have to tell me. So tell me what you…er…have to tell me.”

Mirthin rolled his eyes and continued. “Listen, I think the Runner has some information about me and my company that I don’t want them to have. It’s not something that we really want to be public knowledge. I need you to break into his mainframe, wipe the intel, and then leave without a trace. You think you can handle that?”

Rennan thought about it for a moment. The Runner was the man who was in charge of the entire station. It was not exactly an easy job to take on. “Being undetected is something that is standard fare, friend, but the Runner is going to have some big-time security and I’m not too sure about handling that in my present state of mind. Can I sleep on it for a few days?”

“Aren’t you already sleeping?” Mirthin smirked.

Rennan woke up in his stark white room with a start. He gasped as he sat up, taking the stale air into his lungs. He did not recognize the room at first, but the disorientation was something that came every time he went into the meeting phase of his dreams. He yanked the needle from his arm and padded the hole in his skin with a white cotton pad that was placed at his bedside table for that express purpose. How much longer could he stay in this room?

The window’s shades were down but rotated up when the room sensed he was awake. The window overlooked the city, with the tall spires of the corporations that ran the planet piercing the creamy yellow first-moonset sky like the needles in his arm. The wide inlet between their locations reflected the yellow sun and the larger moon, Athena, as they set.

The dreams were coming too real now. Were they dreams, or were they memories? He was not sure anymore. He pulled the database into existence from the chip in his left hand. The holographic screen popped up and automatically presented him with the information he was looking for. No, he had never met a gentleman named Colin Mirthin in his lifetime. Not yet, anyway. He had not set foot in the bar on Psyclon for almost three years—not since his partial incarceration here on Geneda.

He wiped the cold sweat from his brow with his hand. The hologram closed. He paced around his room for a while, not sure why or how but relishing the small amount of exercise his legs gave him. He would not try to break the window again today. There were bruises on his knuckles and heels from the attempt yesterday. He would not attempt to cut a path through the wall like the day before. Maybe today would be his proverbial “seventh day,” a day to rest and contemplate and plan for the future, however long his future might be.

At least they had not taken his chip, he thought. He would go even more insane without his chip. The hologram was the only tangible link he had to the outside, if he assumed that what appeared there had not been previously altered or filtered by the corporations. His dreams were bad enough; he refused to think about what reality could possibly be if the chip was lying to him as well. He felt as though everything his life had become had amounted to nothing.

And now he was here. In a white box, with a window and a lying link to the outside.

He pulled up a video feed of his old apartment on the hologram with a thought. The video was from the security camera that was outside of his door. There was nobody in sight. What had he been expecting? There had been nobody there for days on end. An eddy of wind blew the Federation flag just below the railing and he could see the torn ends of it. Yesterday there had been the flickering shadows cast by a fire on the wall next to his door, but it appeared that it had been put out by now. Where was Siri? Did she get out? Why had she not gone back to the apartment to check on him?

He closed the hologram and sat down on the bed again. The bed was a large oval of white plastic, softened by pillows of white foam covered by white polyfiber where he had not gouged pieces of it out three days ago. It seemed like at the time there had been more damage done to the bed. Maybe it was healing itself. You never knew with these corporation prisons.

How had they even put him in here with no door? How were they going to get him out? Maybe they were simply going to let him lose his mind and die in there. Maybe that was all that the buildings on the other side of the inlet were: more prisons filled with more unopened cells with more criminals and dissenters and the corpses of those who came before him.

His day of rest consisted of him lying upon the polyfiber mattress, watching the shadows of the blinds on the window grow longer and longer as the sun and Athena set. He sat up when darkness had come. The white reflection of Artemis glistened on the inlet. The train line between his side of the inlet and the other wide of the inlet carried a train across—a glint of white light across the middle of the sky. Who even rode that anymore? He was tired of doing nothing. He wanted them to fill the room with the gas again and attach the dreaming needle to his arm again so he could at least dream of being free.

His stomach made a loud growl. He noticed that there was a tray of food across the room. He was not sure how he felt about the room reading his own desires before he knew they had manifested in his mind. He strode over to the white tray on the white floor. Upon it was a glass of water and two pills. The pills were nutrition pills, he knew. He had not eaten traditional food in months; it was too expensive. The pills kept him full and healthy for a day at a time, twelve hours per pill. He missed roast beef though. What he would not give for a slice of roast beef right now.

The room must hate him, he figured. No slice of roast beef appeared anywhere.