Achilles choice

Anyone Linking into the Void must create her own kinesthetic analogy. For one it might be the Library of Congress, crammed to the skylight with talking books. For another, being seated in a vast lecture hall surrounded by experts who had the precise answers to all questions. Jillian’s programming teacher had taken her own image from literature: Gormenghast, an immense, sprawling castle-city of a million infinitely varied rooms.

The adult mind was too rigid, its woridview too set, to build such an analogy. It must be created in childhood; but after that, it grew.

Jillian closed her eyes and breathed deeply ten times, with each breath sinking into a world of total relaxation, a specialized trance leading to the Void state.

The earphones hummed gently. Breathing. Heartbeat sounds, slowing. The purr of breakers against a shore. Synthesized into and among those sounds was a choru, s of voices too distant to be consciously perceived. Lights flashed in her goggles, so dimly and quickly that she could never focus upon them. At her temples, tickles of pressure and electricity buzzed and caressed her skin, eased her into a state combining deep relaxation and total awareness.

Gradually the speckles of light congealed into searchlights playing through a fog. Then smoky swirls of color, and she was in her Void, in a mental ocean of layered oils, a phantasmagoria of sensation created by the union of an exquisitely conditioned mind and a dozen seamlessly orchestrated channels of sensory input.

The water cleared. Only a few varicolored fish, dazzlingly bright, betrayed the chaos beneath the tranquil structure of her illusion.

She sank through the depths until she felt sand and shells beneath her feet. A dolphin playfully nosed against her, and then scooted away into the murk.

She walked along the ocean floor toward a ring of shattered coral reefs. This was her place. In the reef was set an ancient and barnacle-encrusted door, the entrance Beverly had created for her fifteen years ago.

The door yielded to her touch. In the middle of the ring stood a chair, and a wooden grade-school desk. Carved names and slogans had been added over the years; otherwise the desk hadn’t changed since Jilhan’s seventh birthday.

Seated in it, awaiting her, was Beverly.

Beverly wore a frilly white sundress, barely ruffled by the tide. Her high cheekbones were those of Lihith Shomer, Jillian’s mother. Her heavy brows and strong mouth were mapped from Gregory Shomer, Jillian’s father. Her hair was blond with a gleam of fine copper threads. Her eyes were a deep and tranquil brown.

Beverly smiled. “Jillian, darling. What do we need today?” Her voice was honeyed with a Carolina lilt.

Jillian’s accessing of Beverly took the external form of a conversation, a conversation that existed out of ordinary time. Her talks with Beverly seemed to last for hours or days, but upon emerging from trance she invariably learned that only minutes had passed, minutes during which a vastness of information had entered her long-term memory.

Jillian sat down opposite. Emblazoned on the desk was a fifteen-year-old carving. It read: JILLIAN LOvES. Jillian kept changing the name following “loves.” She’d finally left it open.

She was home. She relaxed to a degree inaccessible in her waking state.

Where to start? “I need to know about Donny Crawford.”

Beverly smiled tolerantly. “The same Donny Crawford you’ve been mooning over for four years?”

“The same. We finally met. He went through some kind of fit this morning during his exercise up on the mountain. He said strange things, babbled about ‘war.’ He cautioned me not to tell anyone. My first guess is that his Link with the satellite broke.”

Beverly’s eyes dropped to her desk. A moment later she said, “Satellites EE23 and EEO8 both went off line at five fifty-two local. Energy is blaming both events on random meteoric debris. EE23 will have to be replaced.”

“Is Donny that dependent on satellite Links?” It was something she’d suspected; it was one argument against Boost. Donny had won. Even if Jillian won gold, she’d be a hybrid, a cyborg, magnificent but fragile.

Beverly’s mouth opened to speak, then closed. Jilhan felt something like a vast, compulsive yawn rack her body, and-Jillian stood before an ancient and barnacle-encrusted reef. In front of her was the door, the entrance Beverly had created for her fifteen years before. What?

A power outage? An industrial accident?

Something serious, if Beverly had been forced to reboot. Jillian blinked twice, calmed herself, and stepped through the doorway.

Beverly smiled at her, “Hello, sugar. What can I do for you?” Her voice sounded hollow, as if she were speaking from the bottom of a well.

Jillian felt something that she had never before experienced when in the Void. Sleepy. Headachy. She straightened herself with an effort.

Beverly leaned forward, concern sparkling in her bottomless dark eyes. “I think you could use a little nap, darling.”