Lucid Reality
The “Cloud9 Port-O’-Call” was a cheis-hole rock of heat-blasted dust, just inside a dry band of the Dream’s atmosphere. Nothing more than a way-point for long-haul sky truckers. Here they could stop for maintenance, supplies and to socialize in person.
Mother decided their virtual instance was not much better. It dripped with a gritty grindhouse “cinéma vérité” vibe she found tacky. Rather than polishing off the rough edges, it showcased them, as if every spot of rust and dent was a point of pride. It was like she was in some perverse southwestern horror movie.
Winston should have checked in by now. This wasn’t like him. No, wait, she reconsidered. It was completely like him.
He was probably simmed out and she wouldn’t hear anything for maybe an hour or two. Perhaps a comm would wake him up. There was a good chance he was close enough to live-stream. She made a quick try, but no one answered. A check for his nav beacon and found it was functional, meaning there wasn’t any damage to block her, and they were in range. The Sierra Madre was in autistic mode, which blocked or ignored all outside signals. That wasn’t typical.
She would have to wait. That did not sweeten her spirit.
~~~
The Sierra Madre coasted along at a dead-slow pace. For the last few hours, Billy Joe busied himself with minor repairs on one of their container exteriors. He had given up doing repairs inside. It was too frustrating with all the refugees. They were always in the way.
A patient tried to eat his utility sand skirt. They claimed it looked like “smoked maple syrup with sugar crystal crumbly bits.”
Then there was the constant flood of questions from passengers for whom he had no answer.
Yes, we are safe.
Yes, we would unload soon.
Don’t touch that!
No. I don’t know what time dinner is.
How should I know if that's infected? See a nurse.
No. I don’t want to play holocards.
Stop grabbing my nanosand. I don’t grab your hair!
He estimated the refugees had enough water, emergency rations, and medical supplies to last them a day or two. Still, Billy Joe sure hoped they could offload these people before things got ugly. Bionts got dangerous when deprived of the essentials of life and comfort. Visualizing the possible food riot gave Billy Joe a little shudder.
He finished grinding smooth the last remnants of a new spot weld’s rough edges. Now the lock latched as intended. Satisfied, he went forward to the cab. The airlock closed behind him, making a sigh that echoed his frustration.
While putting his tools away, he heard a computer alert bleeping. He slid over to see they were an hour out of their destination. The comm suite next to it showed a pending message from Mother. He tapped it open and read she was now in livecomm range. That was good enough for him. Time to wake Hoss.
Winston must have gotten eight hours of sleep, according to Billy Joe’s internal clock. The indu slid over to the sleeper door and gave it a heavy rap.
“Yo, Hoss!” he yelled. “Time to get yo’self up!”
No answer.
“Hoss!” he shouted again. This time he banged the door a lot harder.
There was a muffled sound of movement, but again no answer.
“Come on, son, Mother’s on the horn and she wants ta talk.”
Billy Joe hoped Winston had not locked himself in his Levitown instance again. He switched his focus over to the Sierra Madre's virtual interface and dove into the server. There he called up Winston’s private node and tried to enter.
An error message popped up. His attempt to access Winston's home instance was rebuffed. Did the launcher crash? Miss Holly had done an awful lot of damage to the server that was beyond his repair skills.
Billy Joe made a second attempt. After a long lag, the instance accepted his login. Irritated, he ran the repair tool and took a diagnostic snapshot of the program. The instance launcher wasn't crashed but was stuck. The loading montage was caught in a loop. Had the program gone corrupt?
He went into the bio-rhythmic data log to see what went wrong. Something wasn’t right. This should be easy to open, but the program seemed frozen. A power flux could have done it but they hadn’t suffered any disruptions. Winston would have rebooted his software within seconds if this was the case. Otherwise, it would have kicked him out of the launcher as a safety feature.
Billy Joe opened the only file he could, the error log. The same message ran every second for tens of thousands of seconds.
~~~
<<ERROR: #1279374.34VIT>>
<!Concussion detected!>
<!Simulation can not connect!>
<Reason: Medical obstruction to neural induction relays>
<Reason: Transmitters misaligned/out of safe tolerance parameters>
<!*SYNAPSE BURN DETECTED*!>
<!*SEEK IMMEDIATE MEDICAL ASSISTANCE*!>
~~~
Billy Joe snapped back to the real world and slammed open the sleeper door. Winston was half-rolled over on his side, not flat on his back like how he normally slept. Like a snake, a glossy black arm thrust a pistol out from under Winston’s armpit and fired twice.
The low-aimed rounds, intended to blow an intruder’s legs off, struck Billy Joe’s utility skirt. Splatters of gooey sand sprayed all over the sleeper and cab, then quickly flowed back to reintegrate with him.
“Nahq it all!” he shouted and surged his nanosand out to seize his attacker.
Billy Joe's arms transformed into tendrils and he slithered them around Winston’s unconscious body. Holly screamed more in surprise than terror as they wrapped about her like enraged pythons. He jerked her out from behind Winston’s unconscious body and slammed her into the ceiling with a loud bang. Dazed, she dropped her pistol.
“You lying, backstabbing, abominable little...! I should crush you right now! What did you do to him, you whore!” Billy Joe’s arms wound tighter around her limbs like a hungry octopus wrapping up a crab.
Holly could only grunt and wheeze with her rib cage and abdomen compressing in his industrial-strength coils. “I… I didn’t mean... t… to hurt you, Billy Joe.”
“And that’s why y’shot me? By mistake? But hurtin’ Hoss, that was on purpose?” His auto-tuned growl fuzzed with a hot static buzz.
“Wanted... to p- hkkk… prove- who’s boss. Didn’t mean... t’ knoooohhhhhh...hck- knock him out,” Holly pleaded.
Her eyes shimmered with pretty tears of agony. Billy Joe was immune to her begging and manipulative beauty. She squirmed but even her enhanced strength was insignificant compared to his own. He could move ten-ton pallets. Nothing she could do could compare to that. A few more pascals of pressure and he would pulp her.
Warnings from his morality governors began flashing red in his mind’s eye as he inched up to her fatal limits. A little more and his behavioral safety interlocks would shut him down.
With a sigh, her grimace went slack with relief. Billy Joe realized her pain editors kicked in. The torment was no longer a factor for her.
“That ain’t helpin’ your situation none, Miss Holly,” he said, then drew her face close to his. “Besides, I’m of good mind to let you float home.” His threat was a soft rumble.
Holly’s eyes shot wide open. “No, ple-hheeeeee..ase! I c’n- hkk… hhhuuu...make this right,” she squealed pitifully, using the teaspoon of breath she was still able to draw.
Billy Joe considered her claim. Little red warnings still pulsed in his processor. A timer was now ticking down toward forced shutdown if he did not abort.
He looked at Winston, who gurgled a little in his catatonic state. His glazed eyes twitched in random directions. That synapse burn looked more serious than he knew how to deal with.
“All right. I may need yer help in landing us. So I’ll let you live. But if’n you cross me, I’ll chuck you overboard faster'n you could slap a horsefly.” Billy Joe drove his point home with a final sharp squeeze, like a boa constrictor's heart-stopping crush. Slowly, he put her down. The red warnings from his morality governors went back to green.
A few plates in Holly’s armor, deformed by Billy Joe’s squeeze, sprung back into shape with hollow pops. Now that her lungs could fully expand again, she noisily sucked in air.
Billy Joe watched her as she sprawled against the wall next to Winston’s body. Her hands drifted to her empty holsters.
“How stupid do y’think I am?” Billy Joe said.
Holly gave him a confused look.
Billy Joe drew her pistols and magazines out from his utility skirt. They were encapsulated in a pair of pseudopods. “You kin have these back when I think yer trustworthy again or off my airship.”
“Force of habit. I just reacted,” she groaned.
“I don’t care,” Billy Joe’s words dripped with venom. The pseudopods melted back into his lower half, hiding the weapons again.
“You made your point. I’ll play it straight,” she said, sitting up.
“How you gonna make things right? Hoss needs medical help, and not from those brain butchers in back,” Billy Joe demanded.
“Brain butchers?” Holly coughed.
“Yeah, those doctors that run the nut hut we just rescued? Remember?” Billy Joe asked.
“And you don’t trust ‘em. All right. I get that,” Holly said with a weak nod.
“So how you gonna fix this?” Billy Joe loomed over the wired assassin.
“I dunno. I’m not qualified to deal with synapse burn from a cheap induction rig,” she snapped petulantly. She didn’t dare meet his glowering eyes. Billy Joe realized she’d been running her mouth to stay alive. The urge to chuck her off the Sierra Madre quickly returned.
“It wasn’t a cheap inductor that caused this!” Billy Joe snapped. “You gave him a concussion! Tha’s what did it!”
Holly’s face drained of color, her lips and eyes paling to near white.
“You didn’t know that?” Billy Joe realized, surprised at her reaction.
“No,” she whispered hoarsely. “I was tired and upset. I thought I just rung his bell and he'd sleep it off, so I put his rig on him because that's what he always seemed to do. If… if I knew he had a concussion... and I didn’t… I’d have never put it on him.”
“So do you actually know how to get him back?” Billy Joe demanded, sliding in close, looming over her hunched figure.
“Not really. The people who would know are the ones you don’t want to involved with this. They have the equipment and the training,” Holly admitted.
“Then we gotta get some other ideas on what to do,” Billy Joe concluded and went back to the cab. “Come on. You’re gonna have to explain to Mother what you done, Miss Holly.”
