Echoes of Earth by Sean Williams & Shane Dix

Author:Sean Williams & Shane Dix [Williams, Sean & Dix, Shane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

1.2.7

“Peter, can you hear me?”

For the second time that day, he rose from oblivion into confusion. This time, though, he had no idea where he was or what he was doing. He felt like he was caught in a dream—a nightmare in which sight was swapped with sound, where taste became touch, and the world had turned inside out. He was lost—

“Is it you, Peter? It took us longer than we thought to find you, but I think it’s you.”

The familiar voice paused for a moment. He didn’t know where it was coming from, but it sounded like Caryl Hatzis.

“If it is you and you can hear me, don’t bother trying to respond. Just do exactly as I say.”

Even if he’d wanted to respond, he had no idea how to go about it.

“You have to break the connection, Peter,” she went on. “You know how to do that. It’s easy. You have a ripcord like we all do. All you have to do is use it. Once you’re out, we can talk properly.”

He frowned into the void. A ripcord? At first he didn’t know what she was talking about. Ripcords were used as a last resort to crash a conflicting environment, such as the ctrl-alt-del command his father had used on his old PC. But what had that to do with him? He wasn’t even able to enter subversive environments anymore. If he did, all he had to do was...

The memory surfaced with surprising ease from somewhere in the dark and long untouched recesses of his mind. The command had always been there, of course; he simply hadn’t needed it for a long, long time. In fact, he hadn’t used his ripcord since his breakdown upon arriving in Upsilon Aquarius, almost ten years earlier. Nevertheless, it was there now, clear in his mind, as it always would be should he ever need it.

Hatzis was repeating her instructions to him, but this time he was ignoring her, focusing instead on his ripcord command.

“Tabula rasa.”

He spoke the words loud and clear into the void, knowing that the Tipler’s AIs would recognize it.

Suddenly he was hanging in shadow between the hole ship cockpit and the Tipler, one hand still clutching the manual access port. He groaned slightly and eased his grip. His throat hurt from where the droid had attacked him earlier. How much earlier, he couldn’t tell. How long had he actually been out?

The voice of the Tipler interrupted his thoughts: “Do you wish to end this session?”

“Huh?” he croaked. “Oh, yes. Yes, I do. Arachne, can you bring the cockpit around here?”

He didn’t know if the ship’s AI could hear him, but he figured it was worth a try. Relief flooded through him as the AI’s voice replied:

“I am receiving transmissions from—”

“Yes, I know,” he said. “But they can wait. Just get the cockpit over to me, all right?”

He relaxed somewhat as the open mouth of the cockpit swung into view, then kicked himself toward it as soon as it was stationary.

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