The Dream Cloud by H C Edwards

Author:H C Edwards [Edwards, H C]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-04-08T22:00:00+00:00

Trey recalled the jumble of images and the confusion he had upon waking just a short time ago.

“Then what is wrong with my memories? If I never made it back to sync with our Cloud, then the last thing I should recall is leaving Akropolis…so why do I feel like I remember…something of my time over there in Charlottesville?”

“Do you?” Talbot asked fixedly. “Do you remember anything from there?”

Trey closed his eyes. He tried to access those memories. Again the flashes came, the jumbled imagery, but this time it seemed to slow until there were freeze frames, almost like photographs taken and put on display in the back of his mind.

A hole in the roof of the sanctuary…rooftops…water everywhere…the quantum processor in his hands…powering the housing unit…

Trey opened his eyes, shaking his head.

“I don’t know…maybe. It’s like bits and pieces of a puzzle, but I don’t know what the whole picture looks like so I can’t make sense of it.”

Talbot frowned.

“We thought that would be the case,” he said with a sigh. “You see, the satellites that relayed the signal to our Cloud are quite ancient. They handled global positioning for most of the Old World but while they were considered quite capable at the time, they cannot handle the amount of data required to support a quantum computing system, hence the confirmation signal. Except somehow, someone, figured out how to piggyback the signal and send a massive data stream along with it, a data stream so large that we believe parts of it were corrupted or lost in the network of satellites before it reached our systems.”

“What was on the data stream?” Trey asked.

“Memories,” Talbot replied. “Memories with a quantum signature that cannot be faked or replicated.”

“So who sent them?”

“You did,” Talbot replied.

“What?”

Trey was stunned.

“How,” he started, then reversed course. “I don’t know how to do something like that. I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

“I know,” Talbot said. “You must have had help.”

Trey didn’t know what to say. It was shocking and overwhelming to think that there was an entire section of his memory that was missing or corrupted. The situation was reminiscent of his very first revival in Akropolis, waking inside of a walled city, the known world destroyed, everyone and everything that he had ever cared about gone like so much dust in the wind.

And then it dawned on him what must have happened. He turned to Talbot.

“You put the memories in my Cloud profile before you revived me.”

“I’m sorry, Major,” Talbot said. “But we had to know who sent it and why. The quantum signature meant we couldn’t access the information ourselves. Only you could.”

“But you said the data was corrupted.”

“We thought it might be. We had our techs study the data stream as best as they could, but it was…disorganized, lacking continuity.”

Trey could feel anger budding inside him.

“So you shoved it in my brain and woke me up to see what would happen?”

“There was no other way,” Talbot said quietly.

Trey pushed off the cot and walked away.

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