The Watchers: A Space Opera Novella by Ballard Jeffrey A

Author:Ballard, Jeffrey A. [Ballard, Jeffrey A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: New Rochester Publishing
Published: 2014-12-19T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

I’M BACK in the conference room where we met Ambassador Elkier, but it’s shorter than normal and I’m in a consciousness projector. The viewing port looks out over the Old Industrial part of New Florence on Evaga.

An impossibility. A dream.

I find a clock: 14:32. I look away and study the room: the oval table, the brown leather chairs are all the same. But the projector I’m in is made of wood, it smells spicy and floral, moist, alive. It reminds me of home. I look back at the clock: 10:12.

Definitely a dream.

I school my mind. This is the trickiest part, when you first realize you’re dreaming. If the conscious mind, awakened at this realization, rejects too strongly the setting from the subconscious, the dreamer will wake.

Lucid dreaming is almost a byproduct of our training. Our minds are trained to accept bizarre inputs, thoughts of thousands of individuals, processing their senses as if our own. I feel my conscious mind slide into the passenger seat, able to process and still give direction, but willing to go where the subconscious is going to take it.

I stand and consider what to do. I feel the need to talk to someone, which means finding another person. But do I go deeper into the station or through the window to Evaga? The station or Evaga?

It’s not possible to engage Sumiko from a dream.

Sumiko. The thought is like molasses: heavy, difficult. Going through the window would wake me.

I leave the conference room and go deeper into the station. That’s not quite right. I don’t move—I move the station around me. It slides by on command, an odd mixture of polished black tiles and Evaga concrete with some street trash from Strata.

The personnel quarters. I come to a door with an embossed “W” on the door. Joslyn’s room. I haven’t yet seen another soul, but somehow I know.

I enter.

She sits on her bed eating a stir-fry dish, her heavy glass table from the sitting room set in front of her as if she were eating at a restaurant. She’s dressed as she always is in loose fitting black pants and off-white shirt. She looks up as I enter.

Everything in a dream is a reflection of the dreamer. People are but a reflection of ourselves, filtered through our expectations of them. Joslyn was one of the first people I was able to identify a meaning for in my dreams: Wisdom.

“Greeting, Emre,” she says, “How may I help you?” Her standard greeting when she’s relaxed.

I move into the room. It’s her room, through and through, no strange dream anomalies, besides the glass desk from the sitting room in the bedroom. That in-and-of itself is strange. The walls are a warm textured blue throughout, with a soft luxurious carpet in the bedroom and an intricate in-laid wood design of the systems in the Ancillary Universe on the sitting room floor.

“I do not know how to help Sumiko,” I say. The statement surprises me both in saying it, and its sudden obviousness.

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