The Watchers: A Space Opera Novella (6 page)

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.

I had only been helping her escape, acting as a guide. But toward what? Could she survive long term on Evaga? A life on the run? Was that possible without my constant input?

“How have you helped her so far?” she asks.

“I’ve helped her escape, avoid arrest. Calmed Branden so that he wouldn’t give them away.”

“And that is not enough?”

“No.”

“Why?”

The question almost irritates me—it’s something Joslyn would ask—but I’ve learned to go with it, both in a dream and when actually speaking to her. “I wish her to be able to survive without my intervention.”

“You wish to pass her off to someone else’s care?”

“No. I wish she wouldn’t have need of anyone else’s care.”

“But you would object to having her in someone else’s care?”

“What? No.” I didn’t think I did. “What do you mean?”

“Plaiselle.”

“What …” My conscious mind is off and racing before adding the exclamation point. It’s there … elusive … the connection. I can feel my frontal brain starting to pull me toward wakefulness, the desperate need to remember Plaiselle awakening the same part of the brain that contains the primary motor cortex. The part of the brain that is dormant during dreaming, too much activity and it kicks the dreamer out of the dream thinking the body is moving which requires more immediate attention.

I try to set an anchor. Connect the thought with something absurd. Plaiselle was Watch Director when the Boon Blockade happened. I try to picture bright pink ships surrounding Watch Station as an anchor.

It doesn’t work.
Ka-tish
. The dream slips away.

I open my eyes to see Renya rushing through my door. It doesn’t take long to wake from a lucid dream; the conscious mind is already engaged. The experience is similar to putting a book down, shifting your mind from a fictional reality to the present one.

I sit up calmly, and rest my feet on the floor.

Renya says, “Plele and the other Watchers on Klast are dead.”

***

I follow a half-step behind
Renya as we rush through the hallways, heading toward the closest consciousness projector room.

Renya continues updating me as we hurry, “The other members of Plaiselle—”

Plaiselle, the word strikes a chord. It’s important to Branden, but how?

“Emre, are you listening to me!” Renya stops to face me.

I lower my eyes and shake my head no.

Her eyes blaze, and she steps into my personal space. She may be shorter than I, but it feels as if she looks down on me from a mile above. “Damnnit, Emre. Now, now is the time we need you most. It has to be you. Has to be!”

“Why?”

She exhales through her nose like a bull ready to charge. I realize then I hadn’t been listening as I much as I thought I had. Watchers are dead, and all I can think about is an elusive thought from a dream I was trying desperately to latch onto for Branden’s sake. “Because Emre, we need you to go deep, to coordinate the resistance.”

Mixed feelings flood me: to be needed for a self-perceived weakness; to be ordered to violate our most basic tenets—coordinating would require Watching the Prime Universe and speaking directly into minds. There was precedent, but still. And there is something else, something in connection with Plaiselle … resistance.

“We want you,” Renya continues, “to first verify the de— deaths on Klast.” The stutter is the first sign to that which I should have been immediately aware of. Plele was on Klast, her mentor, the closest thing we have to parents around here.

“Renya, I’m so sorry about—”

“There isn’t time for this.” She turns on her heel and starts rushing toward the projector room again. “The Regency is moving to arrest and remove Watchers from Watch Station. They’re seeking to divide us both physically and electronically. Already, no signals can leave Watch Station. We have no way to get word out. There have been anti-Watch stories buried in the nets in the past few days, some even referencing the ‘disobedience’ of the Directorate about refusing to Watch the Ancillary Universe.

“Don’t you see what’s happening? The Regency doesn’t want to control us, they want to
replace
us. Throw out all our rules in favor of their own. This isn’t an occupation—it’s an annihilation.”

It sinks in. This is for real. The Regency has made a bold gambit to end the game on a daring strike. And we’re on our heels, desperate: not only willing, but viewing breaking two of our foundational rules as our only hope. Of course we would defend ourselves, stand against an abuse of power. And then it hits me, so would the people on Evaga. There has to be some kind of resistance to the DNA profiling law. Some kind of resistance to help Sumiko. People will always rise against tyranny, against unjustness.

We enter the projector room, the same one I’ve been working out of with the Regency officials. I stride over to the projector, sit down and start attaching the neural patches. I look at the control panel and two problems hit me: there’s no power, and the control panel is physically incapable of dialing in the Prime Universe—a safeguard.

“Uh … Renya.”

“I’m working on it.” Renya had entered the room and dropped to her knees and removed a white floor tile. She plunged her head and arms down below the floor and fiddled with stuff. I’m not sure what, but it sounded like she knew what she was doing. I can hear her pushing wires out of the way, and her grunts as she struggles with certain things.

As she works, I prepare myself to jump Universes. Theoretically, it is no different than moving in space in the Ancillary Universe, but conceptually it is like physically leaping across a great chasm where both sides keep moving at split-second randomness. But the Watch needs me. They are counting on me.

Renya says, her head buried beneath the floor, “They cut off power to all the projectors. I’ve just got to … make … a few …” She pauses for several seconds, long enough for me to think she forgot about me.

“Renya?”

“Yeah, listen,” she continues, sans head, still buried beneath the floor. “After Watching Klast, check in with Watch Director Joslyn to get orders. The rest of the Plaiselle team is leading an assault on the personnel quarters to free her. Part distraction for us up here, part we ‘effing need Joslyn. She’ll act as … commander …. Got it!” She extracts herself from the floor and hurries over.

“Where should we set the coordinates?” I ask her. For some reason, I think putting them on the farthest most edge of the Ancillary Universe will help me mentally prepare for the Universe jump.

“No time. I hardwired power to the projector, but the Regency will learn of it soon, if they haven’t already. Make the jump from wherever it sets you.”

I want to object, but she flips the switch.

I try to calm myself. Breathe in through the nose, out through the mouth. I am not Emre. I am not a single person. I am not Sumiko. I am not a mother or her baby. I am both. I am all.

I am the Hope of the Watch.

Slip
.

***

The building in Old Industrial. The factory floor. It’s quiet now, only artificial lights from the surrounding city leak in, only pale shadows inhabit the space now.

Of course the projector puts me here. It was the last place I Watched, the last place dialed into the control panel.

I start preparing myself for the Universe jump. Calm. Peace. It is no different from skimming in space. One dimension is the same as another. No difference at all. Easier even, my consciousness closer to the source, closer to …

A whine.

A tiny echo of a cry on the edge of my awareness, a ghost sound almost, not really physically present. It’s small and sharp and pierces my preparation: Branden.

Right on the heels of it is panic: Sumiko.

I’m already heading in their direction before I realize it. Through the building, down onto an abandoned street. I sweep past the rustling of papers, my teeth on edge as the panic grows.

I burst through a wall of noise into the city proper. Lights from the surrounding buildings flood the area. The swirling police lights seize my attention, the desire to flee is suddenly overwhelming.

Sumiko is inside a police vehicle. They’ve caught her. Branden isn’t with her.

I
have
to get to Klast. But where is Branden? I split my mind.

One half, I start to go through the preparations for a Universe jump again. The other half I seek Branden—a tiny little consciousness, a confused mass of stimuli and reactions.

There
. Not too far away. Another woman holds Branden, trying to calm him. The woman already loves him, cares for him as if he were her own, tender. Sometimes I hate the ability to see into everyone; this would be easier if I could hate her.

I dip into Branden. Instead of comfort, I send panic, pain. He’s not with his mother and nothing,
nothing
, will calm him until he is. A child should never be separated from their parent, for
any
reason.

The other half of my brain isn’t doing what it should. It can’t focus. I stop again. This time I focus on building a wall between my minds, so they are ignorant to each other. It’s a dangerous tactic, but there’s no choice.

I imagine the wall as a thousand threads growing between regions of my mind, interweaving, interlacing, growing thicker into each other. They lock into one another, individually surrounding each part of my mind. A loose thread flaps in my mind for me to pull to set the wall, a keystone thread.

I pull it.

PEACE
.

I calm my mind. I prepare to jump Universes. The thought doesn’t frighten me as it once had. Focus on traveling closer to the source of my consciousness. Nice and easy.

Close the senses. No sight. No sound. No smell. No taste. No feeling. Shut them down. I am nothing, devoid of all.

Nothing.

Imagine the Prime Universe. But where? Something important. Klast. There’s something on Klast.

But I’ve never been to Klast.

Watch Station. Joslyn’s room—the first location that pops into my mind.

Sight: Blue textured walls. Sound: The silence of space. Smell: Dry, sterile air of Watch Station. Taste: Clean, carpet fibers on the air. Feel: The glass writing table, resting comfortably underneath my forearms.

The table feels like an old friend in a turbulent time. A place of refuge in a swirling mess. But I am the Watch Director, I will see the Watch through this. The task has fallen to me and I will be equal to it—
Emre
?

***

Sumiko
is near tears, on the razor edge of hysterics. She sits in the back of an armored police vehicle, on a bench made to hold gangs of dangerous criminals. Not a mother trying to be with her child. Her arms are stuck together in electro-cuffs in front of her, magnetically bound to the center of the floor by a stronger bond than any metal.

She has nearly given up hope of escape, of raising Branden, of seeing him grow. She turns to anger, hatred so furious that now she wants other people to hurt, to cause as much damage as she can.

Not yet, Sumy
, I say to her.

Her shock kicks her out of her fury cycle. She’s working through my voice, what it means, where I’ve been, why didn’t I stop her from getting arrested? She wonders all these things, but doesn’t ask them. Tentatively, she says,
Karon
?

Karon? Am I Karon? I’m not sure, but I know I don’t have time to figure that out right now.
Calm yourself, make yourself compliant. Make them complacent. I’m going for help
.

Can’t you make them leave us alone
? She thinks to ask me to kill them but backs off before actually asking. More than Branden will be lost if I fail.

I don’t answer, instead I leave skimming for the resistance that must rise against tyranny. One split, two, three, ten, twenty. I scour the city, ever deepening schisms threatening to tear apart my skull.

I must not fail.

***

I am rebuffed. Hard.

I’ve never felt anything like it, never knew such a thing was possible.

Emre
! Her outrage and hunger for knowledge tumble over me. Both are palpable; even if I couldn’t skim her, it’d be obvious from the scowl on her face and her immediate pacing about.
Klast, tell me what you Watched on Klast
!