He didn’t. “These people you—work for. They’re supposed to be helpless, that’s what everyone says. You can optimize a brain for down there or up here, not both. Anyone comfortable thinking at Planck scales, they can barely cross the street unassisted up in the real world. That’s why they set up in the desert. That’s why they have people like you. That’s what they tell us.”
“All true, more or less,” Lianna said.
He shook his head. “They micromanage tornadoes, Lee. They turn people into puppets with a wink and a wave, they own half the patent office. They’re about as helpless as a T. rex in a daycare center. So why haven’t they been running things for years?”
“That’s like a chimp asking why those hairless apes aren’t slinging bigger feces than everyone else, if they’re so damned clever.”
He tried not to smile, and failed. “That’s not really an answer.”
“Sure it is. Everybody goes on about hive mind this and synesthesia that like they were some kind of superpowers.”
“After last night, you’re going to tell me they’re not?”
“It goes so much deeper than that. It’s perceptual. We’re so—impoverished, you know? We don’t look out at reality at all, we look in at this model, this caricature our brains cobble together out of wavelengths and pressure points. We squint down over handwritten notes that say two blocks east, turn left at the bridge and we think that reading those stupid scribbles is the same as seeing the universe passing by on the other side of the windshield.” She glanced over her shoulder, to the edifice at their backs.
Brüks frowned. “You think Bicamerals can see outside the windshield.”
“Dunno. Maybe.”
“Then I’ve got some bad news for you. Reality went out the window the moment we started mediating sensory input through a nervous system. You want to actually perceive the universe directly, without any stupid scribbles or model-building? Become a protozoan.”
A smile lit her face, startlingly bright in the deepening gloom. “Wouldn’t that be just like them. Build a group mind complex enough to put any hundred baseline geniuses to shame, and use it to think like a paramecium.”
“That wasn’t exactly my point,” he said.
The sun winked good-bye and slid below the horizon.
“I don’t know how they do it,” she admitted. “But if what they see is even closer to reality—well, that’s what you call transcendence. Not the ability to micromanage tornados, just—seeing a little more of what’s out there.” She tapped her temple. “Instead of what’s in here.”
She stood, stretched like a cat. Brüks rose beside her and brushed the desert from his clothes. “Then transcendence is out of reach. For our brains, anyway.”
Lianna shrugged. “Change your brain.”
“Then it’s not your brain anymore. It’s something else. You’re something else.”
“That’s kinda the point. Transcendence is transformation.”
He shook his head, unconvinced. “Sounds more like suicide to me.”
He felt his eyes start up under closed lids, stepped out onto that razor-thin line between dreamtime and the waking edge: just enough awareness to see the curtain, not enough to notice the man behind.
Lucid dreaming was a delicate exercise.
He sat up on the pallet, phantom legs still wearing corporeal ones like the abdomen of some half-molted insect. He looked around at furnishings that would have been spartan to anyone who hadn’t just spent two months sleeping on the desert floor: a raised sleeping pallet a couple of meters long, dipped in some softer, thicker variant of the fleshy synthetic lining the floors. An alcove in the wall, a medicine cabinet fronted with frosted glass. Another one of those washbasin pedestals, this one with a towel bar bolted to the side facing the bed: a hand towel draped over it. The cubby Luckett had tucked him into for the night, all pretty much the way it looked when he was awake.
He’d learned to launch his dreams from a platform anchored in reality. It made the return trip easier.
Brüks flexed his temporoparietal and ascended through a ceiling of polished granite (that was surmise—he’d forgotten to take note of its composition in the waking world). The monastery spread out around, then below him: dwindled from a life-size fortress to a tabletop model on a cracked gray moonscape. A fingernail moon shone bone-white overhead; everywhere else, a million stars glinted hard as ice crystals against the darkness.
He flew north.
It was minimalist magic: no rainbow bridges or talking clouds, no squadrons of aircraft piloted by tyrannosaurs. He’d long since learned not to strain the credulity of whatever mental processes indulged his presence here, critics that had lived in his head since before his dreams had even been lucid. Some inner skeptic frowned at the thought of a space-faring bicycle and dreaming eight-year-old Danny Brüks found himself stranded between the stars. Some forebrain killjoy snorted at the giddy delight of flying and suddenly he was entangled in high-tension wires, or simply ejected back into consciousness at three in the morning, spat out of sleep by his own incredulity. Even in dreams, his brain had been selling him out since before he’d had hair on his crotch. As an adult he’d had no use for them until his limited baseline learning curve had run out of waking hours, forced him to learn new techniques in his sleep lest academia’s new-and-improving generation devoured him from behind.
He could fly now at least, without thought or self-subversion. He’d learned that much through years of practice, through the induction hardware that had once guided his visions when REM started up, through the exercises that eventually let him ditch those training wheels and do it all in his own head. He could fly, into orbit and beyond and back if he wanted to. He could fly all the way to Heaven. That was where he was going now: the Northern Lights swirled in the sky directly ahead, a blue-green curtain shimmering above his destination like a Star of Bethlehem for the Holographic Age.
But no talking clouds. He’d also learned not to push it.
Now, ghostlike, he passed through Heaven’s fortifications and descended into its deepest levels. Rho languished there as she always did, alone in her cell, still wearing the paper smock and slippers she’d worn in Departures when they’d told each other it wasn’t goodbye. A cuff around her left ankle and a dozen links of corroded chain shackled her to the wall. Hair hung across her downcast face like a dark curtain.
Her face lit up, though, as he descended through the ceiling.
He settled beside her on the stone floor. “I’m sorry. I would’ve come sooner, I just—”
He stopped. No point in wasting precious REM with dreamed apologies. He tweaked the script, started again.
“You wouldn’t believe what’s happening,” he said.
“Tell me.”
“I’ve got caught up in some kind of war, I’m trapped behind enemy lines with a bunch of—really. You wouldn’t believe me.”
“Monks and zombies,” she said. “And a vampire.”
Of course she knew.
“I don’t even know how I can be here. You’d think with all this stuff happening I’d be too wired to even sit down, but—”
“You’ve been going straight for twenty-four hours.” She laid her hand on his. “Of course you’re going to crash.”
“These people don’t,” he grumbled. “I don’t think they even sleep, not all at once anyway. Different parts of their brains take—shifts, or something. Like a bunch of dolphins.”