Dawn dropped his hands, smiled again, then turned and stepped off the porch. She walked toward the water pump that was in the side yard under a large oak tree, and she turned and spoke over her shoulder as she walked. “Welcome to the world of the English, Jed. Almost no one knows what’s real.”
Jed worked the pump handle while Dawn gathered water in her hands and splashed it on her face. He had so many questions, he wasn’t completely sure where to start.
“What does the Q do? What part of what I’m feeling is the drug?”
Dawn wiped her face with her sleeve, and Jed was fascinated to see the water spots on the sleeve of the green dress. Whatever kind of computer simulation this was, it was mind-blowing.
“Q gives you a feeling of euphoria,” she said. “Of acceptance and acquiescence. It helps your brain meld the imagery that the computer is producing with the sensory perceptions that your brain adopts in order to help you believe the illusion. On Q, your brain ‘fixes’ things by adding in the imperfections and oddities that exist in real life. When computers try to do this alone, and your mind isn’t on Q, the animation comes across as clunky and artificial. Animators and programmers call this ‘the uncanny valley.’ It’s too real, so the mind rejects it as creepy and odd.” Dawn pumped the handle a few times until some water spurted out. She caught the moisture in her hand and let it drip through her fingers in front of Jed’s face. The sun glistened through the drops, and he was reminded of the drops on the grass on his last day in Old Pennsylvania, after he and Amos had milked Zoe.
Dawn continued. “The computer really only produces about fifteen percent of the image, and your mind produces the rest. Little-used parts of the brain are turned into supercomputers that render imagery based on the billions of microscopic memories stored throughout your brain. Your mind becomes the rendering chip. Q facilitates this pipeline. Back in the old world, television created these simulated realities—only slower and not as well. What the BICE can make is kinda cool and very technologically advanced, but even so, the brain always knows it isn’t right. The Q helps your brain stop being so naturally cynical. It helps you suspend your disbelief. You become more accepting of the data you’re receiving. That’s why I wanted to be here for your first experience. When Transport showed that they would rather capture you than kill you, I figured they had a plan that involved implanting you and putting you on Q.”
“Why didn’t they kill you?” Jed asked.
“Good question,” Dawn said. “I was hoping they wouldn’t.” She smiled at him, but he didn’t seem to like her answer. “Because they don’t know if they’ll need me in the future to help control you. And they need you more than they need just about anything else.”
“Why could they possibly need me?” Jed asked.
“Because every war has more than one facet. It’s not all guns and bombs. There are things like public relations, propaganda, and public opinion. They need you—to use you as a tool against your brother and the resistance.”
Jed was still worried about Dawn. “They already killed Conrad and Rheems as traitors. They’ll kill you too if they don’t think you can help them.”
“Well, you’re right. At some level, at least,” she said. “Conrad and Rheems didn’t have some of the capabilities that I have to disrupt and confuse their system if I need to.” Dawn winked at him. “I might even be able to arrange for my own escape if I really have to.”
“Then you should do that,” Jed said. “Get out of here and don’t look back.”
Dawn laughed. It was almost an ironic laugh. “If you think I would abandon you here, Jed, or that I would neglect my duty to TRACE or the SOMA, then you don’t know me as well as you should. As well as you will.”
Over the next few days, Jed’s life settled into a pattern. He slept most of the time, and during this sleep—at first, anyway—he recognized that his mind was going through training. Often he would be standing in front of the white screen and he would find himself manipulating data, or filing information in folders that would appear before him. He learned how to categorize data, parse conversations, and add rankings to information before he filed it away.
When he awoke, sometimes he would forget the overall gist of what he’d been doing in his sleep, but he’d always remember that the training was moving forward.
On occasion—at random times when it was quite unexpected—Dawn would appear in his visions, and she would teach him things he needed to know: how to hide things, how to recall and change data even after the information had already been filed. She even taught him how to authentically alter his memories, so that the information that was filed was substantively different than what had actually happened.
And sometimes Dawn would take him to another place entirely. She showed him battles and wars. They stood on hilltops and on buildings and watched men and machines destroy and kill, and Dawn talked to him of history and the process that had brought this world to the edge of ruin. She showed him that the colonization of New Pennsylvania had been troubled from the very beginning. The same conflict and civil war that had marked the old world had carried over into the new.
A lot of what Jed learned from Dawn was data without context. He didn’t gain true understanding because he didn’t have all of the supporting information and experience that would help him truly make sense of it. He felt like a spectator, watching a show that had nothing to do with him, like he was being forced to see a movie about the world and everything that was wrong with it. He willed it to stop, but he had no power to control anything that was happening to him in the dream state.
One day (or maybe it was night? he had no way to know), Dawn took him on a journey to an area in the west called “the Great Shelf.” There she showed him a massive line of limestone cliffs, hundreds and hundreds of feet high, bifurcating the whole continent from the north to the south. Atop the Shelf there were a dozen cities and towns, spread hundreds and hundreds of miles apart. Dawn explained that Transport had spent billions of tax unis to build cities that they’d hoped would eventually be filled with immigrants from the old world. But, she explained, things hadn’t worked out as Transport had planned.
There were millions of people living beyond the Shelf, but the bulk of those colonists—along with their young, born on New Pennsylvania—avoided the planned cities as if they were filled with the plague. So the cities had only a token civilian presence, mostly colonists who relied on the government for sustenance and survival. Some of the cities had no more than a thousand to ten thousand souls living in them. The Shelf cities survived only thanks to the massive infusion of tax unis grafted from both the old and the new worlds. The old philosophy—where consumption, rather than production, provided for an unnatural and unsustainable system of urban living—wasn’t workable in the new world. It didn’t work in the old world either, but the old world system was slow in collapsing because it had thousands of years of production propping it up.
“Why do they even keep the cities if they can’t support themselves?” Jed asked.
“No city of any meaningful size is ever self-sufficient,” Dawn said. “Every city relies on production that happens in the countryside. Food, raw materials, goods, et cetera.” Now she pointed out into the wilderness beyond the city. “In the old world, it took millennia to develop industrialized systems adequate to maintain large cities. Rome and Athens used slave labor, wars, and harsh taxation. Centuries later, machines did the job just as well, and even if the industrialized nations still relied on wars and taxation, they’d been around long enough to use sleight of hand to hide the reasons and purposes behind the wars.” Dawn looked at him and saw that even in cyberspace she was losing him. There was still a huge culture gap. The Amish weren’t dumb, she knew, they just had no point of reference when it came to human culture on such an urban scale.