Darkness permeated his mind, and in moments the white screen appeared before him. He immediately reacted by dividing the screen into nine windows, just as he’d done the last time he’d used his BICE.
Next, he imagined himself dividing his mind—his own consciousness—so that a whole new Jed was operating each screen, and simultaneously all nine of the windows came to life, each monitor showing him different data.
Now he was faced with a whole new reality. What was happening to him? He could feel the sway of the stretcher, and the cool breeze on his face. He could still faintly hear the voices of his friends as they carried him along. But in his mind, he was looking up at nine view screens, like nine panes of glass in a window. He looked closely at the bottom right-hand pane, and on that ninth video screen the image of the coffee can appeared.
Either he was suffering from brain damage and he was now hallucinating that his BICE was still functioning, or… could it be? Could his brain have been permanently altered by the presence of his BICE? He remembered back to the early days, when he was just studying about the BICE and how it worked. He remembered someone… maybe it was Dawn… telling him about experiments that had been done on the brain in the past. In one such experiment, soldiers were given goggles that inverted their vision, and therefore the world that they saw. Since the lenses naturally inverted every bit of light that enters the eyes, the brain had the job of flipping the upside-down images into a right-side-up picture. With the inversion goggles on, everything looked upside-down. The soldiers’ feet touched the ground above their eyes, and the sky hovered below. A tool lying on the ground would appear to be “up,” but if they tilted their head up to look at it, their view would pan in the opposite direction—toward the sky. Which was “down.”
In short, the goggles were very disorienting, and at first, the soldiers often got very sick. Doing the simplest tasks became extremely difficult. But then a strange thing happened. After several days of wearing the goggles non-stop, their brains eventually began to re-invert the images. The brain was able to correct for the inversion goggles, by turning the images back over so that the men began to see things right-side-up again. Their brains had re-trained themselves.
Then the goggles were removed—and the brain, having grown accustomed to inverting upside-down visual inputs, continued to invert the images. As a result, the men once again had the feeling that everything was upside down, even though they weren’t wearing the goggles. Fortunately, within a few days their brains had re-re-trained themselves, and everyone’s vision had returned to normal.
Overall, it was a fascinating lesson in how the brain can learn to function and adapt to alterations to its normal input.
Jed’s brain (it seemed) had learned to work as if the BICE was still there, providing him visual input so that the newer, higher-functioning areas of his mind could interpret data. On one screen, an image was displayed. It showed a large empty area, devoid of hills or valleys, where the Amish Zone should have been. It was as if the whole community had just disappeared. He didn’t know how he knew that this had once been where the Amish Zone was, but he did. Even the immense walls were completely gone. On another screen he was seeing the process of okcillium being extracted from reclaimed road base, back in the old world. On still another screen, he examined maps and data that appeared to show a location up on the Great Shelf. All of these things—except for the image of the empty space where the Amish Zone had been—were things his brain already knew. His mind was simply using a new process for interpreting and organizing data, having learned this method from working with the BICE.
The other screens showed things like force readiness reports, and files about the history of the AZ and the building of the wall. All things he’d read before. He thought of Dawn Beachy, and a file containing her picture appeared on one of the screens. He scrolled to an overall summary of the information Transport had about her. He had the feeling that, if he’d ever looked at or studied a piece of information before in all of his life, he now had access to it in real time.
This was all impossible, of course. If he had no BICE interface, he couldn’t be accessing the Internet. Maybe he was just having hallucinations. Maybe his brain was somehow responding to the injury, and as a result he was flashing back to an earlier episode in his bizarre experience.
He felt a drowsiness coming over him then, and he breathed deeply again. He heard voices: those of his friends as they carried him along on the stretcher. And there were other voices, too. The voices of strangers he’d never met.
He squeezed his eyes tightly, and he saw the screens in his mind, and they’d gone dark.
Ask questions.
He thought for a moment.What is the next step? Where do we go from here?
And the screens answered him.
(29
ABOUT TIME
ONE WEEK EARLIER: SUNDAY
In his sleep, Jed soared high above the Amish Zone and looked down on it from the air. Down below, his body was ostensibly sleeping, cramped but not too uncomfortable, on the floor of Matthias’s kitchen, along with Pook, Billy, and Ducky.
At altitude, he took it all in. He could see the entire extent of the Amish Zone, and the incredibly high and thick walls that surrounded it. Looking closer, he discovered that the walls appeared to have been constructed of rubble, pushed into the form of perimeter walls. But the top of the wall and the inside—facing the Amish countryside—had been finished and smoothed with concrete. Stairs and railings had been added here and there, so that anyone from inside the Zone could scale to the top if they felt like it.
Jed still didn’t have answers about who had first built the walls… or why. The barrier had not been built to keep the community safe from animal predators, this much he knew. He studied the walls a while longer, then shifted his perspective so that he could see the whole community in one scene—and found himself deeply moved by the awesomeness of it all. This plain community, connected by blood and heritage to the old world of before, and even to the still-older world of medieval Europe, had survived and thrived—while the largest empires ever built by humans had all come and gone.
Although it was night, Jed could still see every detail, and he adjusted the light until it was perfect for his purposes. He could see the rich soil, the tree-lined lanes, the perfect intersecting lines of plowed fields and fences. He could see the immaculate houses and yards and barns set in stark relief against the verdant nature the community revered and managed. He saw a people who’d determined that they would define themselves rather than have their reality and culture defined by the times. That thought satisfied Jed, and soothed his soul.
He came to a stop and hovered in space, just studying it all awhile, reveling in the same beauty that had made Amish communities the target of tourism for hundreds of years. After a bit of reflection, Jed took a few deep breaths and then brought up his BICE control interface. He examined the file drawers for a moment.
He tried unsuccessfully to bring up Dawn’s avatar, but wasn’t surprised by that; he was starting to suspect that her BICE had somehow been removed or turned off while she was being held by the Yoders. He regretted now that he hadn’t cleared up that little mystery with Dawn before setting her up in his bedroom for the night. When he’d told her goodnight, she’d given him the bottle of Quadrille, so he knew she expected him to get online. But if she’d planned on joining him in cyberspace… well, he had no way of knowing.