“Water?” asked the priest.
The heat inside the mud walls was oppressive under the relentless midday sun. The young man’s eyes fluttered then opened. His breathing was heavy and ragged. His lips were cracked. “Yes, water, please,” whispered the young man.
Reaching under the folds of his thobe, the priest produced a leather bladder. He extended his wiry arm between the bars of their adjoining cells.
Still coming to his senses, Bob blinked. His meta-cognition systems were coming back online, but his neural load of smarticles was low. How long had he been out? He didn’t know, but he needed a refill. He didn’t have enough in his system to reach out to the satellite networks: he had no GPS or tracking information. Bob’s eyes darted around the room, collecting information.
His internal systems were busy mapping his immediate environment.
The man in the cell next to him smiled, revealing a mouthful of blackened teeth, and he held up a leather pouch. Water sloshed within it. Bob studied the man: faded keffiyeh headdress, deeply creased face of battered leather, watery eyes laced with cataracts.
Bob’s pssi posited an origin for the man: Bedouin.
It was near zero humidity and over a hundred and thirty degrees. He had to be in the Sahara somewhere. It was within the range of the launch energy of the passenger cannon pod when he’d blacked out.
Taking the bladder from the Bedouin, Bob mumbled, “Thank you.”
He lifted himself up on one elbow and drank. He’d never been this dehydrated before. His biostats were all over the place. Heat stroke was setting in. Just raising himself up brought a wave of nausea.
“Slowly,” urged the Bedouin, his palms up. “Drink slowly.”
Bob looked at the bladder of water, then the dusty floor. The Weather Wars had wreaked havoc on this corner of the world. There were rivers of water in the sky just as there were rivers of water in the ground, and weather tech was enabling rich countries to divert all of it. He took another swig from the bladder.
His proxxi, Robert, was still locked out, and Bob flexed his phantoms into the empty hyperspaces around him. Barely anything for them to hold onto, just the faint chatter of a cellular voice network at the edges of his senses. He let loose a splinter to see if it could burrow through, but its cognitive strength, like his own, was thin at best.
“ ‘Where am I?’ ” the Bedouin said. “ ‘Who am I?’ ” He smiled. “Yes, very good questions.”
He seemed able to hear what Bob was thinking. Who was this old man? Or was he asking Bob to think about his own identity? He was certain he was in northern Africa, but then again, as the old man’s face swam in his visual fields, whether this was “reality” was another question. His body might still be in the passenger pod, while his awareness secreted away in a virtual world.
The aches and pains felt real enough, but how to verify that he was in base reality—the identity world? The only sure-fire way would be to kill himself—if his awareness snapped into another time and place, back in his body, then this world and space wasn’t real. But if nothingness came afterward, then the world he was in, or rather had been in, was real—and there was no possibility of return. And of course, he didn’t really know if nothingness came after death, either.
It wasn’t an experiment he wanted to try quite yet.
Reaching inside his core with a phantom, he punched his Uncle Button, the hardwired fail-safe built into the deepest layer of the pssi operating system that snapped your consciousness back into your own body.
Nothing changed.
This must be it, then. Best to leave that final escape route for another day.
Taking another swig from the leather bladder, Bob leaned higher against the wall of his cell, feeling the straw embedded in the mud bricks prickling his back. He leaned over and inspected a wound on the side of his leg. Whoever snatched him had cut out his subcutaneous patch of smarticle reserves.
He had been in this area of the world once before, on a family holiday. His father hired a guide to take a sensor-scanner out into the Western Desert between Egypt and Libya. Some of the earliest Christian churches, from the first century, were in the ancient oasis towns that dotted the basins of the Sahara. There wasn’t much detail in this area in the standard wikiworld, and hiring a guide to physically visit with the sensor enabled his family to flit in and “be there” from Atopia. The trip had been a gift from his father to his mother. She was a devout member of the Atopian Christian society, the Eleutherous.
Bob messed the whole trip up by missing the outings, and if he did make them, by heaping scorn on the idea of religion and poking holes in any stories the guide told. He ended the whole project by jamming the sensor with his dimstim traffic. It was an accident, but his mother had been quietly crushed by his thoughtlessness.
Thinking of his family, his stomach knotted.
He always found a way to mess things up. Barely two days after leaving the security of Deanna’s place, and already everything had fallen apart. Why had Patricia put this on him, trusted him?
Then he remembered that he gave Nancy a copy of Patricia’s data cube. Now he wanted to take it back. Maybe she hadn’t found it yet.
“Life is suffering, young man,” said the old man, watching him.
Bob looked at him. Life is suffering. “What do you mean?” He handed the water pouch back, letting his hand touch the old man’s, just enough for a few smarticles to transfer from Bob’s skin.
“It is obvious you are suffering.” The old man tucked the pouch back in his thobe.
With a sweep of his phantoms across virtual workspace controls, Bob logged into the dusting of smarticles on the man’s skin. Measuring skin potential was an old method of lie detection.
“I’m stuck in a jail, shouldn’t I be suffering?”
“But suffering isn’t necessary.”
It was working. Bob was getting a baseline measurement of the man’s skin tension. He switched tracks. “How did I get here? Were you here when I arrived?”
The old man looked up, opening the palm of his hand to the ceiling. “You dropped from the sky in a flaming chariot, as it was prophesied.”
Bob groaned internally. Not another doomsdayer. “How did I get in the cell? Who put me here?”
Nodding, the old man narrowed his eyes. “Four men, one of them old Toothface.”
His skin potential remained steady. He was telling the truth. Bob studied his face. “Are you with them?”
“No.”
No reaction. Nothing that Bob could infer from the man’s body language or facial markers or skin potential indicated he was lying. Bob relaxed slightly.
“And where are we?”
“Near Siwah, the town is several miles away. Just the four men are here, and us.”
Bob decided the old man was telling the truth. “And why are you here?”
The old man laughed. “For seeking the truth.”
Without an outside connection, Bob had to rely on his internal wikiworld maps. He did a quick flyover of the models of the maps and terrain he had, but there wasn’t much resolution. He stood on his bunk and pressed his face against the metal bars of the window. Looking back and forth through the window, he reconstructed as much of a three-dimensional map of the area as he could, trying to correlate this with his internal maps.
He needed more information.
Bob looked around the sandy floor, searching, and there, in a corner, he saw a scarab beetle. Walking over he picked it up, blowing the dust off it, lifting it up to his mouth.
The old man watched, his eyes growing wide.
Spitting on the beetle, Bob gently began rubbing it. The old man frowned as he watched Bob massage the insect. Slowly, over several minutes, some of the smarticles in his saliva worked their way into the creature and suffused into its nervous system. Bob made a connection, opening up a sensory space that morphed into the beetle’s. Looking up, he could see his own grotesquely large face peering down, could feel the beetle’s terror. Calm down, he told it as he took control of its motor neurons, I’m a friend.