I found myself standing in a nondescript corridor, one that wouldn't be out of place in the office spaces in the university I half-remembered.
The last thing I remember, I was lying down to get some rest… Another dream, then?
The world remained consistent, even as I tried to jog my brain into lucidity. Behind me, large windows overlooked well-tended grounds, where I felt more than saw students peacefully studying.
The hallway ended just beyond the door I was standing before, a nondescript office with a plaque reading, 'Dr. Schenberg.' Just below that, a smaller sign read, 'Dean of Engineering.'
The name was painfully familiar. Was this the man whose memories I'd been seeing?
This place felt welcoming, a sharp contrast to that awful stabbing dream. Slowly, I pushed the door open.
Beyond lay a well-furnished office of a good size, and the first thing I noticed was the bookshelves. They lined the walls, floor to ceiling, and the entire office was in severe disarray.
The second thing I saw was the man sitting at the desk, typing furiously on a keyboard. He wore round spectacles on a sharply featured face, and messily cropped brown hair at odds with the defined short beard he wore.
After a moment, his eyes flicked up at me, back at the computer, then back at me. "Yes? Do you need something?" He inquired brusquely, waving me to take the chair before his desk that was not covered in books and sketches on paper.
"I…" What did I say? "I don't know. This is a dream, I think."
He paused his typing, frowning and focusing fully on me. "You're a bit young to be a student. Go find your parents, kid. I'm busy."
Unbidden, words spilled from my lips. "Do you know a Kasey?"
His fingers twitched and his eyebrows drew close as if trying to recall. "What business do you have with Doctor Morioka?"
I worked my suddenly dry mouth, feeling the strangest mixture of validation and trepidation. "She's about yea high," I lifted my hand in an approximation of the dreamt woman's height, "Blond, maintains a passionate calisthenics program?"
The man nodded again, "And why do you ask after her?"
"I'm her daughter?" I blurted, "Sort of. It's complicated?"
His eyes widened and he stood, hastily walking around the desk to get a closer look. He knelt, studying my features intensely. He was so focused on my eyes that I had to suppress the reflex to look away.
Satisfied with whatever he saw, he leaned back and rested on his heels. "You have her spirit, don't you?"
Was that just a figure of speech, or was he being literal? I could remember being a student, maybe even at this very institution, but nothing like a doctorate! It was gratifying, a little, to know that my past life hadn't been completely wasted away.
I nodded after a moment of hesitation. "Uhm, I inherited a lot from her. That's a massive understatement… Where are we?"
He cocked his head, "You talk like her, you walk like her." His eyes trailed off to his desk, where a picture rested. It was him and Kasey, my Kasey, giving a presentation somewhere.
They had precious few moments to speak backstage before they'd go up to the podium. Under the cover of a comforting embrace, "Even if they don't listen, we don't have to stop, Aeolia." The woman gave him another squeeze, "I believe you. We must be ready for the dialogues to come. If those suits decide to pay for a manned mission to Jupiter is worth it, that's great. If not, we'll still have Veda. She's almost ready."
Shaking my head, the present reasserted itself. Aeolia was holding the photograph, seemingly oblivious to my confusion.
"Your name, it's Aeolia, right?"
The man nodded. "Doctor Aeolia Schenberg, yes. I knew your mother very well."
I could feel my perception of the world crumbling. Stumbling over to the chair, I sat heavily and cradled my aching head in my hands. "I have so much to worry about, and now there's whatever this is." A wordless groan of frustration rose from deep within me, a focus I could use to vent those negative emotions.
A hesitant hand rested on my shoulder, and I looked up to see that Aeolia had moved the papers occupying the neighboring chair to sit. "Whatever you're dealing with… If you're anything like Kasey, you'll find your way through it. That feeling of powerlessness, of too much to handle all at once, broke me once. It was your mother who taught me to rebuild and keep moving." Wistfully, he set the picture down on his desk.
"What happened to her?" I asked, curious.
"She's…" He sighed, "Dead. Cancer. The circumstances are complex."
I reached up, taking his hand and holding it. "Can you tell me?"
His features firmed and he nodded brusquely. "During the study of a decayed baryonic particle I'd recently discovered, we found a method by which we could mechanically manipulate them. It was during the development of storage devices that we had our first accident. We were unaware of the properties of these particles in higher concentrations, and she was exposed to an amount that should have killed her instantly. Instead…" He spread his hands, a mouth drawn in a grim line, "She became something else. She wanted to call herself an Innovator, seeing it as a great leap forward for all humanity. All I saw was the loss of my wife as she changed. She began delving into old religions, seeing patterns that didn't exist, calling them threads of fate that tie all intelligence together. I couldn't understand her, at the end, only that she was steadfast that she would see me again."
Wetness fell on my arm, and I realized tears were falling from my eyes. "I am seeing you, Aeolia. Didn't I tell you? So long as we are never forgotten, we will live on forever."
He cast away my hand, standing and backing up against the shelves. "What are you?! The terrors that haunt my dreams, they've begun wearing kind masks…" He raved, addressing the room in general. "Begone! You are not my wife!"
"I'm sorry!" I cried, stumbling toward the door, "I'm so sorry!"
I crossed the threshold, eyes blinking open, glimmers of light shining down on me through leaves.
I'm awake, I thought, sitting on my bed and wiping away tears.
I'd seen the man's memories through the little bits of knowledge I'd been taking from that new light. Maybe It was just a normal dream, this time. He didn't want me to do anything, just seeming curious, until I'd said… Well, the life I remembered was Kasey's, and the sight of Aeolia had begun to drag up memories I'd not even suspect.
Maybe it was real, the same way my dreams of Kasey and Mai were real. At the end of the day, it came down to whether or not I would accept what I experienced as reality.
I dared not risk calling that dream a delusion, not when I'd had the barest glimpses of what that man was capable of. I might be able to find my way back and speak with him more.
It was surprising how strongly I desired that. I needed to ask Kasey about him, to try and verify it with her.
The particles he'd mentioned struck a chord with me. When I closed my eyes, I could easily envision the scene of the accident Aeolia had described.
The storage unit had been overpowered for the concentration of GN Particles to be contained, and that had an unintended side-effect of further compressing the particle flow. A warning alarm sounded, followed by a flash of gold-tinged green that suffused the room. The cloud was warm and comforting, and for a moment I thought I saw everything.
Frowning, I pulled out my tablet and noted everything down. GN Particles? Gundam Nucleus? Whatever meaning was tied to those words was lost to me, leaving me scratching my head. This all had to be related to the lights, but…
If that was the case, why had Kasey seen my starscape during the accident?
Groaning, I added a note of Headache-inducing- handle with care. It wasn't the first topic that inspired migraines that my nanites could do nothing about, and it likely wasn't to be the last. At least I knew a little more about who I'd been on Earth. Cold comfort it was, knowing I had been married yet unable to recall any of the moments that so clearly haunted Aeolia.
Was there anything else of note? I'd stolen a glance at some of those papers that the professor had moved aside, the details clear in my mind. It was the partial design of a compact and powerful particle generator, evidently using a quirk of spatial topological defects to produce non-harmful GN Particles for further utilization.
My tablet clinked to the ground through numb fingers. Oh, yep, there was a little bit of an aneurysm.
Huh, without my nanites, I'd just be dead here. It was a disconnected sort of thought that fit with my discombobulation.
Shaking feeling back into my arm, I scooped up my tablet and left my hobbit-hole. I was up with the sun this morning, the dawn painting the sky with beautiful rosy hues.
It was a shame Symon had left with Jinhe the day prior. We'd finished the next few steps of our overall construction plans for First Fork, and he'd not be able to enjoy the fruits of his labor until they returned.
We'd expanded the concept of the water tower to a four-story tall building that housed the tank on the roof, providing constant pressure for the waterworks we'd painstakingly installed throughout the small town. Below that water tank multi-use rooms of varying scales, not for residence, but as the beginnings of the offices we'd need to centralize the governance of First Fork, with the understanding that we would potentially house tens of thousands here. At the very least, we had several comfortable meeting rooms, freeing Symon's office.
The plans for handling sewage had altered when Jinhe presented the techniques his people used for repurposing waste. Through a complex series of mechanically agitated heated chambers, solids would be broken down and diluted, the excess liquid would be siphoned away for further treatment, and the resulting sludge would be baked in another agitation chamber to evaporate any remaining water. The resulting mulch was much safer to handle than raw waste, ultimately stored away in sealed wooden basins for further use.
It turns out there are a ton of useful compounds found in human waste, and this new system enabled us to put them to good use in the future. At the very least, we could trade the mulch as fertilizer, given that we were skipping straight toward the highly controlled cultivation demonstrated by the aeroponics bay. We wouldn't need massive amounts of farmland to sustain ourselves in the long term, something Symon had been adamant about avoiding.
I recommended that book to him because I remembered it to be interesting, not because I wanted to skip right to arcology-based design!
Though, once he had passionately described how a coastal arcology might represent an excellent fusion of defensive capability and living space, everyone in the room had latched onto the idea.
"Maia!" A familiar voice called. Ame, Symon's not-quite partner, fell into step beside me. "Good morning."
"Morning to you too, Ame. We have a few hours before the meeting, did you need something?"
"You're wearing a storm, wanted to see what was what. You doing alright?"
Maybe, it would be alright to tell her a little?
Slowing to a stop, I stepped off the newly paved street, Ame following. "I just had an interesting dream, is all. It was about someone I think I used to know, but don't remember. It's got me all twisted up inside."
"A former lover?" She teased, "Japing. What happened?"
I told her everything. The strangely familiar campus, Aeolia's office, his oddly focused manner, like what he had been working on was more important than anything until I'd said something he cared about. The memory backstage, odd words coming from me that I had little context for.
Through it, Ame listened patiently. It was only after I'd petered out that she asked, "Do you want to do anything about it?"
"What's there to do about any of it? I can't just stay awake all the time, I can't control what I dream of, and I don't know if any of it is even real." I still felt silly, treating a dream as something real to be interpreted over the mishmash of neural processing that happens when we sleep. I hated how ambiguous everything was, "Why can't it just be straightforward, like the Others?"
Ame giggled a bit, "The Others just want us dead. Living is the complicated part, and dreams are a just part of that. I talk to my gran sometimes, dreaming of her cozy hut and the sapcakes she'd make for the Feast of Lights. Even if she isn't really there, it's still nice."
"So, what, I should just enjoy them?" I inquired, considering the prospect. The brain bleed had happened only after I'd tried to break things down into more 'real' terms.
She tapped her nose with a wink and a nod, "If I were you, I'd try to enjoy them. How often do you get to speak with the departed? It's a long time till the low solstice, you know."
"I can try, at least… Wait, what about the low solstice?"
This time, she tapped me on the nose. "Go ask Ellir, she'd tell it better than I can. We celebrate our departed on the shortest day of the year when the boundaries between the god's realm and ours blur. We keep everything well-lit to welcome home our dead and friendly spirits, and the light keeps out the bad things."
"Is this that feast of lights you mentioned?" I asked, haphazardly connecting the tidbits.
Ame excitedly bobbed her head, "Yes! This year will be the best, ever. Lom has so much to play around with before then!"
Chuckling, I remembered the flakey meat pastries spiced with cloves and summer berries he'd come up with the other day. "Fair, that's something to get excited for."
Something occurred to her, as she turned and pointed down the street at one of the in-progress construction sites. "When will the bathhouse be done? Symon won't stop talking about it!"
Shrugging, "Next couple of days, I imagine. We've almost finished the tenements, and public utilities are next on the docket." I felt proud of our progress. It was steady, and First Fork would soon be able to ably house another two thousand souls. "Personally," Pointing to another site across the wide plaza, "I'm looking forward to establishing our school. We'll have a great library attached, a place for learning open to all…" I sighed dreamily.
"I've been reading Maester Rigney's works," She said, giving me a start. "I think I'm beginning to understand why you do the things you do." She leaned over, whispering in my ear, "You're very much like Moraine Sedai if she held no stock in her Pattern. Her determination to do what she must reminds me of you."
I stepped back, confused and vaguely insulted. "How much have you read, Ame? I wouldn't level such charges at me. Moraine doesn't care about people, she's utterly focused on her mission."
Ame nodded, "And she'd even kill the lads if they posed a threat to her goals, it's true. I've almost finished The Eye of the World. She wants to save the world, you want to help us save ourselves. You see?"
"I'm no Aes Sedai," I said, spitting on the ground for emphasis. "Keep reading, you'll see the things I hate about them."
She shrugged, nonplussed. "I like the idea. Those words mean servants of all, right? Isn't that what you're talking to Symon about lately?"
Sighing, I shook my head. "I'm talking to Symon about public servants, it's completely different. People employed as part of a broader administrative organization dedicated to the health and welfare of the people under their purview, which means so, so much more than just having an ageless face and a bad reputation."
Thinking about it, she finally nodded. "Well, in that case… Ah, I'm sorry. Do you want to break our fast? Lom is making something with eggs and roast turnips this morning."
Nodding, "That sounds really good. He's not let us down yet!" Inwardly, I hoped I was right.
We made a beeline to the Lodge, now standing before a broad plaza with the tenements arranged around the outside, except for the view of the Antler. People were already sitting on the myriad benches, some playing games of chance with carved bones, some just using darning socks as an excuse to gossip. There was a cheerful uproar from the crowd gathered near the edge of the plaza, where two large men were doing their best to drive the other beyond the bounds of their competition.
From the kitchens came the scent of roasting vegetables and baking meats; Lom and his crew have been hard at work for hours to feed the growing population.
We gathered ourselves wooden trays laden with a bowl of today's experimental breakfast, as well as a plate each of flatbread and a slice of tender roasted fish. Ame was content to wait for us to sit before prodding me with more questions.
"Why do we need uniforms?" She asked, pulling at her tailored black sack coat sleeve.
"Remember what I said the other day about the rules of warfare?" I nudged her, "Members of the military must be easily distinguished from noncombatants. It's going to be a while before it matters, I think, but that uniform makes it clear who is a combatant and who is not. We need to start making the distinction clear, now. When it comes time to deal with the other nations of the world, we will be able to clearly lay out the lines of acceptable engagement we will follow." I sighed, "I imagine that to the Watch, what we are doing will be terrifying. If we can present clear and understandable rules, like people in uniform are acceptable targets in battle, and people without are unacceptable targets, and if we can uphold that faithfully, we present ourselves as reasonable. Not savages come from the north to raid and pillage, but a society capable and willing to bring terrible weapons to bear on those who break the rules."
She considered it over a few bites of the turnip creation, nodding after a bit. "That means… They can fight us with armies, but if they attack our people directly," She slammed a fist into her palm, "We stop playing nice."
Nodding, "With the enchantments on those uniforms, most weapons they have won't kill us. That gives us a serious advantage on the hypothetical battlefield, and that's before we show anything like Muscle Tracers or Valkyries. We don't want to scare them so badly they see us as an existential threat, but we don't want to be so obviously weak that they can roll right over us." I lifted my hand, wobbling it. "A delicate balance."
Ame grimaced, "Why play the games at all? We can just take the land that we need, all we have to do is hold it. If they can't get rid of us, they'll give up!"
I shrugged, "That's also a legitimate strategy we could employ. Personally, I'd rather show them cautious people willing to defend themselves who remain open to diplomacy than a war band carving out a realm for themselves. We have time to talk about it, you know."
She nodded, looking past me with a smile. She waved, and a moment later Brelan approached.
"Ah, Maia," He said awkwardly, shuffling awkwardly in his brass-buttoned coat. "Ame, did you need something?"
She nodded, standing and pulling him over to sit next to her. "Maia needs more perspectives. Why do you think we wear the uniforms?"
He shrugged, his well-groomed short beard quivering as he chewed something. "'s so people outside uniforms don't get attacked, just for being around. We're the people fighting so that others don't need to." He gave me a deep nod, "Jorik wants to be just like you, you know? He wants to learn to heal, so he can save others like you saved him. I don't know if he'd wear the uniform, but he might. It's his choice."
I blinked, not expecting that. "That's good! I'd be willing to teach him what I can. We're going to need healers, a lot of them. Those uniforms protect you from arrows and spears, not sickness."
Ame shrugged, "Well, Brelan, I think you said what she'd just said. Maybe." She glanced at me, "I guess that answers my question. Targets, huh?" She looked around, perhaps seeing for the first time the distinction between a soldier and a civilian. "I can be that," she said with a resolute nod.
With hours yet before my morning meeting, I greatly enjoyed their company. In the middle of that lively plaza, listening to the bustle of people going about their business, the sounds of music and laughter on the air, I forced myself to relax, to take the time while I had the opportunity.
A chill breeze ruffled my wings, carrying a familiarly queer cold scent that seemed to slither down my spine.
Standing, I looked around, only Ame and Brelan noticing my concern.
"What is it?" The man asked, "That smell…" His eyes widened, "That's what we smelled during the fight!"
"Raise the alarm," I ordered, "Ame, tell Grenwin that I'm going to bring out the Knight. I'll keep watch. Brelan, go with her and back her up."
They departed quickly, and I was just as hastily making my way towards my hangar.
We'd taken to calling this mech the Knight, after its blockier and generally more solid-looking composition compared to the Valkyrie. It fits well enough, in my opinion.
I changed into the cooling suit that had been in the cockpit of the craft, a formality for me but necessary if anyone else needed to operate it. The thing ran hot, and even the cooling in the cockpit wasn't enough to fully compensate for the extreme temperature spikes that I'd discovered on the maiden voyage out into the woods.
More than cooling, the suit read neural impulses, quite literally tracing how my brain controlled my muscles. All I had to do was step into the controls, mechanical arms folding up and around my body like an imitation of the larger form. A helmet slid down over my head, a text prompt requesting the activation password I'd had to set the first time I'd started it. It took a moment to adjust to the virtual keyboard, my fingers only needing the slightest twitch to register keypresses.
Once the password was accepted, the fusion reactor below my feet roared to life, and through the helmet screens, I 'saw' through the mech's cameras. Radar and other sensing displays came up as I turned the Knight, carefully stepping through the hangar portal and up the ramp. I'd taken long enough that most people had evacuated into the lodge, wide eyes set in pale, drawn faces watching the Knight as I stood watch.
The sensors were clear, for now. If there was anything larger than a deer moving in those woods, I should be able to see it, let alone a horde of wights.
Nothing. Vents on the Knight's shoulders opened, drawing air into the mech's chemoreceptive atmospheric analysis mechanisms, 'smelling' the air. Within moments, the onboard computers registered the presence of several unknown compounds, not a great surprise, but I was sure something in there was causing that smell.
This would be so much easier if I had someone or something helping sort through this information.
By the defenses, I saw Grenwin and Ygdis organizing the troops, taking places at revamped barricades. Two Maulers were being brought out to be mounted, followed by the charged capacitors needed to fire them.
We were set up and ready within moments, a testament to the drills we'd been performing every evening.
We waited, as tense as we were prepared for whatever was to come.
