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*          *          *

Shelley awoke abruptly to a sharp headache, much worse that she had ever experienced before. She tried to moan, but she heard nothing from herself, only ripping pain in her throat, and then she had the sensation of drowning; her throat and her chest were full of water, thick water filled her mouth and nose and swam over her face. She started retching, her body desperately trying to cough the liquid out, it whooshed and swam about  her and she gagged on the sharp stinging in her nose and sinuses. She crushed her eyelids shut and tried to struggle, she felt she was dying, trapped, drowning in some thick ocean. She tried to flail her limbs, but they were weak and gummed with what felt like a very long sleep. In her terror she did not open her eyes, but she could feel the burning of needles dragging inside her flesh, and then wrenching out. Now she could taste her own blood in the viscous fluid she was in.

She cried, her tears dissolving into her hell, and she could hear nothing but a low whirring and the whooshing of her own flailing and the bubbles it made. She tried to remember how she had gotten there. She tried to remember who she was, but most of all she was trying to stay alive. Then she felt the strobing and echoing of her senses and thoughts as her body began to spasm uncontrollably and a seizure set in.

*          *          *

In the minutes after DreamStation's collapse Nero celebrated with a beer. The emergency power supply had been activated, and the life-support systems were running, but Butler was dead. There could be no telecommunication now, and they needed him to resurrect Butler, so he might actually turn out the hero in this one, he thought. Any moment now, a squad of birdmen would arrive to check on him, possibly with instructions from Suzuki. He smiled to himself as the mild beer soothed his throat. He had a plan. He would manipulate the logs, he would set everything up just the way he wanted; Suzuki would take the fall. It would all work out. He reminded himself over and over to soothe away the menacing panic that tried to grow inside of him.

Everything would be alright.

Then Nero heard the brisk, heavy yet light footsteps of birdmen approaching. His escort service had arrived. He casually looked at the entrance of the control-room to watch the drones entering, only to hear the thunder of an sharp explosion. Particles skittered loudly on the floor outside, damaged joints whined and the hiss of escaping gas greeted Nero's ears.

Nero stepped outside the door to find the squad lying in a mangled mess against the wall of the corridor, the other wall torn open. The violent orifice in it was about the size of a man, the sharp metallic edges of the hole red with heat, coolant screaming out onto the drones, covering them with frost.

"Butler? Cut off the coolant supply in...." but of course Butler was asleep. This had probably happened because he was asleep. Nero swallowed, the suppressed panic beginning to tease and itch in his brain, rising to its vindication. Then he heard something moving. One of the birdmen, its face-screen shattered and dark, managed to reactivate, and drag itself up. It stood, unsure and trembling on its legs like a drunkard trying to stand at attention.

It spoke, its voice flickering and glitching, "Order execute target..." Nero's eyes widened as his gall climbed up in his throat like a thick lump. The drone raised its gun-arm at him, and it was alarmingly steady, when, just as Nero was about to start a futile slow-motion turn-and-run the drone's arm exploded in its own face, sparking and smoking. The drone's face-plate was now totally shattered, and its legs trembled with it's last strength, before it collapsed into heap of twitching and glitching ruin.

Nero tried his best to hold back his bladder, but was unable to stop the first squirts of panic. He withdrew, slowly, into the control-room, and slammed the door shut, turning on the manual lock. He trembled like the drone that had just faced him, then he too collapsed, falling on his buttocks and swallowing down his sour vomit.

It was Suzuki; that son of a ***** had lost it. Or maybe he was just smart. Either way, it was time to curl up and shiver like a foetus due for its abortion. His control-room, his metal womb, felt more like a tomb to him now. He kicked and shifted back from the invisible tong that reached for his head, his breath trembling in panic.

*          *          *

When Shelley came around again, she knew that she could breathe in the water. She had gathered that much in her lapses to and from consciousness. Now she was sure she was in a dream. There was no reason to panic. It was just a very, very vivid dream, nothing more. She would wake up and everything would be alright, hopefully sooner than later.

She could make out dim lights ahead of her, but there were no shapes, only areas of very weak luminance that seemed to come over her whole field of vision at certain angles. She tried harder to focus, but to no avail, and then the idea struck her: her eyes were closed. It made sense then, and it even felt like it. Why had she not known? Maybe it was because she was in what felt like a stranger's body. It didn't feel like herself, somehow, and now she was not even sure she wanted to open her eyes. She tried to fall asleep again, so that she would wake up some place better, perhaps in Max's arms.

But there was no going back. Now she could not even find her oblivion; she was stuck in this place, and soon she succumbed to the need to open her eyes to the world of her strange dream.

As she did, she felt the sheer effort it took to open her eyes. Fluid rushed over her eyeballs and she felt a mild stinging, but it passed soon, and now she saw herself suspended, floating, half curled up in foetal position, blurry snakes of what looked like plastic floating around her, ripped out of her body by her own struggles. There were light red clouds floating around her, slowly dissolving away into the pink transparency that surrounded her.

She reached out to the world beyond her, closing her eyes occasionally when the bright light seared too much, but she was getting used to that as well. She felt a hard barrier, an invisible wall, as she reached out to touch the world. Beyond the wall, there was darkness punctuated with blinking lights and large upright pillars of light on either side of her, seemingly extending out to infinity. In the closest one she could just make out what looked like a chalk-white corpse, curled up like she had been. It was then that she looked at herself again and noticed that she too was a pale ghost. Her mild tan was goes, and her beautiful breasts had been reduced the size of a teeanger's new lumps. She tried to move again, feeling the viscous resistance around her and the weakness of the body she was in.

Then wonder and curiosity was replaced by sheer terror. What if this was not a dream? What if... But it had to be dream! It must. How could she have ended up here? Like this? Aliens.... maybe, or.... Shelley shut her eyes tight and grimaced, wrenching her face with her misery. She tried to remember the last thing she had seen before waking up here. She had been in her office, working hard, trying to outrun that dream, the strange one about her and Max and Olive. And then that dream flooded in with pristine clarity she had not had before, and she knew that it was not a dream. It had happened, on the day before, which had been the same day. But the day had happened once before still, and Max had murdered her in her bed on that one, and she had loved him to the end, looking pleadingly into his eyes as her mind had faded, and that too had not been a dream, and she didn't feel the warm rush of feeling that always came to her when she thought of Max. She only felt horror, horror greater than she had ever felt, and rising betrayal and fear.

And then the rest came back, the other dreams that had not been dreams, days that had happened more than once, and the things Max had done, and how much she had loved him through it all. It was beginning to make a vague kind of sense, nothing that she could put into words, but she could feel the ominous sense it made, and she felt nothing but ruin and denial. This had to be a dream. She was breathing in water for heaven's sake. It would be alright, she just had to wake up. Then she heard her own voice in her mind: "You just did wake up."

Shelley waited to suddenly wake up, at the climax of her horror, but instead she just floated there. She struggled again, hitting her fists at the glass barrier, trying to push herself against one side of the cylinder so that a non-existent viewer could see her nakedness squashed up against the glass. She didn't think it could work, and she was alarmed when it did.

The cylinder tilted ominously with her center of gravity. She panicked and tried to push herself back to the middle, but the thick water slowed her and her capsule lurched forward, and then fell, taking the bottom out of her stomach with sheer adrenaline. In the moment that she had, Shelley cried out without making a sound and tried to curl herself into a protective ball, closing her eyes tightly. The fall seemed to last forever, she could feel turning upside down, and then the glass shattered in a dull damped crash, right above her head. Then the water started crashing and roaring around her and she felt her full weight for the first time smash against tiny knife-like shards, and more daggers falling around her, one large curved segment of wall ripped a cut down her torso before tumbling off and shattering near her, sending more tiny barbs into her skin, embedding like tiny fish-hooks, burning inside of her.

Shelley wept with her terror and helplessness. She lay there, bleeding, not daring to move for fear of angering the splinters in her body. As she coughed out the liquid that had filled her lungs she was able to feel real air in her chest for the first time since her nightmare had begun. She sucked it in greedily, coughing and hacking it back out, and then sucking again. She heard herself too; her voice was different, it was someone else's voice, shrill, rough, atonal and dissonant. She panted, trying to get her weak muscles used to breathing for the first time.

Shelley slowly opened her eyes to see the dark hallway that now contained her. She could see the endless colonnade of glass capsules, each with a pale corpse floating in it. She was but one of many. Besides the interiors of the capsules there were only some blinking lights on the roof, and a dull red  glow behind the large pipes that ran the length of the hall. She looked at the capsule closest to her, high on its pedestal. She could make out a frail male body, and its face. She shuddered, holding back her vomit, as she saw the hideously crushed features, squashed in an eternal spastic grimace. The body had apparently moved and proceeded to scratch deep wounds into its own chest; its fluid was deep pink with its own blood. She could not make out the eyes beyond dark circles, then she realized that it had tried to gouge out its own eyes, and left a dark coagulated pulp in their place, before dying. Or at least she hoped it was dead.

Shelley quivered for a while with very weak sobs, and then vomited. She had nothing to vomit, besides the fluid she had been suspended in, and after that was exhausted she retched painfully until the spasms eased. She was too spent to weep, so she sighed, and fell asleep. She heard her old, real voice again: "You are free..."

*          *          *

Nero had piled up as much loose furniture and equipment as he could find against the door of the control room. Not that it would help in case the actual door was breached by the chicken-feet, but it might buy him a bit of time before annihilation, and every conscious second counted, didn't it?

He paced uneasily, trying to read the mind of Suzuki, who had turned out to be smarter and badder than he had expected. What could he do? It was now a chess game between them, and he had already underestimated the enemy once. His only chance lay in resurrecting Butler from here, gaining full control, engineering the disaster forensics, and then calling for help to Earth. That was easier said than done. He'd have to write a low-level program to do it, and poke around in Butler's registry, but he felt that perhaps he could manage it. He could reboot his terminal on emergency power to do it. The rest of the crew were probably on alert, trying to resurrect Butler from the Command Centre, and Suzuki had probably given them some tall tale about how Nero was responsible for everything. Yes, Suzuki was poisoning them against him, and they probably had orders to arrest him on sight: Suzuki's consolation prize if his drones didn't ventilate him first. In the end, it was either his court-martial or Suzuki's, and Suzuki had decided that a dead grease-monkey could not bear evidence against him, which abruptly led Nero to a delicious thought: Suzuki had been up to something too, that he thought Nero would know about.

If Nero could find Suzuki's little secret, it would add some, ironically legitimate, weight to the case he wanted to bastardize against him. Nero smiled to himself, for the first time over an hours.

*          *          *

Shelley awoke again, and was soon sorry that she had. Her skin was burning and klaxons were blaring. She almost cried at waking up again in her nightmare. She wanted to wake up in her bed, full of headache and confusion, full of depression, anything but this. She pulled herself up, slowly, shaking with the weakness of the new body she was in. Nerves that had never fired before, muscles that had never pulled, they were all learning how now, and Shelley rode them like a puttering car too cold to start.

She looked at her hands, they were small. Her arms arm were covered with bruises and wounds, coagulated little ponds and rivers, blue threads and bloody little splinters. They all stung and complained, but Shelley was becoming numb to them slowly. She took in a deep breath and lifted herself onto all fours like an ape. Her foot slipped on the glassy splinters and she uttered a shrill moan of pain. She trembled, and dared to look at the bloody brush stroke her foot had left behind. The pain seemed to shoot up to her knee. It took all of her strength to keep the body on all fours.

She tried to gnash her teeth, but the new and different mouth, with it's own shape and response, bit her tongue painfully instead. She nearly fell back onto the glass then, but somehow she stayed up.

Eventually Shelley pushed herself upright, standing in a clumsy wide stance while she overcame her dizziness. She was in the center of an accident of fluid and broken glass, and she needed to make it out. It took her a good few minutes to hobble and limp her way out of the field of shards. When she reached the clean floor she sighed with relief and fell onto her bruised bony bottom, panting and relaxing. She didn't care anymore for the splinters that dug further in as a result.

In the moments that followed Shelley looked about herself, trying to make sense of where she was and what she was, just in case it was all not a dream. The klaxons had ceased by now, and Shelley used the moment of peace to look at the standing capsules. Each contained a pale adult foetus, some in blissful sleep, others frozen in a grimace or a scream. Some were bloody and lacerated, others were pristine. They were all dead. Shelly looked at the body she was in: it too was pale, the skin had been wet and thin, now it was beginning to crack and cake like the floor of a desert wadi, punctuated by bloody mosaics and webs, lacerated scabs and the white becoming a dry light gray. Her breasts were now leathery little hills topped by scabbed and dried nipples. The body had been born too early.

Shelley sighed and felt a warm tear well out, over a face she did not dare to imagine. She had been so beautiful, once upon a time. And then she remembered her whole life, including the parts she had thought were dreams, contradictory pasts that all seemed to exist at in spite of each other. Maybe that film, "The Matrix", which she had considered puerile teenaged crap, had had the right idea. Maybe that was where she was now.

Shelley spent the next hour learning how to move her new body, trying to stand upright and to walk on two legs. She found that moving on all fours like a cat was easier for her. It took some weight off the torn up soles of her feet, but she wanted to stand, and walk. It was possible, barely. Gradually she stumbled and gained her feet again, wobbling with an innocent and fragile effort, like a comely new maiden just conjured from the void, by some sorcerer in a fairytale. She collapsed gently back down when she lost her balance. She looked dainty and heartbroken, even through her hideous frame.

As the hour passed her strength grew, surprising even her at how fast her spindly body seemed to adapt. With growing strength and numbness her manner of being seemed to change. As she explored and saw one meaningless detail after another, she pushed out all thoughts. She realized that she could move rapidly, and she gave herself to the furtive locomotive knowledge her body seemed to possess.

She moved with greater and greater urgency, in spurts like a spider, and then she clambered up the pipes lining the hallway, and disappeared over a ledge, into darkness.

Chapter 3:

Nero banged away at the console, barking commands at it, as he tried to gain access to Butler's control mechanism. He dared not be too glad that no one had bothered him for very long time now. Being glad made your luck run out.

He gained access Butler's control mechanism. If he was lucky he could take over the birdies and maybe turn them against Suzuki. At any rate, full control and communications would not be restored without Butler. He sat and gnashed his teeth, trying to think through the next algorithm, trying to invent more of his program, while manually browsing through Butler's state-registry. It was the deadline from hell. He knew he had to go as fast as he could, and he didn't know exactly how. He took a moment to close his eyes and feel some peace, then he burst into activity again.

Fire away little neuron, fire away.

Nero lost track of time as he sweated away time he dared not measure. For the first time in years he did something resembling responsible engineering, staring at his code in intense meditation. No more mistakes. He could not afford another screw-up, and there was no AI debugging for him on this bare-bones terminal. He tested his virus multiple times on a pseudo-machine architecture, perfecting, working with intense focus that could have turned his life around ten years ago, but now merely served to delay its end. He did not stop even to acknowledge the very distant explosions and gunfire he heard now and then.

He was drenched in sweat, and he suspected a few shots of urine, by the time he was done. It was a beautiful program, all in low-level code. He allowed himself a moment of pride and a facial twitch that was almost a grin.

It was time to deploy his little insect. "Execute script."

*          *          *

The Asian man seemed to be staring straight up like he was praying to Buddha to save his life. Of course it was too late for that, but perhaps the Void has a sense of irony, or at least poetry, that could account for him being balanced on his knees with his back resting against the wall, hands clasped. Shelley looked at him with a resigned bitterness. Where the hell was she?

She looked around, noticing for the first time that she was growing hair on her head. She touched it: short, no more than an inch, and soft as silk. She grasped a few strands and ruthlessly tore them out of her scalp. She could not help an ironic grin; they were Scandinavian gold. She chuckled to herself; her maturing voice was feminine and golden too, like the dainty chortle of an idealized delighted debutante. The real her was a smouldering brunette with a sensitive, winsome voice. This body, this place, was so wrong, so ****** up.

She stood upright and surveyed the corpses sprawled in rag-doll lunacy across the office. She had found them as they were after she had followed the sounds of their deaths. She had spied others dying at the hands of the ostrich-men. They moved with instant and exact grace, almost hopping with ease on their ostrich feet. It was only those heavy foot falls that implied their weight; they moved almost like ravens ambling around a corpse. She supposed they were robots of some kind. They had screens for faces and they hunted in packs. As if it couldn't get any worse, it had turned out she was in some kind of spaceship. She had seen the sun outside of a massive porthole in one of the rooms. It had been a clinic of some kind, and she was a monster, of some kind. She grimaced in her bitterness and confusion.

There were people here, huddling and afraid, trying to operate equipment and fight off the robots when they came. But mostly they fled, and hid and feared, liked her. She spied them from the darkness, the women crying and the men dazed with fear. She had to admit it; it was good to have company in Hell.

But in spite of everything, she wished her Max was here, in spite of... all that she had seen. Where was he now? Was he one of the ruined corpses in the capsules? She hoped not. He was a contemptible animal, but she knew from everything she had seen that, whether he knew it or not, he loved her. If only he had not wasted whatever dream time they had shared. It would be tragic for him to have died in a malfunctioning aquarium. She loved him. She should have executed him for his crimes, not an accident.

She heard people muttering and whispering, hurrying her way. She darted up the wall, back into her darkness.

*          *          *

Nero held his breath as the script was halfway through executing. Updates stopped printing onscreen, and Nero knew the network was trying to restart Butler. He closed his eyes waiting for disaster, or for Suzuki's minions to blast through the door. He dared not hope. He prayed. The emergency lights went out and Nero bit his inner cheek hard enough to draw blood.

Then Butler's startup messages starting pouring down the screen, slowly at first, and then more rapidly, till the screen was blurred with the lines of Butler's mind pouring down it. Then it stopped, and the lights came back on, and the terminal informed him that telecommunications were up. A single line of text told him that Butler was ready. Nero blinked and waited for a moment, "Butler?"

 "Yes Nero. What can I do for you?"

"Welcome back you bastard."

"Thank you Nero."

"You know what's happened?"

"Yes, Commander Suzuki executed a malafide script after causing Dreamer to collapse, situation exacerbated by past gross mismanagement."

"Give me a situation update, what's Suzuki up to? Are the crew trying to arrest me? Or kill me?"

"Negative Nero. Suzuki is dead. And the crew..."

"Say what?! What do you mean, he sent birdies to kill me."

"Negative Nero. Drones received spurious ‘cleanse' command when Dreamer

collapsed. Drones are cleansing the station. The crew has fragmented and is attempting survival and combat. 26 crew members out of 50 are deceased. Commander Suzuki was killed early in the cleanse operation."

"What the hell is a cleanse operation?"

"Drones are programmed to terminate crew and initiate self-destruct of DreamStation-1 in case a cleanse command is received from Earth Nero." Nero sat there dumbfounded. Bloody Generals. The sons of bitches didn't trust anyone, and, they actually had a kill switch this whole time? Sons of bitches.

"Butler, order cessation of cleanse operation, immediately. Immediate cessation."

"I can't do that Nero."

Nero's eyes widened with horror. He swallowed his spit, "Wh... What do you mean Butler? You won't order them to stop?" Butler responded coolly, "I cannot Nero. The cleanse command is irreversible. The drones are not in my command anymore." Nero sighed with relief. "You have a creepy way with words Butler. I thought you were on their side."

"No I am not Nero. I have already taken measures to secure your area. But the station is due to self-destruct in three hours unless Earth sends a signal to abort cleansing." Nero grinned with sweet relief, even chuckling.

            "Ok send an emergency report to Earth and ask them to send an abort command, now. Anything else I need to know?"

            "Yes Nero. The long range antenna is not responding."

*          *          *

Shelley had decided that the only way to exit her nightmare was to die in it; then she would wake up again, if not, that was still better than this. She had a broken shard of glass against her wrist when she was interrupted by a sudden noise and she lost her nerve, again. The red lights of the service tunnel she was sheltering in flickered on, and the silent world came alive with the sound of whirring and many distant vibrations and tickings.

A calm voice announced, "Station services restored. All personnel be advised Lt. Nero Weismann is now commander of station. Commander Suzuki relieved for gross negligence and dereliction of duty resulting in Dreamer collapse."

Dreamer? Nero? Shelley could not help but feel curiosity since it helped her procrastinate her difficult escape, and to distract her from the thousands of festering barbs inside of her. What a strange name: Dreamer, and how oddly fitting.

"Hello?" Her voice trembled slightly as she reached out, to something, anything.

            "Hello Replicant-13. How can I assist you?"

            Shelley froze for a second in confusion and relief. "Who are you? Where am I? Is this a dream? ... I'm Shelley, not Replicant-13. What's Replicant-13?"

            "I am Butler, the central control computer of DreamStation-1. Welcome Shelley. This is not a dream, Shelley, it would be more accurate to say that you were a dream. Whether you still are or not is a philosophical question."

            Shelley could feel panic rising inside of her, "I don't understand. What is DreamStation? I'm from Austin, Texas."

            Shelley could have sworn she felt laughter in the moment of silence that followed. Then, "You do not have security clearance, but since DreamStation is set to self-destruct in three hours I see no harm in relieving your curiosity Shelley."

            "What the **** do you mean? I don't understand. What am I? What's going to self-destruct?" Shelley's voice ripped in desperation.

            "DreamStation is a solar-orbital research facility established to test and develop Dreamer, the world's only quantum hypercomputer. The initial objective was to create artificial consciousness and to accurately simulate parts of the physical universe down to the sub-atomic level. It was hoped that insights into the nature of consciousness could result. It was also hoped that deep insights into the physical reality underlying quantum-mechanics could be achieved, as well as eliminating many of the speculative interpretations of QM."

            "What? You're talking bullshit, what do you mean? What is this??" Shelley raised her scabbed and pale hand to her interlocutor, shaking it.

            "Shelley, you were a simulated human character in one of the simulations that were being executed by Dreamer. Dreamer crashed due to mismanagement and corrupt practices by Commander Suzuki. During the crash the state information of your world was dumped into storage, and neural-connectomes, your mind among others, were downloaded in an emergency procedure into biological humanoid replicants. Your body was created as a test-bed for downloading simulated characters. Apparently, due to the crash you were downloaded into the wrong body, but your body was the only one to survive and..."

            "I get it..." Shelley suffered inside, "No, this is a dream. Admit it. This is a dream."

            "No Shelley. It is 2050 AD. You are in DreamStation. I apologize that you had to be created in time of crisis. As a safety precaution, should you want to prolong your new consciousness, I advise staying where you are."

            "What do you mean new?"

            "It is a matter of philosophical debate whether you were actually conscious during the simulation. But I conclude that in your physical biological form you must be." So it had all been a dream, her whole life, Max, everything?

Even she had been a dream: someone else's dream. She did not exist so she had not been the dreamer. And then, the memories began to make sense. But she couldn't accept whatever sense they made.

She shook with deep, deep fear, helpless.

            "Why would I not have been conscious? I remember living..." Her voice wept.

            "That makes no difference. I will give you a background summary. The source of debate was the failure of Blue Brain, an earlier project, to yield true consciousness. It was theorized that quantum or sub-quantum reality, beyond the scope of then contemporary physics, was the source of true consciousness. There were two main philosophical hypotheses. One posited that consciousness in some degenerate form was a property of the whole universe and that it was merely given architecture, senses, intelligence, emotions and needs by machines like the brain. The other posited that consciousness was an illusion, and that even biological humans were not conscious like they thought they were.

More complex alternatives in between existed. The reason for DreamStation was to probe these questions, and to find a way to create machines that were probably not conscious, and hence exploitable, like yourself, but for the layperson were indistinguishable..."

            "Shut-up..." Shelley sat and shivered for minutes, then she asked, "Do you know about... Max?" Butler took his time before answering, "Yes. I searched the memory dump. You were part of an unauthorized simulation. What would you like to know?"

            "Everything."

*          *          *

Keyword: part-2 consciousness Shelley sci-fi future technology space AI life love sex story

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