Against Gravity

And then he was inside it.

It was all terrifyingly familiar.

Kendrick let his POV drift forward until it was near the centre of one of the cylinder's two main chambers. Then he set it to a slow rotation. Grass rippled far below – or perhaps above – and, watching the windowscreen, he felt a strange tug in the area of his stilled heart.

Far down the length of the station he saw a dense cluster, like a swarm of locusts, hovering in the air. Then they were moving, uncountable minute dots growing denser one moment, thi

Kendrick reached out with his wand to shut the simulation down, his mouth suddenly dry. It came to him that if his heart were still capable of beating, it would be rattling like a drill in its cage of ribs.

This was the point at which he became aware he was not, in fact, alone.

"Caroline?"

He stood up. Something had moved in the bedroom, making a sound. He swore at himself, several possible explanations for his presence here competing for his attention all at once. Stupid, stupid bastard, he thought. He hadn't even looked in there properly.

He put his hand against the bedroom door and pushed gently. Caroline stood at the far end of the room, naked, staring out over the rooftops. She didn't react or even turn round as he entered. Something was very wrong.

"Caroline, are you all right? What are you…?"

Kendrick's voice trailed off then. No reaction, no sign that she was even aware of his presence.

He stepped up to her, reaching out a hesitant hand to her shoulder. He moved around to her side, and was shocked at what he saw. Her augments had turned rogue: thick ropes of augment-growth lay under her skin, wrapping themselves around her spine and ribcage. They hadn't yet spread up past her neck, which explained how she'd managed to keep her condition hidden from him.

Kendrick wondered if she had become catatonic, which happened when the augments interfered too much with the central nervous system, effectively reducing the mind to a prisoner in a bony cell.

Caroline's expression remained vacant and he noticed that she appeared to be gazing upwards, past the rooftops and into the sky. He touched her chin, carefully turning her face towards him. He wanted to lead her away from the window, get her back into some clothes – anything.

Out of the corner of his eye, Kendrick noticed Caroline's own wand sitting on a table by the bed. So it must have been her who had picked up on the line when he'd called.

And then, finally, her stare locked on to his. He felt a seizure rushing on him like an express train.

A white-hot comet exploded inside Kendrick's head, and Caroline's face reeled away from him as he tumbled to the floor, her expressionless gaze shifting fractionally to follow his descent. He screamed as pain rippled like fire through every part of his being. As he screamed again, his tongue burned like molten lead.

Kendrick prayed for death, for a cessation of such terrible, overwhelming pain. He lay at her feet and his back arched and twisted as he writhed on the carpet, desperate to escape his own body.

It was the boy with the butterfly wings again.

Kendrick could see his face more clearly now, and wondered what it was about it that looked so familiar. The wings were beautiful and diaphanous, two or three times larger than the diminutive torso from which they grew. The eyes were tiny azure things like gems glittering in that curiously blank face.

The idea that he somehow knew who the boy was haunted Kendrick. I could swear I'm really in this place, he thought. For the bedroom was gone, and all around him the walls of the world curved up to meet each other. Shimmering shapes of bright energy flickered across the landscape, and a sound came to Kendrick's ears, barely audible, as if a million-strong choir was humming quietly to itself, somewhere very far away.

He strained to listen, remembering the background sound he had heard when he'd called Caroline from the market earlier: like listening to the whole world having a conversation at once. But instead of cacophony everyone could understand everything that was being said. A perfect meeting of minds…

And then the Archimedes was gone as abruptly as it had appeared, and Kendrick found himself back in the real world. The pain vanished as if it had never been.

"Well, sunshine, fancy meeting you here."

Kendrick blinked, hauled himself up, and found himself kneeling in a pool of his own sweat and vomit. Peter McCowan crouched next to him, hands clasped on his knees, gri

Kendrick looked around wildly, then saw Caroline slumped on the floor beneath the window.

"Peter, what the-? Oh, Christ." He rolled over onto his hands and knees, pulling himself upright. As he leant over Caroline, he saw that she was still breathing.

"I was just dropping by."

"You're not even here. I'm going fucking crazy."

"Aye, well, there's the thanks you get," Peter sighed, pulling himself upright and wandering out of the bedroom.

The grey skies outside had been replaced by the begi

Now he lifted Caroline up by the arms and manhandled her into her bed. Her head lolling, she made a guttural grunting sound, her eyes rolling wildly under their lids. As he pulled the duvet over her she twisted into it. She mumbled something incomprehensible, but as far as he could tell she was out of the bizarre fugue state that he'd found her in. Now she appeared to be sleeping naturally.

Kendrick shook his head numbly, and followed after McCowan. He found him in the kitchen.

"Two sugars, right?" Peter banged cupboard doors open and shut until he found the tin marked Sugar. Kendrick watched as the ghost poured hot water into two mugs before sinking into one of the chairs by the kitchen table. The ghost reached for an open carton of milk and dribbled it into each of the mugs, spilling almost as much on the table.

McCowan pushed one across the table towards Kendrick, slopping even more tea out of the mug. The hot liquid began to soak into a small pile of paper magazines and an eepsheet. Kendrick sat down opposite, gingerly sliding the magazines and 'sheet away from the growing pool.

Then he stopped and stared at the two mugs. Ghosts just didn't make cups of tea. If he picked up his own tea, that would make the thing sitting across the table from him objectively real. He made no move to pick up the mug.

Kendrick licked his lips. "Who are you?"

"Peter McCowan. Probably." Kendrick started to say something, but the other man held his hands out in a stop gesture. "I'll qualify that. I'm Peter McCowan. I am also, to a lesser extent, you, and also Caroline, and anyone else I ever knew who was also involved in Ward Seventeen back in the Maze. So, to rephrase things, I'm Peter McCowan – but that's not necessarily the same thing as the Peter McCowan."

Kendrick remembered the Peter McCowan he'd known: a charming rogue whose apparent ability to talk his way out of almost any bad situation had deserted him the day he arrived at the Maze.

Kendrick shook his head. "I keep thinking that Caroline is going to walk in here and see me talking to a blank wall. I thought you were some kind of hallucination, but I'm not sure anyone can have this kind of conversation with a hallucination. In which case, I don't know what you are."

"It's a good question. Let's just say the augment technology they put in me in the Maze had the unexpected side-benefit of preserving the memories and thoughts from a dead mind. As to why it should do so, well, it constitutes a self-evolving cybernetic organism in its own right. Maybe preserving such things increases its ability to survive. Maybe Draeger intended that. Or maybe I'm just a cooperative community of nanites, several tens of thousands of generations beyond the ones that first inhabited my body, which only thinks it's me. Either way, my advice to you remains the same. Don't go back to Hardenbrooke."