Wormhole (The Rho Agenda #3)(50)
Dr. Jacobs rose to his feet, patted her hand again, and turned toward the door. Volker switched off his iPad and followed.
“Can I at least go to the bathroom?”
“I’ll have a nurse bring a bedpan.”
“Doctor.” Heather raised her voice just enough to cause him to turn back toward her. “Right now my alternate reality looks pretty damn good.”
Jacobs’s face acquired a sympathetic cast. “You can’t beat this by yourself, Heather. But we can. You just have to let me in.”
As the door closed behind them, Heather concentrated on their footfalls, the sounds plus their echoes rendering an image in her mind. A hallway, all right. Eleven and a half feet wide, ten feet tall, and really, really long. Another piece of her facility blueprint filled in. And when the nurse brought her the bedpan, Heather would see whether it was the same one who had assisted Dr. Sigmund.
Heather looked up at the camera, then closed her eyes, gradually letting her vital signs drop. They expected her to be exhausted, so she’d feed them the data they wanted.
Heather smiled inwardly at the thought.
Just like training Pavlov’s dog.
Deep in her drug-induced dreams, Jennifer found herself at the McFarland breakfast table, seated beside Mark and Heather as Mrs. McFarland set the platter, stacked high with her golden-brown pancakes, at the table’s center. She recognized the scene. It was the morning after she and Mark had shared Heather’s dream about the Rag Man. She watched it unfold around her, a disembodied ghost, unable to make herself known to any of the participants. With a pang of regret, Jennifer knew those days were gone forever.
The dream shifted to another morning at the McFarland table. Her other self glanced at Heather, who seemed unusually distracted this morning.
“What’s up with Heather?” she heard herself think.
Heather lifted her gaze to Jennifer’s. “What was that?”
It was as if Heather had heard her, even though she hadn’t said the thought aloud.
Again the dream shifted, this time to the night she’d run from her room to meet Mark at the top of the stairs. Heather had called out to them in pain and terror, her thoughts reaching into their minds as she’d been carried off by the Rag Man. And her thoughts had guided Mark through that dark night to find her.
These experiences were completely different from Jennifer’s ability to read and influence people’s emotions. She, Mark, and Heather had been able to share their thoughts. And they’d done it without wearing the alien headsets. How? And why hadn’t they managed to do that same thing on demand?
Her questions focused her thoughts, pushing back the drug haze as she called upon her brain for answers. She felt a chill run down her spine. Finding the answers to those questions suddenly acquired an importance that drove her to an ever-tighter level of concentration.
Jennifer shoved the drug haze aside, isolating its effects to a small portion of her mind as she called upon the full extent of her analytical abilities. The alien headsets were the key. She was sure of it.
The first time she’d stood inside the Bandolier Ship and felt the headset establish a link between her brain and the ship’s computer, she’d felt it alter her brain, not exactly rewiring the connections, but forcing activity across the entire structure. Neural connections that had been so weak that they were dormant had come to life, able to be accessed and put to work in ways that had previously been impossible.
When she, Mark, and Heather put on the headsets, they could share thoughts. In fact, if they weren’t careful, the others could penetrate into private areas, accessing thoughts and feelings not meant for sharing. Jennifer thought about that. The headset picked up the thoughts from their minds, transferring the impulses to the Bandolier Ship via a subspace link. But how had they occasionally managed to establish a similar link between themselves without the headsets?
Distances weren’t the same in subspace. It wasn’t the same as the way gravitational effects warped the space-time fabric. Instead, subspace had its own wave transmission speed, and that relationship between time and distance defined their meaning just as the speed of light did in our universe.
Jennifer had seen it for herself, had used it to hack into remote networks, accessing their data through the subspace receiver-transmitters or SRTs. In the case of the computer hack, the system hadn’t required a physical device at the far end to achieve a tap.
A sudden excitement coursed through Jennifer’s nerves, presaging a great discovery that nudged the corner of her awareness. She only had to relax and let down the wall that held it back. The answer was right there, so frustratingly close she could almost reach out and touch it.
Why did the computer subspace hack work? You focused the SRT on an exact coordinate and then scanned for computer signals in the vicinity. Since all signals leaked a small fraction of their energy into subspace, it became a matter of efficient tuning and filtering to pick out the desired information from the background noise.
But the headsets provided the powerful alien computer with a target for its subspace probe, providing exact coordinates for the link, as well as a unique personal encryption key that tagged each of the starship’s crewmen, akin to credentials for a secure wireless network connection.
Once the link had been established, the Bandolier Ship’s computer remembered it, recognizing that crewman’s signal whenever it encountered its subspace signature. But did the computer really need the headset to make contact after that?