Nightmares and Clematis

I did sleep but something strange happened. I was in a small room, and there was a huge noise, as if something large and mechanical was banging on the wall. And then this non-human body was sitting on my body, and it had coarse fur and its tail was hitting me repeatedly. It didn’t hurt but it was still scary. I cried out…

And woke up. I was in my cubicle in the quiet little dormitory room we had chosen for sleep, with low Day 1 sunlight visible through a half drawn curtain.

Naomi was sitting cross-legged outside the cubicle . ‘Are you OK?’ she asked. ‘You were crying out.’

I wasn’t sure if I was OK and said so. Strange disconnected thoughts were running through my head, and peculiar colours.

Naomi closed her eyes and her face twitched a little, and I felt a slight tickling sensation in my brain. I realised that she was breaking our low-tech rules, checking on my mental state properly.

‘OK so you had a dream,’ she said. ‘They used to call them nightmares when they were like that. You should recover quickly.’ She gave me some water to drink, and after a while I went back to sleep.

I woke up early & wrote what you read above, or most of it. Then fell asleep again. When I got up, the others were gone. I grabbed a picture of the room then went down to the restaurant.

From the passageway I heard Naomi’s voice. ‘He clearly passes the sentience test so we can’t just…’ She stopped as I came into the room.

Darina looked up at me and grinned. ‘How are you feeling?’

My stomach and chest felt curiously cold. I think I was frightened.

When I didn’t say anything, Darina nodded, said, ‘We were just wondering if you want to have a restart. You know, take the backup copy of the embodiment station record and install you in a new body. You’re not very comfortable in that one, are you?’

The cold feeling in my torso increased. My throat was dry. It was true, this body wasn’t functioning very well. It was a sensible suggestion, but…

‘It means we’d have to wait until the next Lunar day for the walk,’ said Rick. ‘But I guess that’s not an issue after 55 years.’ He didn’t look very happy about it, though. His fist was clenched on the black enamel of the breakfast table. He was wearing a gold ring on one of the fingers.

‘I checked the availability for re-incorporation,’ said Naomi. ‘They’ve got a large monkey, pretty similar to human and it’s got full mental capabilities. They could get it ready in a couple of days.’

‘Gives us time to rework the template,’ commented Carys, chewing on a croissant. I noticed there were flakes of pastry all over his bright red jumper. ‘Don’t mean to be rude, Paolo, but I think we overdid the state of blessed ignorance thing. Your mind’s a blank slate. That’s the reason you’re having nightmares.’

‘I think I’d rather not.’

It was only in the silence that followed that I realised it was me who had spoken.

‘I mean – I’d lose everything since we arrived, wouldn’t I?’

Naomi frowned. I noticed she also had pieces of pastry on her jumper, which was yellow. ‘We might be able to do a low-level transfer.’

‘Not to a different template,’ said Rick. ‘Some things are actually impossible, whether we like it or not.’ He looked up at me. ‘Half a day’s not much. How old are we? Nearly all of that billion days, isn’t it? 2.7 million years!’

‘Which is old enough to know better.’ It was Ava’s voice, curiously light and wobbly. She was standing by the table and had pulled a chair back. ‘Come on, Paolo, sit down and get some coffee at least. If you don’t want to restart, you don’t have to. We go on as we are.’ She smiled brightly at Rick. ‘Clematis walk in half an hour, yes?’

The Clematis Walk begins with a single plant and a dark slab of stone. There is no inscription on the stone, just those bright crystals you can see in my picture. But all of us knew that in our previous state we would have experienced directly the words embedded in the fabric of its matter, the same words that are present in a trillion other stones throughout inhabited space:

‘FOR ALL THE DEAD’.

It had been a long time since any part of our Company had been in a human body, but we all knew what to do – even me, with my blank slate of a mind. Without a word, we stopped and turned to face the stone, then stood, heads bowed, silent, for the pulse of sixty seconds.

Then we walked on. Everywhere, there were Clematis – purple, green, magenta, white, cream, blue. Apparently it was the first plant to flower on the true Lunar surface, when they put the sky in.

After a few minutes Carys dropped back, gently took my arm and said, ‘Sorry about what we said back there, Paolo. It was a bloody stupid idea. We’ll look after you.’

Ava looked back over her shoulder, and her face was bright with a smile. She too slowed, took my other arm, and we walked on between the flowers.