The Soul Continuum Read online

  Medallion Press, Inc.

  Dedicated to my wife, Ruth,

  who would probably stop baking me cakes and biscuits if it weren’t!

  Published 2015 by Medallion Press, Inc.

  4222 Meridian Parkway, Suite 110, Aurora, IL 60504

  The MEDALLION PRESS LOGO

  is a registered trademark of Medallion Press, Inc.

  Copyright © 2015 by Simon West-Bulford

  Cover design by James Tampa

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the Library of Congress.

  Typeset in Adobe Garmond Pro

  ISBN # 9781605426471

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  No matter how much thought and effort an author puts into writing a novel, it would fall short without the support of many good people. This book is no exception, and I am very grateful to everyone who helped me.

  My wife, Ruth, is the cornerstone of that support, enduring many an hour of me talking at her about plot holes! Then there are the other writers whose talent and critical eye never fail to amaze me and improve my writing. Top of that list is Gayle Towell, but Grigori Black, Nicholas Karpuk, and Brett Fowler all helped shape the early draft.

  There are a lot of friends I want to acknowledge too. I am always stunned that there are people out there who love to read the crazy stuff that comes out of my head, and it’s their enthusiasm which keeps me excited about writing. Beverley Champ and Ned Dunkley, Carrie and Andrew Anderson, Gill Clark, Jenny Gray, Gill Davidson, Barry Moore, Bruce Lecus, John Steadman, Michelle, Mo, Jazz, Richard—thanks, guys! I wish I had room to list everyone.

  As always, I am very thankful to Medallion for publishing my work, but I am especially glad to have worked with Emily Steele and Traci Post, who did a fantastic job with the editing. And not forgetting James Tampa: I love the cover!

  PROLOGUE

  salem ben

  Am I alive or am I dead?

  Trapped inside a corpse’s head.

  And is it you I see through now,

  With fitful heart and fevered brow?

  “No,” you say?

  What makes you certain?

  For all have drawn that final curtain.

  I do not trust the man before me. Standing there sinister and intimidating. The wide smile on his face reminds me of reptiles: cold-blooded. Measured. Calculating, as if he knows my every move before I decide to make it and wants me to know it with one simple look. He smells of blood—not literally, but I sense the stench of a million deaths clinging to him, and it seems he is proud of this persona; even his clothes boast of danger. He wears a shocking red suit I recognize only from a brief period of Old Earth’s twenty-second century, and the press is so immaculate it gives me the impression he slid inside it like a snake. Together with his night-black shirt, bloodred tie, sleek ebony shoes, and pristinely smoothed blond hair, this man has all the poise of a character the people of his era might have considered to be the devil himself. Though I know he is not. But what chills me more than anything else about him is that I know those burning eyes, because they are mine.

  He has a ring on the third finger of his left hand, but his right hand is gloved, and he holds a fat jewel that is pulsing with indigo light. He tosses it up as if it is an apple or a ball, and he tells me he took it from the cane of the crumpled old man in burnt monk’s garb now shivering at his feet, probably in shock. I have no idea who the old man is, but I feel even more trepidation about him than about the snake in the red suit.

  “It’s understandable that you don’t trust me,” the reptile man says, still toying with the jewel. “You’re not quite yourself yet, and it still might take a few more minutes before you are. Unfortunately, our circumstances don’t permit us to delay. For now you just need to use your eyes. You can trust those . . . can’t you? Just look around.” There is no joy in his eyes as his smile stretches like plastic.

  “It’s not a question of trust,” I tell him. “I can’t think clearly yet.”

  “That’s exactly why it is a question of trust. You have to do what I tell you. If you don’t, you will live out the rest of your days in regret. Is that what you want?”

  Despite his protestations of urgency, I am in no hurry to answer him. I refuse to give him the satisfaction of knowing he has the advantage, though my temporary identity crisis and fractured memory make it obvious he does. Instead I turn my back on him to survey the scorched shell that is barely recognizable as a Soul Sphere, trying to piece together some semblance of the man I was, whilst trying to take in everything this man has been telling me. He tells me that the Soul Consortium was almost completely destroyed while I was living Jamelia Strong’s life. My entire home—almost every sphere that makes up the Soul Consortium—has been crippled by our conflict with the feeble old man at the reptile’s feet, or the malign presence that apparently possesses him. It almost succeeded in altering the universal laws of physics to fulfill a desire I could never comprehend, the reptile Salem tells me. The entire universe would cease in its eternal cycles, and future life would never have the chance to rise again. Or so he says.

  Smoke clouds the emerald light of the huge sphere in which we stand, and it dims even the many lights of the recorded souls that fill this place. So many lives still to live and experience. So many memories to cherish or endure. I have seen through so many eyes. I have gazed in terrified awe at the sight of humanity’s first sun as it devoured billions of years of history in a swell of interstellar fire; delighted at the sight of the first newborn dolphins on our first colonized world; exulted in the announcement that the Chaos Wars were over; wept over the last brushstroke of Van Borgorchev’s final work of art; brushed my hands over the great walls of Mortis IV. I have experienced all of that and so much more. I chose to live all those lives. But now this man asks me—as a matter of extreme urgency—to experience a life that should not even be present among the archives of the dead: my own.

  Even darker now that it is shrouded in smoke, the WOOM, the thing that immerses me into another’s life, waits for me in the center of the sphere like the chrysalis of some monstrous insect. The black shell, still glistening in the emerald light like wet skin, opens its lips to invite me in.

  “Are you going to take much longer?” says the reptile, the other Salem. He lifts his left arm, slowly pulling up his red sleeve to examine something with ticking dials on his wrist. “I did warn you that we won’t have much time once we have removed him from the WOOM.” He stops tossing the jewel, taking a moment to examine it nonchalantly. “Don’t be deceived by his appearance. Keitus Vieta here is the most dangerous entity you are ever likely to meet.” He gazes down at the shivering old man, who looks back at him like a child needing its mother. “He can’t be killed—you tried. He can’t be persuaded—you tried that too. And he can’t be allowed to remember who he truly is. Subtracting him prematurely while he was living your life will confound him for a while—he thinks he’s baby Salem—but he is not from this universe and Qod believed there is real danger that his true nature will resurface. Even if we place him in stasis, he’ll eventually find a way out.”

  “So how do you plan to be rid of him?”

  “Be rid of him?” Red Salem laughs. “Didn’t you just hear me? We can’t get rid of him. Our onl
y hope is that we keep him confused. I’ll keep putting him in one of the WOOMs in one of the other spheres so that he keeps living different lives while you’re in there living your own life.” He taps his temple. “Somewhere up there in that brain of your dead life is the secret to his demise and the means to return Qod to us. You remember Qod, don’t you? Your only friend and companion?”

  Qod’s absence is something I cannot bear. Incorporeal intelligence or not, her presence when I am not immersed in somebody else’s life is all that keeps me sane. She is my conscience when I think of ending it all and my companion when I don’t. Where she has gone, I don’t know, but Red Salem tells me that Keitus Vieta is responsible.

  “You have to find it all out,” Salem says, “and when you come out, you’ll have all your own memories back again. Won’t that be good?” The fake smile has not left his face.

  I know he is lying about something, but separating the lies from the truth is impossible for me in this condition. I had only a few minutes to reassimilate after I finished living the life of Jamelia Strong from the Palomino colonies. She was a young soldier who had lived a wonderful life until her last fifty days, when she was captured and interrogated by the enemy. Torture and brainwashing left her vulnerable and pliable before she was eventually killed, and this is what has left me in such a delicate state after immersion. It takes approximately sixteen minutes for the brain to return to normal after the neural flush is executed, but less than five passed before I was pulled unceremoniously from the WOOM. I had the vague notion that I was really someone else but was mostly convinced that I was still Jamelia, rescued from captivity in a war zone. I did not realize that the devastation around me was actually the swiftly collapsing Soul Consortium.

  I was dragged out of the Martyr Sphere half-delirious and carried through dark corridors shuddering with explosions, falling girders, and electrical fires. And then I died en route. I think I died several more times, and with each death, the Soul Consortium genoplants brought me back, cloning my body and instantly mapping my consciousness into a freshly generated brain, but then the room I was resurrected in was destroyed and I was reborn in another genoplant and then another. One of them even lost power halfway through the process. I was incredibly fortunate to come back at all, but when I eventually regained consciousness in the final genoplant, the Consortium’s nanodrones had managed to establish better control, and the rate of repair started to overtake the rate of collapse. The Soul Consortium was safe again, and the damage wrought by the struggle with Keitus Vieta would be reversed.

  Most of this I learned from him, the other Salem Ben, who came to find me seconds after my final resurrection. He told me that in the midst of the confusion and the destruction, the malfunctioning genoplants had created several duplicates of me, he being one of them, and that certain personality traits had been impacted by the damage, which was why his personality was somewhat different from mine. He led me here to this other Soul Sphere, a place I did not even know existed, called the Aberration Sphere, where Keitus Vieta was discovered.

  Conveniently, he does not have the time to explain further and is evasive about how I am able to live my own dead life, and why Keitus Vieta was already doing that, and how he seems to know so much about it all. He just wants me to trust him and, swept up in this whirlwind of information, chaos, and delirium, fresh from the paranoia and psychological wreckage that came from Jamelia’s life, I find myself agreeing.

  “A wise choice, my friend,” he says, then looks up. “Control core, initiate WOOM protocols. Select subject 9.98768E+14 and immerse”—he slaps my back hard—“this man.”

  Subject 9.98768E+14: Select.

  Subject 9.98768E+14: Aberration detected.

  Subject 9.98768E+14: Override authorized—ID Salem Ben.

  Subject 9.98768E+14: Activate. Immersion commences in three minutes.

  A stream of black fibers weaves its way from the walls of the sphere to scoop me up toward the waiting chrysalis. I look down at the other Salem as I drift upward, see the glare of his red suit clash against the emerald glow of the Aberration Sphere, and panic for the last time about whether I am doing the right thing. He examines the jewel again, apparently uninterested in my frantic questions and fearful pleas, and puckers his lips as if considering carefully what he should do with the gemstone. In the last few seconds before I am fetched into the WOOM, I see him place the jewel back on Vieta’s cane. He nods smugly, satisfied with his decision, looks up at me, then smiles his reptile smile again as he waves good-bye.

  “Will you be here when I wake?” I call after him as the lips seal.

  “Oh,” he says, “you know what they say, Salem. ‘There’s one born every minute,’ right?”

  A tiny spot of light hovers in front of the WOOM, and an uncomfortable mix of fear and curiosity wells up inside me as I consider what it would mean to live one’s own life.

  The sparkling dot shoots forward.

  The lips of the chrysalis close.

  Darkness falls.

  salomi deya

  The greatest evil one may behold

  Is not of dictators, killers, or maniacs,

  But of freedom from conscience

  The loss of one’s soul

  ONE

  My mother has changed. I feel it when she tucks me in at night, when her soft palm strokes my forehead, and I hear it in her voice when she whispers gently to me in the dark at my bedside. She asks the same question every night, when Nature has silenced the bay and chirp of the day and the only light shining in through the cottage window comes from gentle moonbeams; she asks when she thinks I am sleeping, when she believes I will not reply—because if I answer yes, she will be grief-stricken, and if I answer no, she will still be grief-stricken. She asks if I see bad things in my dreams. The answer is no. Waking or sleeping, I never see bad things—and besides, I don’t dream.

  Yes, Mother has changed; I see it in the daytime, too. Not in a way that would be noticed by others but in the way she holds herself when she thinks I am not watching, like the laboratory investigator she killed—she has the same stoop, holding her stomach, her eyes closed and her mouth frowning with the pain. But she never falls like the man did. Instead she sees me looking, then straightens up and puts on a smile.

  She told me this would be a new beginning for us. She said, with her teeth gritted, that I should forget our old life and that she would never let anyone come near me again. But all I could do at the time was focus on the teardrop trembling on the end of her nose. Twinkling and perfectly round, it was beautiful. Her fingertips dug so hard into my arms that the bruises were there for a week. She didn’t mean to hurt me, I know that, but she was desperate for me to understand, as if the harder she squeezed and the more intensely she stared into my eyes, the better chance she had at projecting her feelings into me. But she knows I am incapable of feeling her fear or distress. I have never known what those emotions are like. I have a unique disease, and I am—as she describes it—“burdened by the curse of perpetual happiness.”

  She turned her face away after saying that, and although I hugged her, pressing my cheek into her back, I could not stop her crying. She wants me to understand what grief is like, but if I ever do, she will never forgive herself.

  It got worse for her after we moved.

  We live in an eco-bubble now. A little hideaway world, no bigger than an asteroid, concealing a population of three hundred and twenty refugees. It is indistinguishable amongst a multitude of—as yet—unpopulated eco-bubbles just like it, skimming the chromosphere of a very special brown dwarf, called Saliel. Its real name is THA197191, but Mother wanted to rename it after my great-grandmother, who was supposed to be a healer. And that is why we came here: for me to be healed.

  I don’t know if this little world will ever really feel like home, but at least there is an imaging grid surrounding it that makes the eco-bubble seem familiar and safe; there is something called an Absorption Tower powering it. It is over a mile high and dra
ws electricity from the atmosphere to channel it into an underground control center. Sometimes, when the atmosphere is at its most violent, we can see the swirling coppery-green sky through huge storm cracks in the imaging grid just above the tower. Mother says it is the charged reaction of titanium oxide and vanadium oxide with the oxygen in our bubble that makes the sky look that way, but I like to imagine we are living on one tiny space pea amongst thousands, swirling around in a thick boiling soup that’s being stirred by a giant star spoon. Except we don’t feel the movement or the heat.

  Most days, when the storms are calmer and we don’t see the real sky, the eco-bubble makes this world look just like our old country home. Through the window I can admire the beach and a line of tall white houses skirting the borders of the grassy plains a mile from shore, a scattering of smooth boulders for the sea foam to froth upon. I can even see gulls circling above them, hunting for scraps. Sometimes it’s hard to believe it is all an illusion, created especially for me and others like me, so that the trauma of our treatment will be cushioned by a homey setting. Or so my mother hopes.

  “Salomi, come away from the window. It’s time for your medication.”

  Fake though it is, Mother has that wonderful smile I love so much. There are little dimples on either side of her mouth that are so cute, and her nose wrinkles just a tiny bit. I think, every time I see her, I feel a little bit happier than before, and I love her just a little bit more too.

  “Come here.” She has her arms open and she wriggles her fingers in eager anticipation of a hug, and I am only too happy to oblige.