Starfish

It's very quiet in a Ganzfeld. Usually the temporal and occipital lobes seethe with input, signals strong enough to swamp any competition. When those fall silent, though, the mind can sometimes make out faint whispers in the darkness. It imagines scenes that have a curious likeness to those glowing on a television in some distant room, perhaps. Or it feels a faint emotional echo, familiar but not, somehow, first-hand.

Statistics suggest that these sensations are not entirely imaginary. Experts of an earlier decade — people much like Yves Scanlon, except for their luck in being in the right place at the right time — have even found out where the whispers come from.

It turns out that protein microtubules, permeating each and every neuron, act as receivers for certain weak signals at the quantum level. It turns out that consciousness itself is a quantum phenomenon. It turns out that under certain conditions conscious systems can interact directly, bypassing the usual sensory middlemen.

Not a bad payoff for something that started a hundred years ago with halved ping-pong balls taped over someone's eyes.

Ganzfeld. That's the ticket. Don't talk about the ease with which these creatures stare through you. Forget the endpoint: dissect the process.

Take control.

I believe some sort of Ganzfeld Effect may be at work here. The dark, weightless abyssal environment might impoverish the senses enough to push the signal-to-noise ratio past threshold. My observations suggest that the women may be more sensitive than the men, which is consistent given their larger corpus callosa and consequent advantage in intercortical processing speed..

Whatever the cause of this phenomenon, it has yet to affect me. Perhaps it just takes a little time.

Oh, one other thing. I was unable to find any record of Karl Acton using the medical scanner. I've asked Clarke and Brander about this, neither could remember Acton actually using the machine. Given the number of injuries on record for everyone else, I find this surprising.

* * *

Yves Scanlon sits at the table and forces himself to eat with a mouth gone utterly dry. He hears the vampires moving downstairs, moving along the corridor, moving just behind him. He doesn’t turn around. He mustn’t show any weakness. He can’t betray any lack of confidence.

Vampires, he knows now, are like dogs. They can smell fear.

His head is full of sampled sounds, looping endlessly. You’re not among friends here, Scanlon. Don’t make us into enemies. That was Brander, five minutes ago, whispering in Scanlon’s ear before dropping down into the wetroom. And Caraco click click clicking her bread knife against the table until he could barely hear himself think. And Nakata and that stupid giggle of hers. And Patricia Rowan, sometime in the imagined future, sneering Well if you can't even handle a routine assignment without starting a revolt it's no wonder we didn't trust you…

Or perhaps, echoing back along a different timeline, a terse call to the GA: We lost Scanlon. Sorry.

And underlying it all, that long, hollow, icy sound, slithering along the floor of his brain. That thing. That thing that nobody mentions. The voice in the abyss. It sounds nearby tonight, whatever it is.

Not that that matters to the vampires. They’re sealing their ‘skins while Scanlon sits frozen at the end of his meal, they’re grabbing their fins, dropping outside in ones and twos, deserting him. They’re going out there, with the moaning thing.

Scanlon wonders, over the voices in his head, if it can get inside. If this is the night they bring it back with them.

* * *

The vampires are all gone. After a while, even the voices in Scanlon’s head start to fade. Most of them.

This is insane. I can't just sit here.

There’s one voice he didn’t hear tonight. Lenie Clarke just sat there through the whole fiasco, watching. Clarke’s the one they look to, all right. She doesn't talk much, but they pay attention when she does. Scanlon wonders what she tells them, when he’s not around.

Can’t just sit here. And it’s not that bad. It’s not as though they really threatened me —

You’re not among friends here, Scanlon.

— not explicitly.