[34] The World He Promised

My body felt heavy.

The first thing my eyes registered was the familiar pattern of opus tessellatum beneath me.

Small pieces of dark stone ran together in a pattern I knew well. Beyond them, framed stills seemed to hang sideways in the air, furniture rising strangely from one side of my vision.

...No. They weren't sideways. I was.

The moment I became aware of the heaviness, it seemed to lose its hold on me. I planted a hand against the floor and pushed myself upright.

Why was I lying on the floor?

I didn't know how long I had been there. Whatever reason I might have had to move didn't seem important anymore.

I looked around.

Dark wooden shelves lined one wall, crowded with old books, folders and familiar objects arranged exactly where I expected them to be. A heavy desk sat beneath the window, covered in paper notes, an old brass lamp, a compact data terminal and several small instruments connected by thin cables.

Nothing about the room felt unfamiliar. Even the small details were where they should have been.

I crossed to the bed and sat down, the mattress dipping beneath me.

For a while, I simply stared ahead.

There was a chair near the window. I knew that chair. Dark wood. High back. One leg had always sat slightly uneven against the floor. For a moment, a thin metal frame ran beneath it. But a second later, it was wood again.

Near the lamp sat a black rectangle with a smooth glass surface and rounded edges. I couldn't remember putting it there. By the time my attention returned to the desk, only a stack of papers remained.

The light above me hummed. There shouldn't have been a light there.

The ceiling now seemed lower than I remembered, pale and flat, with a long white tube running across it. That too was gone before I could make sense of it.

The room was familiar, yet details kept changing around me.

I lowered my eyes to my hands.

I couldn't see them.

Maybe... this was a dream.

The thought settled strangely easily.

Yes... there was something familiar about being here.

A feeling I couldn't place.

Someone had been here before. Someone I was waiting for.

Who? The answer wouldn't come.

I stayed where I was, listening to the silence, until a voice finally broke through it.

"Charlotte... it's okay."

My chest tightened.

That voice.

"I'm fine."

The room around me began to fade.

"Fine."

The white outside spread across everything.

"Fine..."

The voice grew farther away, stretching until it sounded less like someone speaking and more like something remembered from a long distance. The floor disappeared beneath me, and the room was gone.

Red and blue light replaced it, flashing across wet pavement, glass, metal, the sides of parked vehicles. 

People were shouting somewhere beyond me. Uniformed enforcers moved through the street, holding back a crowd while two others dragged a man toward a waiting vehicle. He was still fighting them, face twisted with anger, saying something I couldn't hear.

"Charlotte..."

Someone stood beside me.

"You fool...! What if you were wrong?!"

My voice was already shaking.

"I... You're important to me too. Why do you treat your life so carelessly?!"

The words came easily, carrying an anger I could feel even though I didn't remember feeling it.

The blurry figure chuckled.

His face remained indistinct, but I knew him.

Doctor.

"Then stay beside me and tell me when I'm wrong... Charlotte."

"Doctor, you... in this place... are you..."

His mouth moved again, but the sound never reached me.

The lights around us kept flashing across his face, never long enough for me to make it out clearly.

I watched his lips instead.

Come live with me.

A pause.

Charlotte.

The street washed out into white.

My eyes opened.

For several seconds, I remained where I was.

"...Mm."

Soft sheets. Too many pillows. Morning light slipping through a narrow gap in the curtains.

My face felt warm. A faint frustration crept in, though I couldn't tell where it came from. I could feel my heartbeat more clearly than usual too. Slightly elevated. Breathing normal. No pain. No dizziness. ...Residual autonomic response from the dream, most likely.

I pulled the blanket a little higher anyway.

A dream. I closed my eyes again before the last of it could scatter, as if some part of me was strangely reluctant to let it go.

The flashing lights. The man being dragged away. My own voice. His.

'Charlotte.'

My heartbeat picked up again.

What is this feeling? Is this stress?

I opened my eyes again. This was the third time I'd had the same dream.

Dream... The word didn't feel right anymore. It had gone further this time, clearer. 

It's almost like... a memory, slowly returning to me?

I stayed still at the thought. The feelings remained. The words exchanged, all too sweet, too precious.

Every time I slept, whatever these were seemed to give me a little more.

And the Doctor was always there.

Some of the things he had said to me since my arrival in this world had carried the same strange familiarity, even before the dreams became clear enough for me to understand why. Words that had seemed oddly specific, yet somehow stirred something in me at the time, now sat alongside fragments that kept fitting themselves around them, as though they were drawing out memories buried somewhere deep within me.

The more I tried to recall them, the warmer my face became.

I buried myself a little deeper beneath the blanket.

Morning had never been particularly agreeable to me.

It took several minutes before the room around me began settling back into its proper place in my thoughts.

...A motel.

I had found it the previous night along one of the roads I had been following since leaving the camp yesterday. The room was unnecessarily extravagant for something built beside a road, but the mattress had been clean, the locks still worked, and after clearing the remaining infected from the building, there had been little reason not to take the best room available.

"Get up, Charlotte..." I sighed.

As comfortable as it was, I did have an itinerary this morning.

I pushed myself up and let the sheets fall away.

"...A peaceful country."

I sat on the motel rooftop with the morning air brushing against my face, one hand resting lightly around the Lumen Stylus. My lab coat hung loose over my shoulders, its hem shifting faintly in the breeze.

From up here, the road stretched between rows of buildings, following much of the same path I had taken yesterday. Cars had been left at strange angles across the lanes, some with their doors still open. Farther out, rooftops and old commercial blocks crowded together beneath the pale morning sky, interrupted here and there by thin trails of smoke.

Much of it reminded me of the Antediluvian history texts I used to read. Centuries-old transport systems, exposed power lines, ageing buildings that still carried the shapes of an older era.

I had always liked history, even the obscure parts that only dedicated historians buried somewhere in the Monolith of Babel would have cared to know. Yet here, those old pages had become my new reality.

A reality that was hardly free from disorder or greed, but had not yet been shaped entirely by them. Even now, with the country falling apart around me, it was difficult not to think of what the Doctor had said when I had awakened.

'Most people here could live their entire lives without ever seeing a battlefield. They worried about work, school, bills... normal things.'

No endless wars fought between megacities. No districts built around a cruel eventuality. And certainly nothing like Professor Vael's suspended blade, the old saying that those born beneath society lived one mistake away from a quiet death.

That's right. The Doctor promised a world of potential here.

Eden was a small country. Dated in its advancements, certainly. But that wasn't what made it feel different. Where I had spent my first week made that much clearer.

The camp was filled with people who treated the disaster as something that had happened to them, rather than something they had always expected. Families talked about returning home. People worried about property they had left behind, ruined vehicles, work that had stopped, schools that had closed. Even the soldiers behaved differently. The dead were counted, the missing were properly recorded, and bodies were covered when there was time. Officers argued over evacuation routes and civilian capacity as though keeping ordinary people alive required no further justification.

For all the chaos around them, they had come from a society where surviving until tomorrow had once been ordinary.

The Doctor had been right. He wanted me to see this world from his perspective.

And from there, I learnt more about this tiny country.

The survivors answered enough when I asked: How they had lived before all this, what they expected from their government, their employers, their schools, their families.

How casually they spoke to strangers, I thought. They were remarkably unguarded.

Most of the survivors in the camp trusted the Eden Defense Forces simply because the uniforms were there. They expected the soldiers to know what they were doing, and assumed they would be warned if things became dangerous enough to leave.

Again. Unguarded, and naive.

It didn't take much to see that the military was in a far more compromised position than the civilians realised. The busiest entrances of the camp, the late patrols, where the wounded came from, how supplies moved, who people actually listened to. By the time I left, I had a reasonable picture of the camp as a microcosm of the EDF: how it functioned, where its attention was being spent, and which parts of the country were already slipping beyond its control.

There was one thing that stayed with me, though.

Seo Yerin. A higher-ranked military operative.

The Doctor wasn't much of a combatant himself, yet he had chosen to leave two of the strongest assets at his disposal with her. At the time, I hadn't thought much of it. But that changed once I learnt more about the EDF's communications.

Their security simply wasn't built to account for Photon intrusion, or any of the other attributes for that matter, which made listening in almost effortless. Yerin's name appeared often enough in exchanges with officers spoken to with obvious deference, and the discussions themselves carried increasingly grim expectations for the country's future.

That made the Doctor's interest in Yerin feel less incidental. Perhaps he had already understood what was happening inside the EDF, enough to know that its reach was shrinking and that someone like Yerin could matter once the gaps started appearing.

Maybe he wasn't simply reacting to the collapse. I entertained the possibility that the Doctor had already begun placing people where he expected those gaps to form.

A faint shiver ran through me.

It was almost impressive. More than that, it felt familiar. The Doctor gathering capable people around himself, securing useful connections, quietly establishing something of his own while larger powers began to fail around him.

...Just like he had before.

My thoughts stopped there.

I brought a hand to my chest.

Before...?

Lately, the distinction between the Doctor I remembered in fragments and the man I had met in this world had begun to feel less certain. The dreams were only making that worse. Feelings, words, pieces of another life were surfacing without warning, sometimes so naturally that I only noticed after I had already accepted them.

Have I been too quick to judge?

Perhaps the same thing had happened to him.

Twenty-seven years in this world did not necessarily mean twenty-seven years with those memories. They could have returned much later. Gradually, perhaps. Or something might have triggered them.

...Meeting people from that other life, for example.

But then why lie?

He had spoken as though he had understood where he came from almost from the moment he arrived here. If his memories had only returned recently, then parts of the story he gave me could not have been true. And that was hardly the only inconsistency.

I lowered my hand slowly, only to find that the thought had left me more confused than before.

Every explanation seemed to account for one part of him while making another harder to reconcile.

The Doctor from this world. The Doctor from my dreams.

The distinction between them was becoming less convincing by the day, yet somehow no easier to understand.

I let out a quiet breath and looked back over the rooftops.

Perhaps I should simply return and ask him.

The strange messaging function he had used before—the one he compared to a stripped-down PMT—wasn't available for some reason he had mentioned. Which meant that if I wanted answers from him directly, I would have to find him myself.

The thought of returning was considerably more tempting now than it had been yesterday.

Still... there was one other claim of his I wanted to verify for myself— Chocolate.

I'd already tasted more of this world's food while staying at the camp, though most of it had been prepared in bulk for sustenance rather than enjoyment. Sweets had never really come up.

"Shops, warehouses, homes. Whatever hasn't spoiled yet."

My eyes drifted toward the buildings below; a supermarket marked by large initials caught my attention.

"Cadbury..."

I turned the packet over in my hand.

"Toblerone. Ferrero..."

There really was an absurd amount of chocolate to choose from.

"Ah. KitKat."

This familiar, thin shell of chocolate gave way with a crisp snap, followed by layers of wafer that crumbled almost immediately. Light and sweet at first, before everything softened together into a second, creamier burst of flavour that I took my time savouring.

More importantly...

I raised the Lumen Stylus and let it scan across the rest of the chocolate bars on the rack.

"...Real cocoa."

Cocoa was scarce, the sort of ingredient reserved almost entirely for the rich and influential.

I had tasted it only a handful of times myself, usually through wealthy clients or other people in high places I had crossed paths with during my cases. Even then, it was rarely served like this. More often it had been stretched into some kind of liquid dessert, diluted enough to make a small amount go further. Here, someone had wrapped it around a wafer and sold it as an ordinary snack.

"Not just chocolate..." I murmured in awe.

Several infected already lay scattered between the supermarket aisles, each with a neat hole punched through the head, leaving me free to examine the shelves at my leisure. Something farther along caught my eye.

"...Strawberries?"

I had assumed anything like that would have spoiled long ago. Without hesitation, I tore the packet open. A small dried strawberry dropped into my palm, wrinkled and light, but still carrying a deep, natural red.

I swallowed.

Something shifted behind me just as I was about to place it into my mouth.

The Lumen Stylus shot past my shoulder without my turning, punched through the infected's skull, and returned to my hand just as I tossed the strawberry into my mouth.

...Sweet. Tart. Concentrated. ...Real fruit.

I slowly looked down the rest of the aisle.

Rows upon rows of brightly packaged sweets stared back at me.

...This was the world he promised.

The next few days passed quickly.

So did the dreams.

Each time I slept, they seemed to carry me a little further than before. The Doctor's face was still difficult to hold onto, but his voice came more easily now, along with moments I had no recollection of ever living through.

Some of them were... intimate.

The Charlotte in those memories didn't quite feel like me. We sat close enough for our shoulders to touch. I fell asleep beside him while he worked. At one point, I rested my head against him with such familiarity that remembering it the next morning left me light-headed.

During the day, I continued exploring Eden without much of a fixed route, following whatever seemed useful or interesting enough to warrant the detour. Bookstores gave me more than maps ever could. School texts, old magazines, novels and travel guides filled in pieces of the customs, culture and geography beyond this country.

PC rooms, apartments, restaurants, karaoke rooms, hotels, offices. Places built for work, leisure, celebration and boredom.

The more of them I entered, the more I knew. And the more I acclimatised.

I spent most of one afternoon in a phone repair shop.

There was value in seeing how far I could push the technology here. While I wasn't especially gifted with this sort of work, tinkering had always been an occasional pastime. I liked circuitry for its honesty. If I understood it properly, I could see that understanding take shape in front of me.

Once I had cleared the place out, I pulled apart half a dozen devices across the workbench and began rebuilding one from whatever components seemed useful. The Doctor carried one of these himself. If both devices ultimately relied on electromagnetic communication, perhaps there was a way to bridge the difference.

I was adjusting one of the exposed components when another hand suddenly rested over mine.

'What's this now? You're making something again?'

My movements stopped.

The answer came to me before the memory finished playing out.

"...It's a surprise..." 'It's a surprise, Doctor.'

For an instant, another version of my voice said the same words somewhere beneath my own, as though I had remembered the response before I heard myself give it.

...The seat across from me was empty.

I set the phone down. Something had gone blurry, and when I brought my fingers beneath my eyes, they came away wet.

"..."

Tears. I wiped them away slowly, though I couldn't quite understand why they had appeared.

After a while, I returned to the phone.

The result was ugly, but functional. I replaced several internal components, rewrote what I could, and used Photon to compensate for the parts this world simply didn't possess. After that, I climbed a nearby cellular base station and altered its equipment enough to recognise what I had made.

For a while, it worked well. The phone could now send and receive through equipment it had never been designed to interact with, and after enough adjustments, I could even force it to recognise signals outside its intended range.

If I could extend the modified signal far enough, there was at least a chance I could make contact with the Doctor's device.

The problem was distance, scale, and permanence. 

Photon, in that respect, behaved rather like a glow stick. Once separated from a sustained source, whatever I shaped with it gradually lost its light until nothing remained.

By evening, the first components I had reinforced were already dimming.

I turned the phone over in my hand.

Perhaps I was thinking too broadly. A city-wide network was impractical, but a small closed one was another matter.

If each modified device could relay through the others, I wouldn't need to alter every tower between them. The range would still be limited, and I would have to renew the Photon-assisted components eventually, but for a small group moving within the same area... 

I made two more before nightfall.

By the time I finished, the shop had gone completely quiet.

I packed the three phones away into my lab coat and stood, my attention drifting back to the workbench. My fingers moved to the back of my hand. The warmth from earlier wasn't there anymore.

"...What are you to me... Doctor?"

I asked the man in those memories, even though there was no one there to answer.