I found myself in a dream state, but this must be what they called lucid dreaming, because my mind was crystal clear, even as I was aware that my body was knocked out, and I was floating in complete and utter darkness.
And I was being bombarded with information. I was vaguely aware that my nanites were working overtime to suck it all in so it didn’t explode my brain, leaving them with no bandwidth to work on reviving me.
It was as if I were at the bottom of Niagara Falls looking up, with my mouth wide open. If not for the nanites absorbing all the water before it crushed me, I’d already be dead.
I intuitively sensed that the nanites were jettisoning their previous database to make room for this new information, knowing it was a priority to protect my mind, and sucking in millions of Libraries of Congress worth of data each instant.
After a while I was able to move out from under the Falls, and out of immediate danger, still aware the torrent was raging at full force behind me, and that the nanites were still doing their thing.
As this inconceivably massive flood of information continued to rain down in the background, the nanites siphoned off the barest trickle of it and fed it to me. I was somehow aware that it was a playback of Tessa being interrogated the day before—which was what she must have been striving to remember—and that my nanites believed this was the very information I had wished for as I was losing consciousness, although I had no idea how they had gotten the footage.
The scene they delivered replaced the endless darkness as it unfolded in my mind’s eye, once again with perfect 3D clarity. Tessa was in the same room we were in now, and a male hand was carefully injecting the contents of two syringes into her arm, one after another. Thirty seconds later she bolted awake and lifted herself so she was sitting on the edge of the bed. One of the syringes must have contained the same reversal agent I had given her.
She appeared to be gazing at someone just out of sight beyond the green-tinged wall of force. “Who are you?” she said, sounding almost drunk. “And why do I feel like I’m drunk?”
“My name is Kenneth Kussmann,” said the man. “Commander Kenneth Kussmann. And the reason you feel a bit tipsy, Major Barrett, is because we drugged you. With a truth serum that not only does its job to perfection, but is immune to nanite intervention.”
“I won’t tell you anything,” she said, trying to sound forceful but still sounding drunk. “I’ll die first.”
“I guess we’ll find out, won’t we? You say you won’t tell us a thing. And we say you’re going to tell us everything we want to know in rich detail, no matter how much you fight it.”
“Where am I?”
Kussmann ignored her. “We know most of what you know,” he said. “And the little we don’t isn’t important. So this is more of a formality than anything. But we’re striving to understand human emotion better, especially love, so this gives us a chance to further our research.”
“Who’s us?” she asked with a drunken grin, painfully slow on the uptake. “I only see one of you there.”
Kussmann ignored her again. “Tell us about your feelings for Jason Ramsey. Do you love him?”
She looked as if she was trying not to answer, trying to bite her tongue, and appeared confused when she couldn’t prevent her words from spilling out. “Of course I love him,” she replied. “Madly. More than I thought was possible.”
“See, that wasn’t so hard. Like we said, you’re even volunteering details. It’s quite the truth serum. The only problem is that the Federation can detect it in the bloodstream for up to six months after its use, so we have to use it sparingly. In your case, since you’ll be dead by this time tomorrow, that isn’t a problem.”
“Jason will save me.”
“So not only is love blind,” said Kussmann in contempt, “it’s stupid too. It seems to be a motivating force for your species, though. So maybe the blindness and stupidity are responsible for this motivation. Once human beings lose their judgment and rationality, they can delude themselves, go to heroic lengths, make great sacrifices, in the name of love. Love of their mates, their friends, their children, and so on.”
“Jason will come,” she said, slurring her words. “You’ll see.”
Tessa tilted her head in confusion, her razor-sharp intellect having been dulled to plodding levels. “And what do you mean, our species?” she said. “What species are you? You look awfully human to me. Are you a hologram?”
As I watched this scene continue to unfold in my mind’s eye, I was aware that the massive waterfall of data was still raging in the background.
“So next question,” said the commander, ignoring her queries, as always. “Why do you love him? Why did you choose Jason Ramsey? You’ve been bred and engineered to be all but irresistible physically. You’re already smarter than most of your human peers. You have access to a huge knowledge base, possess a sense of humor that our intel suggests is quite appealing, and so on. In short, you could have your choice of mate. So why a short, relatively soft spinner of tall tales?”