Chapter 41- Fireflies

Lupe smoked about three times as much as she usually did on the train ride over to Neptune's Bounty. Richard wanted to talk about their rudimentary plan but it was not something to risk being overheard on the trains. So he let her smoke in silence.

Richard didn't bother dressing up as he did last time he paid a call to a security station. In fact, he dressed down much more than usual, wearing only a red shirt and dark gray trousers, complete with a dark brown fedora. It was better to blend in, as the circumstances around Helena pointed to the fact that she was of interest to powerful smugglers – powerful smugglers who may very well be staking out the security office. With Lupe in her modest cream-colored dress, burgundy coat, and black pillbox hat, they looked like a perfectly average lower middle-class couple out on an errand.

Richard wasn't too optimistic about his odds of success. Success as in coming to a solution. Fixing it, he thought as they picked their way through narrow alleys of crates full of ice and fish. He didn't dismiss the extrasensory aspect out of hand – he knew firsthand that the ADAM created unnatural circumstances – but the possibility of communication with pure mental effort was unbelievable. Perhaps he'd catch a whiff of Helena's thoughts. Maybe enough to make an educated guess. Maybe.

His pessimism began to unravel, however, once the security station came into sight. Lightning bugs? He blinked several times. No, the lightning bugs weren't there. He couldn't see them with his eyes. But he saw them, somehow. Like he just landed in Oz, but an Oz that was only for him as Lupe apparently didn't notice anything. As they entered the security station the lightning bugs increased in number to the point that it was almost a swarm, glowing and drifting through the air.

Richard was only vaguely aware of Lupe speaking to the clerk. The lightning bugs seemed to take a particular interest in him and lazily gravitated towards him at the expense of Lupe and the clerk as they spoke. Lupe was too distracted by Helena to notice the bewildered expression on Richard's face as the clerk led them down the hallway.

*You* a voiceless voice rippled through his mind. *I see you so much more clearly. Lupe is clever, isn't she? She brought you to me.*

Richard stopped dead in his tracks. What the hell?

*Shocking, isn't it?*

Lupe now noticed his state of sheer confusion. "What is it?"

Richard stared back at her with wide eyes. What do I tell her? She wants to know what you want.

*I know. I can show you. My abilities work best at close range. Come inside and hold my hand.*

Richard exhaled rapidly and stared at Lupe. The detective next to her was staring at him as well. "It's…she wants me to go in there and talk to her," he slowly said, trying to piece together his thoughts knowing that they were no longer private. What in the hell am I going to see in there?

*Something you'll remember, I promise you that.*

You're Polish, he suddenly remembered. Why don't you have an accent?

*You're an American, but why are you speaking Polish? Do you see? Thoughts don't have language.*

They do though, I know I think in English, Richard argued with his thoughts.

*You seem like a nice guy, but you don't know a thing. Just open the door.*

Richard shook his head briefly, trying to shake off the lingering surrealistic sense of disconnection that was hampering his ability to interact with the physical world. "Open the door," he softly ordered.

The detective, who was watching Richard with great interest, reached for the handle. "You sure? Your eyes are as big as saucers. You look like you've seen a ghost."

*Goodness, what's taking you so long?*

Richard nodded, trying not to make eye contact with the curious Lupe to his right. It was distracting on top of everything else to have two conversations at once. "It's fine. I'm fine. Just open the door."

The detective shrugged and turned the door. Richard's breath caught in his throat at what he beheld. Lupe's description of the monstrous mermaid was present, but only as a static washed-out image. Over the nightmarish form was a glowing golden ghostly projection of a young and healthy-looking woman who Richard presumed was Helena. Helena's specter was hovering over her physical form.

"Lupe," Richard said hoarsely. "Do you see anything unusual?"

"Aside from…Helena? No." Lupe sounded puzzled.

*She can't see me. But you can see my glow because you have one too.*

What do you want?

*Hold my hand and I will show you.*

Richard took a tenacious step forward. You're not going to hurt me, are you?

*Of course not.*

There was a strange perception of credibility in her reassurance. He crouched down next to the monstrous mermaid. Helena's golden projection turned her head to watch him. Richard reached out and grabbed what remained of her hand.

The room around him and the other two people in it immediately faded away. For a second Richard lingering in a black voice, but before he could process and be terrified by it, he found himself standing in an lush green park. Outdoors. In the sun.

He stared, mouth agape, in bafflement, unable to believe what he was seeing but also unable to deny what he was seeing. He stood in a clearing of green grass and was surrounded by large oaks. Interspersed between the massive trees were neatly trimmed hedges brimmed with wild roses. Clouds drifted overhead lazily.

"Do you like it?" Helena's voice came to him from behind.

He whirled around. There stood Helena, in the flesh, wearing a light pink dress and no shoes. "What…?"

"This is a park near my childhood home. Or was, it was destroyed in the war. It's how I remember it. I don't know if it is accurate. But I can imagine it and I can go there." Helena walked over the hedge and stroked a rose. "It's not real. The sun has no warmth. The flowers no scent. It's a memory, that's all."

Richard tried to feel the sunlight, but she was correct. "How?" Richard asked, still awestruck by the visual illusion.

"You've only got one slug. I got six," Helena answered simply.

Richard was dumbstruck by this statement.

"They gave me much more too, the genes of sea animals, because they hoped that it would make the slugs more productive. It didn't. I don't pretend to understand how I can do this," Helena continued. "But I can see my memories so clearly, and I can show others with slugs as well. One of the smugglers touched me one day, on accident, they were scared of me, and I could see his memories too. All of them. Like mine."

The black void suddenly swallowed up the park and was replaced by another park – but this was no sunny day. The grass was torn to pieces by shells, the paving stones and masonry shredded to hunks of hostile concrete, and the bare trees splintered by artillery fire. Richard instantly began to panic. "No! Why would you bring me back here?!" This was where he had been shot.

The blackness overcame them again and was quickly replaced by a stuffy library, shelves crammed with thick books on mathematics and engineering principles. In front of him was a desk piled high with notebooks and open reference books. Richard sighed in relief as he recognized the auxiliary study library from his university.

"I'm sorry, but strong memories are the easiest to find and to recreate," Helena offered as an apology.

Richard was still too amazed to be angry. He looked at the open page on the desk and found it to be a blurred, unreadable mess. Apparently her abilities were limited to what Richard himself could recall, as he certainly couldn't remember the exact text of any given book.

"You spent a lot of time here. To hide from Dorothy," Helena narrated while looking around the room. "You came here on weekends. You took the train. There was a little coffee stand outside of the train station. The woman who worked there was pretty. No ring. You wanted to run away with her. But you would never dare to even speak with her aside from ordering and paying for your coffee."

Richard turned to Helena. "Yes. You've proven you know very intimate details about me. Things that I have not thought about in years." The woman at the coffee stand had been the first in a long line of women that Richard had idle dreams about, so much so that he had forgotten her until Helena brought her up.

"Oh, it's not only the deep memories I can find." Helena smiled at him. "You're lucky Lupe likes what you do to her, otherwise I would rip your consciousness out and leave you to float in nothingness."

Richard cocked his head. "Can you do that?"

Helena shrugged. "I do not know the extent of what I can do, but I can affect the minds of people nearby. Fontaine has men watching this place. They want me back. I am very special to them, you can see why. They know I can look into minds, but they do not know that I can show others my memories and their own."

"They would make…" Richard sighed, unable to imagine the precise abomination of a plasmid that would be crafted but knowing it would be far worse than anything he could imagine anyway.

"Yes, yes they would. So far I have been able to cloud the mind of the men watching this place. I have made their memory slippery, so they are not sure of what they see seconds after it happens."

Curious as to how he would interact with objects in this dreamsleeve, Richard grabbed the back of the desk chair. His hands grasped something, but it wasn't the varnished wood that it looked to be. Instead, it was spongy and warm and oddly organic.

"You need to escape, right?"

Helena nodded an affirmative. "I thought that was obvious to Lupe but she didn't seem to understand."

Richard's natural curiosity about the world – or false words – around him was fully kicking in. He picked a book from the shelf at random. The cover felt real enough, but the pages were like gossamer spider webs and completely blank. "Oh, I think the problem was she didn't know where you wanted to escape to. It's not as if you could live in our bathroom. We haven't even a tub."

"Ah, of course," Helena mumbled to herself. "She doesn't want to accept it because it's so unnatural, but for me it is the most natural and obvious solution."

Richard paused to consider. "The open ocean," he flatly guessed.

"Right. My physical form needs to be out there. I need to feel the cool water. I need to swim. I know this to be true." Helena stated this as a matter of fact and not a ghastly outcome of her condition.

Richard set the book down and picked up a pencil. It felt too light, nearly insubstantial. "What about all the sharks out here?"

"What about all the sharks in here?"

"Fair point." Richard abruptly threw the pencil at the window that, true to his recollection, showed only the brick wall of the nearby administration building. It didn't bounce properly. Instead it slowly slid down the fall. "Fascinating."

Helena regarded him and his experiments. "It's a shame we cannot experiment together fully. Perhaps you could help me understand what has happened better. I see it as an artist. Which is useful, in its own way. But my first thought was to, well, you see what I do, I make memories real. But you are trying to figure out how they work."

Richard picked up another pencil. He pressed down on the tip and instead of poking him it compressed against his skin. "I would probably discover something I don't care to know in regards to the mechanics of this. Some eldritch or non-Euclidian truth about the nature of reality. Something like that. I'm better off not knowing."

Helena laughed a little bit. "Do you find my existence horrifying?"

"It's something else, I'll give you that. I don't envy you. But it's certainly interesting. Not horrifying." Richard tried to break the pencil and it tore in half like a fresh breadstick. "You know, on second thought, I don't know if I can resist this. Why is the pencil like this? Could we get stuff in the books if I could remember what was in them? Or I reread a book?"

"I need to escape," Helena stressed. "Will you help me?"

Richard nodded and picked up another book. This one didn't have a title on the spine, or even letters, just a jumble of meaningless lines and circles where the title would go. "You know everything I know, evidently. So let's make a plan."