上海梦想 精彩片段：
Chapter 64
Caldwell awoke to the smell of hospital disinfectant and a searing headache. His mouth was dry and his head felt like it was about to explode. Every part of his body ached unbearably. There was something in his nostrils making it hard to breath. He reached out and felt his nostrils. Plastic tubes. Drips. He tried to open his eyes but the room was too bright and the light burned into his retina like sunlight through a magnifying glass. His eyes hurt. There was constant throbbing on the front, back and sides of his head, like his skull was about to disintegrate. He tried to lift his head but was hit with pain so intense that he passed out.
He dreamed of Fouler. The HYDRA man had come to visit him with the American girl, the girl called Diane Joplin and she had said something to him, wished that he got better soon. Fouler had congratulated him on a job well done and told him about some assassin that had been shot by Agent Jones at the Keio Plaza Hotel. The assassin had tried to kill Agent Jackman. Fouler had possession of the assassin’s remote module, which had allowed him to connect remotely to the major-general’s network in Beijing. He wanted to tell Fouler that he had seen the assassin, the face that had appeared before him and Li Jin, the ghost in the clouds.
Caldwell had attempted to speak in his dream but he couldn’t. His mouth opened but the words wouldn’t come out. Mei Lin was there too in his dreams. She had a cast on her leg. She sat on the side of the bed and stared at him for a long time. Then she brushed his hair back and kissed him on his forehead. She said something about them never being separated again and Caldwell smiled and everything went black, like somebody had turned the lights out.
Then there were the nightmares, endless hours of gruesome images. The Omnipotence chasing after him, dragon robe alight with fire. Then he had witnessed his parents’ car crash in Xian, the twisted metal of it captured in gruesome black and white images below the screaming newspaper headlines.
And Kat had been there too in his dreams. Standing beside the hospital bed and looking at him with those vacant blue eyes of hers. She’d held his hand and told him that everything would be OK and she was proud of him. And behind her stood Ms. Seven Levin, Agent Jones and Agent Jackman, the latter with his hand in a sling. They had smiled at him and Agent Jackman had said “you’re the man.” But Caldwell hadn’t understood what they meant. They had gone away and Caldwell had dreamed again of Virtual Shanghai and The Bund, the solitary figure of Li Jin receding in the distance. And Li Jin had stood on the pavement on Zhongshan Lu and waved at him and then he had vanished.
Caldwell dreamed another dream. Fouler, Mei Lin and the Joplin girl were standing by his bed. Next to them a hospital trolley with a white and silver cylinder on it. The cylinder looked like an elaborate rice cooker. And Fouler had said that this cylinder was Akio Inoue, the Japanese man who had created the consoles. And Caldwell had watched as a hologram of this Inoue had emerged from the top of the cylinder and started speaking. What he was saying wasn’t making much sense and seemed to be more like jumbled up thoughts in Inoue’s head than real speech. It was just these fragments of thoughts spoken at high speed, the words spilling out in a torrent. Caldwell didn’t understand a word the Japanese man was saying but he kept hearing sumimasen a lot and he figured that probably meant sorry.
In his dreams Caldwell saw his childhood for the first time and it had a distinct timeline. His mother was there with him, those sensitive amber eyes full of affection. And there he was in his father’s den playing with his father’s computers and his father asking him what he wanted to be when he grew up and he had said he wanted to be a programmer. His father had smiled and told him to go and have his bath as it was almost bedtime. His mother had walked in and gathered him up, smiling with those amber oriental eyes.
He woke up staring at a blank ceiling. Outside the open window was the sound of traffic, the distant hum of a city. Shanghai? A look of panic came over his face. Mei Lin moved quickly towards him and sat on the edge of his hospital bed. His headache was gone and the thing in his nose was no longer there but his body ached and he could feel every bone in his body. He could remember everything that happened right up to the AI trying to kill him.
“I had the weirdest dream,” he said. “You were all in it, that Diane Joplin girl, Kat, everyone.
“That wasn’t a dream Cad. They were all here in Tokyo.”
“Tokyo?”
“Yes, you collapsed in that control room in Shanghai and the whole place was going to blow so we bailed out of there with just seconds to spare. The whole place went up in smoke. You needed treatment but Fouler suggested we just fly straight to Tokyo. You’ve been out for almost three days. It seemed the AI tried to kill you using some kind of infrasound to destroy your internal organs. Luckily we got you out of there in time. You sustained only mild internal hemorrhaging.”
“I remember. It was a horrible experience. You said back at the control room in Shanghai that the major-general was dead. What happened?”
“One of the PLA guards suspected something was amiss and surprised me in the foyer of the mansion. The ensuing fracas attracted the others. I found myself in a bit of trouble and was beginning to think that I wouldn’t make it out alive. Luckily Anthony and Victor arrived just in time and saved me from being outnumbered. I had called them from the Peace Hotel when we dropped off out luggage. There was a huge gunfight in the compound. We made it to the main hospital building but by the time we got there the major-general and the Japanese Yakuza had been shot by one of the PLA men. The man shot himself right in front of our faces, mumbling incoherently. We found a wireless detonator in the major-general’s hand.”