They had revisited Hibiru, this time without using drones. Instead of having to walk the drones along the corridors and fly them down the stairs, Dutch had simply visualized the next place they had been. She could see it too, and when she did they were instantly there. They revisited the archives. John was there again. 

He won't see us, Dutch told her. He's using a drone and drones don't see into the Q. 

She also found that she couldn't pick up a plate to try to read it. No hands. It really was dreamlike. But not simply her dream, she realized. It was part of the shared physical universe dream. It wouldn't always agree with what she wanted to do.

Mariah woke up thinking about the Q. Quantum foam, an expression in material terms of the underlying universe of pure thought.

It's easier to move through the Q than to move through physical space, she thought, because in the Q the body is peripheral. This is why the new ability of people to use QAR, Quantum Augmented Reality, as a substitute for body perception, and to use body drones as a substitute for actually being physically there in the place where those substitute perceptions originate, has awoken the ability to be in the Q in so many minds.

She knew that earlier practices, such as the shaman dream state, sensory deprivation chambers, and certain hallucinogenic drugs, had given some practitioners at least some limited access to the Q. It required a certain quality of mind to gain such access. Often it also required rigorous training. 

The resulting experiences were inherently personal. It was not possible to adequately convey these experiences to others. At best, efforts to convey them verbally fell far short. Efforts to convey them through visual art could sometimes evoke a truer response. But the response would be just as personal as the original experience, and equally unable to elicit a coherent verbal description. This had made it easy for those who could not have the experience to chalk it up to fantasy.

QAR had changed all that. It made it possible to record the experience at the quantum level. And play it back. It no longer required a natural shaman or rigorous training to experience the Q. The experience could be shared with almost anyone.

Mariah and Dutch both knew this. They understood it at a visceral level. They also understood that the visceral response was limiting. It was the body's way of expressing what the mind had experienced.

Mind-to-mind sharing, directly in the Q, was a step beyond this. But only a step. There were phenomena accessible in the Q that had nothing to do with a physical body.

Shamans, especially shifters, understood this. Mariah understood this. She knew both the downward and upward agreement needed to alter reality, one's own and that of others. Downward to the cellular level, upward to the immediate group level. 

First of all, it was not agreement with physical reality that was desired. It was agreement from the spiritual entity behind the physical reality. Agreement from the Q. Which developed into an understanding that the Q was the truer reality. Accepted physical reality was but a vast and intimately shared dream.

It was dream agreement at levels beyond the immediate group that was still mysterious to her. She knew that, in the broadest context, spacetime is not material. It is where the material resides. Spacetime is an artifact of thought. The material exists in thought, as thought. Without thought, nothing material exists. Every material particle is a particle of thought. But was this, for any practical purpose, a useful concept?

She asked Dutch about this. He said, Yes. It's about what connects those thoughts. Then he woke up.

"The starting point is links," he said. "That's what got Newt so excited. The ancient Annunaki gods had links to Hibiru. But if they shared them with Earth humans at all it was with only a chosen few, shamans who had the vision to understand."

"Oh, right," she said. "As long as we knew only Earth, we knew nothing of this. Even the shamans, who had hints of something beyond, could not be sure if their dreams were real."

Dutch nodded. "But now we know. We went to Mars, and we learned the truth of Hibiru. We went to Hibiru, and now we have links to that place as well. It seems we could explore the entire physical universe in the same way. Fully explore the shared dream.

"The universe is vast, and our physical lives too short to explore it very far. We might learn to extend our physical lives, put our bodies into hibernation as the Annunaki did. But what would be the point? Our minds are not limited in that way. We are composed of thought. We, as thought, exist only in Now.

"On the other hand, all past thought exists for us as memory. And all memory is accessible in Now. Nothing is lost. The Now of spacetime is an endless expansion of itself."

"Of course," she said. "One limitation of our minds is that we remember through links. At any given moment, our minds focus on one small area of thought, just as our eyes focus on one small area of space. We achieve the illusion of time by jumping from thought to thought, linking to other thoughts in a sequence that makes consistent sense to us. And the agreement we sense from other minds is what makes these thoughts real to us."

He nodded and said, "You and I have both visited Hibiru in our minds. Our minds have links to Hibiru. We can visit Hibiru, distant as it is, in an instant. Together or separately. And there we can find additional links, mental links to the physical entities that comprise Hibiru. From that we get agreement on the existence of Hibiru."

She was getting it. "Hibiru is part of the vast agreement that comprises the physical universe. And all of it is a manifestation of mind! The drones we used don't have minds. It was our minds that went there."

"Remember what Newt told you on the space cruiser? That, mathematically, there are ten to the minus thirty orders of magnitude of size below us, and ten to the plus thirty orders of magnitude above us?"

"Yes. That's still an amazing thing to try to comprehend."

"He was talking about a size scale, but it's the same on the time scale. On our scale we have time as we know it. On the very small scale events happen very fast. On the scale of the whole universe, it's very slow. Possibly doesn't even exist. In between us and the universe, there are different levels of awareness, with different scales of thought, different concepts of time. With the right links, we can visit some of those levels."

"Really? Can we really do that? How many links will we have to find?"

"Remember degrees of separation? Even among millions of people it takes surprisingly few links. If you can find the right ones. The web of links each of us has to start from is also surprisingly small. But we tend to be rather adept at noticing useful links."

"So you think it's worth a try?"

"Yes I do. Let's go."