The Monolith

by Stephen Roark

  Pieces of plastic, printed circuit boards and resistors flew into the air like hideous fireworks as she beat the poor thing to death. Each blow did more damage, but it didn’t matter; the first impact and subsequent swing had been enough—my Fount was totaled. Like a defeated warrior, I dropped to my knees in despair.

  Images of the Weeping Hills flashed through my mind. Rey’s smiling face, Rathborne’s look of approval and Wilhelm’s eyes as he sat beside me in the cart on the way back to town.

  “Mom…” My voice was barely a whisper as she turned to me, brushed an angry tuft of hair from her face and looked at me with a proud sense of finality.

  “You know they’re starting to move kids to the hospitals?!” she asked angrily. “People who can’t log out of that game! They said they were lucky this is a niche game, because if they had a hundred thousand people in there, they wouldn’t be able to handle it—people would die!”

  “But, I can get out—”

  “They’re bringing in emergency stasis units, Clay!” she roared, taking a step forward. “Like the ones they use for the Mars missions? Yeah, that’s how bad it is! Do you have any idea what those cost?!”

  “Mom, I’m not going to be stuck there—” I started to say, but it was no use. Mom had her mind made up and there was no debating her. Without another word, she stormed past me, arms crossed, and marched back into the house, slamming the door behind her.

  “Shit,” I muttered, gazing at the wreckage that had once been my most prized possession.

  What do I do now?!

  I felt a rage boiling within me, threatening to take me over—not because my Fount was gone, but because I no longer had any way to help Rey. She was stuck there, one of the Bloodless, her mind held captive by some unknown force, or glitch, and there was nothing I could do about it.

  I knelt there a long time, racking my brain for a solution. My “friends” all had Founts, but there was no way any of them would let me borrow one—not now—not after the great betrayal. I could steal one of them, but unlike me, who came from an area of hopeless security, they all lived in big homes with state-of-the-art security, and being thrown in jail would definitely rule out any other possible options I had for getting back to her.

  But what other options?! I thought furiously. I realized my right fist was clenched tightly, feeling for the hilt of an axe that wasn’t there.

  “Shit,” I muttered, rising and kicking a quarter of my Fount that lay battered and broken on the ground. I suddenly hated the thing for being broken. It clattered away from me before splashing down in a shallow puddle.

  When I went back inside, my mom was in her room with the door closed. Obviously, she wasn’t in a mood to debate me. There wasn’t anything to talk about anyway. My Fount was gone and she wasn’t buying me another one, even if she could afford it right now. Part of me wanted to burst in and scream at her, but that would have been childish and wouldn’t get me anywhere anyway. Instead, I went back to my room, closed the door, and slumped down in my desk chair.

  “Think, Clay,” I muttered to myself, rapping my forehead with the middle knuckle of my left hand. “What can you do here?”

  Nothing…

  That was the answer, and I knew it. I was genuinely, 100-% screwed.

  My tower PC chirped beside me. The monitor was off, so I switched it on, and instead of my wallpaper of the Mars Base-B settlement, I found myself staring at a blank screen with a simple line of text:

  You are not alone, Rand.

  “What the Hell?” I muttered as I stared at the message. I expanded my Holoboard and went through a few keystrokes and gestures, but nothing happened. A blinking cursor sat on the line below as if waiting for my reply. Slowly, I typed.

  Who are you?

  The next message was almost instant.

  Someone like you.

  Before I could respond—

  Follow the red woman, Rand.

  Red woman?

  I started to type my reply, but before I could, a knock came from the front door. I jumped, and spun quickly in my chair to face the unexpected sound as my heart rate skyrocketed. We never got unexpected visitors in the Barracks. Neighbors knew better than to go knocking at someone’s home, and outsiders—well, we didn’t get many of those either. That feeling you get when something is just a little bit off, or someone might be watching you, ran up the back of my legs like a cold snake.

  I glanced back at my computer screen, but the messages were gone, replaced by my wallpaper image.

  “What the…?”

  Knock, knock, knock!

  “Ju—just a minute!” I called out. Slowly, I got to my feet and made my way to the surveillance screen in the living room, the wide-angle camera giving a perfect view of the outside of the house. I saw my Fount, smashed to pieces on the ground, and standing at our door was a woman, black hair pulled back in a ponytail, tapping her fingers aimlessly like everything was normal as she looked up above her like she was watching non-existent birds. She wore a red delivery suit.

  “What is this…?”

  She raised her hand to knock again, but I thumbed the button for the microphone.

  “What do you want?” was all I could think to say.

  “Delivery,” she replied, as though my question made no sense whatsoever.

  “Delivery for what?”

  “Uh—I just deliver the packages,” she stated. “Can you open up? This requires a signature.”

  I kept looking at the camera, scanning the rest of the area around her to see if there were any others with her, lurking in the shadows, ready to clobber me with a pipe if I opened the door. But she seemed to be alone

  To say I was a little freaked out would be the understatement of the year. Between the impossible message on my computer and now the strange girl standing at my front door, I was starting to question whether or not I’d actually returned to my real world, or had been sucked into some alternate dimension where logic and reason had no place.

  “Open up,” the girl asked again. “Rand.”

  My heart skipped at least three beats and my mouth fell open when I heard her say that name. Only a few people knew my in-game name: Rey, and my false friends, but definitely not any girl who looked like the one growing tired at my door. I pressed the button to speak to her, but my curiosity got the better of me, and I tugged the door open.

  She smiled at me with bright blue eyes and held out the package and a small screen to sign on.

  “Here you are,” she said cheerfully, but there was something else behind her eyes—something hidden, as though she was trying to tell me something. The package felt like and was more of an envelope than anything. I carelessly signed my name and she handed it to me. “Have a nice night, sir.”

  “W-wait!” I called out as she turned and walked away from me. She stopped and looked up at the sky for a moment, then brought her eyes back to me.

  “Do you like my jacket?” she asked, running a hand down her rose colored sleeve. Before I could respond, she whirled on her heels and walked quickly away.

  “Wait!” I called out after her, but she didn’t, and within seconds she was out of my tiny courtyard and gone, vanished into the rows and rows of houses. I looked down at the envelope in my hand, then back the way she’d gone.

  Follow the red woman, Rand.

  “It can’t be…” I muttered to myself. But could it really have been a coincidence that after getting a message like that, a girl in a red delivery uniform showed up at my door with a random package?

  I glanced back at the house where my mom was sleeping, and down at the shattered Fount lying spread across the ground like a desiccated corpse. There was nothing for me there now—not if I was going to find Rey and discover the mystery of the monolith.

  “Fuck it,” I grumbled, tossing the envelope back into the house and shutting the door behind me. I raced off in the direction of the red woman.

  Slum water splashed beneath my shoes as I ran, ducking a low-hanging braided cl
uster of cables that slumped from a stack of three homes like an anesthetized snake. It wasn’t hard to figure out which way she’d gone—there was only one street heading in the direction she’d taken, but it led even deeper into the Barracks, not out to the freeway…

  I jumped a waterlogged pile of cardboard, my eyes scanning in front of me for the strange woman, when I heard a faint buzzing overhead. I knew before I even looked.

  A quad rotor drone hung in the sky, perfectly balanced, the lens of its on-board camera aimed straight down at me. As I moved, it moved, tracking me easily as I raced deeper and deeper into the bowels of the Barracks.

  Someone’s flying that thing, I thought as I took a hard left and vaulted over a fallen set of printed orange trash barrels. I glanced up again and the thing stopped impossibly quickly, then darted left through a crevice and out of sight. I slowed down and looked back, waiting to see if it would reappear.

  “Rand,” a voice called from behind me. I spun around to see the red woman standing under the vaulted eave of one of the ancient factories the Barracks had been built around. “Over here.”

  “Who are you—?” I blurted out loudly, but the girl calmly placed a single finger over her lips, and for some reason, I quieted down.

  “I’m like you. Come with me.”

  She turned and tugged a piece of printed polymer from the wall beside her. She waved her hand casually and I heard something shift deep beneath the ground. With a solid click, a square piece of concrete behind her sank, then slid back to reveal an almost pitch black stairwell.

  “Come.”

  Without waiting, she stepped down into the darkness. I heard that dragonfly hum above me and looked up to see the drone emerge from a drainage pipe three stories above me, then dip down with blinding precision, and follow her.

  This is so stupid…I thought as I actually contemplated taking the stairs after her. It was an old government factory she’d gone into. Those were supposed to be sealed up and completely off limits.

  I moved up to the concrete mouth and the set of simple stairs lit by a series of exposed light bulbs that hung from a power line that snaked across the ceiling like it had been put up in a hurry.

  Definitely a bad idea…I thought.

  But there was nothing waiting for me at home—not anymore. Taking a deep breath, I took the first step down.

  24

  A Curse and a Blessing

  “I’m proud of what we’ve done. No president in history has faced a crisis of this magnitude. We acted swiftly, saved millions of lives. Americans are strong, resilient people. They’ll bounce back from this in no time. Mark my words.”

  —President Bicton, 2113

  I felt like I was stepping back in time as I made my way down the old steps into the guts of the city. The stairwell just kept going and going, plummeting down a rough, circular tunnel that looked as though it had been bored out of the earth by a giant worm with rows of teeth the shape of drill tips.

  This was an ancient part of town, “the old city,” as we called it. It was so old that the only real truths that remained about its origins were that it had been built by the government and was still off limits, despite having an entire slum built around it. Every kid in the Barracks knew the story—or maybe urban legend—about the group of three boys who managed to sneak in a top window and were immediately whisked away by a squad of government ultralights, never to be seen again. True or untrue, those boys were on my mind as I descended.

  A glimpse of red fluttered ahead of me and I saw the delivery girl standing patiently at the bottom of the steps, where a smooth matte-green concrete floor spread out before me to a set of double steel doors that looked like something straight out of a bank vault.

  “Hey!” I cried out as I walked towards her. “What the Hell is going on?”

  “All will be explained,” she said as the rotors on the drone that had been tracking me hummed down and landed easily on her arm like a loyal falcon returning to its owner.

  “Where are we? How did you get down here?”

  “This is the Reactor,” she said simply. “The old heart of the city. Shut down by the government over one hundred years ago. We…repurposed it some time ago. Never knew it would turn into something so important.”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but she turned to the enormous doors and rapped a pattern with the back of a knuckle.

  Tap-tap…. tap…tap-tap.

  The sound of heavy gears and precision metal groaned from behind the two monstrous slabs of steel. Then, a crack appeared, and one of the doors opened slowly, just enough for a person to pass through.

  “Come,” she said again, and stepped through the opening.

  “Shit!” I stammered again, slapping my thigh with a palm.

  Why can’t this make sense?!

  I felt like a ball of string being batted around by a kitten, or a tiny figurine in a board game being played by some bored god-like beings amusing themselves with my misfortunes. Still, I’d come this far…

  A huge axe could have come out of the blackness as I stepped through the door, and chopped my head off, and I wouldn’t have had any right to be surprised. Thankfully, that didn’t happen, and I found myself standing in a dimly lit room, draped with cables of all kinds that had clearly been spliced into, with smaller lines running off in every direction.

  There was a circle of chairs that were fully reclined, almost like hospital gurneys, but made from faded leather, each with a Fount sitting on the ground beside them. At the center of it all stood three people.

  I recognized one of them, the red woman, her arms crossed as she leaned casually against a beat up storage locker. Beside her was a tall mammoth of a man, his skin as dark as coal and his hair as white as snow, and behind him, doing his best to appear like a tough guy, was the obvious tech of the group. He was pasty white, not quite thin but not quite in shape, and wore camo cargo pants with a tattered tank top.

  “Welcome, Rand,” the man spoke, his voice strong like an iron bar.

  “Where am I?” I asked, then followed up immediately. “Who are you?”

  “We are the free,” he replied with a smile containing more confidence than I’d ever seen from a face. “Those who, like you, have broken free of our chains.”

  I felt like I was listening to a preacher—a preacher who I did not understand.

  “That was you?” I asked, latching onto the only thing I could even try to comprehend. “On my computer?”

  The preacher nodded slowly, but the eyes of the young man behind him lit up.

  “Mickey,” the man introduced us. “Our resident tech genius. We call him the wizard.”

  “Hi,” Mickey said sheepishly, raising a hand. The preacher placed a hand on the woman standing beside him.

  “This is Fujiko,” he said simply. “And I am Altarus.”

  “You—you were in the game?” I asked, trying to get a grasp on what the strange man was trying to tell me. It was like trying to get a firm grip on a bar of wet soap.

  “We were,” he replied, taking a step forward. “But like you, we were able to escape.”

  “How?” I asked. “How was I even able to do that when no one else was?”

  “It seems as though we all share some kind of…unique aspect to our minds that has freed us from the system…that allows us to escape the clutches of whatever it is that binds the rest of them.”

  Unique aspect to our minds? I thought, feeling the frown on my face as my eyes wandered around the room. Then, a realization hit me like a slap in the face.

  “My epilepsy…”

  Altarus nodded but said nothing, letting me take it in. My epilepsy had been a constant burden in my life, and I’d spent years trying to find the best medication to keep my seizures under control. Every time I had one, I was in bed for a day or two trying to recover from the massive headaches, nausea, and worse—temporary memory loss.

  I’d wake up on the floor with no idea where I was or what had happened. When I’d look ar
ound the room, I had no sense of the layout and was unable to fill in any of the gaps with my mind. Luckily, I’d recognize my mother, but that was about it. The last few days would be a complete mystery. Could it really be that somehow this thing that had been torturing me all my life had actually saved me from being trapped in the world like the others?

  “That’s why I was able to get out…” I muttered to myself, remembering the moment when I’d felt that strange sensation as I was pulled back to my room. It was morbid and strange, twisted and grim, but somehow I couldn’t help but smile. “Incredible.”

  “You’re lucky,” Fujiko said firmly, speaking for the first time since I’d arrived. “Like the rest of us. We brought you here because we need your help.”

  “Yeah, how did you do that?” I asked curiously. “That thing to my computer?”

  “It’s pretty simple actually,” Mickey chimed in with a kind of timid enthusiasm. “I’ve been tracking Fount logins, which is easy if you know what you are doing, waiting for logouts. When I saw yours, I simply searched your username, and since you used it on a couple of other games, I was able to get your full name, which I used to search in the surrounding areas of your Fount’s signature, which led me right to you.”

  “Oh,” I replied. “But the message? On my PC?”

  Mickey smiled confidently. “Well—that’s why they call me the wizard.”

  “And quite a drone pilot too,” I added, to which Mickey smirked.

  “We want you to join us, Rand,” Altarus interjected. “Something is happening in the world—something terrible—and we have been chosen. Will you help us?”

  I glanced around the room, at the strange bed-chairs, hoses and cables draped down from the ceiling and walls, the Founts and Crowns just waiting to be used.

  “My friend is inside,” I said softly.

  “We all have loved ones trapped inside,” Fujiko said firmly. “Which is why we hoped you’d understand.”