That made Dylan think about Matt. His best friend had been killed in front of his eyes, and rather than undoing all of it, the awful agents who had been responsible planned to erase Matt from history. Maybe he’d been erased already. Dylan didn’t know if his imprisonment in the Forge prevented him from having his memories tampered with like everyone in the real world. On some level, he wished he could have the memories erased, because thinking of the good times with Matt brought him to his knees with tears over and over again.
Twice so far, a sullen-looking guard had brought him a tray of food and a plastic cup of water. Dylan had tried to make conversation with the guard. He’d tried to inquire about the Forge, the other prisoners, and the origin of the food. The man didn’t respond. He just looked at Dylan disapprovingly and walked off.
Dylan had hesitated the first time food came. He ate just a taste of what appeared to be a turkey sandwich on rye, and waited to get sick. Nothing happened, but he left the rest of the meal alone just the same. By the time the second dish had appeared, with a bland, plain pasta and what seemed to be steamed mixed vegetables, Dylan’s hunger got the better of him and he ate ravenously.
He sat back on the bed when the food was all gone and he felt the cold surface against his back. The air in the Forge, though the name conjured up images of tremendous heat in his mind, was somehow kept at a comfortable temperature, but most of the surfaces he touched had the same unsettling chilliness to them as the store.
Stevens had told him that the prison complex had existed at least partially before his people had found it. That made sense to Dylan. When one looked past the obvious high-tech adornments, the building was old. Ancient, even. That implied that others had come there before the government had found the place.
He slept for a while, and when he awoke he was astonished that he had slept so soundly. The guard was standing outside the bars watching him.
“What?” Dylan asked. “What do you want?”
The guard was silent.
“Are you studying me? What do you want from me?”
Again silence. The man held up a tablet device and typed something in with one hand.
“You are studying me, aren’t you?” Dylan asked. “Why won’t you answer me?”
A siren sounded. It was far away but Dylan could tell it was a powerful wail. The guard looked more annoyed than surprised. “Fucking forgemites,” the guard muttered.
“Forgemites?” Dylan asked. “What does that mean?”
“Nothing that concerns you,” the guard said. He paused, then said, “Forgemites are what live in the Forge. They can’t get in.”
With that, he walked away, leaving Dylan more confused and frightened than before.
Whatever was happening with the forgemites lasted about five minutes. Then the siren ended, and in its place Dylan heard weeping and moaning from some of the others in the prison block.
“Who’s out there?” Dylan called. “Can any of you talk?”
At first there was nothing but the weeping and moaning. Then he heard a voice. “Help. Please.”
“Who said that?” Dylan called. “I can’t see you.”
“Help. Please,” the voice repeated. There was something so familiar about the tone.
“What’s your name?” Dylan asked. As the question left his lips, something clicked into place. “Clyde? Is that you?”
Silence.
“Clyde?” Dylan tried again. “It is you, isn’t it? It’s Dylan! Remember? Emma and I tried to help you get home.”
“Nobody ever goes home.”
Dylan was sure the voice belonged to Clyde, but the man seemed more confused than the last time they’d interacted. “How did you get here, Clyde? Did you end up here after the purple came?”
Again he was met with silence. “We’re going to get out of here, Clyde,” Dylan said. “All of us are going to get out of here. We’re going to go home.”
This time all he heard was a cackle from one of the others in the cells.
Dylan closed his eyes and went back to sleep. In the perpetual absence of sunlight, he found it easy to slip back into unconsciousness over and over.
When he next opened his eyes, the guard was back with a meal. “Do you know the names of the other people in this room?” Dylan asked.
The guard frowned. “You ask too many questions. You’re here because you broke the law. And it’s a courtesy you’re here and not in the general population.”
“I get that. But there’s a man I’m trying to help get home. I think he’s here in one of these cells. His name’s Clyde.”
“None of these people have names,” the guard said. “The resets have erased their names. You’re not the first person in the Forge to think about going back.”
“I have gone back. It’s not impossible.”
“Listen, kid,” the guard said, “I’m not saying it’s impossible for anyone to go back. We all go back when our shifts on duty end. I’m saying for those whose identities have been eaten up, it’s a different set of circumstances. Most of these people here in this block made some simple bad decisions and got stuck. It’s not about punishing any of them or keeping them from going back. It can’t be done.”
“How do they get erased just because they go to the past?” Dylan asked.
The guard laughed. It was a scratchy, nasty sound. “Does this look like the past? This is a pocket between worlds. Without the Forge every single one of us here would fall into nothingness forever, and that’s if we’re lucky and the forgemites didn’t get us. You think because the store opens on 1989 that it’s a portal to the past. It’s not.”
“Everybody keeps saying that!” Dylan said. “I know it’s the past. The facts check out. The people are real.”
The guard dropped his voice to just above a whisper. “What you’re accessing is a pocket universe. It was cloned from the real universe when that pharmacist fiddled with shit that was way above him. That little bubble can bend and twist and distort but it doesn’t change the real 1989 and it has no impact on the present or the future.”
He leaned closer to the bars. “What you see outside the store is a symptom. The Forge is the problem. And as long as it remains a problem, people will keep stumbling into it and ending up like the poor assholes in this hall. Now I hope you’re satisfied because that’s the last thing I’m saying on the matter, and I only said it because I have some sympathy toward your situation. Don’t rock the boat, kid, and maybe this won’t all end too badly for you.”
When the guard had departed, Dylan pondered the ramifications of the things the man had told him. For one thing, he didn’t think the guard and Stevens were necessarily bad people. They seemed to be performing an important task, keeping the Forge and whatever the hell the forgemites were away from people.
Murphy, on the other hand, was a very bad man. The thought that he had been alone with Emma for a while made Dylan furious. He had a feeling that if he was going to be released from his imprisonment, it would depend on Murphy giving approval. Dylan thought it was much more likely Murphy would vote to execute him and be done with it.
His new understanding of the store, the version of 1989 he had experienced, and the Forge gave Dylan a great amount to ponder. Before Emma had introduced him to the vacant lot and the store that sat invisibly in it, he had never imagined anything like this. Worlds. Plural. And a dark space between them. Was it true he was living in that space? He couldn’t understand how that was even possible. How could he breathe? How could he see or hear?
He looked around the seemingly ancient cell. Clyde was in another of those cells, he was sure of it. Dylan knew he couldn’t leave that place without getting Clyde out as well. And what of the others in the cells? The lost souls in his wing and the prisoners in other parts of the facility deserved to be freed. Their families deserved to have their loved ones returned.
Dylan felt his determination grow. He wanted out of that cell, and when he got his chance he was going to somehow make things right.
He just had no idea when or how that chance would ever arrive.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Jim stayed low and used the ample shadows to hide his progress down a series of ramps and tunnels. Inside the enclosed spaces, it was impossible to glean anything about his surroundings, but when the walls opened up he could see a vast spider web of pathways leading in all directions. Occasionally he saw people, almost all men, wandering up and down. The paths met in hubs throughout the endless space. He wondered if there was a central hub to the network of pathways. He couldn’t see anything of the sort from his vantage point. If there was a bottom, or a top, for that matter, to the space, it was lost in the distance and the darkness.
The air was slightly chilly and still. Jim took a deep breath. There was very little odor to the air. He took a left at a fork in the path and moved downward along a very steep ramp. At the bottom he saw three men huddled on a metal platform. They had the posture of guards, but he didn’t see any weapons. Off duty, maybe?
Just the same, Jim walked slowly until he was about fifteen feet away from the men. He crouched in the dark and listened.
“I need this shift to end,” one of the men said. “This was the third wave of forgemites in the last two days. The fuckers are getting restless.”
“You aren’t scared of them, are you, Nick?” another man said. “We have the sonars for a reason, you know.”
“Don’t fucking start with me,” the first one said. “I know what we’ve got. But I also know that having to man the turrets is goddamned exhausting. And the two of you assholes never had to deal with one getting in. One! And it fucking took out seven trained men before we stopped it.”
“I get it, Nicky,” the third man said. “Maybe you should take some of that vacation time you’ve saved up and go away somewhere nice with the wife. We all need a break from time to time.”
“Maybe you’re right,” the one named Nick sighed. “I don’t know. Did you hear about the new arrivals?”
“Yeah,” said the second man. “Everybody’s talking about it. Teenagers. Somehow got involved with the Pennsylvania portal.”
There are more than one of these things! Jim realized with a start. The more he experienced, the more he saw and the more he understood, the more overwhelmed he felt. He waited, sweat beading up on his forehead despite the chill in the air, and silently willed the men to walk away.
“If kids are wandering into the portals, the surface agents aren’t doing their fucking jobs,” the third man said. “Maybe some of those fuckers should get sent down to the Forge and we can have the cushy jobs out in the real world.”
The second man laughed. “Oh yeah. That would be sweet.”
The three men continued their chatter for what seemed to Jim like at least an hour. Finally, the one named Nick said “Gentlemen, I’m going to cut out a little early, if you’d both be so kind as to not report me. I’ve got a grave headache.”
“Buddy,” the second man said, “I’ve told you before, if you don’t give your brain a chance, you’ll never adapt to the higher gravity. But it’s cool. Go out in the world, young man. I’ll see you next week.”
The one named Nick left Jim’s view. The others turned to each other. “Fuck it,” the second man said. “If he’s going, we might as well go too. Next shift will be out here in a half hour anyway. Prisoners are contained, and we just put down the forgemites. Nothing to worry about.”
The men shook hands, went in turn to type something into a computer console, and left the platform. Jim waited a minute, then crouch-walked his way to where the guards had been standing. His legs were on fire from being bent down like that for so long. He scanned around, assuring himself that nobody was watching, then stood straight up. His knees fired echoing dual gunshots that made him cringe, but nobody was nearby.
Jim walked over to the edge of the platform. He had seen buildings on some of the larger hubs, but the smaller platforms like the one he was standing on only had the computer that the guards had accessed. Jim looked at it. The screen showed a Microsoft Windows desktop running a proprietary software. Jim laughed. He’d expected something extremely high-tech or possibly from the far future.
The currently open window was where the guards clocked out of shifts. Jim saw that the last guard had entered a code, still showing as a series of asterisks in a white box, but the man had not actually clocked out.
Jim looked over his shoulders, confirming again that he was alone. The menu system of the software was incredibly dumbed down. He worked his way through to the security cameras. He gasped as he saw the list scroll into view. There must have been hundreds if not thousands of entries. He pulled up a filter box and looked through the various options. He typed “Clyde” into a search box, but the system failed to return any results.
Jim pulled up a list of the prisons. There were ten listed, with various explanations of each of them. He selected several, jumping back and forth through the menus. In each prison there were anywhere between ten and twenty security cameras. He got a sense that none of the facilities was particularly big. The network of structures was vast, but he could tell that the emptiness was far more expansive. These people had built out what they could, but there was probably a limit to the materials they could siphon away from the real world.
None of the cameras showed into the individual cells. Jim pounded his fist against the console. It had seemed so easy, so perfect, that he had been granted access to the guard console. He wasn’t going to be able to find Clyde that way.
Jim took a deep breath. There was only going to be so much time before the next shift arrived, and he was accomplishing nothing. If there wasn’t a proper registry of prisoners, or at least not one that listed Clyde, and he couldn’t see anything on the security cameras, what could he actually accomplish?
He flipped through several more camera choices at random. One of them was labeled “Forge Perimeter.” Jim clicked on that, and the screen filled with a black and white panning shot of what looked at first to be a massive heap of rocks. Then he saw the debris shifting and realized he was looking at something living. A countless many somethings, climbing and clawing over each other.
He quickly tapped a button to restore the home screen. On the upper right, he noticed an icon labeled “map.”
Jim selected that and saw a detailed, zoomable display of the very network of paths he had been traversing. He saw that a good portion of the named facilities was in fact the prisons, and the men were kept in the area on the map’s right, while the women were in a smaller cluster to the left.
Jim made mental notes, trying to hold onto the directions toward the men’s prisons. He stepped away from the computer and ducked back into the shadows. He started to head down a path that continued at the same elevation as the platform. He heard a sound and crouched low.
A man was coming up the same path Jim was headed down. “Is there somebody out there?” the man called. Jim stayed as silent as he could. He felt like his heartbeat was audible, the way it pounded in his temples.
The man walked right by him, then doubled back quickly. “You!” the man said, looking into the shadows where Jim waited. “I see you in there. Who are you? Come out!” The man walked closer. Jim rolled to the edge of the walkway, and slipped his legs off the side. He dropped down, hanging by his hands.
He looked beneath him and saw another surface. It was impossible to gauge the distance down. He felt his hands weakening and slipping from his sweat. The man was above him, looking around in the darkness.
Jim’s hands gave way, and he fell. It wasn’t a terrible fall, though long enough for him to take stock of the very notion that he was in the air. He bent his knees as he landed, with an enormous clang!
“I knew there was someone there!” the man called. “Help! I need backup!”
Jim ran as fast as he could. He didn’t hear any sounds of anyone giving chase, and was grateful that the man had shown up for his shift before anybody else. Even so, he continued to run, dodging fr
om one node to the next. He saw a building rising up ahead of him and hid behind it. The structure was made of heavy grey stone.
Jim looked around. He could hear multiple conversations, presumably from in front of the building, as he assumed the solid stone would mute any noise from the inside. That didn’t mean there wouldn’t be more opposition inside.
The thought made him pause. Why was he assuming these people were “opposition?” Had he seen anything to believe they were trying to do anything wrong?
Maybe not, but he was trespassing. His restored memories had reminded him of Agent Stevens and his threats, and of course there was the vanished boy in the store. Something was very wrong in this horrible place.
He couldn’t hide forever. That much he knew. And he couldn’t fight these men. The guards he had seen didn’t appear to be armed, but that didn’t mean much. He was no weapons expert. And they had manpower and probably significant training. What option did that leave him if he was going to get Clyde and return home?
Jim realized he was going to have to ask for help, with no way of knowing whether his request was going to get him killed.
“Excuse me,” Jim said. He walked out from around the side of the stone building and faced the two guards who were chatting at the entrance. Both of them grabbed at their belts, but Jim was relieved to see they were going for radios. Whatever business took place down in this hell, it seemed it wasn’t a violent one. That made him think again of the boy in the store and he wondered if his assumption was correct.
“Who are you?” the man on Jim’s left asked. “How did you get down here?”
“I’m Jim Hamilton,” Jim said. “I was unfortunate enough to get lost through the store on Butler Avenue, and I wasn’t myself for a while. Now I’m feeling better and I hope you can help me find my friend and get out of here.” He hoped his voice registered more confidence than he was feeling.
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