The doors to the Great Library were thrown ajar.
“It’s not like this is bad,” an agitated Null tried to justify to Seven and the others. “I’m sure there are thousands of open doors across this city.”
“Do you recall seeing any? Because I’m pretty damn sure every door I’ve seen has been closed,” Twenty shot back scathingly. Turning to Seven and Eight he remarked, “There’s something in there.”
“Someone could be in any of the buildings,” Eight rolled her eyes.
“You don’t know that!”
“What are we going to do? Search for somewhere to spend the night that meets your criteria?” inquired Seven.
“We can try!”
“You can try,” Eight corrected Twenty. “The monster didn’t come into the opera house with us, why would it go in here?”
“It’s not the monster that worries me,” Twenty groaned, fighting his imminent defeat. He looked to Seven, pleading with his eyes despite his silence.
“I say we take our chances,” Seven didn’t feel brave but neither did he feel endangered by entering the Library. “I’m sorry but I’m ready to call it a day and the Library is right here.”
Seven took a step ahead of the others, detecting that they needed a leader in this very fragile moment. The doors to the Great Library were unnervingly appropriate for the tomb that the city had become; chiseled into the stone doors were dramatic scenes of warfare that gave the depicted conflict an airy and regal repose. Seven continued past the doors into the main hallway that lined the outer corridor of the Library.
Twenty followed in tandem with Null and Eight, apparently glad enough to let someone else walk into what he was sure was imminent danger. Of the foes that immediately presented themselves to Seven and the others, the most fearsome were dust and darkness. A forlorn light reached through the doorway behind them and seeped through the dirty windows, revealing dozens of carpeted areas with furniture.
Despite the common signs of abandonment that manifested inside the Library, it possessed a homely feel. What furniture remained was badly deteriorated with stuffing poking out of torn corners, threads colorless with age. But, Seven relented, it must have beckoned to scholars back in the city’s prime. The Great Library had provided scholars and academics with a refuge, a welcome respite where citizens could retreat to learn and read and research in a controlled calm. When the city had died the Great Library had died with it.
Seven collapsed onto the dusty sofa and coughed through the eruption of soot that followed.
“Twenty was right,” Null remarked harshly. “We’re not alone. Can’t you feel it? It feels like someone else has been here. Somehow I can tell.”
Seven lifted his head from the couch and stared off into the darkness. Seven’s eyes wanted to slide shut, a moment’s relaxation had informed him how tired he really was, but Null’s voice carried through the growing darkness and roused him. If Null didn’t feel safe then Seven resolved to search the Library until she did.
“I’ll go take a look,” he decided, shocking the others with his unilateral decision.
“I can come with you,” Eight rose from the armchair she had slumped into.
“Well if you two are going,” Null reluctantly composed herself for the expedition, unhappy with the idea of venturing off into the waning light. Seven nodded appreciatively to her while enduring Twenty’s virulent glare. Rather than deal with the man, Seven inspected the interior of the Great Library.
This first corridor obviously ringed the Library and had been constructed to impress any who entered it. A curved roof, held in place by cracked pillars, lacked the height of those adorning the Library’s exterior but created their own sense of wonder.
If true sunlight, not the pale excuse for it outside, could pierce the grime layered on the windows then the hall might be fully illuminated. To Seven’s eyes everything was graying into obscurity: the paint on the walls, cracked and faded, echoed the ashy color of the furniture. Even the stone floor beneath their feet had lost its sheen.
Hundreds of people, maybe even a thousand, could fit into the corridor with Seven and the others. Yet they never would, a baleful Seven realized, because every one of them was dead.
An involuntary shiver ran up Seven’s spine and the words tumbled out of him, triggered by the unseen presence of instinct.
“Day of wrath! Oh day of mourning,” Seven began.
“See fulfilled the Founders’ warning,” Eight continued as the familiar tune overtook them.
Twenty, sickened to be repeating it, said “Haven and Earth in ashes burning!”
“When from skyward we descend,” Null offered quietly, watching Seven.
“On whose sentence they depend…”
Even though he had acquiesced to the idea of not being along in the Library, hearing another voice still shocked Seven. Twenty, Null, and Eight were the only other living people that Seven had encountered and heard; their voices were the sounds of their shared existence. Into the fray, into the mystery, came another.
“That’s right. Two roses were missing from the granite table at the opera house. We found Null earlier and until now one survivor was unaccounted for,” Eight concluded in a moment of revelation, nudging Seven as if it made sense.
Eight studied the area that the voice had come from. Seven watched her eyes trace the outline of a column near the inner wall, struggling for visibility in the weakening light, and she dared to step forward. Perfectly willing to trust a fourth stranger, especially when they shared the mystery of the song and rose, Eight spoke loudly.
“You can come out. We won’t hurt you,” Eight assured the darkness.
“Do you have a rose? Like us?” Null joined the inquiry.
“Not all of you have roses,” the voice replied quietly, the hint of an accusation hiding underneath her words.
“We left ours at the opera house,” Eight explained, gesturing between herself, Seven, and Twenty.
“I still have mine,” Null retrieved the rosebud from the pocket in her gray pants. Extending it carefully she approached the pillar in question, the darkness growing as the sun set behind the Library. Seven tensed, ready to spring to action, but Eight placed a hand of restraint on his arm and he stopped moving. His attention was robbed from the proceedings and instead dwelled on her hand, his arm, and the sensation that scurried across his body from the point of contact.
Only the appearance of a young woman, revealing herself from behind the stone column, recalled Seven’s attention.
“Great. Another girl. What a surprise,” Twenty snapped.
“I’m...sorry?” the woman answered, her voice so low that Seven strained to hear, even though he knew her already. This final survivor had been here, at the Great Library, in his memory. Her name was Ninety-Nine and, just as back then, she was the smallest of the survivors.
She kept a cautious distance and her arms were pinched to her sides in an attempt to not appear threatening. Her eyes hardly left the floor except to quickly assess who she shared the Library with.
Sympathetically, Eight recommended, “Don’t listen to Twenty.”
“None of us do,” Null confirmed.
“Yeah, no, let’s just trust another stranger that pops up out of nowhere,” he sneered.
“We trusted you, didn’t we?” Eight berated Twenty, returning her attention to their newest companion. “Can I ask your name?”
“Eight-Eight-Nine-Nine,” she answered, wrinkling her nose as she said the name.
Eight conducted the introductions with their full numbers, alongside the abbreviations.
“Have you chosen an abbreviation?” Null encouraged, trying to get Eight-Eight-Nine-Nine to speak.
“An abbreviation?”
“Well. Yeah. We can’t go around calling you Eight-Eight-Nine-Nine,” Null argued while observing her point fall flat.
“Why not?”
Null paused. She glanced at Eight, looking for support.
“Because having
a number for a name is strange,” Eight collaborated. “Abbreviating helps us personalize ourselves.”
The small woman considered Eight’s opinion, her eyes flashing to Null, before she made a decision.
“I like the sound of Ninety-Nine. If numbers made sounds, I think it would...ring…” she decided, her determined expression showing the length of her deliberation. Ninety-Nine was not a woman who made decisions lightly, as far as Seven could remember.
“And you’ve got the same sob story as us? Woke up in town, sick and amnesia-stricken?” Twenty coaxed her, airing his distrust loudly.
“Sob story? It wasn’t very sad. I was sick for roughly sixteen minutes after I woke up this morning around dawn or so. I encountered this building earlier in the afternoon, likely around one, and thought it would be a good place to start looking.” Ninety-Nine moved away from the group and pressed a hand against one of the pillars that followed the curving wall. Closing her eyes, she let the overwhelming vacancy of the building return to her.
The others shared a brief and worried look as they stared in bewilderment at Ninety-Nine.
“Looking for what?” Null tried.
“Computers,” Ninety-Nine’s eyes snapped open. “A survey of fifty-four rooms on the first floor alone revealed two-thousand, three-hundred, and eighty-one computers. Further observations indicate another four floors of varying likeness.” Ninety-Nine decided that Seven and the others were no threat to her and joined them, their small group of five complete at last.
“Are any of them working?” Seven asked.
“None of them are functional. I encountered a chamber at the heart of the first floor that appears semi-functional, but it would not activate fully,” Ninety-Nine explained.
“Didn’t you say you passed by the power center?” Eight rounded on Twenty.
Immediately on guard, Twenty retorted: “Yeah. So what?”
“Was it on?”
“On? No!”
“Fantastic,” Eight snapped, suffering another blow to her efforts at understanding the city.
“At least we’re not any worse off,” Twenty sighed. He glared at Ninety-Nine but otherwise accepted her admission into the group of survivors.
“Worse off?” Ninety-Nine inquired, following the others to the nearest set of dusty furniture.
“No food, no water, a monster on the loose,” Twenty listed sardonically, “And an island that we’re stuck on with no memories whatsoever. Did I miss anything?” he asked, looking to Eight and Null expectantly.
“Without further planning there’s little to be done about our geographical isolation, neither is there an easy solution to the predator-entity that hunts across the island,” Ninety-Nine posited, thoughtful and scholarly, before admitting, “There is, however, a good amount of food and water here,” she pointed at a hallway straight across from the entrance.
“What?” Twenty jumped from his seat.
“Really?” Eight’s voice trembled, reflecting the excitement that Seven felt. They stood up together. “Could we have some?”
“Absolutely,” Ninety-Nine smiled at Eight, and in her demure manner turned around and headed for the hallway. Seven, Null, and Twenty followed closely behind Ninety-Nine and Eight at the mention of food. “During my earlier sweep of the first floor I encountered a central chamber whose purpose remains unknown to me; it is obvious, however, that an unknown third party intended it to be found because of the curious placement of supplies therein,” she explained, obviously at ease with her newfound companions.
With the revelation of supplies hidden inside the Library, the structure abruptly lost the morbid solemnity that engulfed the rest of the city. Someone besides the five of them had come to the Library and stocked it in expectation of their arrival but plunging into the hallway’s darkness, in pursuit of those supplies, still aggravated Seven’s fears.
“How much further?” Twenty groaned.
“Not far.”
A change in the air confirmed that their destination was imminent and the five survivors entered another dusty room.
“This is the Inner Sanctum,” Ninety-Nine announced.
Seven could see the footprints being left in the wake of himself and his friends, the ancient surface exposed beneath the layer of dust. He marveled at the magnificent, empty room, its features dimly illuminated by square panes in the room’s sloping walls.
Outlined on the roof was a pentagonal shape whose corners were connected to the floor by five pillars. An enthralled Null let her hands travel the pillars. Crafted from some type of faded bronze, Null spoke highly of the anonymous material. “These aren’t stone like the ones outside. They’re not entirely metal, either,” she spoke with hushed wonder.
At the center of the pentagon on the roof was glass. Or maybe it was a diamond? Seven couldn’t tell and if Eight could, then she wasn’t offering the knowledge to anyone else. The roof fixture also emitted a faint light that revealed metallic canisters pressed against the walls adjoining the door they had come through.
Only just adequately lit for five people, Seven considered the Inner Sanctum an otherwise isolated place to hide desperately needed supplies. A sudden screeching bounced off the walls, causing the survivors to seek out the noise in a moment of panic. Twenty had broken one of the sealed lids from a canister, producing bottled water for everyone present. Turning one around in his hand, he smirked and tossed it to Eight.
“Get a load of that label,” he called.
Turning the plastic bottle in her hand, Eight examined the label.
On the white label lay a red rose.
“More roses,” Null mumbled, once again pulling her withered flower from her pocket. She tossed it onto the floor beneath the diamond in the roof. In silent tribute Ninety-Nine produced her own rose and laid it next to the canisters. Ninety-Nine’s fingers released the flower, identical to Null’s, and left it alone.
“Fascinating,” Ninety-Nine muttered without elaborating.
Bound by roses and the music, the five survivors could not afford to ignore the mystery of their existence for much longer. Had this been part of the doomed city’s plan? Preserve five of their number, equip them with the materials necessary to survive, and cut them loose after the catastrophe?
Seven pulled the cap off the water bottle and took a long drink. By the time he pulled the bottle away it was empty. A day in an abandoned city certainly dehydrated a weary explorer.
“That tastes good,” Seven admitted.
“There’s more! Food and blankets and all sorts of other stuff,” Twenty remarked, giddy.
Eight placed her own empty bottle on the floor near one of the room’s five bronzed pillars. An invisible worry kept Null, Eight, and the others from moving to the center of the five columns and Seven preferred it that way. What might be meant to occupy the empty space at the middle of the room?
Null, Twenty, and Ninety-Nine busied themselves with devouring the contents of the meal packages. Seven joined them and dug through the open container until he too was enjoying dinner. Eight refrained from joining them and instead went searching through the containers, hoping to find something that was not food. Seven watched her, concerned, but when she freed a white box emblazoned with a medical symbol from the container he understood.
Their brains identified the logo without strictly understanding it.
Eight knew it contained what she wanted. How she knew was another mystery for another day. Eight found Seven, sat next to him and, acutely aware that her three companions watched her every move, she grabbed Seven’s hand.
Seven made no effort to deter Eight and intently watched her pull the dirty and bloodied rag free from his injured hand. The cut was dry and had stopped bleeding, it even seemed smaller somehow, but that didn’t stop Eight from cleaning the wound with chemical solution.
It burned ferociously but Seven didn’t twitch or complain; the pain felt far away as long as it was Eight who administered it. Then she dabbed the cut with gauze, and sealed it
in a new bandage. Seven’s new bandage was the product of unknown benefactors who anticipated danger and starvation in a post-apocalyptic world, but he was silently thankful.
Finished, she took an extra meal pack that Twenty offered her.
“You’re awfully protective of Seven,” Twenty broke the silence.
“He’s awfully protective of her,” Null retorted.
“Once upon a time we knew each other,” Eight replied, her tone uncooperative. Seven wasn’t sure if she was relying on his earlier memory of their gathering or something else entirely, but neither did he care much. Seven felt his expression reddening but Eight’s confidence made it worse. He stared at his food and kept eating.
“Do you recall certain memetic incidents as well?” Ninety-Nine asked, studying Seven’s newly bandaged hand from afar.
“Memetic incidents?” Twenty snorted.
“Memories,” Eight clarified.
“Sure. Don’t you?” Twenty inquired accusingly.
“Perhaps, though likely in a different capacity,” Ninety-Nine admitted and she leaned forward, scribbling numbers into the dust. From his angle Seven identified zeroes and ones written in lines and broken by paragraphs.
“And that is?” Twenty drawled.
“Binary.”
“Binary what?”
“Code: the language of all computers.”
“What does it say?” Null asked.
“My name.”
“And you can read that?” Eight pressed.
“After I conducted my survey the language came back to me,” Ninety-Nine shrugged, unable to explain the phenomenon. “I experienced the memories in a similar code, transmitting time and place and descriptions. A whole event, encoded and transmitted. It was thrilling,” her eyes filled with wonder. “What did each of you remember?” Ninety-Nine asked, looking to Null and Twenty.
Twenty recalled his artistic yearnings, describing brushes, painting, and colors. When he tried to deliver a proper explanation of colors he abruptly stopped talking and passed the conversation off to Null. She wasted no time in elaborating on her architectural expertise, breaking down the materials, design, and possible length of neglect suffered by the Library.
Someone to Remember Me: The Anniversary Edition Page 8