Revolution in the Underground

by Michaels, S. J.

  With her head still down, she walked into him, and attempted to push him aside as though he were the last object, that, if bypassed, could spare her from further misery. “Come on,” she said as if pleading with him, pushing a little more forcefully now than before. “What are you doing?”

  Ember put his hands on her shoulder solidly, and she instantly melted. She brought her left hand to her eyes to cover her bursting tears as Ember brought her into full embrace. “It’s okay. You can tell me.”

  “No… no I can’t,” she said in-between sobs.

  “Why not? You can tell me anything.”

  “Because it,” she said, sniffling, “won’t be the same.”

  “I won’t judge you, I promise.”

  She closed her eyes, using her left thumb and index finger to wipe the tears to the bridge of her nose, as in a pinching motion. “Close the door,” she commanded

  “So you’ll tell me?”

  “What choice do I have?”

  Ember closed the door and followed her to the beat-up couch. She moved a pile of journals and trinkets and sat down. Ember likewise cleared a space and sat down next to her, turning to face her as she spoke.

  “I wasn’t born in the Underground. I’m not exactly sure where I’m from, but I know it wasn’t from here.” Ember nodded as if this were a reasonable assertion and fair starting off point. “I remember the trees, the forest, the rivers—just as you and your sister have described—but I don’t remember much about the people. On my fourth birthday,” she said, her face turning grave, “I got into some disagreement with my parents… at least, I think they were my parents… my real parents that is… and I… I… wandered off into the forest. Well, you probably can figure out what happened from there…”

  “No, no I can’t,” he said, trying to fit the jigsaw pieces together. “What did you fight about? I don’t understand.”

  “That’s the thing… I don’t remember… That’s what hurts me most about all of this… I simply don’t remember. I was only four years old. I remember feeling angry and cheated, but nothing more. I wandered into the forest, hoping to make my parents regret doing whatever it was that they did to me, and then… like you, I fell down a hole… and the next thing I knew I was here in the Underground.” The tears of a more mournful variety began to pool in her eyes.

  “And what happened next?”

  “It’s all really a blur. I had a very serious concussion, and apparently I was expected to die. After I was nursed back to health, I told everyone my story but they all called me crazy. You have to consider though, that this was back in the day when the thought of an outside world was coming under attack—even in the Buffer Zone. It was popularly believed at the time—as it still is in many parts—that the Underground was all there ever was and all that ever will be. Luckily the revolutionaries got a hold of me before the Police could come and take me away. I was then adopted by two middle-ranked revolutionaries by the names of Marty and Marilyn.”

  Inundated with information, Ember could not yet decide how to divide out his sympathies. Instead he probed further, “Did your foster parents believe you?”

  Kara tipped her head thoughtfully and wiped the tears from her eyes. “Marty and Marilyn—the people I would come to call my parents—loved me very dearly. They were very eccentric, inventor types whose major claim to fame was in scientifically proving that the only way the Underground could subsist after four hundred years was if it were an open system—that it must exchange matter and energy with an outside world. In other words, they proved that there must be some exit to the outside world. They were, in this sense, in the best position to believe me. They spent most of my childhood searching for my entrance, and had invented various tools designed to dig through and around the Underground.”

  “So, did they believe you?” he asked, not seeing where she was going.

  “I think… I think they wanted to believe me… but after years of no evidence, I know they must have become doubtful.”

  “Why ?”

  Kara sighed as if it pained her to recall the memories. “We were a very eccentric family. When I was ten, my mother used a machine to try to dig her way out of the Underground. She was gone three days, and when she returned she was completely crazed—foaming at the mouth and severely dehydrated. From then on, she was never quite the same. Leaving the Underground became an obsession for my parents—not so much because they hated it here, but rather because they wanted to know of the existence of an outside world. You can imagine how this all made me feel. Here I was, a child born to an outside world and it wasn’t enough for them. They told me that they believed me but each act of desperation evidenced the contrary! If they really believed me then they wouldn’t have searched so hard.”

  “Maybe they just really wanted to leave?” he suggested.

  “No… They wanted to know. They wanted to see with their own eyes! Hear with their own ears! Smell with their own noses! They wanted this, because they did not believe me fully! My own parents thought I was crazy! They loved me dearly, but they thought I was crazy! You can just imagine how this made me feel. My own parents!” Kara paused and looked down pensively before continuing, “Only my neighbor really believed me.”

  “Sven?” he asked. Kara nodded tearfully. “So what happened to your parents?”

  “Every year, they would alternate… trying to dig their way out of the Underground. You can also imagine how this appeared to the revolutionaries. My assertions were seen as brainwashed beliefs—a natural consequence of being raised by such obsessed foster parents. We were labeled fringe extremists and our views were almost completely ignored. And then, finally it happened… About a year ago from today… My mother left once more to dig her way out, but she never returned.” Tears came flowing down her red cheeks. “It’s the not knowing… that’s the hardest. The thought of her dying somewhere in the dark void… alone… not ever knowing… it’s tough, you know?”

  “It will be okay…” he said, struggling against his curiosity to appear supportive. He put his arm around her.

  “And then, a year later… My father left… And… well… he ran into you two… and… you know the story from there. At least he died knowing that another world existed… that I was right… and it is only fitting that his death would begin the liberation of his people!”

  “Why did—”

  “Yet there are still people slandering us!” she interrupted. “I do not believe what Styles said for a second. My parents were not sleeper cells! I understand that there are some curious coincidences, but I know that my parents were both committed revolutionaries! The fact that they gave you the seeds proves it! And it kills me that still, today, people call them crazy! If only they knew! But alas, they will see soon. It breaks my heart. Even now, people call me crazy!”

  “Are you?” Ember asked swiftly.

  “I’m not crazy! I’m not—”

  “It’s okay if you are,” Ember explained with a soaring heart, “it wouldn’t make a difference to me. You know, sometimes I think that I am a bit crazy myself.”

  “No… I’m not… I’m not…”

  “Kara?”

  “Ya?”

  “I know that there is something that you aren’t telling me. It’s okay, I won’t judge you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What were you doing just now? Just a few minutes ago? Who were you talking to?”

  Kara could no longer look Ember in his face. She looked down and shielded her eyes with her hands, but her cheeks, which were blushed red from embarrassment, betrayed her. “I know… I haven’t told you the whole story.”

  “Tell me then,” he said, too curious to broach the subject more delicately.

  “Promise you won’t think differently of me?”

  “Promise,” Ember declared solemnly, though he would have agreed to almost anything at this point.

  “Sometimes I talk to her… my sister…” Kara said with a defeated voice. She paused as if this
explanation would have to suffice.

  “What?” he said, trying to incite her to continue.

  “I mean, I know that she’s not really there! At least not like you are here! I know she’s not in front of me! Not physically! But she is… she is here,” Kara said, dramatically bringing her hands to her heart. “I feel her.”

  “You have a sister?”

  “That’s the thing… I don’t even know for certain… I was only four when I left, and I had that terrible concussion. I hardly remember anything. Everybody… except for maybe Sven… thinks that I have made it up… so that I could have a friend to play with. They think that just because I talk and play with things that aren’t there, that I must be crazy. Because I make strange facial expressions and hand gestures that I must be crazy. That it must be related to the concussion… But I don’t see her when I talk to her… I just feel her! I can’t explain it. I know that it’s me who’s talking for her, I know that she’s not really there—yet I feel like she is. I think that somewhere, up above, I have a twin sister—an identical twin sister. And… I think her name is… Maya.”

  “Maya,” he said, trying out the pronunciation.

  “But of course… all of this is too coincidental for everyone else! They think I have misunderstood childhood memories of staring at my own reflection… Even her name… Maya… They think my infantile mind crossed it by exploring simplistic phonetic alterations of my own name!”

  “Why do you care what they think?! You know what you know and they can’t take that away from you!” he said, trying to comfort her.

  “Oh, Ember… but they can… It’s not that simple. Memories… Reality… Existence… It’s not as concrete as you think it is.”

  “What are you talking about? Of course it is! If something happened, then it happened! If you have a sister, then you have a sister!”

  “Ember… please…” she pleaded, seeming exhausted. “Do you know how much I have thought about this? I know the evidence. I know that I had that concussion. I know that it is awfully strange that, beyond hazy memories of forests and rivers, I remember nothing of the world above. My own biological parents are a haze. And my sister… well… she’s even more of a misty vapor. She’s only a feeling really. And I know that if I were to invent a sister, I would probably pick her to look and act just like me. I know it’s all too convenient… And every doubt that others raise adds to my own! I don’t know what is real Ember! Do you see the problem?! My own senses—my own perceptions—I’m not sure that they can be trusted!”

  Ember didn’t know what to say. It had never occurred to him that his own thoughts and that his own senses might not be real. “Uhh…” he mumbled to fill the pause.

  “And then sometimes I wonder if I’m real! If I’m just someone else’s imagination! Sometimes I feel… like a specter in an immaterial world.”

  “I… I… don’t understand.”

  “If I told you,” she said with a spirited boom, “that you weren’t real… that this whole thing… Everything you know and love… wasn’t real… That it all was just the imagination of another…. What would you say? What would you do?!”

  “I would say… that…”

  “That I’m crazy?!”

  “No, I wasn’t going to say that!”

  “It’s okay… because I don’t care what you think or say! If I knew that it was all fake… It wouldn’t change anything… because I know, that in my world—in my mind—I exist… even if I don’t actually exist… I am here… alive in some form… some manifestation… In this same way, my sister exists. If I believe that my sister exists then, I think in some way she does! If she does exist and if she is my identical twin, then she shares my same genetics. Semantically, the argument can be made that we are the same beings divided corporally only. Then, if you follow me, why can’t I divide myself arbitrarily even if she doesn’t technically exist? Why can’t I artificially self-create my own manifestations? Divide myself in two? Could I not say that she is real, if she exists here in my mind? What is reality anyway? What is identity?”

  “I think… that you don’t really believe this,” Ember said, having had done his own share of metaphysical reasoning before.

  Kara looked askance, as defeated as ever. “Look… I know that I’m justifying it to myself… I know it’s a bit out there… I don’t know what I believe… It’s just… try to understand where I’m coming from… Suppose that someone told you that, after all of these years, your sister, Maggie, didn’t actually exist. That she was just a figment of your imagination and that, this whole time, you were talking to yourself. Now imagine that everyone tells you that. What would you do? You would start to believe them, right? Imagine the pain. The suffering you would feel in your heart. The loss. And you would let them mar the memory of your sister? ‘No,’ is what I say! They can’t take her away from you! Even if the whole world says it’s so, it doesn’t really make it so. You can create life from imagination and words, but you can’t take them away! Those memories you have, even if they’re all fake to others, they’re still very real to you. Your sister then, would be a part of you—just as real as you are. Do you see?!”

  “But my sister is real… I can see her… I can touch her…”

  “I know that… but… my sister… I still think she exists somewhere out there. I feel it deep down… and I need this… I need this theory to make certainty out of uncertainty. I need this… you see… it is actually a really rational belief, designed to give myself a foundation.”

  “But, why do you need to talk to her? Wouldn’t it be enough to just think it?”

  “I guess—and I hope you don’t find this too simplistic—I do it because I like it. I find it consoling. When I talk to my sister, she’s always a child. She’s always innocent and hopeful. It makes me feel good. I don’t know why I make the faces I do… I don’t know why I talk the way I do… It just feels right. And the thing is, there’s nothing irrational about that! In fact, it is quite rational! It’s different, but rational. I could fight it, but what sense would there be in fighting something that makes me feel good about life?”

  “And Sven? What does he think?”

  “Sven?” she laughed. “Sven puts up with it. I know he doesn’t like it. He’s the one who told me that I should hide it from people. He probably thinks that it’s a consequence of the concussion, and I can’t fault him for that. But does that really matter even if it was? Does it really matter where it came from? How it came to be? Or even if it’s real? If it gives me solace? In this crazy, absurd world, if I can find solace anywhere, shouldn’t I take it?”

  And just like that, all of Kara’s secrets were made bare before him. She had lost two sets of parents through heartrending circumstances. She had, quite plausibly, invented a sister to cope with her grief and she had used labored metaphysical reasoning to justify her actions. She seemed dangerously confused yet was unwilling to change or do anything about it. Her past was troubled, her present, insecure, and her future, uncertain. She was irrevocably flawed, perhaps even tragically and fatally so. And Ember loved it. He loved all of it. Everything, down to the most flawed quality. He loved it, and he loved her. Never before did she appear to him so beautiful as she did now. His heart soared with waves of emotion. He wanted, more than anything, to create a world together with her—to become one in mind and spirit—but he knew that now was neither the time nor place.

  “The passion of the extremes,” he said, resorting to one of his favorite lines for he knew not what else to say, “is always preferable to the dim twilight of the middling path.”

  Just then, Maggie walked in, rubbing the fatigue from her eyes. “What are you guys talking about?”

  ***

  Meanwhile, Sven and Styles entered an abandoned laboratory. On the floor were broken Erlenmeyer flasks, discarded Bunsen burners, and magnetic stir bars. Styles turned on the light switch, but only a few fluorescent tubes flickered in the back, accompanied by infrequent sputtering sounds and occasional
showers of sparks. In the very back of the back of the lab, in an otherwise empty corner, was a large, human-sized, hollow tube whose contents it appeared to have been removed long ago. Presently, they approached it.

  “Can you tell me what’s going on now?!” Sven asked, evidently annoyed at the day’s long journey.

  “We’re beginning the last phase.”

  “And what exactly does that mean?”

  “It means that we need a computer for the sequencing.”

  “A computer? Are you kidding me?! This place looks like it’s been completely ransacked by the Police. They would never have left a computer here!”

  Styles entered the evacuated chamber with unusual reverence and timidity. He closed his eyes for a moment and appeared deep in thought. Sven popped his head into the chamber, for it was not quite large enough to accommodate two grown men comfortably. As Styles crouched down and put his hand on a tile, the chamber lit up in a blinding opaque, sterilizing white. The tile, on which his hand was still placed, glowed a soft green. Below them came a swift swishing noise. The tile sprang up about an inch from the ground.

  Sven looked around in amazement. There were pockets in the Underground that were unusually technically advanced, and Sven in fact had seen most of these places, but it was nothing like this. It wasn’t that the technology was so incredibly elaborate—on the contrary, it was quite minimalist—but rather that it was so digital, so electronic. There were no cogs, no intricate meshwork of moving parts. It was like nothing he had ever seen. This was, Sven knew, the fabled advanced work of pre-Underground engineers. Sven had heard stories about the sprawling cities of old—so advanced that all necessities of life were provided for, so luxurious that there was no suffering. He knew the rumors of a golden city from the past—the golden lights and soaring buildings—whose technologies were so unfathomable that no single person knew how any one thing operated. Though he didn’t know with absolute certainty, Sven believed that this chamber was from that time.