by T. S. Welti
The door slid shut behind us closing us inside what appeared to be a grimy concrete prison cell with no bed or toilet. The cell was empty except for a single pod.
“I thought you were going to show me someone who’s been purified,” I said. “There’s no one here.”
“Have a seat,” he said, pointing at the open pod.
The once glossy white surface of the pod was smudged with dirt and other filth I didn’t want to speculate on. The fabric that covered the gel-cushioned seat, the armrests, and the leg-rests was frayed and worn thin. With no toilet in this cell, I didn’t want to imagine what kind of foul mishaps had occurred inside this pod.
“I’m not getting in there.”
“Then we’ll leave,” he said, and he immediately made for the door behind me.
“Wait.”
He stopped next to me and a strange feeling filled me; my skin tingled as I breathed his scent. That must be what soap smelled like. He gazed down at me and, though he was at most five inches taller than I, he was a giant in this room. He knew everything I wanted to know; yet, he refused to force this knowledge on me. This was my choice.
I sat in the pod and willed myself to ignore the musty scent as the gel cushion conformed to my torso. The neuro-gel was equipped with electrodes, which sent electrical impulses throughout my body to stimulate my tactile senses and gave the perception of movement.
“Remember what I told you: no panicking. This experience has been known to cause episodes.”
I nodded at his reminder and took a deep breath as he manually lowered the lid on the pod. The gel pads in the lid of the pod conformed to my arms and legs; swallowing me whole. My head was the only part of my body not encased in the neuro-gel. The headrest behind me pumped a steady flow of oxygen into the small space where my head was free to move in the blackness. Within seconds, the feed flickered around me, assaulting my eyes, and Darklandia came to life.
I was in my living room. I called out to my mother, but no one answered. I crossed the living room carpet, no longer wet from the wash, and entered the kitchen. A dirty glass sat on the counter next to the ration dispenser. I peeked inside the lavatory and found it empty. My grandmother’s bedroom was also empty. I crossed the living room again toward my mother’s bedroom. The door stood ajar a few inches. I pushed it inward slowly and found my mother standing in front of her mirror braiding my hair.
I had never seen myself inside Darklandia. I studied the smile on my face as my mother ran the brush through my hair and a memory came to me. My mother once pulled my braid so tight that my scalp bled. I didn’t notice until I found the blood stains on my pillow the next morning. The numbing agents in my rations had masked the pain.
I desperately wanted to share this memory with my other self. Instead, I watched in silence as her head jerked backward every time my mother tightened her braid. Her smile never faltered. My mother tied a blue ribbon around the dangling end of her braid and sent her away.
She bumped into me as she attempted to exit the bedroom, but she couldn’t see me. I moved out of the way as this other version of my virtual self exited the room with a bemused expression.
“Wake up!” I shouted at her, but she continued toward the kitchen as I followed closely behind.
She reached for the glass and I knocked it out of her hand. Her eyebrows crinkled together as she stared at the shattered glass on the kitchen floor then she opened the cupboard and reached for another glass.
This couldn’t be the past. My father and grandmother were both gone. This couldn’t be the present because the real me was inside the pod on Level 17. Unless, I wasn’t really inside the pod.
Then I remembered something Nyx said. “I’m going to show you what a purified human looks like.”
He was showing me a purified human and the purified human was me.
10
The kitchen faded to black as the feed died and the pod hissed open. Nyx stared at me from across the cell as if he were waiting for me to explode into a fit of panic or disbelief.
I shook my head slowly at first then more vigorously. “That doesn’t make sense. If I’m purified, where is my father? Where are all the people who’ve been purified?”
“First of all, calm down.”
“Calm down! You’re telling me I’m purified! Do you think I’m stupid enough to believe that?”
Oh, no. The episode was coming. I could feel it happening as my body flooded with an uncontrollable urge to scream and strike out, just like all the others who’d had episodes and ended up purified—no, not purified. What happened to them?
“Sera, before you can understand what I’ve just shown you, you need to understand what Darklandia is,” he continued calmly as I took deep breaths to mimic his composure. “Darklandia is not a way for you to ‘exorcise your darkest thoughts’ as they would have you believe. Darklandia is the hand of the government reaching inside your brain and rearranging your thoughts to suit their reality. Why do you think you’re forbidden from speaking about what happens inside Darklandia? Do you think it’s a coincidence that you see your father every single time you serve your hours, except today?”
“Are you saying my father was never purified?”
“Sera, the father you knew only exists as an observer inside a memory inside Darklandia, and that memory isn’t even accurate. That false memory only exists to remind you of what happens when you disobey the government.”
“Has my father been raptured?”
“Lose the filter, Sera. You can say killed,” he replied, obviously annoyed with my narrow-minded questions. “No, your father isn’t dead, but he may as well be. Your father is being kept on Level 16 with the other high-profile cases. Most people who are detained are kept on the other levels as lab rats. Only the ones like your father, the cases they label as ‘challenging’, are kept on Level 16.”
“Challenging? What are they doing to him?”
“Keep your voice down,” he said, but his face relaxed as he stepped forward and knelt in front of me. “I don’t know what they do on Level 16, but I know it’s not good. That’s why we need you. We need you to attempt to communicate with your father inside Darklandia. We need you to get the algorithm he worked so hard to get before he was detained. If we get that algorithm, we can wake everyone up.”
I stood from the pod and Nyx hung his head as he knelt in front of me. He wasn’t kidding. They really were waiting for me to wake up. They needed me to get this algorithm.
My mind flashed to my last memory of my father again—the false memory of my last day with him in Central Park. Something about that memory was odd. It wasn’t my father’s fervor over the places where people cried real tears. That was expected, as my father had been talking crazy for weeks before that day. It wasn’t the green grass in Central Park. Only one patch of grass clung to life in the entire park, right along the border between the forbidden North side and the safe South side of the park, where the old reservoir used to be. My father and I visited that patch of grass every week as if it were a deity to be worshipped.
It wasn’t any of those things. It was the cherry soda.
“There was no soda,” I whispered and Nyx looked up from where he knelt. “And his sec-band never flashed red. He wasn’t even wearing a sec-band…. He was shot.”
He stood and looked me in the eye. “Do you see now why I said you never would have believed me?” I nodded as he moved toward the cell door. “We can’t stay here much longer. The video camera is going to switch back to the live feed soon. I’m taking you to the village.”
I glanced up and saw a single camera in the center of the concrete ceiling. “You’re taking me to Greenwich Village?”
“Not that village,” he said, nodding to the door for me to join him. “The village is the nickname for the place where Hispa and I, and the rest of the rebels, live.”
“You refer to yourselves as rebels?”
“Well, we like to think of ourselves as the fourth branch of the government tha
t’s constantly ignored by the other three branches.”
I thought of one of our Darkling History lessons from just a few weeks ago. America once had three branches of government: executive, legislative, and judicial. After the Civil War, Atraxia kept the principle of three branches, but they renamed and reprioritized them: Felicity, Community, and Security. The three I-T-Y words all Atraxians needed to be happy. What more could a person need?
Nyx smiled as he slipped his sec-band into the scanner. “Reality.”
As I dragged my leaden feet through the halls of the detainee facility, I remembered the heavy pistol I held in my hand shortly before my sec-band flashed red yesterday. As we passed the offensive water fountain in the lobby surrounded by so many concrete columns, I thought of the pillars in front of St. Paul’s Chapel, riddled with bullet holes. As we passed through the front doors of the detainee facility and Nyx exchanged niceties with the angels, I thought of the blood my mother scrubbed from my cheeks the day the angels shot my father in the chest.
As soon as we took our seats inside the subway car, I blurted the question I had been biting back since we left Level 17. “How can my father be alive if he was shot?”
“He’s alive. I’ve seen him come online every time you’re inside Darklandia. They’ve been watching you. Every time the system gets a read on you, they put your father in as an observer. I don’t know if they’re trying to torture him or if he’s being used against you.”
“Isn’t it possible they’re just scanning his sec-band to make it look as if he’s logging in? He wasn’t wearing it when I last saw him.”
“It’s not his sec-band. What you don’t know about the pods, what most people don’t know about the pods, is that the neuro-gel inside the pods recognizes you and verifies your identity. It’s called your neuro-signature. The sec-band grants access to the darkroom, but it’s the neuro-gel that actually logs you in and verifies you’ve served your hour. That’s why you can’t scan your sec-band and just hang out inside the darkroom for an hour. They would know.”
The walls of the subway car tightened around me like the neuro-gel. “They know I was sitting inside that pod today?”
“No. I told you I’m the senior analyst on the Darklandia mainframe. I wrote a code to bypass the neuro-signatures on the pod on Level 17. The signatures on that pod are intercepted, encrypted, and sent to our servers instead of the Darklandia servers. Hispa and I have been trying to use the raw data from those intercepts to break the algorithm, but all we’ve come up with so far is that every person in Darklandia is assigned a score. We think the score represents how likely the person is to wake up.”
“I must have had a high score.”
“You were definitely on the leader board.”
“Then why am I free?”
“Well, don’t forget you were almost marked yesterday,” he replied. “I don’t know exactly how it works because I haven’t seen the research, but the Department of Felicity knows the effect the mark has on unmarked citizens. I imagine the mark serves as a constant reminder to others to stay in line. Whereas, removing you from the system may have a negative effect. Once everyone forgets about you, your effect on others is neutralized.”
“That’s why they keep feeding me the memory of my father, so I don’t forget.”
“Now you’re beginning to understand.”
I wanted to ask him why the government wanted to do any of this; it couldn’t just be to control everyone. But my throat ached from asking so many questions and my near episode. My hunger pangs had morphed into a sharp, twisting stomachache. A few hours ago, I might have thought these were the pains of changing into a darkling. Now, I knew they were the pains of longing; my body longed for the rations, the drugs.
“You’re not well,” Nyx said, as the train began to slow.
My body slumped so far in my seat I was on the verge of sliding off. He helped me stand and wrapped his hands over mine as we gripped the safety pole. His palms were calloused, though I couldn’t imagine why a computer geek would have calloused hands.
“We’ll be there soon and you’ll finally get to eat real food.”
Even through the pain, I managed a smile. “You’re very kind,” I said, and he looked away. “I’m sorry. Did I offend you?”
He shook his head as he gripped my hands tighter. “No, you didn’t offend me. You complimented me. Have you ever complimented someone?”
The train stopped and my right eye twitched as the pain in my abdomen radiated down my legs and into my back. “No, I don’t think I have.”
He slipped a lumen out of his back pocket and punched in a bunch of commands with his thumbs then tucked it away. “Humility,” he said, slipping his arm around my waist to help me out of the subway car. “We counted the I-T-Y words once. Guess how many they mention in the Code of Felicity?” He half-carried me and I half-stumbled across the platform toward what looked like a lavatory door in the back wall. “There are 128 different I-T-Y words in the Code of Felicity and none of them are filter words. Gray can recite every single one in less than two minutes.”
“Who’s Gray?” I groaned, feigning interest as I got the feeling he was only talking to distract me from the pain.
As we drew nearer, I noticed the sign on the door was not a lavatory sign. The sign was clearly marked No Access. Nyx held his sec-band inside the scanner next to the door and it flashed green. The door slid open revealing a dark stairwell.
He helped me down the first few steps and waited for the door to close behind us before he answered. “Gray is one of us,” he whispered into the darkness between us.
I couldn’t see him and, oddly, this relaxed me and made the pain subside a bit. Then a row of motion-activated lights flickered on along the staircase and the pain returned with full force.
“You’re one of us now, Sera,” he said, his face so close I could feel his breath on the tip of my nose. “We’re going to take care of you.”
His face faded from view and my eyes rolled back as another wave of pain rolled through me. He reached down and scooped me into his arms.
“I can walk,” I muttered. “Put me down. I can walk.”
The rocking motion as he descended the staircase made my head spin. I was grateful when he quickly reached the bottom of the staircase.
“We’re not far now,” he said, the strain in his voice was evident even with my eyes closed.
“Please put me down,” I said, and he lowered me gently.
I clutched the front of his coveralls as I opened my eyes. We were inside a concrete tunnel. If I listened hard enough, I could hear the sound of water running.
“It’s not far,” he said, as he slipped his arm around my waist again and guided me forward.
The tunnel curved to the right and ended abruptly. A ladder reached up toward a manhole approximately twenty feet above us.
“We’re not going up,” he said, as he placed his foot on the lowest rung of the ladder. The tread was so low it hit the floor as he pressed down with his boot. The rung bounced back when he removed his foot. A loud clang startled me and I spun toward the noise to find a steel door behind us sliding open.
The floor inside this corridor was slick with moisture and I couldn’t imagine why. Manhattan hadn’t seen a drop of rain since March and that was only for a few minutes. The longest bout of rain to hit New York in the past twenty years was the four days it rained in December three years ago. The Department of Felicity had ordered everyone to stay inside so we didn’t get sick, but my father snuck me outside after curfew. I licked raindrops off my lips for ten minutes before the angels hauled my father off for his first evaluation and marking.
We stepped into the new corridor and Nyx pulled a lever on the wall. The door slid shut and he guided me further into this clammy concrete underworld. We soon came upon another door; this one had a scanner. Nyx inserted his sec-band, but the band flashed orange.
The door slid open and he helped me over the threshold onto a steel walkway perc
hed over what looked and smelled like sewer water. My stomach lurched as the walkway swayed beneath our feet. Nyx still had his arm wrapped firmly around my waist as we hobbled along.
My father once took me with him on one of his calls. My father worked as a pod technician for the Department of Felicity. Whenever a pod stopped working, it was my father’s job to fix it. I was eight when he took me with him to fix a pod in what used to be the Central Park Zoo. I wished I could remember who that pod in the zoo belonged to. This sour water beneath us reminded me of the stench that radiated from the scorched soil in the former animal park.
The walkway split off in two directions and Nyx guided me to the left. A few steps and we were back on solid ground inside another concrete corridor.
He stopped at the first door on the left. Affixed to the face of the door was a large, framed photograph of a U-shaped, one-story building surrounded by real grass and trees. Chunks of the outer walls appeared to have been gouged with bombs and bullet holes, which were patched with wooden boards and slopped on concrete.
“That’s above ground,” he said, as he reached for the doorknob—a plain doorknob—something I hadn’t seen except in photos. “I’ll take you up there another time, when you’re feeling better, so you can feel the grass.”
His chest pressed against my side and I tried not to think of Darla’s parents in that twin bed. He pushed the door open and I couldn’t believe my eyes. We were inside what appeared to be a greenhouse flooded with natural sunlight.
“Where are we?” I asked, as my heart thrummed painfully, almost drowning out the fire in my belly. “What is this place?”
“We’re underneath 97th Street in Central Park.”
“Upper Manhattan? The bombed side of Manhattan?” The darkling side of Manhattan?
Nyx gazed down at me, his jaw clenched, as if he were daring me to speak my thoughts aloud. “Upper Manhattan is the safe side. Don’t forget that.” He pulled me toward him and whispered in my ear. “And don’t ever use the word darkling in front of the others. There is no such thing as darklings.”