Darklandia

by T. S. Welti

  “That’s not comforting.”

  “The phrase is ‘sweet felicity’.”

  “Sweet felicity?” I repeated the phrase I had used hundreds of times in my lifetime. “You’re telling me that my father is trained to give up the algorithm at the mention of such an extremely common phrase?”

  “Only inside Darklandia… and only from you.”

  “How am I supposed to work that into a conversation about cherry soda and tears?”

  “You’ll figure it out.”

  “You’ve put too much faith in me. I’m not as strong or clever as you think.”

  “You’re only as strong or as clever as you think. And it’s my job to make you think you’re very strong and clever.”

  “You’re not doing a very good job.”

  I was pleased to see him smile at my teasing, but his smile quickly faded. “I’ve been watching you… inside Darklandia. I know what you’re capable of.”

  Something passed between us as he gazed into my eyes, as if he were transferring bits of confidence and knowledge to me through the air. A chill passed over my arms and I hugged myself, feigning cold though it was at least 80 degrees inside this building with no air-conditioning.

  “Another thing you should know,” he said, as his glare penetrated me. “If the bots detect an anomaly in your standard projection, in other words, if you become self-aware inside Darklandia, the system may deploy the clones.”

  “What are the clones?”

  “The Sera you saw inside the pod on Level 17 was a rudimentary clone I coded specifically for that pod. The clones inside Darklandia are digital projections of people you trust. The clones are controlled by the master levels.” I gritted my teeth at yet another phrase I didn’t understand. “You’ll learn about the masters soon. Right now, all you need to know is that you’ll notice the clones if they do deploy them because they look different from the standard projections, but you won’t understand why they look different. They’ll use the clones to deceive you, to throw you off your mark. No one expects you to wake up and make contact with your father on your first attempt, Sera, but if you get close they may use the clones the same way they’ve been using your father—to create a false narrative, a false memory. Just keep telling yourself it’s not real. Keep willing yourself to wake up. Got it?”

  “That’s a lot to remember,” was the only response I could muster.

  He nodded as he backed away from me, which I took as my cue to get inside the darkroom. I rounded the corner into the lobby and scanned my sec-band. I glanced over my shoulder through the glass door. My gaze skimmed across the street and skidded over a silver helmet pointed in my direction. I turned back to the scanner and realized the door to the darkroom was still shut. I held my wrist inside the scanner again and it didn’t flash green.

  A spark of panic shocked me, overtaking me, until I could hardly breathe. I watched my sec-band, shivering as I waited for the red flash.

  “Scan it again,” Nyx whispered urgently into my ear.

  My hand trembled as I slid my wrist into the scanner again. One second. Two seconds. Three seconds.

  12

  The sec-band flashed. Green.

  I let out the breath lodged in my chest and scampered into the darkroom before the door closed. The darkness, only slightly broken by the row of tiny blue lights marking the path to the pod, made me uneasy. Now that I had been inside the pod on Level 17 and I knew the darkness in the darkrooms wasn’t required, I realized it was just another psychological device. It gave the pod user the impression they were willingly submerging themselves in the darkness; willing participants in the illusion of Darklandia.

  My body collapsed into the pod as I tried to conjure a way to work the words sweet felicity into the conversation with my father. The neuro-gel detected my presence and tightened around my limbs and torso as the lid of the pod whirred closed. The darkness was heavy, my heart hammering against my breast, as I waited for the feed.

  The feed flashed on; no flickering as there had been in the pod on Level 17. Immediately, the site of my father’s blue eyes filled my vision as he gazed at me across the park bench. The wind lifted the hairs on my arms as it lifted the pale hair on his head.

  None of this is real. Hold onto that thought, Sera.

  I pleaded with myself, but the standard projection soon took over as they force-fed it into my nervous system.

  My father’s eyes crinkled as he smiled and fear chafed at my insides as I glanced at the Atraxian star carved into the skin between his eyes. Why did he have to take me outside to see the rain last week?

  He handed me a bottle filled with a glistening red liquid. The liquid turned a pixelated gray for a moment then switched back to red.

  A glitch. This isn’t real.

  I shook my head as I took the bottle in my hand and pressed it against my lips. The liquid bubbled and popped as it washed over my tongue and exploded in my throat. I spit it out all over the grass and my lap.

  My mind flashed back to a distant memory: red liquid sprayed across my face. The memory flickered away suddenly and I gasped, coughing from the beverage sizzling in my throat.

  My father laughed as I wiped tears from my cheeks. “You get used to the fizz,” he said, his voice distorted and distant as his fingers wiped my chin.

  My father’s hair beamed in the sunlight, like platinum and starlight spun together. I wished I had my father’s hair color. Instead, my hair color was something between starlight and the dark side of the moon. Grandmother called my hair color “sweeter than honey”. I didn’t know what sweet or honey were, but I was almost certain neither of those had anything to do with hair.

  Sweet…. I had a strong and sudden notion I was forgetting something.

  Sera? Are you awake?

  My head snapped up. “What is it?” I asked, referring to the red liquid in the bottle.

  Whatever it was, it was nothing like the salty, metallic ration I drank that morning.

  “It’s cherry soda,” my father replied, smiling at the confused expression on my face. “Cherries are a fruit. Soda is a drink infused with carbonation to give it that bubbly feeling.”

  The bubbles inside the bottle mesmerized me as they floated up and formed a foamy ring on the surface of the liquid.

  Cherry soda. Now I was certain I was forgetting something.

  Sera, wake up.

  “Where did you get it?” I asked, as I tipped the bottle on its side, fascinated as more pockets of air drifted to the surface where they burst only to be replaced by more bubbles.

  My father glanced around the park, his gaze skidding over the Guardian Angels positioned along the path every one hundred yards. Their silver helmets reflected the sunlight making it impossible to see through the glass to the face inside; impossible to know what or whom that face was watching.

  “Sera, what would you say if I told you there’s a whole world outside Manhattan? A different world. A place where cherry soda runs like water from fountains and people are so happy that sometimes they cry.”

  “They cry?” I clapped my hand over my mouth as I glanced around the park at the angels.

  “Real tears,” he continued. “How does that make you feel?”

  “Feel?”

  Crying was something people did only when they were in extreme physical pain—unless you were a darkling. I remembered all the pictures of darklings our teachers showed us in Felicity school, starving darklings huddled on street corners, tears cutting paths through the filth on their cheeks. Just the memory of it filled me with terror.

  “Don’t be frightened,” he said, flashing me the gruesome, crinkled darkling smile he had inherited from my great-grandmother. “Please, Sera, don’t look at me like that. I don’t want to hurt you. I want you to know the truth.”

  My father’s face flickered with an expression of pain, so quick I would not have noticed it if it weren’t for the fact that his face now appeared fuzzy and his hair had stopped moving with the breeze.
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  Wake up, Sera.

  “The truth?” I replied. A lump formed in my throat as a surge of hot anger swelled inside my belly. I was sent here to get the truth. “Sweet felicity.”

  My father’s body quivered like a poorly projected hologram. “You are eighty-seven light-years ahead of them. You’ll make it,” he replied, as his sec-band flashed red and his body went rigid against the park bench.

  The feed switched and I was in the corridor on Level 17. Nyx was next to me, his fingers clasped tightly around the crook of my arm as he guided me toward a cell.

  “Where are you taking me?” I asked, unable to hide the tremor in my voice.

  “To your cell.” His lips moved, but they didn’t seem to be in sync with his words.

  “I don’t have a cell.” He ignored me as he yanked me along the cold corridor. “You’re not paying attention. I don’t have a cell. I don’t belong here.”

  “When you choose suffering, suffering is what you get,” he replied, his voice as cold as his fingers on my skin. “Suffering is optional, Sera.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Suffering is optional, Sera. Why do you choose to suffer?”

  “It’s not a choice.”

  “Suffering is optional.”

  His lips didn’t move as his words echoed inside my head. He pulled me into a dingy cell and shoved me into a pod. My neck cracked as my head ricocheted off the headrest.

  “That hurt.”

  “And it’s all because you didn’t drink your rations.”

  This isn’t real. Wake up.

  13

  The pod hissed open and Nyx stood over me holding out his hand.

  “They’re coming,” he said, as he pulled me loose from the grip of the neuro-gel.

  I didn’t have to ask to know what Nyx meant. The bots detected the message to my father.

  “Where’s Darla?” I asked, as the door slid open and Nyx pulled me out of the darkroom into the empty lobby.

  He yanked me sideways toward the corridor instead of toward Broadway. “They took her.”

  The corridor darkened the further we got from the darkroom until we were in near total darkness. He opened a door labeled BOILER ROOM and pulled me toward a staircase leading into what looked like a dark basement. I held my ground in the doorway as Nyx attempted to yank my hand again.

  He gawked at me. “What are you doing?”

  “Who took her? Where is she?” I demanded.

  The sound of boots pounding the floor assaulted my ears and there they were. A gang of angels at the far end of the corridor rallying toward me. For a moment, I was mesmerized by the way their feet pounded the tile in unison.

  Tick-tick. Tick-tick. Tick-tick.

  Nyx yanked my arm again and I stumbled down the first steps, twisting my ankle. “Sorry, but we have to hurry.”

  “They’re going to purify her!” I shouted, as we barreled down the last steps into a concrete room saturated in the stench of oil smoke.

  “Listen to yourself!” Nyx shouted back, as he pulled me toward another door labeled DATA. “She’s not going to be purified. She was detained.”

  He shut the door behind us and secured an old-fashioned lock above the door handle. I marveled briefly at the rows and rows of computer racks covered in a thick layer of dust and cobwebs.

  He spun me around to face him. “What did your father say? Tell me the exact words.”

  The way he grasped my arms made me think of the way he pushed me into the pod on Level 17 and a spasm of fear told me to run. But that wasn’t real. He didn’t really do that.

  “You’re eighty-seven light-years ahead of them. You’ll make it.”

  “Eighty-seven light-years?” he replied, glaring at me with such intensity I thought I might melt under his gaze. “Are you sure he said eighty-seven? And those were his exact words?” I nodded and he released me just as something crashed against the door. “Help me.”

  Together we heaved three computer racks in front of the door. “How are we getting out of here?” I shouted over the incessant banging on the door as Nyx made his way to a crack of light in the ceiling. “Where is that light coming from?”

  He rolled another rack under the light. “Hold this steady.” I held tightly to the computer rack while he used it as a ladder. His legs wobbled as he climbed the final two tiers and reached for the crack in the ceiling. A loud boom at the door startled him and he quickly leaned forward over the rack to keep from toppling backward. It didn’t help that the wheels of the rack kept sliding. I couldn’t hold it stable under his weight.

  He steadied himself and reached for the ceiling again. His fingers glided over the crack where the light streamed in, casting flickering shadows across the data room. My heartbeat thumped through every inch of my body as the crack of light stretched into a bright shaft of light and the battering against the door ceased.

  Nyx jumped down from the rack and pointed up. “You go first. I’ll hold the rack.”

  I climbed the rack as he held it much steadier than I had. Standing on top of the rack, my head and shoulders peeked out onto a small concrete courtyard surrounded by battered glass storefronts.

  “Hurry up!” he shouted at me and I quickly pulled myself onto the concrete. Within seconds, Nyx was at my side and pulling me toward the far corner of the courtyard.

  We entered an old café and I followed him as he raced past the counter toward a back door.

  “Aren’t we going to get Darla?” I asked, as we zipped around the ancient food prep stations in the café kitchen. “We can’t let them take her to the detainee facility.”

  Without answering my question, he squeezed between two large steel cabinets, which I thought were once used as refrigeration units. He pressed on the wall behind the larger unit and a light came on inside the kitchen.

  “They discovered us. We can’t go back to the Darklandia headquarters,” he said, as he extracted himself from between the two machines. “Do you understand what that means? It means I no longer work for the Department of Felicity. I can’t get into the data center anymore.”

  I fell to my knees; my hands splayed on the grimy floor as the anguish overwhelmed me. “How can you say that?” I cried. “How can you just leave her there?”

  Nyx knelt in front of me, pulled a lumen out of his back pocket, and began typing furiously. “We’re not leaving her,” he said. “I only told you that to let you know that we have no choice but to break in now that I’m banned.”

  “Banned?” I glanced at his wrist. “Why didn’t our sec-bands flash?”

  He stuffed the lumen back into his pocket. “I just deactivated them.”

  The back door of the café burst open and my fingers scraped the floor as I scrambled backward.

  “It’s okay,” Nyx assured me, as a hulking man in a Guardian Angel uniform, minus the helmet, rushed through the back door.

  “I heard someone was panicking,” the man in black said in a deep silky voice.

  “I hit the panic button,” Nyx replied, as he stood and offered me his hand. “Sera, this is Jock. Jock, this is Sera Fisk.”

  Jock cocked his head as he watched me rise from the floor and wipe my hands on my tunic. “Anyone ever tell you you look just like your dad?”

  I shook my head as I took a deep breath and tried to calm my racing pulse. “Never.”

  “We have an emergency,” Nyx said, as he and Jock moved toward the open back door. “They detained the other girl and I’m locked out. I need you to get in touch with Hispa and tell her I’m invoking a code black.”

  I followed Nyx and Jock out into a dark alley where Nyx pointed to a ladder hanging from a fire escape. “What’s a code black?” I asked, as I grabbed the bottom rung of the ladder. Jock grabbed my waist and lifted me until I got my foot on the bottom rung.

  “Code black means my identity’s been compromised,” Nyx replied before he heaved himself onto the ladder beneath me. “Hurry up and get in there.”

  I climbed over
the railing onto the fire escape and found the window already open. I clamored inside into a spotless apartment filled with gleaming white furniture. A bowl of real fruit sat on an impeccable steel countertop in the kitchen. In the corner of the living room stood a single white pod, not a speck of dirt on the blue silicone neuro-gel pads. I should have been outraged; instead I found myself terrified. We didn’t belong here.

  “This is my apartment,” Jock said, noting the expression of horror on my face. “When I’m not working to save the citizens of lower Manhattan from being brainwashed, I’m detaining them for resisting the brainwashing. It’s sick, I know, but I’m a Guardian Angel and this is how we live.”

  Jock’s face contorted with remorse as he moved tentatively about the apartment, shutting the window, adjusting the blinds, centering the bowl of fruit on the counter; anything to distract himself, and maybe me, from the sordid truth.

  “Hispa’s formula didn’t work when we plugged it into the existing framework,” Jock said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Nyx replied. “We have the algo.” He smiled at me the way my father smiled at me when I danced in the rain.

  Jock gawked at me as he loosened his white tie. “Are you telling me she… On the first try?”

  “On the first try.”

  “And the masters?”

  “Not yet,” Nyx replied.

  “What are you telling him?” I asked Nyx.

  He shook his head as he sat on the edge of the seat inside the Darklandia pod and glanced up at the lid as if he expected it to close on him. “It’s not important. Right now, we have to regroup at the village to decide how we’re going to get inside the data center without my sec-band.”

  “And get Darla. Don’t forget we have to get her.”

  “I haven’t forgotten.”

  Jock grabbed a fruit I recognized as a red apple from the fruit bowl and tossed it to me. “Here. Enjoy your first apple.”

  “Don’t eat the whole thing,” Nyx said quickly. “And drink your ration with it or you’ll get sick.”