Finally the grey mountain light seeped through the car windows and into his eyes. He put the seat up and stepped out of the car. His body was stiff and the chill morning did nothing to ease him. He sat on the bonnet of the car and stared into the valley where he and his family had lived for three generations.
The light came slowly. He didn’t know if he wanted it to come faster and reveal the truth or for the sun to change its mind and never illuminate his life again. At first when he saw the column above the city he thought it was smoke but the shape was to uniform for that to make sense.
As the morning gained strength he realised that what he could see was a hundred thousand tubes stretching beyond vision into the sky. Everyone was wired up to…for the briefest moment he had the word ‘heaven’ in his mind but it was gone almost before it was formed. Johnson knew that heaven had no wires. That which was above him, beyond his sight; no, that was not heaven.
He abandoned the car and walked away from the road into the hills. Finding himself somewhere in the tree line, he was cocooned for an hour or so in the damp air of pine shadow. Too soon though, the trees thinned out and ended. He was nearing one of the lower summits.
His body eased out with the walking and although the air was chill against his face, his blood was warm. He stopped for a moment. There was no one around. The forest and the hills were silent apart from the occasional birdcall. The solitude embraced him and for a short time he felt a positive surge, a thrill of freedom.
A rustling nearby caught his attention immediately in the quiet ambience. He looked to where the noise had come from and saw a fox darting for cover in the undergrowth. From the top of the fox’s head a thin black tube extended skyward. The fox was there and then gone in an instant but the image did not escape him. He knew what he had seen and what it implied. A bird flew overhead. It too had a tube connecting it into the blue. Looking back at the trees, he saw that some of them were similarly interfaced with the sky. He turned away and struck out a pace for the top of the mountain.
Half an hour later he was there, staring out across the land. Back towards his city the view was relatively normal although he could still see the waving tower of black above it.
When he looked deeper into the range of mountains, a harsher cold than any frosty morning could instill spread out from his heart. The highest peak of the range was partly shrouded in mist and cloud but he could still see the monstrous black colon that protruded from its loftiest crest. The mountain’s tube must have been dozens of metres across at least.
Nothing was free; the very land itself was invaded and ensnared. He raised his hands to the sky and dropped to his knees in the loose shale of the mountainside.
“Why?”
The tears came first. He covered his face with his hands, hiding himself from the truth of the world around him and wept. When he was spent, a rage grew in the vacuum behind his sobs.
His shaking hands reached up above his head and took hold of the tube. In response it stiffened and clung harder to his skull. He drew down some slack from the sky and with a force summoned from the core of his soul, he ripped it from its housing beneath his hair.
Two screams echoed high in the hills, one of which was not his own.
Through the cloud of pain around his head he stared into the open end of the tube and saw traces of his own blood around its opening. Inside the tube were smaller, open-ended tubules leaking clear fluids and several strands of what appeared to be wire and fibre optics. The tube pulsed in his hand with a life of its own, bleeding some kind of serum onto the barbecue apron he was still wearing. Around the opening of the tube, six thick, curving needles clawed and clenched at the air. Then, with a force he could not resist, the tube was drawn quickly upwards and disappeared into the clear morning light. He tested the wound on his crown with tentative fingers and could feel tiny holes where his skull had been penetrated by the workings of the tube. He thought he felt fine, considering the nature of the damage, but he seemed to have developed a problem with his vision; everything he looked at now appeared vaporous and insubstantial.
He walked back down to his car with blood leaking through his hair and down onto his collar. He drove the car back to his house but had difficulty controlling it, as if he were handling the wheel and gear shift several pairs of gloves. After several collisions with roadside barriers, he abandoned his car near the bottom of the hills and walked the rest of the way home with his thumb out. No one stopped.
He found Angelina hugging the children on the sofa. All of them were crying.
“It’s OK, Angie. I’m back. I’m alright.”
No one looked up.
“Angelina, kids. It’s me.”
No one with a tube ever sensed Johnson’s presence again.
Chapter 10
For a few days he wandered through the town visiting work colleagues and friends, each night returning home to his family. There was no response from anyone no matter how loud he shouted. When he tried to touch people his hands slipped through them as if they were spirits. The only things that he could touch in the world were the tubes. He discovered this when he knocked Bill Shuckman’s as he tried to touch his previous superior’s head. Shuckman had jumped in shock and shaken his head, as if to clear it, before carrying on with what he had been doing.
He understood then that it had never been his tube pulling at him. The tube, he realised, was the only real thing in the world and all it wanted was to remain a secret. He reasoned that someone else had torn free of their tube just as he had. They had been pulling on his tube to get his attention. Whoever it was had succeeded.
Chapter 11
Each night he sat with his grieving family, talking to them, trying to reassure them that he was all right. The world continued to be indistinct to him and his influence over objects remained lessened but not gone. The temptation to pull on Angelina’s tube to let her know he was still with her was hard to resist. He thought about it all the time.
Finally, one night, as she and Matthew and Rebecca watched TV, he stood behind her place on the sofa and reached out to take hold of her tube.
“I believe that would be a mistake, Robert Johnson.”
He turned around to see a face he found familiar but could not place. It belonged to a man about his own age; a man whose body, unlike everyone else’s appeared clearly defined and solid. The man stood in the doorway to the kitchen, unnoticed by anyone else despite his rather commanding tone and presence. Just like Johnson, he was tubeless.
Johnson let his hands drop to his sides.
“You can see me?” He asked.
“Yes,” said the man. “Very clearly. These others, however, are a little…misty.”
“You’re the one that caused me to do this?” Johnson leaned forward to expose the place on top of his head where his hair had begun to grow back.
“I’ve set you free, have I not?”
“No you haven’t. Not at all. This is a worse prison than the last one. Far worse. No one even sees me now. No one can touch me.”
“Isn’t that a relief?”
Johnson ignored the question. He stepped towards the man and reached out. He took hold of the man’s shirtsleeve and rolled the cloth between his fingers. It felt real. It felt good. When the oddness of such a gesture struck Johnson, he let go.
“Who are you?” He asked.
“My name is Milo Fiori.”
“Why do I know that name?”
“We went to school together.”
“God, yes. I remember. Something happened to you, though. Everyone said you’d been kidnapped.”
Milo shrugged.
“Now you know the truth.”
“You’ve been…like this all this time?”
“I grew up this way. At least, ever since…” He made a pulling motion over his head and made a comical pop with his lips.
“Milo, you’ve got to tell me what’s going on. I have to know everything now.”
“I don’t know everything. What
I do know will take time to tell. We should go somewhere.”
“I can’t leave them.”
“Trust me, Robert, it will be easier if we do it my way.”
“Will I be able to come back again? See them?”
“Of course, why not?”
“I don’t know. I just…”
“It’s been hard on you. It’s the same for everyone. Come on.”
Johnson followed Fiori into the night and for a long time they walked the streets of the city. Along the river where houseboats and barges were moored. Around the square in the city centre where Johnson had worked. Through the malls where people could shop all night. Fiori told him how the
world really worked.
“So, it’s people like us on the other ends of the tubes?”
“Just like you and me.”
“And they experience everything we do?”
“Everything. But the difference is, they don’t feel pain so much and they feel pleasure more. They can also experience what it’s like to be an animal or even a rock or tree.”
“Like the mountain?”
“Exactly. That particular tube splits into several hundred others. ‘Being the mountain’ seems to be one of the most popular experiences. After being human.”
“Why would they do all this?”
“Because they’re scared of life.”
Fiori told him how people had become what he termed ‘indistinct’. After generations of using gene technology to phase out certain unwanted traits in their offspring, humans had become unable to resist disease.
“The tube acts as a conduit for vicarious experience—what they call ‘the real reality’. Meanwhile, the receiver lies protected in some kind of safe environment where neither disease nor any other kind of adversity can enter.”
“How do we get to these people?”
“We don’t. They’re inaccessible.”
“Can’t we fly up to them?”
“When did you last see a plane, Robert? Or a helicopter or a fucking hot air balloon?”
It was one of the many truths that landed like punches on Johnson’s already battered consciousness. They walked away from the city and towards the suburbs where they traced their way through neighbourhoods and around the sports fields of schools.
“How do you know all this for certain, Milo?”
“One of them came down here once and made the first disconnect. There has been a line of us ever since. You’re the next one.”
“It’s just you and me out here?”
“’Fraid so.”
“There must be a way out.”
“Every disconnect has looked. None have ever left. If they had, we wouldn’t be here now—the line would have been broken.”
“Why did you pick me?”
“I can’t say exactly. I was told that when the time came, I would know. I knew it had to be you.”
“I don’t know whether to thank you or wring your neck. I was happy, Milo.”
“Really? Didn’t you know better deep down? Didn’t you know you’d never be truly at peace?”
Johnson’s pause was too long. In the end all he said was,
“There has to be a way out.”
“You’d leave all the rest behind? Angelina, your children?”
“I’d come back for them.”
“What if leaving meant there was no coming back? That’s already true, don’t you think?”
Chapter 12
Johnson stayed away from Fiori for the next few days. He didn’t want the job of the disconnect. He didn’t want the responsibility. He wandered into the hills again following the main mountain road. After a while the road became uneven and then broken, huge cracks across its surface. Further along, the earth became visible between the cracks and finally there was no road.
It stopped about forty miles from the outskirts of town. There was no path or track, only a sudden end and beyond it, the blurred undergrowth and trees. Johnson walked on regardless. He became neither tired nor hungry nor thirsty.
He walked far beyond the place where he’d ripped the tube from his skull, past the huge mountain, held in the grip of its own vast conduit. He followed a pass which brought him to the other side of the range and there he found the end of the world, a milky white oblivion that he dared not step into. The earth stopped as the road had, but now there was a drop. He flung a stone over the edge. It slowed in its descent, as if sinking through liquid. He never heard it hit the bottom.
The walk back to the city seemed far longer.
Chapter 13
“If you had designed this place, where would you put the exit?”
“I could never create something like this.”
“Come on, Milo. Think about it.”
“I don’t know.”
“But you would have an exit, right? In case something went wrong.”
“You’ll never find such a thing.”
“What about the one who came from up there? Did he stay here and sacrifice himself? When he’d done what he had to do he went home, I’m sure of it.”
There was a protracted silence between them, Johnson’s passion grating against Fiori’s apparent indifference.
“Don’t you want to get out of here, Milo?”
“I’ve already tried.”
“But why have you stopped trying?”
“It’s not so bad here, really. Life is less complicated than it was with the tube.”
Fiori was looking away, watching the spectral cars and the people. Gazing at the sleek tubes that would never leave them to an unaccompanied existence.
“Milo.”
“Yeah.”
“I want you to tell me everything you know that can help me find a way out. I mean everything.”
They discussed it all again as they toured the city. Two ghosts, invisible to everyone else, leaning towards each other in heated exchanges. Johnson found he was still unsatisfied.
“There must be something else. Something unusual that you’ve never made sense of. Something the last disconnect passed to you that doesn’t fit with everything else.”
Fiori was quiet for a while before speaking again.
“It’s probably nothing useful, but–”
“But what? Tell me.”
“Why don’t I show you instead?”
Fiori led him to the stone monument in the centre of town. The monument stood at the centre of a pyramid shaped plinth. The plinth possessed four levels, each diminishing in size and upon the uppermost and smallest level, a large statue looked precariously balanced. It was a representation of a naked man climbing. He had no ropes or equipment and much of the detail was taken up with the sculptor’s attention to the rock face. It was practically vertical and the naked man was striving to find the next finger hold. It was obviously well beyond his reach.
Johnson had passed the statue a thousand times and never once stopped to inspect it. He had been able to see it from his floor of the office block and had even eaten his lunch in its shadow on warm summer days. Now he looked at it with new eyes.
“Why didn’t you tell me about this before?”
“It was so obvious, I forgot.”
Johnson glanced back but the man seemed perfectly serious.
“Read the inscription,” said Fiori. “That’s what I brought you here for.”
Johnson knelt down to inspect the polished granite, where the inscription had been chiseled and read it aloud.
“’This city was founded by souls who searched fearlessly for the knowledge necessary to scale the tiers of every aspiration. They pressed on; strove upward believing only that there was a summit to be attained. They ascended, not knowing what they would find, not knowing if they would survive. This city was there reward. May we all have the courage find the next tier.’ Jesus, Milo, this is it.”
“It’s a lie, Robert. This city was built by people who want to live without risk or danger. It doesn’t even have a name.”
“You’re wrong. The ascending
platforms, the metaphor of the man climbing; it all adds up.”
“To what?”
Johnson grabbed Fiori by the shoulders and shook him.
“This is the way out, Milo.”
“The statue?”
“No, what it symbolises. We have to strive for the next tier.”
“But what does that mean?”
“It means that if you really want to leave, you can never give up.”
Johnson turned away from Fiori and began to walk back towards the house where his family still lived. His head buzzed with the implications of the statue’s message and he found he was on the verge of running. In his excitement he didn’t even try to get out of the way of the tubed people on the street, instead he walked though them. Fiori had trouble keeping up.
“Hold on, Robert. What are you going to do?”
“What don’t we need to do now that we don’t have tubes?”
“Eat.”
“And what else?”
“Sleep?”
“Right. I need to get some rest. I need to dream.”
“You think you can dream your way out of here?”
“I don’t think I can, I know I can.”
“You won’t be able to sleep. It’s the stupidest idea you’ve had so far.”
“Maybe, but at least I’m having some ideas, Milo.”
At the corner of the block where Johnson’s house was, Fiori stopped trying to keep up. Johnson was at his own front door before he realised. He stopped and waved to the man who had woken him up from the dream of the tube. Fiori waved back and shouted,
Snake Eyes Page 3