Slave Stories

by Bahr, Laura Lee

Me and Midge got real lucky. We both worked at the Mainframe, where all the communications came through. True, most people had computers and phones the size of their fingernails, but the sheer amount of processing needed to manage everyone’s fingernail computers and constant checking of their Fece-book feeds needed a lot of horsepower. That was what was happening at Mainframe, and where me and Midge knew one another. When the silo went, we were in the bottom of the building, just about to put together a Shell. Shells were big, refrigerator-sized boxes that housed servers. It was a crap job. Very physical. You always cut yourself or jammed something because the makers weren’t interested in it being easy or elegant for us, just that they worked reliably, and came in under budget. That’s where me and Midge came in. We had to sand rough corners, bend metal panels, and push and shove pieces in to make it all fit and go together nice enough. Then we had to test and integrate.

  Midge heard the silo go.

  “What’s that?” I asked him. “Sounded like a plane hit a skyscraper, or some octopus God is cracking through the heavens.”

  “Worse,” he said. “Pretty sure the silo is gone.”

  ”The silo?” I asked. “You sure? Why?”

  ”The Clan did it,” he said, looking at his fingernail computer. “Looking for retribution. But the water’s rising.”

  Just as he said it, we both heard the water gushing in. That was enough for both of us to look at one another and freeze. We both had the same idea. “Put the box on its side,” he said. “Quick.”

  We used our might and got it down. The things had to be watertight in order for the Mainframe cooling systems to work properly, so we were in luck. “Do you think it’ll carry us both?” I asked.

  “Hell of a time to find out,” he said.

  “Right.” He jumped inside. We both saw the first streams of water coming in across the floor. I grabbed some of the panels and bars we’d normally used to assemble the things, and threw them inside. Then I threw in my knapsack.

  “No time for personal belongings,” he said. “Get in here.”

  “Got two bottles of water and my lunch in there,” I said while I climbed inside the box. “We might need it.”

  I’d gotten in with moments to spare. The tide rose quickly and the pressure went quickly. We were rushed forward, lunging clumsily inside the box. We both knelt down. What else would we be able to do, anyway? That was the issue, wasn’t it? We had no other means to escape.

  “Now what are we going to do?” Midge had curled himself up against one side of the shell. I made sure I kept to the opposite side to keep balance.

  “We’re going to need to wait this out,” I said. “Wait for the waters to subside.”

  “Where do you suppose they’re going to go?”

  “I don’t know. Somewhere, I hope. I do plan on being home tonight.” I didn’t even believe myself.

  “Don’t fucking count on it,” he said.

  The facility was flooded and it felt like we were inside the bowels of a sinking ocean liner. “Look at us two turds flushing out of this toilet.” I laughed. Midge looked at me sternly.

  Taking a panel and using it as an oar, we quickly passed the break room. Martha and Desiree were up on a break table. We made eye contact. They obviously hadn’t thought of a way out. “Swim. The water’s only getting higher.”

  They didn’t even look up. The water had hypnotized them—because, I thought, maybe they’d seen so much of it. Rumors were rampant that the State filtered sedatives into our water supply. Of course the conspirator inside me had a gut feeling it was true, and people would willingly drown in the stuff like cultists drinking tainted Kool Aid. And of course I had built up a healthy tolerance by treating all water as though dangerous enough to give me the squirts for six months.

  “Aren’t we going to help them?” Midge asked.

  “This isn’t exactly a limber Coast Guard vessel, is it?”

  “Don’t be gleeful.”

  “Do I look like I’m on a bender here?” I asked. “Row. Before the water rises and we’re trapped.”

  “Fine.”

  We did. I’d been right, too, about the rising tide. The floodwaters filled over five feet high, and steadily increased.

  At the end of the hallway, I had an idea. “Row toward the emergency chute,” I said.

  “We can’t go down,” Midge said.

  “Up and out,” I said. “The entrances are all locked during work hours. I’m sure no one released them in time.”

  “They may have,” he said.

  “Too risky.”

  “Say the water doesn’t raise us up and out?”

  “We can climb the rest of the way.”

  “We’ll lose our ship.”

  “Aye.”

  As we passed offices, we saw others. Many familiar faces I’d seen daily, but never knew beyond a shrug. We paddled onward, down a long, large hall. Someone swam on their back and laughed. “Isn’t this grand?” said the high-pitched voice. Eric the angry redhead, we’d called him. No one knew his real name, just that he’d come around and find something wrong, tell you in no uncertain terms, and would be off.

  “They’re opening the rear doors,” I lied. “Hurry.”

  “Where are you two going?” Eric asked.

  “Out,” I said.

  The very next little hallway had already filled enough to its top third. “All the people? They’re going to drown,” Midge said.

  “They’ll be lucky. Free day off work, at least.”

  Just past the little hallway, our makeshift boat paddled toward the emergency shaft. We fit inside and looked up. “The gate’s shut,” Midge said. “Now what.”

  “We open it.”

  “That’ll set off alarms.”

  “Will it?”

  “Likely.”

  “So what? People should know there’s an emergency happening.”

  “Don’t they already know?”

  “Doesn’t appear it’s obvious to them.”

  The water rose even faster. We heard breaking windows below, but no voices. “Hear that?” I said. “Might be people breaking out and swimming for their lives.”

  “Perhaps just the pressure from the water. This building is not an ocean liner.” Midge looked up as we steadily rose.

  “Glad to see it go.” I looked up, too.

  “We might be back, scrubbing it clean for the Clan.”

  “Ever the optimist.”

  At the top, the lever for the door slid back without force. As we were rising, we simply put our hands up, and the door opened. “Not as heavy as I would have thought,” Midge said.

  “I’m not surprised. They cut corners on everything.”

  In a swish, we were up and out, and the waters were just lapping onto the top of the building. “Feel that?” I asked.

  “There appears to be a strong current.”

  “Right.”

  We paddled hard at that point. I looked around at the roof deck, as some portions of it were still above water. “Guess we’ll need to find a new place for the Holiday party this year.”

  Heading toward the railing, we both saw it tilt. “Is that…?” Midge asked.

  “Moving,” I said. “Yes.”

  “The building is falling beneath us,” he said. “Hurry.”

  Of course we paddled like furious young men at that point, anxious to get off and away from the collapsing building. Even if it was underwater, the prospect seemed quite nerve-wracking. “Do you think it’ll suck us underwater?” I asked.

  “Only your last girlfriend sucks underwater,” Midge said.

  “I take great offense to that,” I said. “She’d never lower herself.”

  “Not for you, at least.”

  “Now’s not the time for joking,” I said.

  We made it past the railing, and kept going. “When do you think we’ll be far enough away to be safe?”

  “Until we can’t see it.”

  There was a deep, lumbering sound from below us. It sound
ed big. Like a whale having trouble defecating.

  “That must be it falling down,” Midge said. “All those people.”

  When we looked about, it appeared we were on the open sea. There were very few landmarks visible. The State was most certainly under hundreds of feet of silo water. Midge and myself floated on top in our mainframe shell just as a current picked us up. The whole lot of it smelled acidic and oddly sweet simultaneously. Noticing such a detail would normally be lost on me, but it was overpowering and undeniable.

  “There’s not much above water,” Midge said. “How far do you think this goes on for? Is there regular land anywhere we can go?”

  “Who knows? There is that group of things jutting out of the water over there. Arrogant boners.”

  “The Clan?”

  “They knew. That’s why they’re so high up.”

  “They couldn’t possibly…”

  “They have.”

  Midge looked uncharacteristically mad and focused. “Let’s pay them a call.”

  “Right on.”

  <~~O~~>

  Paddling up toward one on the Clan’s buildings, we both found our anxieties increasing. “At least no one is pointing guns at us and trying to sink us.”

  “Too busy sucking each other off for being so clever to save themselves, I’m sure.” Midge always kept up the wit. Obvious even when we traversed our flooded state.

  As our mainframe case ship made it toward the bulk of the building, I looked in my bag and was happy there was a power cord for my laptop bundled. We used it to tie ourselves to a window handle. “Do you think we’ll ever be able to come back down and paddle away?”

  “Betting on it. Unless we can borrow a chopper.”

  “You can fly a ghetto bird?”

  I thought for a moment. “No,” I said. “That’s not something I could safely bullshit my way through, truth.”

  “Glad to know you can be honest at times.”

  “It doesn’t suit me.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Well, just remember where we parked. I always space that sort of thing.”

  We stood and were able to reach the story above ours easily. Using the Art Deco ledge was like climbing up on a diving board from being inside a pool. Not pleasant, but doable. The window opened easily.

  “Hope there’s a couple girls in there waiting for us in teddies,” I said.

  “You’re such a chauvinist. Women are not just there for our sexual fantasies. They are complex human beings.”

  “I know,” I said. “Just all this work has made me excitable and lonely.”

  “You have me.”

  “I don’t gather you’d look fetching in a teddy.”

  “Maybe not to you.”

  The room was empty of life, although it overflowed with political posters rolled and rubber banded. We opened one. Cornelius Dekker had posed in his most serious face. For Immediate Leadership. These things were always fixed and Dekker was a poisonous character—of course Baroness Un would help him get elected as a state official! Democracy was a fucking illusion.

  I dropped it. “Not posters of Taylor Swift, like I’d expected.”

  “Shame.”

  Outside the room, the halls we encountered were void of people as well.

  “What are we going to do when we see someone? Normally they’d have us jailed at the minimum for trespass. Without the world, all bets are off.”

  “If they try anything, we’ll try back.”

  “I hope they don’t. I don’t like violence.”

  “You’d lie down in front of a tractor so they couldn’t raze your house, wouldn’t you?”

  “And?”

  “I’m not the one who’d lure you away with a pint and a premonition.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “So I’ll do the heavy lifting. Then we’ll see.”

  Around the bend we heard voices. We didn’t hesitate. Coming upon a large meeting room, we spotted immediately the signs of the Classists. Their little metal water bottles looked like a miniature city on the table top. A flagpole stood near the opposite end of the room, a token of all they ruled. The smell of their alien musk overpowered, but there was a new equation: fear. High pitched voices volleyed back and forth.

  “What are we going to do?”

  “Are we trapped in here forever?”

  “How did this happen?”

  “We’re safe.”

  “What about our friends and families who aren’t in the towers now? Are they lost?”

  “How can we know?”

  “Is there a plan for this?”

  “How will I be able to check my Fece-book? Is that still live?”

  That last bit set Midge off, and he made sure to announce us. “Of course you twats would be most worried about self-promotion during all of this, wouldn’t you? A bunch of grovelling micro-celebrities, aren’t we? Worse than the super celebrities. Even stupider and even more obnoxious.”

  The lot of them looked round and spotted us. They looked like well-manicured lawns with a fresh spot of dog shit right in the center. The dog shit being us. Mamma wasn’t kidding when she said I was a little shit growing up. That little shit had turned into a drain clogger.

  “You fucks knew this was coming,” I said. “How many people have you killed while you sit in your tower worrying about posting pictures of yourself on the inter-not?”

  “Is Moog here?” one said, one with Clark Kent hair and designer eyeglasses. “Please page him.”

  “There’s no electricity,” said another weasel face.

  “Don’t we have a contingency for that?” said Clark Kent.

  “We should, but it’s not functioning properly,” weasel face said.

  “Fuck all of you,” I said. “Playing field’s been evened. Our time to pitch.”

  I had no idea why I was saying that, or what I was going to do, but I wanted to pay them back for ever allowing the silo to flood.

  A small fellow, must’ve been under five feet, brown all over, burst into the room. He looked like a bulky Chihuahua. “There’s a problem in here,” he said, and I was sure he was trying to ask a question, but he wasn’t quite all there upstairs. Too much Chihuahua mating, I suppose.

  “This shrimp is your security?” Midge asked. “You’ve all grown so out of touch.”

  The Chi alien charged at us, knocking Clark Kent a foot to the side.

  “What do we have?” Midge asked.

  I didn’t say anything, but as the Chi alien lowered his head and ran at me, I lived up to my name and dodged left.

  Chi alien went right past, oblivious.

  There was a loud crash.

  We turned to see he’d somehow managed to get his entire head into the wall, cracking their wood panelling.

  The room went silent.

  I tapped Chi alien’s shoulder. “Hello?” I asked. “You all right?”

  He didn’t respond. At all. Even to several taps.

  “The bugger’s gone and taken himself out, Dodge,” Midge said. “I can’t believe it.”

  “One down,” I said, turning to the worms. “Now what to do with you all?”

  One said, “We can use you. Stay with us. We’ll take care of you. Bring you into the fold. When this is all over…”

  “When this is all over, you’ll have us hung,” I said. “Don’t even pretend.”

  With that, I went for the flag pole. They parted like the Red Sea. Midge had no idea what I was up to, either.

  All the years hard labour made me nimble enough to pick up the flagpole, which I immediately swung at a skinny young extra-terrestrial with a spotty beard. He let out a surprised little eeky mouse sound when the ballast crashed into his head and shoulder. He dropped to the floor like a swatted fly.

  The others caught on and tried to move out of the way, but I took out two with my next swing.

  They yelled and protested, and Clark Kent was the worst groveller. “Please. I have wives. A family or two.”

  “
So did I,” I said just before I dropped him cold with the fiercest swing I had in me. He dropped in such a way that he’d bent over the table, his hands knocking down the metal water bottles.

  Midge had caught on and made quick work of shutting the doors so they couldn’t escape.

  I didn’t care about them. I quite enjoyed it. How could these dumb, weak aliens have enslaved us? What had been their tool?

  They’d made us stronger, me stronger, while they got smaller, weaker, less apt.

  Raising the flagpole over my head, I dropped it on the heads of any left quivering or shaking, or seizing. Putting them out of their misery? The entire thing went by so fast. It was no more offense to me than sitting on a deck and killing a swarm of mosquitos.

  Tossing the flagpole to the floor of the room, I spat on it. “Fuck you you fucking fucks.”

  Midge nodded at me. “Rough day at the office?”

  “Yes, well, at least I got in a good workout at the end.”

  “True,” he said. “So now what?”

  “We wait.”

  Our blood lust satiated, we made our way through the stairwells to the top of the building. As we climbed, we heard other voices. “You know? Those fellas we took out probably had no real power over anything. Maybe we should have waited.”

  “Who cares?” I said. “It was fun, and I feel better.”

  “By the way? I didn’t know you had a wife and kid.”

  “I don’t,” I said. “I was just messing with him.”

  “You can be such an asshole.”

  “Who can’t?”

  On the roof of the building, we looked out at the flooded state. It’d be several days until the water from the silo receded. We busied ourselves scavenging for food throughout the building, hiding in faraway rooms, taking turns on watch. We were never discovered, even though it came close a few times. The State must’ve known where we were though, they knew everything.

  When we made it down to the ground floor, after the water had mostly gone, we went out through the garage. There were people down there, but they took us for regular workers.

  We passed our mainframe boat, which had been deposited squarely on top of one of those Lincoln vehicles. When I climbed up, I was happy to see my old shoulder bag still inside. I grabbed it, and headed out and away from that area, back to where my home had been.

  The world was coated in mud and debris. Shattered wood littered the streets. Anything that wasn’t a giant State structure had been destroyed. There was muck and junk everywhere. “Where are we supposed to go?” Midge asked.