Nineveh's Child

by Gerhard Gehrke

  Rosalyn gasped at the smell. She didn’t follow.

  “Come on,” Dinah whispered.

  “Let’s keep going. There’s nothing in here.”

  Things were less densely packed on the far side of the room. But here she found a row of three buckets of half-eaten food scraps, all leftovers from meals recently served. Why put them in a storage room? It didn’t make sense. The drugged teens hooked to the network had feeding tubes and didn’t eat solids. This was something else.

  Rosalyn still waited out in the hall.

  Dinah used the card to open one of the doors by the buckets. An array of lights began blinking to life, triggered by a door sensor. More smells assaulted her, musty ones like wet, molding blankets. She saw a cage that took up almost half of a small room. The cool flickering lights weren’t working properly and they continued to dim and flash, but there wasn’t much in the room except more buckets and a pile of rags in the cell.

  Then the rags moved.

  “Hello?” she said.

  What poor wretch was in here? Someone waiting for an open berth in the brain dungeon? Did her brother have to recruit replacements for the nodes that burned out?

  She approached the cage.

  “I’m Dinah. Who are you?”

  The rags trembled. She heard a dry inhalation.

  She crouched down. “I’m going to help you. What’s your name?”

  The figure under the rags screeched, an ear-splitting sound that froze Dinah in place. It exploded toward her and slammed against the cage. A hand tried to push between the bars with thin, long fingers that almost scratched her face. She back and knocked over a pair of buckets. The cage’s door shook violently, until she thought it would come off its hinges. The creature in the cage thrashed and howled. It started to bite at the bars.

  Dinah flailed, reaching for the wall behind her. A hand grabbed her arm and she screamed. She looked up to see Gregory’s pink face and piercing blue eyes. He wore no hat or scarf, his scraggly, wispy hair hanging loosely like strands of gray yarn.

  “What are you doing in here?” he asked.

  The thing in the cage continued to push and tug and gnaw at the bars. Its bright eyes locked on her. It began slamming the heel of one hand against the metal in a rhythmic crang-crang-crang. She tried to back up further, but Gregory held her fast. When she twisted to get free, he shook her.

  “Well?”

  She was momentarily dumbstruck. Finally, she said, “You have a Wally in here.”

  He took a moment to admire the thing in the cage. “Is that what you call them? We do have one, don’t we? Nineveh has many secrets. Now if you don’t want him as your roommate, I suggest you learn to stay in your room at night.”

  With that, he escorted her back to her cell where he locked her up, but not before relieving her of the key card. Rosalyn was nowhere in sight.

  ***

  The faint echoes from the captive creature reached her cell.

  How did I not hear it before?

  But here, now, the sound of it banging on its bars in that unique pattern rose above all the rest of the blended racket that came down through the vents. It went on for hours before finally subsiding. The rest of the rattles and groans from the redoubt fell into the background.

  After a while, she climbed to the vent and called to Rosalyn, but no one answered. Dinah assumed she had hidden somewhere and made it back. Or perhaps she was doing some exploring of her own.

  Her brother showed up an hour later, pushed along by Gregory. The Beast followed along behind them with a casual saunter. He slipped past them once the door opened and walked the length of her cell. He didn’t look impressed.

  “I guess changing the locks isn’t going to keep you in your cell. And leaving a key card to be found was sloppy on our part. We could always put a ball and chain on your ankle. Or, even more simply, keep you sedated.”

  “Why do you have a Wally in here?”

  He grinned. His head was drooped to one side, and he seemed to lack the strength to keep it upright.

  “What an adorable name. Wally. I like that. I might send a memo to the rest of the staff that from now on the creatures should be called Wallys.”

  He made a gesture. Gregory responded instantly, stepping around Dinah. He gave everything in the cell a once-over, searching every possible hidey-hole for anything she might have hidden. There was nothing to find. He chased the cat out before leaving.

  “You have work tomorrow,” Ruben said. “You’ll need the rest.”

  “Where have you been?” she asked. “You don’t look well.”

  He didn’t answer her. He left, and Gregory closed and locked the cell.

  Later that night she thought she heard someone outside her door. When she held her breath to listen, the sounds faded into the rest of the white noise. She tried to ignore it, but found that impossible. But then, through the vents above her cot, there came a raspy exhalation that couldn’t have originated from the exhaust system. Maybe she was just in half-sleep dopiness or under the influence of drug-tainted food, but she thought she heard the Wally.

  It hissed, “Dinah.” Just once, and then she heard it no more. The longer she waited for the word to repeat, the more afraid she became that if she did fully awaken, something would be there in the room beside her cot. She began counting, clutching her sheets and holding on until morning.

  ***

  The days of work continued, with little to demarcate time of day but for when her third shift of experiments ended and she could return to her cell. There her supper would wait. She was granted some liberties. Her cell would be left open for the early evening. She got to eat with Rosalyn during that time, but Rosalyn had little to say. Rosalyn never mentioned their night of exploration or the Wally in the cage.

  They sat at a table just outside their small block of cells. A female janitor was in Rosalyn’s cell, cleaning and changing sheets. They watched the woman work.When the janitor spilled a tray of cleaning supplies, Dinah whispered, “The help they send us is so poorly trained.”

  Dinah felt instantly guilty, as the janitor glanced at her, but Rosalyn’s half-smile meant worlds to her.

  She also got to see Redmon twice more, as she was brought up a few times to the greenhouse for exercise and a dose of filtered but real daylight. On one occasion they worked next to one another for about an hour, but meaningful conversation proved impossible. Gregory was always around any time she had such liberties, though he kept his distance. Redmon’s face had healed, and it was obvious the work assigned her was easier than anything she had done in her old life in the valley. Her eyes constantly moved, watching the hunters watch her. Her interactions with the other gardeners were warm, polite, and didn’t let on that she could probably murder the whole bunch of them with her trowel.

  Once she saw Karl in the greenhouse taking apart a large battery charger for the trucks, but she never got close enough to speak with him.

  Dr. M started to act really strange. He was growing more haggard, and he stopped responding to most of her taunts. Shaving was no longer on his to-do list, and his body odor was that of an old man who needed a bath and a change of clothing. He now had a habit of asking himself questions that she couldn’t quite make out. One morning the table outside her cell had a blanket thrown underneath it. The blanket vanished later in the day only to reappear the next morning, bunched and pushed about as if someone had slept there. He was always in the White Room, always working, and even when Dr. Hel was around he showed her little interest. Perhaps just surviving under Ruben’s sovereignty had taken everything from the man, and he had nothing left.

  Thus dies love.

  The man visibly shrank whenever Ruben came around. When the Beast took to joining Dinah in the White Room without Dr. M interceding, Dinah saw an opportunity.

  “Take me to see the Wally,” she said.

  Dr. M had been leaning on a wall worrying his cuticles as Dinah and Rosalyn ate at their table. Dr. M’s blanket wasn’t there
, but his odor lingered. Dinah was on the verge of a headache, but the thought of going straight to her cell after a bowl of creamed corn and chicken-flavored lumps made her feel claustrophobic. She knew she could ask for a shot but decided to ride it out. Since Dr. M had delivered that shock to her head when she had first arrived, the headaches had mostly been manageable. She wasn’t sure she believed that her tracking chip had been disabled, though.

  Dr. M looked up at her as if the words themselves confused him. She repeated the question.

  “Absolutely not.”

  “The Wally’s part of this experiment somehow. What is it? Why would you bring a monster like that down here if it wasn’t? And right down the hall from our cells?”

  His right hand trembled. He made a fist and hid it behind his back.

  “It’s dangerous, and you know it,” she continued. “Maybe you don’t even know why it’s here and are just following orders. How many goons did it take to capture that thing, anyway?”

  “Twelve,” Dr. M said.

  Even Rosalyn was listening now.

  “It took twelve to capture the aberration,” Dr. M said, his voice suddenly clear. “It killed four and wounded eight. Your brother made me go out with the hunters. We tracked this one to a ruined building ten kilometers north of here. We had orders that no one wanted to follow, but no one refused. Previously hunters had always terminated them on sight. But the orders stated that this one was to be captured. So we went. I was to go along and ensure its safe transit once it was caught. It was the longest I had been outside in decades. And I protested the order. To no avail.

  “Tracking the aberrations had never been difficult. Their dens are typically dark. They prefer ruined buildings, truly an odd behavior. And they are hardly neat when it comes to their droppings and the remains of their kills.”

  Dinah kept quiet. She hadn’t heard Dr. M talk this much since her return. And she knew little about the Wallys. Uma wouldn’t acknowledge their existence. Karl just said they were a predator that showed up some time after the collapse and, like a diseased wolf or bear, had to be killed before they hurt anyone. He told her that the townspeople would drop everything to track and kill a Wally, that the monsters would just show up one day as if spontaneously generated from the earth itself. One neighbor speculated they were werewolves or experiments from science labs, but that sounded too much like one of Ruben’s fancy tales.

  Dr. M continued. “There were twelve hunters with rifles. But only two had tranquilizers. I’m not sure what the rest were supposed to do, since the orders stated that we were not to shoot it. We found it underneath a concrete slab, having dug itself a warren under what had been the building’s foundation. We thought we were lucky in that we had it cornered. It waited until we were all gathered close. Then it came out.

  “That thing got its claws into five hunters before the two with the tranq guns managed to fire. Both missed. Others tried to beat it down with their rifle butts. Blood was everywhere. It might have gotten all of us, but someone disobeyed orders and shot it in the head. That’s the only thing that saved us. The damn thing survived the gunshot well enough, but it was knocked out cold. The man who shot it bled out an hour later. So that’s how we got a monster into the redoubt. It’s locked up. And you want to go see it.”

  “So much effort to get the Wally here, and you don’t know why,” Dinah said.

  “It’s the same reason your brother put so much effort into recovering you. It serves the experiment.”

  He took his right hand out of hiding and examined it as if seeing it for the first time. Dr. M, the whipped dog. Dr. M, yet another cog in Ruben’s machinations.

  Just like the Wally.

  Just like her.

  27. Before: Nineveh

  The first morning the children received small cups of red fruit punch on their trays, Dinah knew something was wrong. The red punch smelled sweet and would normally be a welcome addition to the usual rotation of breakfast juices. But after the conversation she had overheard between Dr. Hel and Dr. M, she viewed the punch as another pill to swallow and something to be avoided. The cafeteria staff smiled their smiles and watched the children carefully. Most of the kids swigged the punch down in one swallow before touching the rest of their breakfast.

  None of the older kids were around, not that Dinah ever spoke to them while in the cafeteria. That would have been a breach of etiquette. And none of her own classmates were paying her any mind. Stevie was yammering about something he had accomplished in one of his tablet games, and the girls were enthralled.

  Dr. Mephisto entered the cafeteria. He walked the serving line with his hands clasped behind his back. He nodded to a serving woman in a white apron who was busy wiping down a steam table. The woman nodded back. Dinah was certain he would come her way next. Then he would watch her drink the red punch and make sure she had swallowed. Maybe he would then produce a giant horse needle and force an extra dose of the poison into her arm, wrestling her to the table to the amusement of the other kids.

  She quickly dumped the liquid on the floor beneath her. She turned the cup sideways and placed it on her tray.

  The perfect crime.

  No one had noticed.

  Dr. Mephisto was now speaking with one of the other children, a younger girl named Samantha who bragged whenever she wet her bed. Even Dinah wouldn’t sit near her. With her spoon, she started pushing at the sides of her oatmeal.

  The doctor eventually meandered over to her table, looked at the tray, and smiled a lopsided grin. He appeared unusually cheery. This made her immediately suspicious. What did he know? Had she made a mistake when she left his office?

  “And how are we this morning, Dinah?”

  “Miserable.” Mustn’t sound too happy.

  He made a non-committal sound. “Don’t forget we have a session this afternoon.”

  He moved through the rest of the cafeteria as if on a stroll. Weird. Maybe he was off to see Dr. Hel. Maybe he had just seen her before coming here. Supposedly people acted strange after having sex.

  “Hey,” Alena called. “You spilled your punch.”

  Dinah glared at her and clenched her jaw. “So? It’s mine to spill.” She looked to see where Dr. Mephisto was. He stood near the cafeteria exit, facing away from her. But had he heard?

  “Well if you didn’t want it, you should have given it to me,” Alena said. “Don’t waste it.”

  Dinah just nodded. The next time she received punch, Alena could have it.

  28. Spill

  Dinah had a wild idea she couldn’t let go of. What if the Wally was in the network somewhere? Maybe not a node, but some function to be named later. If the creature wasn’t wired, perhaps she could find a branch of the network meant for it and learn something. And if it was hooked up, did it have a brain-wave pattern that she could recognize? She had learned enough to know it wasn’t one of her nodes or even the originator of a stream of data. By that point, each downstream node had a name. She knew where Addis was, and Stevie, and the rest of her own class. The upstream numbers had to be generated by a program or a user who she always assumed was her brother. She never sensed a stream of garbage; they had no animals on the network, no monsters, no Wallys. But what if the Wally was capable of higher thought, and not just a rabid beast waiting to be put down?

  Her bitey neighbor with claws was part of the experiment in some capacity. Her brother had sacrificed pawns to capture it. The point exchange needed to make sense. She needed to investigate the network beyond her current virtual space.

  She had gotten even better at managing her workload. Even with the sudden increases and surprise packet surges, nothing overwhelmed her. The nodes were never happy, but she stopped checking after a while.

  Exploring the space around her when hooked to the network was much like feeling her way around a dark room without her hands or feet. She thought of it as being without dimensions, or maybe having just one, like a two-way street heading along the current stream of electrons. But
something about this bothered her, and she needed to reevaluate.

  Each node could be viewed as an access point, like a spoke on a wheel. That would mean an X and a Y axis: two dimensions. She made the effort to feel around some more, which sent an uncomfortable sensation through her brain. As far as she could tell there was no true Z axis, despite her initial sensation of getting hit on all sides by data streams.

  But can I create one?

  She imagined herself lying on the floor. Instead of moving or sitting up, which was impossible, she tested the floor itself. As the numbers continued to flow from every side, she thought of a basic cube below her. When she pushed at the floor, it surprised her by yielding: it wasn’t solid, more like a membrane. An odd falling sensation made her virtual head spin. The imagined cube space was there below her, even though it hadn’t been a moment ago. It was a dark pit of her own creation. Her instincts were to avoid dropping into the unknown. Besides, she had to keep the data flowing.

  She took a moment to catch her breath. Then she lowered herself down what felt in her head like a few feet into the pit. Her streams followed her, eddied about, and even made her float. Some packets of numbers scattered like marbles thrown around an empty room.

  That’s going to mean errors.

  The program or user would know there was a problem. So she couldn’t do her work while changing her position on the Z axis. But what was the Z axis if not a new parameter that she had just set?

  She snapped everything pack in place. All the numbers went where they were supposed to.

  What else could she accomplish?

  Most of her work involved sorting and comparisons. But if Addis was the recipient of all values in a certain range, could Dinah define this task and assign it to an automatic switch that she created? With a thought, it came to be: a simple formula that did the busy work. It was as easy as making the Z axis and the cube. She activated the switch. One portion of her work was now on autopilot. She made more switches, rearranging the incoming and outgoing spokes so they made detours through the switches. In moments, she felt like she was running out of room, but she had the power to rearrange things. The new Z axis was key. She could now build up and down, like making a stack of shelves, a root cellar, a new addition to her house of numbers.