by Brian Craft
In that little window of time, Iris grabs Orion and pulls him out of the alley. They run along the street perpendicular to the arcing camera drone, but that drives them straight toward the police a hundred yards away.
Orion stops in the middle of a busy intersection and turns slowly, absorbing the jungle of buildings and people surrounding them. He shakes his head at the sheer immensity of it all. His expression sobers as his stomach sinks and mind races through the endless desperate possibilities. He spots more drones flying up the adjacent streets to converge on them, and before long, they'll see him, too. They'll see Iris, and then she's finished. He turns to face her. "I can get out of this. I can go talk to them," he says. "But you,—"
“Come with us,” she implores. “Look around again. You know this doesn’t feel right. When you grabbed that man on the transport, you weren’t being a good citizen and stopping a crime, you were helping him.”
She pauses a long moment, hoping the weight of her words will help Orion choose well.
“But then I ran to save myself,” he replies.
“You followed me,” she counters.
Evo beckons them from the only path away from the police, who are quickly descending on them.
Orion reaches to touch her face but hesitates. A sadly desperate reasoning enters his mind, ‘maybe better to never have this at all.’ And then he backs away. “Run, Iris.” He moves toward the police. “Once they have me, they won’t chase you. Get away.”
Evo grabs her arm and pulls her away. “He’s made his choice. We have to go!”
Orion keeps his eyes on her as long as he can and then turns to meet the authorities, throwing his hands in the air and signaling surrender. Police descend on him, virtually ignoring Iris and Evo as they blend into the bustling city.
She watches Orion’s imminent surrender until the crowd swallows her, and she’s gone.
A closed-circuit video monitor displays a drone’s eye view of the pivotal moment as officers rush from all directions with tazer-gloves. Orion’s mouth moves, but the image offers no sound. He’s trying to reason with unsympathetic police before they can reach him. They charge forward and seize him with electrified gloves. There is no resistance as he drops unconscious on the spot.
The video image quickly zooms in on Orion’s face.
Then the monitor winks out and the room goes black. Dr. Burroughs shadowy figure drifts through the darkened office. He stops at a faintly shimmering glass wall, inching closer to the transparent surface to reveal not that the glass is shimmering, but that thousands of tiny objects are skittering around behind it.
Burroughs hovers his bony finger in front of the glass, tracking one of the tiny moving objects, then he pokes at the thing inside with an audible thump.
CHAPTER 8
‘…Did you say real?’
<<<>>>
Orion’s world is bathed in red as he floats, midair, inside a closet-sized containment cell. The crimson light soaks the walls, the floor, the ceiling, and every inch of Orion. The uniform tint dutifully obscures physical details, flattens shadows and depth perception, and once the physical is in question, it seems to steal away time. And with time and perception, so goes reality.
Orion’s arms are stretched wide and cuffed at the ends by thick metal shackles. Each time he pulls against his restraints, a corresponding magnet in the wall drags his arm straight again. The magnetic cuffs squeezing his ankles seem to have the opposite effect by keeping him floating off the floor. More metal belts encircling his neck and waist act to stabilize his body as it hovers in the dead center of the room. He’s powerless and trapped, anxious if anyone will come for him. After a while, he wonders if maybe he’s strayed into a dream and considers that he can try to wake himself.
Unable to bend his neck more than a fraction of an inch, he strains his eyeballs to look above, attempting to see the source of a glowing red halo surrounding his head. His intuition tells him that whatever is making that glow is the same thing burning his brain into aching. He nearly rolls his eyes back in his skull before abandoning it. Barely out of his view, the glow originates from a needle-thin red beam of light projecting straight into the crown of his head. Through that relentless, throbbing headache the last thing he remembers is walking to the middle of the intersection with hands held high. He tried to announce his status as a Hiveminder. After that, there isn’t even a blur in his mind. He woke, stuck in this red room, body floating, and mind drifting in an uneasy haze for what must have been hours.
He swallows hard, working his mouth like it’s full of dust before he says, “Can anyone hear me?” He waits a short time, thinking his efforts must be in vain. He licks his dry lips, although it produces almost no relief from his equally parched tongue. Then he tries again. “Let me out.” Again, no reply, not even a sound outside. To himself, he states the obvious, “God, I’m thirsty.”
And then there is a slight sound of movement in what seems like the ceiling; scrapping, and a series of metal tumblers clacking against a hard surface, like a mechanized lock. The red glow around his head disappears along with the needle-thin beam. The second the beam disappears Orion feels a horrible spin in his brain and a rising urge to vomit.
The ceiling splits from back to front and slides away into the walls at either side. A man is hovering there. No, not hovering, standing. Orion’s head-spin gives way to the clarity that this whole time in the red room he hasn’t been floating upright at all, but rather, flat on his back. The ceiling that just split open is actually the front door of his containment cell. The disorientation is probably planned by whatever sadistic inventor created the cell. And it worked perfectly. Orion’s up isn’t up, it’s the front. His forward for the past however many hours was actually up, and Orion is utterly lost.
"Thank heaven," Orion says. His voice barely able to manages to address the man. "It's been hours."
“Six days. You’ve been in here six days,” the pseudo-sincere black man informs him. “The red beam,” he adds. Orion stares at him like he doesn’t have the slightest idea what he’s talking about. “The red glow, the halo. The red beam? Never mind. I’m Plummer,” he introduces before he taps a control on his handheld electronic device. A better introduction might have been 'jailer'.
The magnets holding Orion’s cuffs slowly de-intensify and float him toward the floor, until about a foot away, they release, dropping him with a thud on the hard surface at Plummer's feet. The surprise release and drop knock the breath out of Orion for a second. Another perversely designed detail for controlling the release of a ‘guest'. Machiavelli would be proud.
“Come on, on your feet,” Plummer orders. Orion rights himself and rubs his head, trying to regain his senses, the sick feeling in his stomach suddenly overtaken by ravenous hunger.
“I’d kill for a food ration. Even #2,” Orion says. It’s a lame attempt to connect a little and gain his footing.
Plummer’s well versed in this. He steps back, an indifferent expression rules his face. “Come with me, and I’ll get you a drink.” It’s a preplanned lure to gain compliance. Then he offers a slight connection in the form of a warning. “Careful what you say.”
The promise of a drink is enough to get Orion moving. He steps out of the cell. Plummer backs out of reach and directs him to the right. “Follow the lighted directions on the wall,” Plummer points to a way-finding illuminated graphic that is customized specifically for Orion. It even has his name on it.
Orion follows the directional, and Plummer follows him.
Orion obediently traces the way-finder along the sterile white halls, passing door after door and turning corners where directed. A few of Plummer’s co-workers pass by here and there. They seem something like the Hive techs from Societal Services: white coveralls, indifferent expressions. Orion realizes he’s the only one in shackles, at least for now. The revelation coming to him the same time as the illuminated directional graphic comes to an end at a door set in a kind of lobby, away from any other doors.
“End of the line,” Orion quips.
Plummer gives him a look that says, ‘Could be, could not be.’ Then he directs Orion to go inside.
After stepping out of the cold, antiseptic lights of the corridor, Orion braces as he squints into golden sunlight flooding through exterior windows. His eyes adjust to witness a cozy office, with carpet, and wood-grain trim on color-saturated walls. A high back leather chair, resting behind a huge desk, is turned away. But the undeniable centerpiece of the room is a freestanding glass case: six feet tall and ten feet wide, about a foot and a half thick and filled with rich, black dirt.
Plummer shuts the door behind Orion, leaving him alone to follow his curiosity toward the glass case. He approaches it cautiously and bends to get a closer look at what's moving inside. Standing right in front of it, inspecting the contents closer, Orion realizes that it's a fantastically intricate dirt kingdom filled with ants; a giant ant colony. Tiny red ants scurry every direction. Building tunnels, moving food and tending young. Even processing the dead.
What at first looks like chaos, upon observation, one can see that these little creatures are following precise patterns with each other. Dutiful. Purposeful. Communal. There are thousands, probably tens of thousands, all moving and giving the case itself a lifelike animated quality. In a certain light, it could look like it is shimmering.
Orion traces one of the larger tunnels upward through the dirt to discover that it emerges at the top where the glass case is totally wide open. There is nothing restricting these little ants from simply crawling over the top and escaping to wreak havoc wherever they please. Orion extends his finger to touch the edge of the open glass top.
"Eh! Never touch the edge!" Burroughs' voice rings out. Suddenly, the high back leather chair spins around. He's been there all along. "Did you touch it?" he asks Orion. The doctor squints back at Orion in suspicious inquiry. He adds his final verdict. "I suspect you did."
“You scared me to death,” replies Orion, looking to redirect things away from his inspection of the ants.
“Let’s hope not,” Burroughs states. “That would be useless in this case and then we wouldn’t have anything else to talk about.” The man walks in a territory all his own. It’s hard to know where he draws his lines. “We have so very much to discuss, you and I,” he announces almost like he is savoring the prospect.
“Why?”
Burroughs smiles. “Because you committed a crime.”
Orion glances at the ants, then around the room and back to Burroughs. His aching head and draining hunger cap this confusion, and he finally asks, “I meant, you said, the edge?” He gestures toward the ants.
Burroughs spins slowly in his chair and then stands. He points toward Orion and says, "Curious type. Fuel for anarchy you know." The rhetorical statement seeds the air while he casually strolls over to Orion as if he's simply a visitor come to admire the ant collection. "What do you think?" he asks.
Orion rubs his head, searching for the right answer. “The video I saw can’t possibly be illegal,” he says. “No harm can come from—“
“The colony, Orion.” Burroughs directs him to the ants. “I meant the ants.”
Thoroughly confused now, Orion asks “Doctor, I… Are we talking about crime or ants?”
“Fantastic creatures. All work together with a single purpose.” Burroughs inspects the bugs. “Telepathy, I think.”
Orion only spoke to Burroughs that one time in the Holography Center, but it gave him a bad feeling. The doctor's dizzying style of communication is difficult to decipher, and Orion realizes he needs to guard his words like Plummer warned him. Orion considers his words, then says, "I don't see how this relates to me."
Burroughs looks straight into Orion now. “Not everything relates to you. It’s about the colony.” Burroughs’s rhetoric keeps nudging things deeper down the rabbit hole.
“The city?”
“The ants. They’re wired for obedience.” Burroughs trails his finger along the edge, careful to not touch it. “A trail of hormones laces the edge. They know to not break it. But if you broke it, I’d have a mass exodus. Anarchy!” Burroughs cracks a spider-eat-fly smile and pointedly asks, “So, did you touch the edge?”
Orion is catching on and bites his tongue. Whatever answer he gives seems to dig his hole a little deeper. Besides, he’s parched and talking is not helping the matter. Burroughs breaks off the interrogation and strolls back to his desk where he buries his rear into the seat. He studies Orion, not signaling anything one way or another, waiting to see what Orion will do. He eventually moves over to sit across from Burroughs and chooses the leftmost of two guests seats.
As soon as he’s seated, he realizes that a glass of water is already waiting right in front of that leftmost seat. He knows Burroughs sees that he sees the water, but he refuses to drink it yet.
Burroughs’s smile fades and is replaced by a suspiciously curious look. “Hm,” is all he says before sitting back to let Orion make the next move.
Orion glances out the window as he considers what to say next. He doesn’t recognize the view from here. It doesn’t seem to be Societal Services, but that will have to wait. He looks back to Burroughs, who’s staring right at him, and Orion says, “What I did isn’t wrong.”
“Illegal though,” Burroughs says without missing a beat. The spider circling the fly.
“You admit it isn’t wrong?”
“I admit nothing,” replies the doctor.
“It’s not wrong to want to see nature. You have nature right there in that case,” Orion accuses.
Burroughs ignores the accusation and instead, he points his bony finger at Orion and states, "Environmental restrictions halted catastrophe. Do you think that was wrong?"
“No. But—“
"Controlling illness and resources," Burroughs rotates his extended finger as if boring into Orion's head. "Is that wrong do you think?"
“None of that’s wrong. All I did was look at the world outside of here,” Orion admits.
“Let’s start there.” Burroughs withdraws his finger and reaches for his digital tablet to consult his notes. “The first intercity flu epidemic killed your parents when you were nine.” He glances at Orion like he is questioning him for a routine medical visit. “What was it like to be a ward of the state?”
Orion shifts a little. “Like living with invisible people.”
“Invisible people. Interesting. Prescribed governmental services for everything,” adds Burroughs.
“Not everything,” says Orion.
“After schooling, you were assigned to Societal Services. Then aptitude scores opened Hive to you,” Burroughs states it like it is common knowledge.
“I don’t see what that has to do with why I’m here,” he replies.
Burroughs looks oddly satisfied at snaring Orion's curiosity. He slowly swirls his finger over a button on his control panel, savoring the withholding from himself before tapping it. All around his desk dozens of closed-circuit holo-monitors appear displaying the city and citizens. "Human evolution. Human and technology interconnected. A system, almost perfect. But there's a flaw, Orion." He glances back to confirm Orion is listening. "Know what it is?"
“User error,” replies Orion.
“Clearly one of our most pliable minds,” Burroughs says. He revels in his own sarcastic reply. “Pace was right. If only this once.”
When the doctor turns away, Orion returns to surveying the beads of sweat running down the sides of the water glass. Each one collecting other drops on the trail to the bottom, where they are beginning to pool.
“Director Pace said you can clean up stray thoughts. I could be back in Hive right away,” Orion reveals a little too much.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Burroughs says. “You should be in jaaaail.”
“I didn’t do anything wrong!” Orion’s last word cracks over his parched tongue.
Burroughs spins back to Orion and abruptly terminates the
monitors. “Breaking the law is wrong,” Burroughs states. “Would you rather be here or in prison?”
“I’m not even sure where this is,” Orion replies. His arid voice drags his last feeble protest like an old boot scraping across a cracked dry lakebed.
Burroughs looks directly at Orion with total certainty and declares, “I apologize. You’re at my Center for Mind Mastery. And I’m going to save you.”
Orion can no longer wait for the drink. He grabs the sweaty glass and guzzles it completely.
Burroughs watches eagerly as he finishes every drop.
A wave of satisfaction pours through Orion, and he finally asks, “What do I have to do to save myself?”
CHAPTER 9
Orion follows the directional way-finder through the hallways of the Center for Mind Mastery, with Plummer right behind. The events of just this single day are enough to exhaust Orion. Fortunately, following the way-finder is easy enough that it demands little of his attention, allowing his tired mind to become lucid and begin to drift.
He scans his surroundings as he walks, unable to worry about his destination but feeling the need to take stock of where he is. Soon, he realizes that every corner or edge in this entire facility is rounded. Look to the top of a wall and it curves into the ceiling. Then across to curve down and become the opposite wall, and then walls curve to meet the floor. Edges of walls are rounded; edges of doorways and control panels are rounded, smoothed, or recessed in navels.
The walls themselves are a silvery-white, and if you look closely you can see that the sections composing the entire facility, have smaller cells inside them. And all the panels themselves are wired together with tiny, hair-thin circuits embedded into glassy surfaces. It is as though the entire structure is technologically fused to become one single piece. Without an edge anywhere, it is effectively infinite.