by Guy Salvidge
“No, we’re not.”
“We must have been dreaming.”
“Maybe,” he conceded. “But Lui Ping’s real. Help me get this door open, it’s stuck.” She succeeded in getting the door open. Inside the cell, a woman lay on a cot and her face was red with tears.
“Lui Ping, it’s me, Rion. Remember me?”
Lui Ping looked up at him but her sobs continued. “My baby... my baby,” she cried. “I can’t find my Lijia.”
“You mean your daughter? We’ll find her,” he said. He kneeled down next to the bed. “Lui Ping has a daughter,” he explained to Sylvia.
“I gathered.”
“She must be here somewhere,” Rion said.
Lui Ping nodded, her face all blotchy, and she sat up in bed. “That man tricked me,” she said.
“What man?” Sylvia asked. “Who tricked you?”
Jeremy Peters. He’s the one who tricked all three of you.
Rion’s ears pricked up at the sound but Lui Ping remained oblivious. “You didn’t hear that?” Sylvia asked her.
“Hear what?”
Only you two can hear me. The other person cannot.
“Someone’s talking to us in our heads,” Rion explained. Lui Ping gave no sign of understanding, but she stood up. The three of them left the cell and searched the empty cells on the other side of the corridor for Lui Ping’s daughter, but the child was not there.
“She’s just a baby,” Lui Ping moaned. She sobbed quietly.
“We’ll find her, I promise,” Rion said. “Does anyone remember this Jeremy Peters?”
“Vaguely,” Sylvia said. “He’s definitely not our... my... father, is he?”
“I thought he was a doctor, but that’s not right either,” Rion said. “Do you remember much about him, Lui Ping?”
“Just that he took my baby.”
They spread out into the prison in search of the child, calling to one another at intervals to make sure no one became lost, but Lijia was nowhere to be found. The passages seemed to back endlessly onto themselves, as though designed to deceive, but it soon became clear that the prison was empty. There was no sign of guards or wardens, no food in the refrigerators, no toothbrushes in the bathrooms, no clothes hanging in the lockers. Sylvia stood in the doorway of the guard dorm, watching dust motes drift in the sunlight. The jungle beyond the window seemed to seethe.
“I found something,” Rion called out from a distant room. “It’s a note.”
Sylvia took one last look under the bunks and followed his voice, but the halls echoed oddly and she soon became disoriented. “Rion?” she said in perplexity, having reached a dead end. Now his voice seemed to come from behind her, so she backtracked.
She was just starting to panic when she bumped into Lui Ping, tears again streaming down her face. “I’m lost,” Sylvia admitted, but the woman barely acknowledged her and continued on. “It’s a dead end,” she said. “I looked through there.” Lui Ping didn’t turn back.
Alone again. “Rion?” No response this time. The halls seemed recurring, not just repetitious, as if this were not a real space but an imaginary one. Sylvia felt sure she’d come this way before and yet the layout seemed unfamiliar. All the doors in this section were open and yet she had not left them open before. Perhaps Lui Ping had.
In each of the rooms she could see sunbeams illuminating the disturbed dust, and each room had a window overlooking the jungle. Bad enough that this gave the impression that the prison complex, or at least this section of it, was essentially a narrow corridor with rooms branching out from either side. She had not had that impression before. What was worse was that the sun seemed to be shining through on both sides of the corridor.
She understood: none of it was real. Not the prison, not the jungle and perhaps not Rion and Lui Ping either. She’d been hoodwinked and had forgotten all about it.
“Where am I?” she said aloud. “Rion? Lui Ping?”
Then she heard the patter of feet from beyond the T-junction up ahead. Someone was whimpering. The person who came around the corner was not Lui Ping but a tiny version of her, the miniature’s straight black hair cut into a bob. The child wore a red jumpsuit and she too had been crying. “Is your name Lijia?” Sylvia asked, rushing up to her. “I’ll take you to your mother.” She held out her hand.
The child looked up at her and screamed, then turned and ran. Sylvia went to grab her, but the girl wriggled free and scurried back the way she’d come. Sylvia set off in pursuit, but when she rounded the corner the corridor ahead was empty. Impossible and yet perhaps not. The child too must be illusory.
“Rion?” she called. She half remembered a world aside from this, other prisons than this one.
“Sylvia,” Rion replied. He stood at a doorway up ahead, where previously he had not stood. “There you are.”
“Did you see the girl run past?”
“No, but look at this.” He passed her the handwritten note he was holding, and she deciphered the spidery scrawl:
Called away to the frontier. The natives are restless. JP.
“Jeremy Peters,” she said.
“It was pinned to this door.”
The door looked as grey and nondescript as all the others. The one difference was that where the other doors had handles, this one had none. “We’re in a simulation,” Sylvia said. “I’m starting to remember how this happened, but every time I try to think about it, I lose my train of thought or something changes.” She stepped through the grey door into another room. The door was an illusion.
Rion followed. “What the hell?” he said.
They stood in an entirely different room, not bland and grey but lushly decorated and filled with colour. It was an office and the nameplate on the desk read J PETERS, DIRECTORY OF SECURITY. The walls were filled with bookcases and the room was dominated by a large desk atop which a computer sat.
“This is his office,” Rion said.
“I guess so.”
“No, I mean... it’s his real office, but it’s not here in this building. It’s somewhere else. I met him there, I think?”
Sylvia walked over to the computer and sat in the chair. Three Security files were open on the desktop and she tabbed between them. It came as no surprise to her that the files were labelled Baron S., Saunders O. and Lui P. She had just started reading her own file when a message popped up on the screen.
Are you sure you want to exit?
Sylvia clicked yes.
Everything around her changed and it was a moment before she could start to interpret what her eyes were seeing. Peters’ office had completely disappeared and now she and Rion stood in a white nothingness. There was no floor, no sky, and yet she saw Lui Ping in the distance. Closer, and in an entirely different direction, she saw Lijia. Both were walking across the white nothing space, turning corners and navigating obstacles that were no longer visible to Sylvia.
“Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” Rion asked.
“If you’re seeing a whole lot of white space, then yes,” she said. “Except I can see Lijia and Lui Ping.”
“And those guys over there.”
These she hadn’t seen, but now she did, looking at the place where Rion pointed. Three men in close proximity to one another hung oddly in unnatural poses, their knees bent. Then she understood: they were sitting on chairs but she couldn’t see the chairs, only them.
“Do you think we can walk straight over there?” she asked.
“Here goes.” Thud. “Shit.” Rion’s hands came up in front of him as he ran into an invisible barrier. “There’s stuff in the way.”
“We’re in a real space but we can’t see it,” she said, thinking. “We can only see the people. Somehow the place we’re in has been hidden from us. Why isn’t that voice talking to us anymore? Hello? We’re stuck.”
I can only hear you when you make an effort to speak loudly. Otherwise you’re just sub-vocalising and I can’t always follow what you’re saying. You’re in a real space, but you’re right
that it’s being hidden from you.
“We’ll never make it over there if we can’t see where we’re going,” Rion said, rubbing his head.
“Yes we will. A blind person could do it, and we have the benefit of being able to see where we’re trying to get to.” She stepped forward, arms outstretched. She felt for the doorway and managed to get herself through it. The opposite wall of the corridor impeded her progress in that direction. She placed her hand on the invisible wall. “See?”
“This is going to take hours.”
It did. It seemed to her that sight was the only sense by which they were being deceived, so she found that it helped if she closed her eyes. They were in a facility full of halls, empty rooms and neatly-made beds. They made slow progress and had to backtrack several times as their fumbling led them into yet more dead ends, but over time the three men grew considerably closer, when Sylvia could bring herself to open her eyes and look. From this distance, Sylvia saw them pointing in her and Rion’s direction. A little later, Rion pointed out that Lui Ping had been reunited with her daughter. She clutched the child to her chest and wandered on.
“I’m thirsty,” Sylvia said.
“So am I,” Rion replied. “Let’s ask them for a drink.”
As they shuffled closer, the palms of their left hands leading the way along the wall of a long corridor, the three men seemed to become increasingly agitated, repeatedly pointing and gesticulating among themselves. When the empty scene winked out to be replaced by a desert island, Sylvia laughed.
They stood on a beach looking out over the roiling ocean. The sky was filled with dark clouds. The three men appeared to be on a fishing vessel bobbing in the harbour.
“Nice try,” Rion said, stepping out onto the surface of the unreal waves.
They walked on water. It didn’t take them long to reach the boat. Sylvia knocked on its hull and the three men looked at her and Rion in obvious fear.
16. The Barracks
Rion thumped at the door in his rage, but there was a veil over his eyes and he couldn’t see much of anything. Stabs of pain shot through his damaged hand and he stopped bashing the door.
“Rion?” Sylvia’s voice. He reached out to touch her with his good hand. She was right there.
“I can barely see a thing,” he said.
“Me neither. What are we doing?”
“Trying to get through this door, I think. I’ve hurt my hand.”
They quietened as they heard voices from beyond the door, voices muttering unintelligibly. The unmistakable scrape of chairs.
“Turn around,” Sylvia said. “I’ll try to get your helmet off.”
He spun. She unclicked something and then he was able to wrench the hated thing from his neck. He threw the helmet away and saw the world with his own two eyes again.
They stood in a grey corridor in front of a door-shaped indentation, and yet they knew there were men behind it, apparently trapped. Rion and Sylvia wore tight-fitting bodysuits that left their hands and feet exposed. His right hand was bloodied and two of his fingernails were half mashed. Neither of them was wearing anything on their feet. Sylvia clawed at her helmet and he helped her to get it off, fumbling at the lock with his left hand. She pulled it off and looked at him.
“Hey,” she said, a wry smile on her face. Her dark hair was plastered to her forehead.
“Long time no see,” he said. “Now where the fuck are we?”
“Dunno. Do you speak Mandarin?” she asked. “I never learned.”
“You’re asking me?” he said. He knocked on the door three times with his undamaged hand. “Open up,” he said, which precipitated another unintelligible conference. He was very thirsty and his hand was hurting almost more than he could bear.
The door opened and Rion saw three Chinese men in a dim chamber filled with screens. He saw the whites of the men’s eyes. “Get out of there,” he said. “Now.”
“Please,” one of them said, his hands raised in surrender. “We’re just workers.”
“Out,” Rion reiterated. They did as they were told, filing out of the dark room with their heads down.
“Get the fuck away from us!” Sylvia said, hurling her helmet at them. The men withdrew and hurried along the corridor and out of sight.
“They’ve probably gone to get something to shoot us with,” Rion said. “We’d better hurry.” They entered the cramped room and looked around at the many screens therein. Empty food packets were strewn everywhere and the room did not smell pleasant. Rion picked up a half-empty bottle of water, drank a sip and passed the bottle to Sylvia. She drained it and handed the empty bottle back to him.
“So this is where they were monitoring us from,” he said. “Those guys must have been the technicians.”
“Look at this,” Sylvia said, pointing to a particular screen.
The screen depicted a helmeted woman blundering through the halls, a small child cradled in her arms. “Shit, it’s Lui Ping.” He took one last look at the screen and raced out into the corridor. His legs were heavy with fatigue but he forced himself forward all the same.
They found Lui Ping and her daughter by the sound of the child’s crying. The maze of corridors was difficult enough to navigate with one’s wits about oneself, let alone with that accursed helmet on. They were in one of the dorm rooms. Lui Ping sat slouched against a lower bunk, having somehow deposited the child on the bed. Lijia was trying to get back into her mother’s arms, but the woman was unresponsive.
“Lui Ping,” Rion said. “We’re going to take off your helmet, all right?” He looked at his purple and red hand and then at Sylvia, and she nodded. She unclipped Lui Ping’s helmet and carefully removed it from the woman’s slumped shoulders. The child stopped crying when she saw her mother’s face. Lui Ping opened her arms and Lijia nestled there in her embrace.
They stayed like that for what seemed a long time. Rion went into the bathroom next to the dorm and refilled the empty water bottle from a tap. He saw himself in the mirror, an unshaven, red-faced vagrant in a light-grey bodysuit. He splashed water on his face and slurped straight from the tap. He washed some of the blood from his hand, but it’d crusted over and it hurt too much to try to investigate the full extent of the damage. Then he took the bottle of water to Lui Ping, who barely had the strength to lift it to her lips.
“What now?” Sylvia said, following him back into the bathroom. She too drank from the tap.
“Now to get out of this fucking strait-jacket,” he replied. “Help me get it off, would you?” He tore at the velcro straps and she helped him out of the bodysuit. Underneath he wore underpants and a black singlet.
“My turn,” she said, but it was harder for him to help her with his bad hand. Eventually she wriggled free of the bodysuit with his help and she was dressed the same as him underneath. She smiled at him in the mirror and he grinned back. “Let me have a look at your hand,” she said. He held it up for her to look at. “It’ll need dressing,” she said.
“No time to worry about that now,” he said. He went back into the dorm, where Lui Ping had managed to move from the floor to the bed. Now she lay there unmoving and the child was already asleep. Lui Ping’s eyes were fixed on Rion but she didn’t try to speak. “You two wait here while Sylvia and I look for a way out,” he said. Lui Ping nodded and closed her eyes.
Rion and Sylvia walked barefoot out of the dorm. The maze of corridors proved not quite as extensive as he’d imagined and it didn’t take them long to find their cells, which were located on the far side of the control room. There were six cells, each with its own shower and toilet cubicle, but the three on the opposite side of the corridor were not in use. “I guess it was just the three of us here,” he said. He started rummaging through the drawers in the small dresser of what he thought of as his cell, soon finding a fresh T-shirt to replace the sweat-soaked singlet.
“I don’t remember this place at all,” Sylvia said. “Do you?”
“No. The last thing I remember –
I think – is meeting Jeremy at his office. We saw that office in the simulation, didn’t we?” He pulled out a pair of jeans from the bottom drawer and put them on, which wasn’t easy to do with his hand in its current state. There didn’t seem to be any shoes.
“I think so,” she said. “What about that voice we heard? It tried to help. It must have been the SCA talking.”
“I think I’ve got one of those things myself,” he said, buttoning up the jeans. “At least, that’s what I remember. Can you still hear us?”
Nothing. No voice in his head and clearly none in Sylvia’s either, judging by her pained expression.
“Maybe it only works when we’re wearing the helmet,” she suggested. They walked out of Rion’s cell and into Sylvia’s. “This is all Jeremy’s doing,” she said. “This thing he’s got here, I think it’s called Controlled Waking State. I saw a demo on it once.”
Her drawers contained fresh clothes. Rion looked away while she put them on.
“Well, we can’t sit here trying to figure it all out,” he said. “Those guys from the control room will have raised the alarm by now.”
“It’s been a while though, hasn’t it? Maybe ten minutes?”
“At least.”
They walked out into the corridor and back around to the dorm. Lui Ping and her daughter were fast asleep, so they decided it best to leave them for the time being. Further exploration revealed the fact that this corridor network, with just a single pair of guard dorms, was only one wing of the complex. It didn’t take them long to scout the place out – the facility was a disused barracks of some kind – before they found a front desk in a foyer. Beyond those tinted windows lay the outside world. They found no sign of the men they’d intimidated before, nor did they find a weapons cache or anything similarly useful. Most of the doors were hermetically sealed.
“We must have run them off entirely,” Rion said, looking at the screen behind the foyer desk that showed surveillance footage from locations throughout the barracks. He opened the desk drawer and rummaged through the piles of papers there until his left hand, the undamaged one, struck something more substantial.