Lost Past

by Teresa McCullough

  “Did you set the bomb?”

  “I couldn’t set a bomb,” she giggled. “Hernandez set it. We planned it together. He likes me. He told me that if you died in the school, he would marry me. But I knew you wouldn’t go in the school.”

  “But I did.”

  “To save the animals.”

  “Are they really animals? Are we a different species?”

  “No, we can still interbreed. But there are so many differences. We don’t get so many Earth diseases.“

  “Which ones?”

  “I don’t know what they are called,” she said irritably. She stood up and walked over to a computer and mouthed some words. Fascinated, John realized why he couldn’t visualize Vigintees with a keyboard. The vocal cords didn’t need to be used, but the remaining act of speaking was enough. The list on the screen started with allergies, Alzheimer's, arthritis, cancer, and diabetes. The remainder of the list included Tay–Sachs, Huntington's chorea, sickle cell anemia, and other hereditary diseases.

  “We don’t even have words for most of them,” she said with pride. “We never get contagious diseases. Our immune systems are much more advanced.“

  AIDS and other contagious diseases weren’t on the list, but John saw no reason to comment on that fact.

  “I have allergies.” Whatever bothered him on Earth didn’t bother him here, but the mold, dust, or pollen could easily be different.

  “Yes, but that’s a mistake. They did something to you so you could live on Earth, and allergies came with it.”

  They had a choice, John realized, a good immune system or no allergies. They gave him the immune system and the allergies were a side effect. For all Katrine’s talk about animals, she never touched an animal. There was no danger of an animal-borne disease mutating to infect people, no swine or bird flu here, because there were no pigs or chickens. Katrine continued to extol the virtues of the Vigintees, and seemed resentful that John was not the perfect man for the Plict. John wondered how a sex drive would continue to exist if it wasn’t bred for, but realized that they must have bred for it, although he couldn’t understand why.

  But he had more relevant questions. “Why did Hernandez kidnap Arthur Saunders, and where is he?”

  The spell was broken when she realized she said too much. He knew he couldn’t get her into that semi-hypnotic state again. She didn’t answer his first question, but answered his second. “We don’t know where he is.”

  CHAPTER 9

  “They don’t know? What’s going on?” Linda asked, after John recounted his conversation with Katrine.

  “Arthur disappeared shortly after he was brought here. That’s why we were tagged: so we can be found,” John explained.

  Linda announced she was going to bed and Wilson pointedly looked at the bunkroom, where Cara was half-awake, and said, “I wish they hadn’t put four of us in a room designed for three.”

  “The room is designed for six,” John said. “They take turns on the bunks.”

  “With only three cups?” Wilson asked.

  “You’re expected to share,” John replied.

  “I think we’d prefer to keep the same schedule,” Wilson replied. “And I’ll wash the cup before and after using it.”

  Linda suggested she sleep on the chairs, since she was the shortest. Wilson went for the top bunk and his feet hung out over the end. John took the middle bunk, thinking that his wish to be sleeping with Cara certainly didn’t live up to his expectations.

  Although John was tired, his thoughts kept him awake. He felt guilty about Mason’s death. He should have told everyone to turn off their cell phones before they met in the motel. Most importantly, he should have turned his own cell off, with its GPS broadcasting his location. He tried to rationalize by saying that if the U.S. government knew what he was planning, then the Vigintees might also know, through no fault of his own.

  If only he hadn’t delayed Mason, perhaps he would still be alive.

  What did he need to make reparations for? There was no question as to whom he made reparations to. The unknown patients he helped could hardly be his goal. He helped Tom and Linda, which meant he was somehow connected to Natalie’s disappearance. Did Hernandez kill her? If so, why? And how was he responsible?

  Katrine was an unpleasant subject to think about. She was a monster, and he once loved her. No, by the Vigintees definition, she wasn’t a monster. People from Earth really were animals to them. Because of the Vigintees’ technological sophistication, he assumed there was also social sophistication. They never had to deal with people who looked different, lived differently, and yet were obviously human. Of course, they dealt with the Plict, but that was easier, because clearly the Plict were superior to humans. How did he know that? He fell asleep trying to puzzle out the answer.

  ***

  When Linda woke up, she realized John was exercising. Linda undressed and put her hand on a wall plate near the shower. A fine soapy mist wet her down. As per instructions given earlier, she scrubbed. Then she touched the plate again for the rinse. She dressed again in the clothes she slept in, putting on her slightly damp bra first. She went to the food dispenser and got a meal, which turned out to be two bland bars that looked and tasted sort of like an unsweetened granola. She filled a cup with lukewarm water to drink.

  Before showering, John showed Linda how to use the computers, showing her a tray table, which swung down from the ceiling. They whispered to avoid waking Wilson. He explained that mouthing the correct words brought up a screen and showed her the earphones. After a few minutes, John commented, “The access is limited. We seem to only have entertainment.” “It’s better than nothing,” Linda said and started watching a play.

  John took his shower and afterwards went to transfer the contents of his pockets to his new clothing. He put his wallet and cell phone in his pocket, saying, “I doubt I have much use for these.”

  Linda pointed at the pen, comb, handkerchief, and pocketknife, saying, “Those might be more useful.”

  “This blade, it is hardly a weapon.” The blade was perhaps one and a quarter inches long. Linda had nothing similar, but was glad she carried her purse. It was a cornucopia of items, compared with John’s pockets. Nail clippers, tissue, lip balm, a brush and comb, hand lotion, a small flashlight, a bag of M&M’s, a calculator, a small notebook, pens, and markers made her feel rich by comparison. Of course, there was also Wilson’s gun.

  Wilson ostensibly woke up after John finished his shower. Linda suspected he was playing possum because it would have been difficult to sleep with her and John’s whispered conversation about the computer.

  Cara woke and drank some water, but went back to bed. “Do you want something to eat?” Linda asked her.

  “Yes, but I’m a little shaky on my feet.”

  “I’ll get it for you.” But the dispenser refused her food, saying she had not contributed to the power grid.

  When Linda protested, John explained, “Exercising helps run this place. They won’t starve you, but you get less.”

  “I wouldn’t think people power could generate enough electricity to run this place,” Wilson said. “And they can’t be doing it when it’s needed.”

  “I have no idea if there’s more power coming from somewhere else, but there’s some way of storing it,” John said.

  Wilson looked skeptical, but Linda explained, “I don’t know what they are using, but it could be something as simple as pumping water uphill and letting it run back down to turn a wheel. I’m no physicist.”

  “But your father— ” Wilson started.

  “I’m not my father!” Linda snapped. “Sometimes I want to change my name. I stopped taking physics courses when I saw the sad look in the teacher’s eyes when I didn’t understand something. At least in the computer science department, they don’t assume I know everything. I wish I was good at something else, French literature or archaeology, where no one ever heard of my father.”

  “I don’t think there’s a lot of
money in those fields,” Wilson said.

  “I’m sorry,” Linda said. “I shouldn’t take my frustrations out on you. Do you want to show me how to use the exercise machine? I’m not much for exercising. Cara, could you get your own food?”

  Wilson put his feet up to give Cara an unimpeded path while John helped Cara get her meal. Cara sat in the nearest chair and ate part of one bar. They saved the rest of the food.

  Later, Baldur came and took John away.

  Wilson asked no one in particular, “Is he one of them or one of us?”

  When both Linda and Cara protested, Wilson said, “You don’t have to give me an answer, and I know you’re both loyal to him, but think about it.”

  Linda and Wilson tried to find out what else they had access to on the computer. Wilson found a sport that was played fervently here. They called it wachesia, and it was vaguely similar to soccer, but was played in the typical, low ceilinged rooms. There were two balls, a white one that could only be touched by the feet and a smaller black ball that could be touched by both hands and feet. The balls bounced off the ceiling and walls. Both balls could score goals, but the most points were given to goals from both balls within a few seconds of each other.

  Their only contact with the outside world was an anonymous person who brought them a third set of clothing and told them that every two days, they would exchange one set of dirty clothes for one set of clean ones. Since the exchange would be made through a partially opened door with a chain on it, Linda saw no way to use this to escape.

  Linda found there was a way to watch programs on the exercise machine. Wilson and Linda alternated watching in their chairs with watching while exercising. After three more days, Cara was up and about. She even tried the exercise machine. It had settings that were equivalent to a gentle walk. Wilson exercised fanatically, more to keep from being frustrated than to keep in shape, Linda suspected. She doubted he would have time when he was working, although his muscled body suggested he exercised regularly. Linda, who never did more than walk to campus, found herself enjoying the distraction, although she sometimes was sorry about her sore muscles.

  The computer gave them the choice of live plays, recorded plays, or movies. There were numerous showings of wachesia matches. There were also reviews and descriptions of the entertainment. Music accompanied every story. At first, Linda found it distracting, because it was so different from anything she was familiar with. Later, it started to grow on her.

  “They’re bad soap operas,” Cara said after watching a few. “I’d expect a high school to produce better shows.”

  “They’re not showing us everything,” Linda said.

  “How do you know? And why?” Cara asked.

  “I have no idea as to why, but I know because there are oblique references to them,” Linda said.

  “What do you mean?” Cara walked over to the screen where Linda pulled up a review.

  “Here, they say, ‘Unlucky lovers.’” She showed Cara the reference. “Look at all the occurrences of that phrase.” The screen filled with a list of articles and indicated thousands more.

  “It may be just a popular phrase,” Cara said doubtfully.

  “No. I’ve read dozens of references. If I didn’t know better, I think it was a Vigintees take-off of Romeo and Juliet. If you piece together the references, the unlucky lovers both commit suicide and both do so because they think the other one is dead.”

  “What do you mean, ‘If I didn’t know better?’” Wilson asked. “Why shouldn’t it actually be Romeo and Juliet?”

  “They think we’re animals,” Linda said. “Why would they copy our literature?”

  “Well, it would be a lot better than what they produce,” said Cara.

  “We should study them,” Wilson said.

  “From their movies?” Linda asked.

  “That’s all we’ve got,” he replied. “Both of you should understand that we are stuck here. We were kidnapped. Even if we escaped from this room, it wouldn’t help because we’ve nowhere to go. We couldn’t blend in the crowd and I think the things in our shoulders are probably there to locate us. I don’t think they leave that spaceship anywhere where we could find it, and I wouldn’t know how to fly it home if they did. The only thing we can do is learn as much about our captors as possible. Any delicate feelings you may have of invading their privacy should be set aside. We—”

  “You don’t have to convince me,” Linda interrupted. “I’m a natural born snoop. And I agree with you. We owe them nothing.”

  They both looked at Cara, who said, “I’m a psychiatrist. I’m happy to investigate these people.” She paused and then added deliberately, “Our kidnappers and the murderers of Mary Chen.”

  They each watched different shows. Linda found a way of entering notes in the computer. Although they each carried a pen, the lack of paper was a problem. Linda transferred some of their conclusions to a pad of paper she carried in her purse, in case they were deprived of the computer, but paper was scarce and had to be hoarded. Every time they found a character was in a certain profession, they recorded it. The characters called doctors delivered babies and attended to minor injuries, such as broken bones, but never anything more complicated.

  Linda watched chase scenes from action movies. The characters ran through the endless mirrored corridors, ducking people, but never outside and never on stairs. There was one story involving a fat man stealing food from a conveyor belt that brought it into the city, but nothing about the original source of the food was mentioned. The fat man died in the story, and somehow this was supposed to be a satisfactory fate. A character in another story worked in the factory that made the clothing, but Linda found no mention of where the cloth came from.

  Many times, there were brief references to ceremonies honoring the Plicts. They played little part in the plot, but people who didn’t attend these ceremonies were invariably villains. The ceremonies involved a lot of music and chanting, which really said nothing more than how wonderful the Plicts were and how the Vigintees were grateful to them.

  Earth was never mentioned, nor was any trip outside the mirrored rooms and corridors. They never turned off the lights, even when they slept. They lived on two different shifts. A common theme was people who met in the two hours a day that were considered between the shifts, fell in love, and one had to change shifts. Often it was comedy, but once a man left all his friends and wasn’t happy about it. The story ended with him returning to his own shift and the couple decided just to use the purple rooms.

  “What are the purple rooms?” Linda asked her companions. To her surprise, Wilson acted like he didn’t hear.

  Cara explained gently, “Sex rooms. People are supposed to have sex in them and nothing else. There was a show where a couple was in trouble because they just used them to sleep.”

  Linda felt the warm rush of a blush on her face. Wilson never looked her way, which was more embarrassing than if he saw her blush. He knew I was going to blush, she thought.

  Afterwards, Linda began to understand some stories a bit better.

  Although there were not a lot of children during prime time television on Earth, Linda was surprised how few children there were in the stories she watched. Large families were nonexistent, and siblings were always more than a decade apart in age. Linda finally stumbled on something about their history from a play designed to educate children.

  About 1700 years ago, an alien species called the Plicts discovered the wormhole to Earth. One alien, Fraxent-Bud VI, found a pair of children, now called the Founding Foundlings, and brought them back. They produced eleven children. He and his successors bred them and manipulated their genes to make them healthier and longer-lived. The Plicts built Vigint City for them and gave them food.

  Linda spent several hours doing some calculations and reported her results,

  “There are between 40,000 and 600,000 of them,” she said.

  “Can’t you pin it down more?” Cara asked.

  L
inda then showed them her calculations. The apartment they were in was not for the poorest people, because the poorest people lived in rooms with thirty bunks, with only a small locker to call their own. The wealthy didn’t have large apartments. Even with the cramped living quarters, the common rooms and corridors took up space. Although the shows they watched were probably not terribly accurate in their representation of the world, she guessed that people wouldn’t tolerate shows that were completely unrealistic. No one was ever more than a twenty-minute walk from anywhere. That argued for a diameter of about a mile.

  “If the population is on the low end of the estimate, I don’t see how they developed the technology,“ Wilson said.

  “Obviously, it was given to them by the Plict, even if there are 600,000 people here,” Linda said. She went on to explain, “No matter how smart these people are, they can’t all be scientists. Some people must keep society moving. There has to be police, plumbers, and politicians. We’ve already seen a large number of actors and writers.”

  “Writers?” Cara asked scornfully.

  “Somebody wrote those movies.”

  Cara snorted.

  “We haven’t seen any scientists portrayed in movies. If they have enough scientists to produce the technology, there should be some in fiction,” Linda said. They went back to studying the society.

  Suddenly, the room went black. After about a minute, Wilson felt his way to the exercise room, explaining that he was going to try to add to the power grid. Linda doubted that a single person would make much difference, but the power came on about ten minutes later. She expected to be upset by the lack of light, but she couldn’t turn off the lights and that bothered her. It might be nice to sleep in the dark again.

  They had no computer access several hours, but when the computers came on, their restrictions were lifted, due to the reboot. They could study anything.

  CHAPTER 10