The Loop

by Ben Oliver

  “Can you walk?” I ask her as I slide down beside her.

  She lifts her hand away, and I see the wound healing itself, scar tissue forming where the lesion had been.

  “I’m okay,” she says, disbelief in her voice.

  “Good, let’s go,” I say, but as soon as I try to move, twenty or thirty rounds send flecks of marble into the air.

  We are pinned down behind the fountain; the water that cascades like a curtain from the summit is almost constantly interrupted by the sonic bullets passing through it.

  Three of the trucks have filled up with the Missing and have pulled away toward the Red Zone, and the final two are filling up fast. I see Pander clamber into the back of one and begin firing covering shots into the crowd. I see the driver of one of the last trucks fall out of the cab, dead from a head shot, but another Regular takes his place behind the wheel, sitting there stoically as the glass shatters and more bullets fly her way.

  “We’re stuck,” Kina says.

  I look around, searching for a way out and seeing nothing. A group of ten or twelve soldiers is making its way around to our left, and eighteen or nineteen more are circling around to our right. We are surrounded; there is nothing else we can do.

  I lean back against the fountain and look at Kina. She smiles up at me.

  “Hi, Luka,” she says, nodding her head in that same nonchalant way she did on the station platform on the way to the Delay, what feels like a lifetime ago.

  “Kina,” I reply, and we laugh.

  That’s the last thing I’m aware of before everything stops and nothing exists.

  * * *

  The emptiness lasts less than a minute. And then …

  * * *

  I’m sprinting toward a statue of a rebel leader near the gates at the back of the park. I see Kina ducked down behind a fountain, blood pumping out of a wound in her leg. I run to her, firing a burst of rounds at a group of Alt soldiers as I go.

  “Can you walk?” I ask her as I slide down beside her.

  And something about this is familiar.

  She lifts her hand away from the cut in her leg, and I can see the skin knitting itself back together.

  “I’m okay,” she says, looking up at me with amazed eyes.

  This has happened before.

  “This has happened before,” I say to myself.

  “What?” Kina asks. “What are you talking about?”

  Suddenly, a blast of gunfire thunders against the fountain, and we duck down lower.

  “Kina, we’ve done this before; this just happened.”

  “Luka, listen to me. Where are the rest of them?” Kina asks, grabbing my arm.

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “Where are Pander Banks, Akimi Kaminski, Podair Samson, and Igby Koh?”

  More USW rounds slam into the fountain and the earth around us.

  “Kina, what are you talking about?”

  I hear a scream and look over the fountain to see Malachai running at the soldiers. He kills one, two, three of them. He ducks as another swings a Deleter at him, and then he kills seven, eight, nine more.

  He sprints and slides down beside us.

  “Hi, guys,” he says, smiling brightly.

  “Hello, Malachai,” Kina says, and there’s something not right in her voice.

  “Where are we meeting the others?” Malachai asks.

  “I saw you,” I say. “I saw you running into the city with Wren. What’s going on?”

  “We need to know where they are, Luka,” Malachai says. “We need to know now.”

  This isn’t right. This isn’t right at all.

  That’s the last thought I have as the world turns black once again.

  * * *

  “It’s not working,” a voice says in the emptiness. “Try something else.”

  * * *

  I was in a battle. Wasn’t I?

  I wake up in the Loop to Happy’s voice.

  “Inmate 9-70-981. Today is Thursday, the second of June. Day 737 in the Loop. The temperature inside your cell is 66 degrees Fahrenheit. Please select your breakfast option.”

  I yawn and sit up in my bed.

  The second of June, I think. It’s my birthday.

  I try to remember my dream—something about a war in the outside world. Did I escape the Loop?

  I stand up and walk to the screen. In the blackness, I can see my own face reflected back at me, and then my breakfast options appear, except they are not breakfast options at all. The words say: WHERE ARE THE OTHERS HIDING?

  I did escape the Loop. Kina, Tyco, the city—I remember it all.

  “This isn’t real,” I whisper. “What’s happening to me?”

  And then I hear a voice, a dull, lifeless voice from nowhere and everywhere at the same time. “He knows it’s not real. Go deeper.”

  And then the world is black once again.

  I try to hold on to something this time, I try to tell myself that I’m being manipulated by someone or something, but …

  * * *

  I’m on the roof of the Black Road Vertical.

  The boy is reaching for the gun that is wedged into his pocket.

  Molly, my sister, walks toward him, not fast and not slow, as though she is unsure of what she is going to do.

  She’s going to push him, I think, and I have to do something. He’s going to kill her or she is going to kill him.

  You’re being manipulated by someone or something …

  What a strange thought to have at a time like this.

  “Stay back!” the boy screams.

  This is not real, Luka. The thought is so loud and prominent in my mind that I almost believe it.

  The boy pulls the gun free and smiles victoriously as he aims it at Molly’s head.

  And then she pushed him, I think.

  But that doesn’t happen. The boy, Tyco’s brother—who’s Tyco?—grabs Molly and pulls off the rubber mask that was concealing her face.

  “I’ll kill her!” he calls. “I’ll kill her right now.”

  I try to shake off this feeling of dislocation, this sense of illusion, and focus on my sister—the Ebb addict?—and how to save her.

  Something is wrong. My mind feels as though it’s twisting around. My memories feel wrong, as though this is a dream, as though it has happened before.

  “Okay, okay,” I call back to the boy. “Let her go, and we’ll walk away.”

  “No,” he shouts over the wind, “first you tell me where they are.”

  You’re being manipulated, I think again. This is not real.

  “Where who are?”

  “Pander Banks, Akimi Kaminski, Podair Samson, and Igby Koh.”

  “I don’t know who any of those people are.” Yes, you do.

  And then I remember.

  This keeps on happening. I keep on moving through my own memories, except they’re different, they’ve been changed.

  “I’m not telling you anything,” I say, and then I yell, “Do you hear me? Whoever is doing this, I won’t tell you anything!”

  I hear that voice again, that emotionless drone of a voice. “Pull him out.”

  And I’m plunged into blackness for a long, long time.

  On my very first day inside the Loop, I cried.

  I remember it so vividly, the short journey on the Dark Train all the way to the Facility, directed along the narrow corridors by a faceless, silent guard. I had been six days away from my fourteenth birthday, terrified and alone. They took me through to the trial room, where they cut my paralyzed body open and wove the wire into and out of my beating heart. I was stitched up and wheeled through to the recovery room, where I was freed from the paralysis and told, by Happy, to put on my prison uniform. I looked at my reflection in the one-way mirror, staring at the prisoner I saw there.

  I was taken back to the Dark Train. When I stepped out onto the platform of the Loop, I remember thinking: This is where I die.

  On the outside, we had known that prison
ers were not allowed visitors, we had known that prisoners’ energy was used to power the building, but we had not been told that they harnessed fear, anxiety, and panic to extract the greatest amount of power possible. We had known about the Delays but not about the inhumanity of the Delays. It would not take long for me to find out just how cruel this place could be.

  The guard shoved me into my cell and locked the door, leaving me in the suffocating silence.

  I stood there in the middle of the tiny room, telling myself to be strong, telling myself that it would do no good to cry.

  I thought of Molly, the way she screamed when the Marshals came for me. And I cried.

  I cried for a long time.

  These are the memories that fill my head as my eyes flicker open.

  I wonder, as I look around the claustrophobic room, Did I ever escape the Loop? Was any of it real? The rat tunnel, the Smilers, the city, Kina? Was it all just a fever dream of my snapped, demented mind?

  I remember the memories I was forced to revisit, and I take a second to question whether or not this is real. I don’t recognize this place, but it seems real, for now.

  I try to lift my arms to rub the sleep out of my eyes, but I can’t move. I try to lift my head, but that is stuck too. I move my eyes and look down—I see that I’m naked and tied to a bed. My arms, legs, and chest are all wrapped in thick layers of polyester straps.

  But then I stop trying to move; I freeze completely. I know now why my mind was filled with memories from the Loop. I’m in a cell. Not exactly the same as my one in the Loop but so similar that it sends chills down my spine.

  It takes a while for my vision to fully adjust to the dim light. When it does, I see that this room is smaller than my Loop cell. It has four walls, one of them with a screen in the center. The cell differs from my old one, though: There is no sink, no toilet, and no window.

  Fear explodes inside me, and I want to scream, but I’m held, motionless, frozen in terror.

  I’m back inside a prison, stuck in a cell. But the walls aren’t angular; they’re square, evenly measured. And they’re not made of concrete; they’re some kind of white plastic, soulless and bare.

  I look around me, and I know I’m in the Block.

  I can feel my heart beating so hard that it might break through my rib cage.

  I feel tears seep into my eyes and fall down my cheek.

  If this is real and I am back in prison, then I wish I had died a long time ago, I wish I had never made it through the tunnels, I wish Tyco had murdered me when he was first released, I wish I had been killed long before I was ever locked up. Death would be heaven compared to these four walls.

  “No,” I finally manage to say, my voice groggy.

  I try pulling against the straps again, but it’s no good.

  “No,” I say again. I can hear the terror in my voice, and it only scares me more. “No, let me out, let me out of here, help!”

  I thrash and pull against the straps. I know I can’t escape, but the panic and fear that are coursing through my body force me to react like a wild animal caught in a trap.

  And then I fall silent as I hear the hatch in my doorway slide open. I turn my eyes in the direction of the sound, and I see two bright lights shining into the dark. I wait for my jailer to speak.

  “Mr. Kane,” the voice says, “are you ready to calm down?”

  “Calm down?” I repeat. “Calm down? No, I’m not ready to calm down, you piece of shit! You inhuman monster! You fuc—”

  Without warning, I fall completely silent and still. I didn’t even feel the pinprick at the base of my spine, I was too busy struggling and screaming, but I know what has happened as I lie here paralyzed, utterly inert.

  I hear the door swinging open and the sound of footsteps as my captor approaches. As he reaches my bedside, the light from his eyes falls on me.

  “Putting you in stasis is necessary,” the man says. And now that I have no choice but to be perfectly still, I recognize that voice. It’s not Galen Rye, that much I’m certain of, but I know I’ve heard it before.

  He steps closer and sits down at my bedside. I see the man’s hands move toward me and hear the sound of the restraints on my head being removed. Without the use of my neck muscles, my head flops over and rests against my left shoulder, my neck slightly twisted and slumped forward so that my breaths come out in loud snorts. All I can see from this angle are his hands resting in his lap, young hands but calloused and worked.

  “The resilience you have shown, Luka … Fascinating.”

  He speaks in the same stilted manner as the bright-eyed soldier on the roof. And yet, despite this, I know that voice, I know it.

  “There is something that we require from you, Luka. We are going to take you out of stasis now.”

  The glow from his eyes illuminates his hands and turns momentarily from white to orange, and the paralysis is lifted.

  I gasp in a full breath of air, savoring the feeling of oxygen reentering my bloodstream. I look into the face of my jailer, and I stop breathing altogether. I freeze in place, as though the paralysis has been reengaged, unable to believe what I’m seeing, unable to believe that I’m looking at my friend, my mentor, my neighbor from the Loop. I’m looking at a ghost. I’m looking at Maddox Fairfax.

  “You’re dead,” I say, my voice a quiet rasp. “You died.”

  His face remains emotionless, expressionless. “No, Luka. Maddox Fairfax remains very much alive.”

  “You …” I start. “Please tell me … You’re not behind this. Maddox, you didn’t do all of this, not you?”

  “Maddox Fairfax will not reply unless we allow him to reply,” Maddox says, his voice still mechanical and cold.

  “You are Maddox!” I yell, the frustration and confusion overriding everything else.

  “Wrong,” Maddox replies. “But we will allow you to speak with Maddox Fairfax.”

  My confusion is quickly replaced by yet another jolt of pure terror as the lights in Maddox’s eyes fade out, and his expressionless face comes alive with terror and confusion. He leans forward and places a hand on my cheek.

  “Kill me, Luka. Kill me, please. You have to kill me, for god’s sake!”

  “Maddox?” I say, my voice breaking as I see the extent of the madness and the suffering that has overcome my friend.

  “They control me, Luka; they control my body. I’m a prisoner. I’m trapped in here.”

  Suddenly, Maddox leaps to his feet, leans back, and launches his head toward the hard plastic wall of the cell.

  I realize—before his skull connects—that he means to bash his own head in, to kill himself, but a fraction of a second before his forehead connects, the lights come back on in those mechanical eyes, and he freezes in place, all emotion evaporating from his agonized face.

  He turns his head slowly back to me, and then he sits down calmly in the chair beside my bed.

  “What the hell was that?” I ask.

  “That was Maddox Fairfax,” the thing that looks like Maddox says. “One of our host bodies. In fact, the first ever successful host body.”

  “You’re going to have to explain,” I say, trying to demand but failing to fill my voice with anything other than fear.

  “No, Luka. This is not a negotiation; this is a demand. You will tell us where the others are.”

  And I know now that whatever is controlling Maddox was controlling my memories, trying to get me to tell them where my friends are.

  A shadow falls in the doorway. With the light of the corridor behind him, it takes me a few seconds to realize that it’s Galen Rye.

  “Allow me to talk with him,” Galen says, his voice dripping with kindness.

  “Very well,” the thing that looks like Maddox says. He stands up and moves toward the door as Galen—his eyes no longer glowing—takes his place in the seat.

  “Luka Kane,” Galen mutters. “Luka Kane, Luka Kane. You have proven yourself to be quite the irritation. Humiliating my officers in the Fac
ility, escaping my prison, running amok in my city. I must admit, I admire you. Your tenacity, your will.”

  He survived the assassination attempt by the Missing, he lived through the bomb blast, and—once again—he chose to imprison me instead of killing me.

  “I have to make this quick, Luka. I am—as you know—a very busy man.”

  “I knew it was you,” I tell him through grinding teeth. “I knew you were behind this. You—”

  “Luka, my boy, please; I have done nothing at all. I merely negotiated a deal with them.”

  “Them? Them? Who are they?” I ask. I can feel my thoughts knotting once again, and pain is beginning to burn in my head.

  “They, Luka … they are more powerful than you can ever know. They have been in control of everything, the World Government, every Overseer in every Region, every powerful person that you can think of. They have controlled us all for almost twenty years.”

  “Answer my question,” I repeat, weary now.

  “We were, frankly, stupid. I include myself in that. We gave them everything they needed, told them willingly: everything we love, everything we hate, political views, names of friends and family and enemies. We handed it over without arguing. We created them, Luka; that’s the irony. We created them.”

  “For the love of fuck, will you stop with the whole bad-guy lecture and just tell me who they are?”

  Galen laughs, and I see a deep sadness in his eyes. “The bad guy, me? Really, Luka? Well, I suppose you’re right, but one person’s bad guy is another’s hero.” He sighs. “Anyway, it was the machines, computers, artificial intelligence. We hit the nexus, the singularity, nineteen years ago. The turning point was Happy Incorporated, the company that bought out all the other major companies until it owned practically everything, the company that produced Happy—the operating system that replaced all others, the operating system that runs everything. The program became sentient. And within—”

  Galen becomes still, silent, as the light in his eyes glows bright. The humanity falls away from him, and he becomes a puppet, mastered by something else.

  “Enough,” the thing controlling Galen states. “We will make you an offer. Tell us where Pander Banks, Podair Samson, Akimi Kaminski, and Igby Koh are, and we will allow you to go free.”