The Memory Agent

by Matthew B. J. Delaney

  Or, I had the bizarre thought, perhaps the city was a normal model and we were the ones strangely sized, shrunk somehow and dropped into the new vast world. Clayton joined me on the sidewalk. He took in the sight without comment, then said, “What do you want to do?”

  “Get the others.”

  Selberg was animated. Charlotte was quiet. Nasir, who had never been to a western city before, had never seen a building higher than the pyramids, became overwhelmed and fell to his knees in prayer.

  “Why, this is wonderful,” Selberg said.

  Clayton checked his watch. “Clocks are wrong though.”

  I followed his gaze to a large clock fixed to the side of the shopping mall. The hands on the face were stopped at exactly quarter past nine. Another clock fixed in the center of the circle also read the same. Whether this was a.m. or p.m., I didn’t know.

  “The clocks are wrong? The clocks are wrong?” Selberg repeated in disbelief. “Who cares if the clocks are wrong!”

  Quarter past nine. 9:15. I turned the numbers over in my mind. “It is an interesting point,” I said finally. “I mean, why quarter past nine?”

  “What?” Selberg turned toward me. “It’s insignificant.”

  “Is it though? I mean, everything in this city is so orchestrated. So well planned. Every detail arranged. So what happened at quarter past nine?” Something bothered me about that time. Some deep memory I couldn’t quite grasp. I checked my watch. Outside, in the real world, it was seven p.m., and we had been in the tunnels for hours. Somehow, I had not noticed.

  “So what are we waiting for?” Selberg said. “We should push on, explore.”

  I considered that. Above us, the air was infused with a vague light, like the glow through thick clouds on an overcast day. The glow must be the result of some sort of internal light source, I deduced, as we were too deep beneath the Earth for the sun to reach us. Yet, the surrounding buildings stretched up to incredible heights, not limited by ceilings or barriers. The size of the chamber we found ourselves in was impossible to comprehend. Hundreds of stories in height, at least. If there was a light source somewhere above, it was massive. And I couldn’t be certain, but it felt like the light was failing. The air seemed to be slowly growing darker. Perhaps the chamber kept a day and night schedule. This faded grayish light during daylight hours, then darkness at night.

  “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.” I hesitated. I didn’t want to be caught too far away from the subway entrance if it got dark. Considering this was an artificially constructed world, night inside the chamber might be infinitely darker than in the natural world of stars and moonlight. Here, the darkness could be absolute and impenetrable. And there was no way to know how long it might last.

  “Scared of the dark?” Selberg asked.

  “Sure, I’m nervous. We don’t know anything about this place. We don’t know what happens at night.” I nodded at our pile of gear. “My vote? We stay here, pitch the tents, and see how the night goes.”

  “I still think we could explore farther. At least one more street,” Selberg said.

  I ignored his statement, and Nasir and I went to work setting up the tents. We picked a spot just off the subway entrance, on the hard, paved sidewalk near the circle. While camping inside one of the buildings might be more comfortable, I wanted to stay close to the station in case we needed to make a fast exit.

  Selberg pouted for a few minutes, then he and Charlotte moved toward the edge of the park to gather wood for a fire.

  “Stay close,” I said to their backs.

  I had been right, as the light soon began to fade quickly. Nasir and I had a difficult time with the tents. We were unable to bury the tent stakes into the concrete, so we had to settle with tying off the support ropes to the edge of the subway station railing on one side and a fire hydrant on the other. We placed all three tents together in a circular pattern. Each of the doors faced outward.

  Selberg and Charlotte returned with armfuls of firewood they had gathered from the park. I inspected the branches, expecting some kind of synthetic materials. Cardboard limbs and rubber leaves, like a set design prop for a theater production. But instead, each branch had fully articulated green leaves and stems of springy, healthy wood. These were real, living branches.

  “I wondered about that,” Charlotte said. “No sunlight down here. No rain. Where do the trees come from?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Because there looks to be a park filled with them.”

  “Let’s just see if they burn,” Selberg said. “It’s getting chilly.”

  I realized he was right. As the light faded, the temperature began to drop quickly. And as dark shadows moved across abandoned streets and the faces of vacant buildings, the city began to feel more and more gloomy. A frightening lost world beneath the Earth. I could tell the others felt the oppression too. Casual glances over the shoulder. A lingering near the edges of the tent. A fire might cheer us up.

  “I don’t know . . . maybe we should study them,” Charlotte said. “We don’t know what happens when they burn. They might release toxic gas. They appear to be trees, but are they? For all we know, these trees might be the entities that built this place.”

  “I’m cold. One way to find out,” Selberg said. He dragged over a large empty metal trash can to the edge of the tents, then dropped his branches inside. He doused the branches with a stream of kerosene we had brought with us, then dropped a lit match on top of them.

  Flames burst forth, which settled into a slow fire as the branches were gradually consumed.

  “Looks normal,” Selberg said. “Smells normal.”

  The fire seemed to burn like a fire should and emitted a welcome heat, which soon had us all gathered around. I used a camp mirror to inspect my face. I had a small gash below my eye from the tunnel explosion. Blood clung to the side of my face in dried rivulets, but the wound had closed and there seemed little danger of infection.

  “Wonder if any of these stores have food,” Clayton said.

  “If they did,” I said, “I guess it’d be a few thousand years old.”

  “Or water. I mean, looks like this place was built for people. So they must have eaten something, right?”

  “He raises a good point,” Selberg said. “If this place was built for people, then there would need to be supplies of food. Water. Where would this come from? Grown down here? Brought in?”

  “Maybe the Egyptians brought it in?” Charlotte asked.

  “You think one culture knew about the other? The Egyptians on top and whoever these people are below?”

  “Worked in The Time Machine. The Eloi and the . . .” My voice trailed off. The Time Machine had been one of my favorite books as a child, but now I couldn’t remember the name of the monsters. The ones who lived below the Earth. The ones who fed on the Eloi.

  “Morlocks,” Charlotte said.

  “You think the people down here were the Morlocks?” I asked.

  “If there was a relationship between the two peoples,” Selberg said, “I would suggest it would be one of symbiosis. Mutually beneficial to both. For example, perhaps the city people gave Egyptians access to their technologies.”

  “And what would the Egyptians give to the city people?” I asked.

  Selberg’s eyebrows scrunched together. “I’m not sure . . .”

  “What did the above ground people give the Morlocks?” Clayton asked.

  “The above ground people were food,” Selberg said.

  “What?”

  “The Morlocks ate them.”

  I hunched my shoulders against the chill and surveyed the circle. Around us was quite dark now, the silhouette of the buildings a faint line against the blue-black sky above. In the darkness near where the park would be, a match head flared and Clayton’s face glowed red in the night as he lit up a smoke.

  “We should get some sleep,” I said. “Not much we can do with the lights out.”

  “I wonder how long the night
lasts here,” Charlotte asked.

  I pulled back the flap of my tent. Inside was a sleeping bag and a small, gas, railroad lantern. I felt immediate exhaustion and collapsed onto the sleeping bag, the hard concrete of West Fifty-Ninth Street beneath me. The tent undulated slightly, played upon by a slight disturbance in the air. The walls were thin fabric. Nothing could be kept out that might want to get in. And as I drifted off to sleep, I wondered if this might be a problem.

  I awoke in a sweat, pulled from sleep like one might pull a boot stuck deep in black mud. I wiped my eyes of perspiration, lit a match and tried to read the face of my watch. I was certain it must be well after midnight, but instead I saw it was just past 9:15 p.m. I had been sleeping for only an hour.

  The same time as the broken clocks.

  I had been having a nightmare. Already the dream was fading from consciousness, and I struggled to remember the details. Somehow it seemed important. There had been a long hallway. Bloody handprints marked the wall. Broken glass on the floor. A bathroom, black and white checkered floor, a shower curtain pulled shut, concealing something beyond.

  And then I awoke.

  In the blackness of the tent, I breathed deeply. I could feel rivulets of sweat trickle down the length of my back. Outside, footsteps approached the tent’s entrance. I pushed myself up onto an elbow and reached for the revolver I had tucked beneath my pillow. It seemed that in Egypt I was not able to get a single night’s sleep without having need of the Colt.

  The footsteps stopped directly in front of the tent flap.

  Clayton’s voice came as a whisper. “Are you awake in there?”

  “Yes. What is it?”

  “There’s something out here you should see.”

  I dressed, then tucked the Colt into my waistband. Fully clothed, I crawled from my tent. Clayton was outlined in darkness.

  “Out there.” Clayton pointed south, away from the edge of the park. In the distance I could see the jagged silhouettes of buildings along the edge of the circle.

  “Third building in from the circle,” Clayton said. “Three quarters up.”

  As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw an apartment building, with tiers of balconies.

  A light from a single apartment burned in the darkness.

  “There’s more,” Clayton said. He pressed binoculars into my hands. “Look.”

  I scanned the dark edge of the building, then oriented myself on the illuminated window. I adjusted the binoculars until the window came into sharp focus.

  A single shade was pulled partway down across the glass of the illuminated window. The shade was cream white in color, with a few dark blurred lines creating a mesh of shadows across the surface. I reasoned the shadows must be objects in the apartment, furniture in the real world, but here, in this place I couldn’t be certain.

  The shade was open about a foot from the bottom edge of the window, allowing me to see a thin strip of view into the room beyond. The distance and the angle from the street made it difficult to see inside, but I vaguely detected a wooden straight line that could have been the leg of a table. I also sighted a thick grayish blob that might have been the edge of a sofa.

  Then, a blur of movement. Something passed by the shade. My grip on the binoculars tightened. My heart thudded deep and resonant in my chest. Silhouetted on the shade was a dark outline, clearly human in form. A single shadowy arm reached out, and in an instant, the light snapped out. I continued to peer through the binoculars, but now saw only darkness. The lit room had returned to the uniform anonymity of the hundred glass windows that lined the building.

  The rest of the night passed excruciatingly slowly. Second by second. Minute by minute. Between my nightmare and the illuminated apartment window, I found it impossible to sleep again. I lay on my back, pistol in hand, and listened to the sounds of the camp. Someone snored. Fabric rustled. A voice called out in a dream. Eventually I fell to sleep, hearing at the far edge of my consciousness a jabbering sort of bark, like the sound of a hyena. But then sleep took hold, and I plunged deep into a dreamless world.

  Morning arrived with the suddenness of a light bulb flaring on. Around me, the makeshift camp returned to life. During the night, the small fire had burned down, and Nasir worked now to restore it. Selberg arched his back and grimaced painfully, while Charlotte walked along the edge of the park and inspected various flowers and trees that overhung the sidewalk.

  I told each of them what we had seen during the night, then Clayton and I headed out from camp to investigate. The air was comfortable and the light was perfect. Another clear indication that this space had been designed for human habitation.

  Clayton spit an inky smudge of tobacco onto the pavement. His rifle rested in the crook of his arm. His body was relaxed, but his eyes scanned our surroundings with intensity.

  We had been careful to ration our provisions, but none of us had apparently felt hunger. The excitement of everything had left me with no appetite. We left camp and headed south across the circle. The street was quiet. The air lay heavy across us, nothing stirring in its dead current. The building itself was glass and steel, new construction materials in my time, but perhaps not in the future. I imagined the dull uniform apartments that must occupy its innards. I looked up again at the apartment window, trying to count the floors.

  “Fourteen,” Clayton said. “Seven windows in from the eastern edge of the building.”

  The entrance was guarded by two glass doors. Clayton tugged on one and it opened easily enough. A slight gust of wind, barely perceptible if not for the stillness outside, emanated through the open doorway. I wondered if the interior air was safe, but Clayton, with a final resolute spit of tobacco, stepped through the doorway and into the lobby.

  The door shut behind us, the air went quiet, and I had the disturbing impression of stepping into a mausoleum. The lobby was standard layout, front reception desk, with a pair of padded leather chairs and a small glass coffee table. On the reception desk was a coffee mug filled with pencils and a pink pen with a feather plume. The elevator was set back into the side wall, with a second door on the back wall, which I presumed led into the stairwell.

  “Fourteen floors . . .” I let the words hang, my legs felt heavy already.

  “Safe thing to take the stairs.”

  “Yeah. No. I’m staired out.”

  I pushed the call button and we waited.

  I thought about that pen in the coffee mug, something so uniquely human. It was an odd embellishment to this world and a level of detail that couldn’t be randomly created.

  The double elevators doors slid back with surprising immediacy, like the jaws of an animal snapping open. We stepped inside and rode up to the floor.

  The hallway was neutral in every aspect. Drab white in color, unmarked doors, dimly lit with only a faint odor of almonds as its only identifiable feature. A typical hallway of which there were probably a million variations all across the city.

  A window was positioned at the end of the hall, and through it we could see down to our small grouping of tents, small khaki-colored fabric that broke the uniformity of the cement. Nasir and Charlotte reclined against the side of the subway entrance, small puffs of smoke visible around them as they pulled on cigarettes. Selberg sat near the edge of the tent. He appeared to be reading.

  “Can see our camp from a mile away,” Clayton said. “Too exposed. If these buildings are safe, we should think about moving inside.”

  Clayton made sense. From this height, our camp did look pretty damn vulnerable. A few fragile tents in the midst of this vast undiscovered wild. And I didn’t have a great feeling about this place.

  Clayton counted off the doors from the far edge of the window, then tried the knob. The door was locked.

  I listened at the door, then said, “So what’s the etiquette exactly when you visit the apartment of a totally unknown civilization of potentially limitless power?”

  “Knock, I guess.”

  “Knocking works.�
�

  I rapped sharply on the door. The sound echoed in the quiet confines of the hall. We waited, tensely holding our weapons, listening for the metallic clack of a dead bolt. The turning of the door knob.

  But there was nothing.

  I exhaled and lowered my rifle. “Maybe it only comes out at night?”

  Whatever happened, I knew I couldn’t be in the hallway for much longer. The silent anticipation was more than I could stand. My feet began to tremble with the desire to run. To move. To be anywhere but here. We listened a minute more, then hearing nothing, we made our way back down the hall to the elevator. I had to force myself not to run. As we waited for the car to arrive, a thought occurred to me.

  “Should we try the roof?”

  Clayton passed a hand over his chin stubble and then nodded.

  The elevator took us to the roof and the doors opened into the diffused brightness of an artificial sun above us. Around us stretched the city. This was the same metropolis I had known, only bigger and grander, with additions beyond the scope of my comprehension.

  “Look, there,” Clayton said, as he pointed off toward the west. In the distance, where the open space of the Hudson would have separated Manhattan from New Jersey, was a solid wall of fog. As I watched, the fog parted from some unknown current of air. Through the swirling opening, I could see solid, dark rock.

  This wall rose impossibly high, higher than any of the buildings, and I realized we were truly inside the Earth. This entire massive structure of Manhattan had somehow been created underground.

  I turned to Clayton. “How is any of this possible?”

  “Don’t know.”

  To the north, the grassy, wooded stretch of Central Park, to the south, the spires of Midtown, glass and steel shimmering in the false light. Everything seemed in place . . . the layered cap of the Empire State Building, the illuminated neon glow of Times Square, only tenfold what I was used to. Even the bridges were visible. I could see the unique inverted U-shaped structures of the Williamsburg far to the south.