Loop

by Ben Oliver

  I can barely move, pressed into the cold floor, blood trickling and pooling around my face.

  I see a pair of black shoes, the toes brought to a polished shine.

  It’s over, I think again.

  I hear the digital humming of some unknown piece of equipment, followed by the contemplative exhalation of the man with the shiny shoes.

  ‘Diastolic; excellent. Respiration; excellent. BP; excellent,’ the man says, and again I’m sure I know that voice. ‘This boy, Luka Kane, is in incredible shape. Young, virile, healthy. He’ll make an excellent battery. Take him to the trial room. Put two officers on him.’

  ‘As One,’ I hear one of the guards reply.

  And then it clicks. I know that voice because I hear it every day in the Loop. It’s Galen Rye, the Overseer. What is he doing here? Is he behind this mass Delay that has already killed half of my friends?

  Galen walks away and I’m dragged to a standing position by three officers.

  ‘Get him to the anaesthesia room before he tries anything else,’ the lead officer demands.

  I’m dragged, bound feet scraping along the floor, back along the corridor I had escaped through. The monkeys are still going wild in the animal room, screeching like a jeering crowd as I’m dragged back to the locked door of the trial room.

  The officer whose clothes I stole stands in front of me in my prison uniform, grinning. ‘How did freedom taste?’ he asks, and, without warning, throws a fist into my stomach so hard that I almost throw up. And then he leans close to me, his voice a whisper. ‘If you’ve cost me a spot in Tier Three, I will make sure you die slowly.’

  ‘Fuck you,’ I groan.

  ‘Take him to the Chair,’ Petrov mutters, and the door to the anaesthesia room slides open.

  I’m dragged into the sterile white room, empty apart from the Chair in the centre. It’s a large and uncomfortable wheeled dentist’s chair, the seat and arms covered in blue plastic; easy to wipe the blood off. I struggle against my restraints as the two guards drag me over to it. The stainless-steel frame glimmers under the lights as I’m turned around and shoved into a sitting position.

  This is the worst part of any Delay – no matter what they do to you on the table, nothing is worse than the Chair.

  There’s an electronic hum from the Chair as the needle is raised. I feel the jab at the base of my spine and immediately become paralysed.

  Every muscle in my body lets go completely and I’m a limp bag of blood and organs. I can’t even blink, drool runs out of my mouth and the angle that my head has fallen makes it hard to draw breath. The only things I’m in control of are my breathing and my bodily functions.

  I hear the whirring of the automatic doors and a few seconds later two orderlies come in wearing dazzling white uniforms, casually chatting to each other about their Saturday night plans. One of them, sporting dreadlocks, is planning to go to a music festival and take Ebb; the other sounds disappointed to just be spending time with her wife.

  Together, they manually adjust the chair until it’s a bed. As soon as I am lying horizontally I can breathe properly again. Dreadlocks sprays my drying eyes with a mist from a canister, and they wheel me through the automatic door and into the trial room.

  ‘Bye bye, Luka Kane,’ Officer Petrov calls out, his voice muffled by the dividing glass. I can only hope that the humiliation of being overpowered by a teenage boy loses him his job, and his place in Tier Three, whatever the hell that is.

  As I don’t have the ability to move any part of me, all I can see is the ceiling high above and all I can do is hope that I don’t feel the madness that they are about to infect me with, that there’s no part of me left alive inside my mind once the insanity kicks in.

  I have never felt fear like this before.

  A face appears above me: a middle-aged woman wearing a surgical mask. She has a horrible grin in her bright Alt eyes and speaks in gleeful tones.

  ‘You must be Mr Kane?’ she asks with no possibility of an answer from my frozen vocal cords. ‘The escapologist – you’re famous around here. Shall we get started?’

  She disappears from my vision and I hear the metallic rustling of surgical instruments.

  I want to run – I beg my body to obey the commands of my brain, I will my legs to move, to carry me away, to not let them operate on me, but there’s nothing I can do except wait.

  The doctor’s face reappears. She’s holding a syringe.

  ‘Here we go,’ she mutters as she pushes the giant needle somewhere into me. I can’t be sure where it has gone, but from where she’s standing I imagine it to be my upper arm or neck. I hear the clunk as she drops the syringe back into a tray and then she appears with another one.

  ‘Number two,’ she says, positively singing the words, and ducks out of my field of vision to inject me again.

  ‘Annnnnd three,’ she says, producing a third needle. This one, I’m sure, is twice as long as the others.

  And then there’s silence for what feels like a full five minutes, and for all I know they’re removing my skin or sawing my feet off. It’s not like I’d be able to feel it.

  ‘OK, that should be long enough,’ the doctor says, and then she makes a surprised little oh sound. ‘Doctor Soto, welcome. Come to witness the fruits of your labour?’

  ‘No,’ comes the curt reply of the female doctor who moves – just out of my field of vision – and grabs something from the tray beside my head and then leaves the room.

  Then I’m moving again; my bed is being wheeled to the other end of the room and I’m pushed into some sort of Perspex container that looks like a cheap greenhouse.

  There’s a hissing sound and the chamber is filled with pale white gas. My instinct is not to breathe, so I don’t, but the gas is pumped into the container for far longer than I can hold my breath. Finally, I give up and breathe the gas in. I can’t feel anything, but I can imagine the caustic mist burning into the tissue of my lungs, blistering my windpipe, poisoning my blood.

  The hissing sound ends, and I lie there waiting for something to happen, waiting for the effects of the gas to do whatever they do, waiting to become like Harvey, like Chirrak, Catherine and whoever else was in Group A.

  I try to think of something, a happy memory to cling on to before my mind shuts down and I become something else. My mind cycles through memories of my mother before she died, my sister and I sneaking into the sky-farms when we were kids, I think about Kina on the platform, then my mind settles on Wren; the first time she handed me a book and changed my world, and if I could work the muscles in my face, I would smile.

  I hold on to the thought, and I wait.

  Nothing happens.

  After a while the door to the container is opened, and I’m wheeled through a door on the other side of the trial room, where I’m left alone. The needle that is embedded into my spinal cord is retracted, and the paralysis is immediately lifted.

  I scream: an involuntary sound of pain and fear and mostly relief that the nightmare of the Delay is over. I feel the sting of the puncture wounds in my neck from the syringes, I feel the incredible sensation of my limbs obeying the commands of my brain, I wiggle my toes and stretch out my fingers, and I can’t help but sob a few times before taking four or five deep breaths to try and get a hold of myself.

  ‘I’m alive,’ I say, my voice shuddering. ‘Why am I alive?’

  They should have killed me when I tried to escape, they should have either shot me right there or taken me to the courthouse to be deleted, but they didn’t.

  Why?

  What had Galen meant when he’d said I’d make an excellent battery? Why are they refusing requests to renege? And why didn’t the Delay put me into a coma or turn me crazy like it did to Group A?

  Maybe that comes later, I think.

  But in this moment, I decide that it doesn’t matter. I’m alive, for whatever reason they decided not to kill me, and – for now at least – I have survived the Delay. I smile and I think back to the
morning, waiting on the platform, seeing Kina’s face; she recognized me, she said ‘hi’ and we shared a laugh.

  ‘Kina,’ I say again, and my smile grows.

  It’s amazing how much a simple moment can be worth to a person starved of connections.

  Happy tells me to change back into my prison uniform, and I obey her.

  I blink away the tears from my eyes and try to look as calm as I can when the door that leads back to the Dark Train opens. Three guards come in; one links their trigger with my heart and the other two keep their guns aimed at my head. ‘Let’s move, superstar,’ the one with the trigger says, and they take shuffling steps backwards all the way to my carriage on the Dark Train.

  There is always a recovery period after a Delay. You need a little time to get back what the government has taken from you. Maddox used to call it R&R for the soul.

  I don’t have time to feel any of that today though; I’m too lost in thoughts of why I wasn’t killed for trying to escape.

  On Delay days they don’t make us take part in the energy harvest, so I guess that means the whole place will be running on stored power tonight. But I can’t even enjoy the moment that the harvest is supposed to come; Wren still hasn’t arrived, and my mind is so wrapped up in maybes and what-ifs.

  By midnight I’ve worked myself into such a state that I have a pounding headache. I move over to the window to watch the rain and, as I wait, all my turmoil slowly turns to the now familiar sense of apprehension as, minute by minute, the rain doesn’t come.

  As I stare up at the sky, an hour passes, two, and still no rain. I give up at 2.30 a.m. and go to bed. I lie there in the darkness, staring into the void, too scared to sleep in case I fall into the coma that preceded the madness that killed Group A.

  I know something is wrong as soon as I open my eyes.

  At first I think it must still be the middle of the night, because the lighting inside my cell is all wrong, but then I realize that it’s because the only source of illumination is the thin strip of sunlight beaming through the small window in the back wall.

  Instinctively my eyes dart over to the screen to check the time.

  The screen is off.

  I get out of bed and walk over to it, staring at my own reflection looking back at me in the black mirrored surface.

  The screen is never off.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I whisper to no one. And then, ‘Happy?’

  There is no reply from the blank screen. ‘Happy, where are you?’ I ask. I try to ignore the tremble in my voice, try to ignore the horrible attachment I have to the operating system that runs this world.

  With the screen off I have no idea what time it is; my wake-up call is controlled by the screen so it could be long after or long before 7.30 a.m.

  No, wait, I think, and walk to the back window where I look up to the sky and see that the sun is high above me. After seven thirty, long after.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I say, louder this time. I wish my sleeping patterns weren’t all messed up, because my body-clock is usually pretty reliable at getting me up a few minutes before the alarm, but now I have no idea what time of day it is.

  Alright, alright, I think, stay calm, at least you’re alive, you’re not in a coma yet. Go about your normal routine. It’ll be exercise soon and you can ask the others if they know what’s going on, and if they don’t know you just have to hope that Wren will eventually show up and explain everything.

  But it’s hard to do all of my exercises without any breakfast for energy, and by the time I get to the third set of push-ups I’m dripping with sweat and exhausted.

  I sit on my bed and just wait for something to happen, but nothing does.

  Time passes – I can’t tell if it’s hours or minutes, but the back wall doesn’t move. I’m certain that exercise hour has come and gone but it’s so hard to be sure when there’s no way of tracking time.

  I pace again, I try singing like Pander, but I’m tone-deaf and the sound only annoys me. I look through the window again and see that the sun is still high up in the sky, or is it a little bit lower now?

  Wren didn’t come after she gave you the warning about the Delay, I think. They must have found out, they must have caught her.

  I wait and wait and wait. Too distracted to read, no energy to exercise, mind racing at a million miles an hour trying to figure out what the hell is going on.

  I pace and I sit and I stand and I watch the sun sink lower and lower.

  Is this punishment? Does the government know what Wren has done? Did they torture her until she confessed to everything? Did they watch her Panoptic footage without her permission? Are they just going to leave us here, locked up, no food or water, no contact, just left to die in our cells like caged rats?

  I notice something as I stare up at the sky; the little lights that encircle the drones on top of the pillar are still on. That doesn’t make any sense; why would those electronics still be working when my screen is off and the lights in my cell are out? I had been working on the assumption that all the power in the Loop is out, but maybe it’s just my cell. And then I remember that Wren had explained the security system in the Loop to me, how if there was some catastrophic power failure everything would shut down except the security features, which would run off energy from the harvest stored in a massive battery five metres below ground. The mechanical instruments that run the doors and a supply of triggers to activate heart devices would also use the back-up supply, and these things are protected from every kind of attack they could think of, from escape attempts to nuclear blasts.

  Dusk begins to settle in, and I remember that it’s been getting dark at around 7 p.m..

  It can’t be seven, I tell myself. Where’s Wren? Where’s anybody to explain what’s happened?

  The conversation between Alistair and Emery replays in my mind, and Kina’s words, about the war.

  What if it happened? What if some cataclysmic bomb has been dropped and wiped out most of the population? What if my family is dead? What if Wren is dead?

  Just as the thought crosses my mind the hatch in my cell door opens and I turn to see Wren staring back at me. The feeling of relief is so immediate that I think for a second I might collapse to my knees.

  ‘Wren, thank god, what the hell’s happened? The screen is off, the back wall never opened, I haven’t heard from anyone all day.’

  Wren doesn’t reply, just stares at me, her blonde hair hanging dishevelled over her face, her eyes blinking unnaturally fast over and over again, and for the briefest moment a wide and crazy smile spreads across her face.

  ‘Wren, are you OK?’

  She blinks, five, six, seven times and then shakes her head as though trying to snap out of a trance.

  ‘Luka?’ she says, her voice unsure. Her eyes clear and she appears to recognize me for the first time since opening the hatch.

  ‘Yeah, it’s me Wren, what’s going on?’

  Wren steps aside and Malachai’s face appears in the gap in my door.

  ‘Are you OK, Luka?’ he asks, and I hear my door being unlocked.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I ask, unable to hide the disappointment from my voice.

  The door swings open, Wren walks into my cell, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and wraps her arms around me. ‘I’m so glad you’re alright,’ she says, her breath against my ear somehow sending shivers down my spine despite the situation. I gently push her back.

  ‘Wren, what happened?’

  ‘There’s no power anywhere, Luka, the whole city is in blackout and things are . . . weird.’

  ‘Weird how?’ I ask.

  ‘She heard things,’ Malachai answers for Wren. ‘Screams and gunshots.’

  ‘Looting?’ I ask. ‘Maybe the homeless?’

  ‘Yeah, maybe,’ Wren agrees. ‘But it sounded like . . . I don’t know, it was scary.’

  ‘You didn’t come on Friday, what happened?’ I ask.

  ‘I was put on paid leave, they wouldn’t let me co
me in,’ Wren tells me. ‘I had two armed officers with me until late last night. I think they might know something, Luka.’

  ‘It might not even matter,’ Malachai says, putting an arm around Wren’s shoulder, the sight of which makes me grind my teeth together. ‘There hasn’t been a power cut in ninety-seven years, something big is happening.’

  She let him out first, I think, staring at Wren’s hand as it reaches up to squeeze Malachai’s. She went to him first.

  ‘So, what now?’ I ask, tearing my gaze away from their interlinked fingers and into Wren’s eyes.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says, looking away from Malachai, frowning at me. ‘The trains are running on back-up power, but they’ll be offline within three hours, same with the streetlights and anything else that runs off stored power. We need to figure out how serious this is and then make a decision.’

  ‘A decision?’ I repeat. ‘What kind of decision?’

  ‘Luka, if this is something big then we need to think about leaving the Loop. All of us.’

  ‘Something big? Like what?’

  ‘Like a war,’ Malachai says.

  ‘War?’ I turn to Wren. ‘War? I asked you about a war days ago and you told me it was crazy.’

  ‘Well it doesn’t seem so crazy now, alright?’ she snaps back.

  ‘Hey, let’s not start arguing amongst ourselves,’ Malachai says. ‘I won’t lie – I hope it’s a war, I know that’s immoral or whatever, but my prospects grow infinitely brighter if the world is in chaos. I’m thirty days from the Block – you think there’s a 2 a.m. club in the Block? There isn’t, and they say there are no Delays, they say that they experiment on you constantly. If this is a war, I’ve never been happier.’

  I nod in agreement, remembering my own confusing longing for anything, no matter how terrible, to end the monotony of the Loop. ‘So, what now?’ I ask.