by Carol Davis
A bribe, I understood.
He wouldn’t be stopping the program prematurely. If he was aware of any of what was happening, he was ignoring it, because the son of a peer elder had bribed him to. I figured that would extend to his denying that anything out of the ordinary had happened, even if I came out of the Dome torn to shreds.
From anywhere else, I could have called my mother. But I’d left my commset at home, because they weren’t allowed inside the Dome. They interfered with the Dome’s projections, sometimes creating a great deal of static and the dropout of information.
So help would not be coming. I was on my own.
Dragging myself along like an infant, trying to protect my head from the falling debris while making as much progress as possible, I traveled backwards through the tunnel hoping to escape its crumbling ceiling. Returning to the opening seemed to take ten times as long as the forward journey had. Hoping that I wouldn’t be immediately buried in the chamber I had left what seemed like days ago, I slipped out of the mouth of the tunnel and dropped back down to the ground. If it had been level and solid, I could have landed easily, but the sand shifted under my feet and I tumbled down onto my back. Rock jabbed through my clothes, but I was able to shut my eyes in time to prevent them from being invaded by the relentless falling dirt.
You’re all right, I told myself as I struggled to sit up. The program will end after two hours. If you find a place that’s safe from falling rock and sit there, the program will end and you can walk out of here.
The tremors seemed to have lessened somewhat. That seemed promising.
Then a massive jolt hit that seemed to throw the chamber sideways, slamming me up against the wall. When it stopped I realized that the ground did seem to be sharply tilted, and I could no longer locate the opening up above, the one that had led to the horizontal shaft. That left me with only one option: I would have to retreat through the narrow passageway that led back to the starting point of this awful contest.
All right, then. The decision had been made for me. I couldn’t go forward; I had to go back.
With some slipping and sliding, I managed to get back on my feet and picked my way downhill to the entrance of the passageway. It seemed narrower than before, but I told myself that that perception was the result of my systems being stressed and damaged. Instead of worrying about the width of the corridor, I tried to recall how many steps I had taken to travel the length of it.
Ninety-one. No, ninety-two.
The floor of the passageway now also tilted downhill and was considerably littered with debris.
Ten steps. Eleven. Twelve.
You’ll be out soon, I thought. Then you can shut this whole thing down and get out of here.
Twenty-six. Twenty-seven.
My left elbow bumped something. It signaled something I didn’t want to see, didn’t want to admit, but I turned my head to look. Beyond where I was standing, the passageway had narrowed down to less than twenty centimeters across. There was no way I could go any further.
The tremors began again, and it became evident within a few seconds that the ground beneath my feet was crumbling. I moved quickly to my right, but not quickly enough; with one great heave the ground split into a yawning chasm that I pitched into with only a moment to wonder how far it would be to the bottom.
I lay still for a moment, surprised by the fact that I’d hit the bottom sooner than I’d expected to, and not as violently. I’d fallen into a layer of what felt like thick, sucking mud, luckily landing face up again so that I didn’t have to move my head to see. The ceiling of the chamber I was now in seemed to be an impossibly long way above me. It was a little brighter in here, at least; the walls were covered with more of those phosphorescent minerals than the previous spaces had been.
I was unable to feel my left hand.
For an instant I was afraid that it had been torn off my body, then I forced myself to look. It was still there, but for some reason it had stopped transmitting sensation to the rest of my arm. There was enough water in the mud that it had shorted something out, I supposed. Yet another reason for my mother’s techs to be furious when they got a look at me.
Everything around me was an illusion, I remembered. But the damage to my body was no illusion.
I’d need extensive repairs. Expensive ones.
My mother had trusted me to act as guide for the two Dsannae, when I couldn’t even guide myself.
I could see the hole up above that I had fallen through, but there was certainly no way to climb up to it. Not that up there was a preferable place to be. Not that anywhere was a preferable place to be – even outside, at home or in the lab. I’d let my mother down. I’d let down the techs who’d worked so hard to build a fully functioning body to house my consciousness.
In spite of all my intelligence, in spite of everything I’d learned in the past fourteen months, I was still a child. Unable to interpret the intentions of others correctly. Unable to protect myself.
That made me feel very, very small.
Another look around revealed the source of the mud: a tiny stream that was bubbling into the chamber from a gap in the wall a meter or so above the floor. From there, the water spread in rivulets across the chamber, disappearing into the ground again about three quarters of the way across. That meant that most of the ground was muddy, but to my gratitude the mud was only a ten or twelve centimeters thick. Still, when I stood up I did it carefully, thinking that at some point those few centimeters might turn into a depth that would swallow me whole.
That look around also revealed a choice of two ways out of the chamber, both of them some distance above me: a squat opening about half my height, and a smaller, rounder one about the same width as my shoulders. I was debating which one to try when a thought occurred to me. Avoiding the mud as much as I could, I made my way toward the taller opening and peered up at it.
It didn’t look like part of the original tunnel. Would it lead to the “finish line”?
Was there any way to the finish line?
Kerae had never said how long it would take to traverse the tunnel. I had assumed it would be less than two hours, the limit of the program. But nothing about this program had followed my expectations. I had no guarantee the program would end after two hours, or that it would end at all. Surely it would be shut down eventually – if for no other reason, then when my mother came looking for me.
But she was busy. She’d said she’d be tied up at the lab for the rest of the day, maybe well into the night. She might not notice my absence until tomorrow morning, and no one else had any reason to look for me.
Something brushed at my ankle. Startled, I jerked my foot away from whatever it was and looked down. The flow of water from the stream seemed to have doubled and was lapping around my legs. Dry ground was definitely now at a premium.
In the distance, the deep-earth rumbling that had accompanied the tremors returned, but this time the sound had a different quality that took me a moment to identify – and I identified it at the same moment that the water that had been gently flowing into the cavern turned into a wild rush. Moments later the opening in the cavern wall began to crumble rapidly, like a crack in some enormous dam.
My body’s alarm systems began to sound as I scrambled toward the wall a couple of meters from the opening, hoping that this newborn lake would become deep enough for me to swim upward before the wall crumbled entirely, leaving me to be struck full force by the oncoming torrent of water. If my skin had been undamaged, I could have swum for quite a while without a problem, but there was a good chance that one system after another would short out as the water invaded my limbs and torso, rendering me unconscious, or unable to move. The air chambers in my body allowed for a certain degree of buoyancy, so maybe I’d float up to the top either way.
Maybe, somehow, I could make it up to the top of the chamber and could crawl into one of those holes that seemed to lead somewhere else.
On the other hand, I could die in here.
I could very possibly die in here. My memory core was protected, but if enough of the surrounding systems shorted out…
The surrounding water took hold of me and flipped me upside down. It took me several seconds to orient myself and point my head toward the top of the cavern. I felt my body’s alarms as a human would feel a flood of something very hot, or very acidic, and I pleaded silently for it to stop. I knew I was in trouble; I didn’t need any reminders of that, particularly when there was no way I could remove myself from danger.
I just…
Some distant part of me hoped that Kerae and Ilianae were drowning too. Failing that, that they’d be forced to pay for this somehow. Not with money; that wouldn’t affect them in any lasting way.
Maybe someone could drop several tons of rock on them.
Hasn’t it been two hours?
“Failsafe!” I cried out, but the water that poured into my mouth silenced the word. Not that anyone would have heard it anyway.
I would have given almost anything if someone, anyone, human, machine, or anything in between, had heard me. I had never wanted anything more in my life than I wanted to hear the sound of a voice at that moment. But all there was was water, and that awful rumbling.
Young…
I was only fourteen months old. I still had a great deal to learn, so much to experience. My mother had told me that as long as my systems were kept in good repair, I could live indefinitely – but I was only fourteen months old, and my life was coming to an end, thanks to two beings who were also still children.
Too young.
Too young to understand. Too young to know better.
I struggled to hold on to the image of my mother’s face. Her smile. Surely she’d find me here, after the program was shut down. No matter how enormous this system of caverns seemed to be, they were all just a projection, and once it was shut down, there’d be nothing left in here but me. Only me, because I began to be sure that Kerae and Ilianae had already left the caverns. That they were standing outside, maybe with that useless sentry, laughing, congratulating themselves for having fooled an artificial being into taking part in their game.
That’s what this was to them, after all: just a game.
They were children, and this was just a game.
That was the last thought I had before my mind shut down.
~~~~
“Matthew.”
I was a good deal less than fully aware. My mind seemed full of fuzz, an entire nest of static that made me not at all eager to press on toward consciousness. I wanted to slide into sleep mode. To shut off all awareness of the outside world and quietly process my data.
I wanted to dream.
“Matthew, please respond. We need you to respond.”
But Matthew does not want to respond. Matthew wants to be left alone.
I felt a peculiar shift; something seemed to shove my brain. For what I thought might be less than a second I did indeed shut down, then light and sound and sensation flooded into my sensors and I sat bolt upright.
“SHIT!” I blurted.
For a moment everything around me was silent. Then someone bleated out a laugh that was quickly followed by other laughter, all of it very enthusiastic and joyful.
The voices were all familiar. My mother’s techs. Joseph. Laura Lee. Randy.
Mother…?
The light seemed too bright. My background processes told me that it was no brighter than normal; that I was in the lab, and the lights were set at the appropriate level for optimal human functioning. I blinked a couple of times, thinking that my visual sensors needed to adjust themselves a bit. Maybe all of my sensors did, because I felt completely overwhelmed, the way I’d felt on my birth day.
“Matthew.”
My mother. I turned toward the sound of her voice as she moved toward me. To my surprise and dismay, her eyes were full of tears, were brimming over with them. The flesh around her eyes was discolored and swollen, something I knew was an indication that she had been crying for quite a while.
I could not cry, even though I thought that might be helpful. I couldn’t bear to see her so upset, so I looked down – and then felt worse, because the techs had not yet repaired my hands and arms. A full third of my skin was missing, and I could see serious damage to the mechanics underneath.
“I’m sorry,” I muttered.
It would have been better if she were angry. I had made her angry several times during my first few months of life, and even though I found out later that she was more angry at herself than she was at me, those had not been interesting occasions. I had learned from them, of course, but it wasn’t something I’d wanted to repeat… until now. Her anger would have been far easier to endure than her sorrow.
“Sorry,” I said again, bowing my head.
I was sitting on an examination table, which made it difficult for her to embrace me, but she tried her best. A part of me wanted to push her away, because I was sure I was unworthy of her affection. I’d failed her in so many different ways. I had done serious damage to my body. Had used up a massive amount of the community’s energy for no good reason. And I had betrayed her trust.
She took my head in both of her hands and lifted it up so that she could look into my eyes. What I saw in her face was enough to make me want to throw myself into the core of a power reactor.
“I thought we’d lost you,” she whispered.
“He’ll be okay,” Randy said. “He needs some more work, but we can get it done in a few days.”
“He’ll be fine,” Laura Lee agreed.
But my mother cried in spite of that. She held on to me as if she thought a powerful wind would sweep through the lab and carry me away. The techs tried a few more times to reassure her, but in the end they simply let her cry.
“She’s tired,” Randy told me, but I knew that wasn’t it at all.
After a while her sobs petered out, and she reached up to scrub the tears off her face with the back of her hand. She took several deep breaths, making a sort of hiccupping sound, then took one more and seemed all right.
“I misjudged them,” I told her.
Her eyes flared wide for a moment, and her jaw tightened. Randy, the oldest of the techs, the one who had been with her the longest – the one I had come to think of as my father, since he was the senior male figure in my life – reached out and wrapped his hand around her upper arm. “We’re gonna deal with it,” he told her. “Visiting elders or not, we won’t let this go. At the very least, we’ll have them banned from ever coming back here again. Don’t worry. Melinda. Come on. We’ll handle it.”
“They’re calling it property damage,” she snarled. She was more angry than I had ever seen her, but judging from his response it was nothing new to Randy. He wasn’t startled. His grip on her arm didn’t falter.
“Property damage?” she barked at him. “I’ll show them ‘property damage’.”
“Mel.”
Her anger must have been fiercely hot; it burned out quickly. Then she seemed lost and exhausted. She didn’t protest when Laura Lee slid an arm around her waist and led her out of the lab in the direction of the lounge where she sometimes catnapped during lulls in her experiments. Joseph followed them out, leaving me alone with Randy.
He waited for the door to close before he said anything. Then he told me, “We never should have stopped monitoring your readouts. She said we didn’t need to watch you anymore, that you’re not a child. That you know enough not to put yourself in danger.”
“Apparently not,” I said to the floor.
“Joe happened to look at the screen when he was moving some printouts. I’ve never seen anyone move in six directions simultaneously before.”
Humor.
So he could relieve the tension.
“Would I have died?” I asked him.
“Possibly.”
“They would have liked that.”
Randy sighed deeply and pushed his fingers through his hair. “I suppose. There
are… It’s a hard thing to understand, Matty. There are personality flaws. You’d have to call it a flaw. Maybe it’s common for them – the Dsannae. I don’t know. I haven’t seen a single thing about them that’s attractive.”
“They’re pretty,” I said.
That seemed to startle him. He seemed to want to reply, but he didn’t. Instead he shook his head, then went over to an equipment drawer, searched through its contents, and brought over to me a pair of gloves. “Wear these,” he said. “They’ll protect your mechanics until we can replace your skin.”
He helped me put them on. I didn’t need the help, but I understood that he needed to provide it.
“Can I–” I began.
He lifted his head and peered at me.
“I need to talk to them,” I said. “I suppose I understand what happened, and why. And it would be nice if I never saw them again. But I need to see them.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I think you do.”
~~~~
They weren’t in confinement. A member of the community would have been locked up (the sentry had been, according to Randy), but as family members of a visiting dignitary they were allowed immunity, a right that had originated on Earth three centuries ago.
Most of the time, when immunity was invoked, the violated laws were minor. Without immunity, perhaps a fine would have been levied, or a warning issued.
This time?
Property damage.
The only thing that made the situation serious was that the property in question would be expensive to replace. No one could bring up anything like reckless endangerment, and certainly not attempted murder. In the community, I was the first of my kind, and no one had thought to amend the existing laws on my behalf.
Partly because no one could decide what I was.
Am I real? I wondered. I no longer felt sure of the answer.
I was brought to the suite of apartments that had been assigned to the peer elder and his staff. Because no one thought it was wise for me to be alone with Kerae and Ilianae, Randy accompanied me. He walked into the peer elder’s apartment with me, then stepped away and pretended to be interested in a row of paintings that decorated the wall opposite the windows. He tucked his hands into his pockets and adopted a very relaxed posture, but I knew that his attention was focused on me. I knew that with him nearby, I was in no further danger, no matter how the Dsannae felt about me.