The Darkness

by Matt Brennan

  My room is suddenly filled with light, as all eighteen screens switch on at once. I heard my CPU whir and buzz. I heard a few screens sync up. Probably New Zealand, those bastards always pop up first. They must have the most powerful antenna array on the planet—at least the biggest one that’s still online.

  Finally, I heard So Says I softly playing through my speakers. Ellie had started playing The Shins non-stop since we found an old archive of music files in the UNN mainframe. I remember I instantly wished I had an emergency monitor at floor level, so I could see her just one more time. I had been, however, clever enough to activate the text-to-speech software with my macro.

  I heard the distinctive sound of my monitor coming up and I knew the text session was active. I struggled to look at the keys on my keyboard, the letters kept going in and out of focus. Finally, I gave up trying to look at the keys and typed what I hoped was at least a version of English.

  DorianOne: Ellie, ru watching ur screen?

  Ellie4Ever: Of course.

  Last year, I programmed Ellie’s actual voice into the speech software and installed it on my machine for her birthday. She’s very shy and doesn’t like the sound of her own voice. So I had her read this passage from a book she had. I checked it out and knew it that had all the different sounds in the English language and had her record it. The program I wrote, took those sounds and matched them with the words she typed. That way I could hear her voice and she’d get to remain comfortably silent.

  DorianOne: Ellie, listen to me.

  Ellie4Ever: Always.

  DorianOne: Ellie, I know I’ve said this before, but this is really happening.

  Ellie4Ever: What is?

  DorianOne: Ellie, I’ve got it.

  Ellie4Ever: Dorian. Stop please.

  I wish I had programmed some emotion recognition algorithms into the program. Because I know she’s mad, but her voice sounded all carefree and happy.

  DorianOne: I wish I could.

  Ellie4Ever: Dorian, this isn’t funny you know. You’ve already done this to me twice.

  DorianOne: I know and I’m sorry.

  Ellie4Ever: Dorian, you told me you would never do this again.

  DorianOne: I know and I’m not doing it now. I really have it.

  Ellie4Ever: Where are you? If you’re sick, then let me see you.

  DorianOne: I’m on the floor Ellie. Look, I don’t have much time.

  Ellie4Ever: Well, how can I see you?

  DorianOne: I hit the macro Ellie, everyone has control of my feed. Just spin the camera.

  I heard the robocam swivel and settled into place. I looked up in its direction and waved.

  Ellie4Ever: Dorian, this going too far! You can get kicked out for a public prank like this.

  DorianOne: Ellie, it’s not a prank. Look at my bio-readout. I’m dying baby.

  Ellie4Ever: Oh my god, Dorian, you have a 106 degree temperature!

  DorianOne: I know, the fever hit me a little while ago and I passed out. I barely got the macro running.

  Ellie4Ever: Dorian, do you mean that this is the last time we get to talk to each other?

  God I remember how I had wished I’d programmed some emoticons or something. But who needed it when we always Skyped.

  DorianOne: I just want you to know I love you. I always have. I felt it the moment I met you.

  Ellie4Ever: Oh Dorian, how am I gonna do this without you?

  I’m losing my focus, I don’t have much time. The keyboard is getting blurry.

  DorianOne: Ellie, I need you to shut off my feed. Don’t watch me die. Don’t do that to yourself.

  Ellie4Ever: No! No, I’m not leaving you alone.

  Why wouldn’t she listen? I knew what it would do to her to watch me go. I couldn’t let that happen to her.

  DorianOne: Been alone for a long time.

  Ellie4Ever: Maybe, but you’re not dying alone.

  DorianOne: Of course I am.

  Ellie4Ever: No.

  I might not have been able to hear the emotion that was in that no, but I felt it in every bone of my body.

  DorianOne: Promise me. Shut me off. I don’t want you to watch.

  Ellie4Ever: Too bad. I’m not going anywhere.

  DorianOne: Ellie, I’m so sorry I’m going first...I kknnnwo iaprmisedddd.

  I’m not even sure what I was trying to type. I couldn’t think anymore. I’d barely been holding onto consciousness and I was about to totally lose my battle.

  Ellie4Ever: Dorian?

  Ellie4Ever: Dorian? Don’t you dare!

  Ellie4Ever: Dorian?

  Ellie4Ever: Dorian, I—I’m sorry.

  The last thing I heard before The Darkness took me was Ellie’s voice saying, “End of transmission.”

  I could barely find the strength to breathe.

  I knew any moment the convulsions would start. My only hope was that they’d snap my spine in the first wave. I’ve seen some tweakers last for hours. Of course, I knew I could have been one of the lucky ones. The high temperature could have turned my brain to jelly before the convulsions even started. After all, I’ve seen that before too. May not sound pleasant, but trust me, it’s much better than the alternative.

  But before any of that could happen, I blacked out.

  And then, I died.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I hear the distinct sound of water sloshing in a bathtub.

  But it’s far away, like at the end of a really long hallway. I try to focus on the sound, but it’s so far away, I’m not sure which is sound and which is echo. It’s difficult to focus because all I really want to do is block it out and go back to the silence. Finally, I decide to give up the fight and just let the silence take me again.

  But the pain hits me before I can slip into its cold embrace.

  My head feels like it was a watermelon after it was thrown off the top of a cliff. I groan and try to roll over, but it’s like I’m wedged into an envelope. My back is soaking wet with frigid water and I definitely think I’m going to puke everywhere. I crack my eyes open and squint to try to figure out where I am.

  It looks like I’m still in the canoe. There is barely any light at all, which based on the throbbing in my head, is probably a good thing. Based on the movement of the canoe, I know I’m in the water. I feel for my gear and nothing is there. I take a good long look at the walls and ceiling, which seem to be poured concrete. I lift my head for a second and am awash with dizziness so I gently lower my head back down to the soft material it was resting on. From the feel, I’d say it was some kind of floatation device. But I could care less, it was soft and horizontal.

  After a minute, the world stops spinning and I risk another peek. I see a landing spot covered with sand and pebbles and the canoe is tied to a log that’s sitting on it. My stuff is lying next to the log. It’s weird that there is this sandy looking beach in this manmade tunnel, but at the moment architectural design is furthest from my mind.

  Okay, so I figure all I have to do is get to the landing, wiggle out of the boat, and not puke all over myself in the process. Oh and try to not get completely soaked at the same time.

  How hard could that be?

  Luckily, the rope tying me to shore is next to my hand, so I pull on it and get the canoe as close to the shore as I can, which sadly isn’t as close as I’d like. In my weakened state, pulling the canoe on the sand just isn’t an option, but I do manage to get it relatively stabile. I lay back for a moment to rest and gather the will to do what needs to be done. My head is still throbbing and I feel like the boat is slowly spinning around, even though I know it’s resting on the sandy bottom.

  I roll over on my side and push myself up to all fours. The boat starts to rock and get tippy, so in an effort to stabilize myself, I put my hand on the side and throw a leg out of the canoe, hoping for ground.

  The water is cold.

  So damn cold.

  My foot finds the bottom and the boat stops rocking. Unfortunately, it also instantly starts pus
hing away from my foot on the sandy bottom. My foot is firmly planted and I’m just not coordinated enough to pull it back in the boat. So just like in the cartoons I used to watch the boat moves away from me and I go into a split, that is until I can’t keep my balance enough and fall into the water.

  The cold instantly hits my heart. The jolt of electricity from my main engine, gives me the clarity and strength necessary to make it up the shore.

  I’d love to tell you, I made it to shore calmly and changed my clothes and no one was the wiser. But that isn’t what happened.

  The second my head cleared the surface of the water I started screaming in agony, even before my mad dash to the shore. This of course brought Lyssa running back in a panic. When she sees me, she starts laughing and turns and walks back in the direction she came from.

  I am shivering so bad. I don’t even have time to feel embarrassed. I just strip out of my clothes and dive into my pack for dry replacements. Just putting on dry underwear is so warm and it almost feels like it’s burning my skin. This is where keeping those hiking boots comes in handy. The snowmobile boots are now soaked, inside and out.

  Once I’m dressed, I go in the direction Lyssa just went.

  I’m starting to warm up and because of that, get more than a little pissed. Not only did she hit me in the head with a paddle and knock me out, giving me a huge lump, a headache, and vertigo, but she is also indirectly responsible for me falling in freezing cold water.

  Lyssa is not my favorite person anymore. In fact, whatever love-sick crush I might of have felt for her is now completely gone. As I walk I decide I’m going to figure out where I am and then I’m leaving within the hour. I begin to sincerely hope she chokes on her corned beef hash.

  I head down the passageway I saw Lyssa take with a purpose no other wobbly human ever had before. There are several caged light bulbs built into the ceiling. This whole place is obviously manmade, but for what purpose I have no idea. The floor, ceiling and walls look like they are poured concrete. I rub my hand along the surface and the dense smoothness makes me think it is of the finest quality and probably several feet thick. Whatever this place is, it was built to last, that’s for sure. The tunnel I’m walking in stretches for sixty feet, before it looks like it turns to the right.

  As I stumble down the hallway I remember when my father got sick he told me the world would spin out of control whenever he tried to stand up. At first, he’d macho his way to his feet anyway. My mother used to say it was because he watched too many John Wayne movies. He felt he had to be stronger than human, even though he really should have been trying to conserve his strength. But it wasn’t delusions of John Wayne that drove him, it was just pride. He didn’t want the love of his life carrying his sewage to the bathroom for him. He needed to try to retain that dignity for as long as he could. Not for her, but for him.

  In the end though, it was unwarranted valor.

  My mother never treated it like a burden. It was almost like she relished it. Maybe because taking his crap filled bedpan to the bathroom meant he was still alive. I don’t know and she never said.

  I mean I don’t know that for certain you understand. But I watched the two most amazing people in the world kick and scream and claw for every breath they could. Even my mother.

  You know, in the end, no matter what you thought before you get sick, life is just always better than alternative. I could see it in her eyes.

  The terror.

  The absolute unbearable and unrelenting horror of what was happening and what was going to happen to her soon. She was a doctor, man. She knew damn well what was happening to her every moment.

  Imagine that?

  Knowing what every pain means. And what you can expect next and what that means when it happens. I kept hoping that eventually, when we finally got her to the end, that she would become peaceful and reach that acceptance stage I’ve heard so much about. If she got there, I never saw it.

  But then I have no idea what the end was like for her. She wouldn’t let me in and she even switched off all her cameras. All I had was her weakened voice coming through the intercom to go by. But it was always there, that lilt. It was subtle sure, but I knew what it meant.

  I knew.

  I stumble through the passageway and reach the end. And as I turn the corner I see a big door, slightly ajar. I push it open and see a huge room.

  The room is probably the size of a small warehouse. Maybe two or three hundred feet long, with a fifty-foot ceiling. The shear size of the room startles me. It’s completely jammed full of crap, not unlike the storage closet in the biosphere, but of a scale I never would have imagined. There are shelving units with shelves full of crap stacked thirty feet in the air. I can’t believe she has all this stuff.

  I see Lyssa sitting at a desk and staring at a bunch of screens in the far corner.

  I’m actually standing on a catwalk about thirty-five feet up. I see a spiral staircase going down, just to my right. I move towards it, but my wobbly legs aren’t too thrilled with the prospect of navigating those steps.

  Lyssa yells, without looking up, “Close the door and lock it idiot. If a miracle happens and they find us, that door is strong enough to withstand just about any kind of explosive, but only when it’s locked.”

  Well, idiot is better than Nancy I guess.

  I close the door and lock the three locks I see. Then I move to the stairs.

  The buzzing in my skull forces me to rethink my initial plan of leaving within the hour. Tomorrow my head will most likely be a lot clearer. So I’ll leave tomorrow.

  I stumble and slide down two steps and think maybe the day after that would be just as good.

  I get to where Lyssa is sitting at her desk and I fall into a nearby couch.

  “How’s your head?”

  “Well, all except for the major headache I have, the dizzy spells and nausea, I’m fine. Why do you ask?”

  “Yeah, I didn’t think I hit you that hard.”

  “Well, I think I can say with absolute confidence, I severely doubt you could have hit me any harder.”

  “Well, you might be right about that. One thing for sure though.”

  “Oh yeah, what’s that?”

  Lyssa spins towards me smiling. “You certainly won’t be splashing me with water again.”

  It was suddenly hard for me to be mad at her, her smiling face and the fact that her joke really was funny, not to mention the gleam in her eyes, made it nearly impossible. I almost started to laugh and joke with her about still seeing stars everywhere I looked, but I suddenly realized that she didn’t apologize. In fact, I don’t even get the sense she’s regretful at all. In fact, from her attitude, I’m pretty sure she feels blameless. That by splashing her I crossed the line, that I actually deserved to have my brains bashed in!

  This realization of course, instantly made me so furious that I thought I could literally kill her. “Or maybe the next time I do, I’ll be sure to bring that paddle all the way around.”

  Lyssa stops smiling. “Look Nancy, it’s not my fault you can’t take a hit.”

  I can’t even believe this is happening. She hit me with a paddle. Not by accident, not in the natural course of the motion of paddling, but full on, hard as she could, on purpose. And she has the audacity to not only fail to apologize, but insinuate that I am a weakling because of it!

  I jump to my wobbly feet. “You know what?”

  She looks at me smugly. “What?”

  I didn’t even know what I was going to say, at the time, at least not until the words flowed out of my mouth. “I think I’ve had just about enough of your company, abuse and your insults. Kindly show me the way to surface and point me in the direction to Vancouver.”

  I can tell by her reaction, that my words were totally unexpected.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Lyssa looks around and then stands up and begins to storm away. She turns back and looks like she is about to speak, but instead spins away again and darts off. T
hen she stops, spins back quickly and marches right back to me waving a finger in the air and again looks like she is about to speak, but nothing comes out. She turns back around and sits back in her chair with a thud. She puts her head in her hands, as if she is in deep contemplation.

  Finally, she looks up at me and I can see a single hot tear running out of the corner of her eye and racing down her cheek. “Look, I’m sorry! I am a total bitch okay! I’m just a horrible human being! There should be laws preventing me from being around people and I know that! I totally suck! And I’m not trying to make excuses, but I’ve been on my own for a really long time with little to no hope of that ever changing and I guess I went a little more crazy than I thought I did. But like I said, that’s no excuse. I definitely should not have hit you. Well, at least not that hard anyway. I mean, you startled me with the splash and I just reacted. But again, not saying it was your fault, because it wasn’t. I was way out of line and I’m really sick about it. But look, this is not easy for me.”

  “What’s not easy?”

  Another tear blazes a new trail out of her other eye. “You. Being here. Alive. It’s not easy. The only person I’ve really ever been around was my dad and that was easy. He was my dad. He was just there and was always going to be there. Until he wasn’t.” Her sobbing begins to border on hysterical and she just manages to sob out, “And then there was no one and it was... hard. Really, really hard. And finally one day, it was- eas-easier. But n-n-now, it’s hard again. Well, not n-now, but it will be soon. Do you understand?”

  “No,” I say, only because nothing she just said even remotely made sense to me.

  So she jumps up, and shouts, “You’re the only person I’ve got, you idiot!”

  Here we go with idiot again!

  Now I’m an idiot because she is completely hysterical and isn’t making any sense. I am so frustrated that I want to scream at her and smash things against the wall. I want to call her a Nancy, a wimp, a crybaby or worse! But then I remember what my mom would always say to me when my temper would flare.