by Erik Hyrkas
Despite being exhausted and hurting in a dozen different ways, Brit was surprised to find that she wasn’t thirsty or hungry; and she was already feeling better after her run up the stairs than she thought she should. Even the skin on her acid-burned hand was beginning to look better. The “halo” they had put on her forehead must do more than take care of basic body functions, she thought.
She walked into the new hallway, which looked as unimaginatively similar to every other room she had seen. She wondered if these people had any creativity at all. Everything she had seen appeared to be bland and uniform, and while the devices of this civilization, like the halo and the cylindrical weapon Peter had called an armilon, were efficient and effective, they too were bland and uniform in appearance. The work she had done thus far had been fairly pointless, as she imagined that any civilization capable of making the halo could have had robots do this work. Then she began to ponder the slaves and whether they were robots. Was this civilization so advanced that they had robots that looked like people? She remembered being called “human” despite the fact that everybody around her looked as human as she did, even if more physically fit than strictly necessary. Each of the slaves looked remarkably similar beyond their hair and eyes, which were different lengths and colors and provided enough variety that at first she hadn’t realized how much they all looked alike. She had recognized only that their similarity unsettled her.
The sound of glasses clinking together and the soft whir of machines distracted Brit from her thoughts. She entered a massive room three stories tall with walls hundreds of yards away that had no visible supports anywhere between them. Arranged in small clusters were machines that stamped out new disks, or “souls” as they had been called, and on either side were slaves either carrying bins of grayish rock to the machine or taking the newly minted disks to the far side of the room.
“Slave,” a guard said from her right, and she jumped. “Do not stand there. Collect vaalia and bring it to the next station.” He gestured to a wall that many of the slaves carrying the gray rock were coming from, and then he gestured to a station that had only one worker in line dumping rock into a chute on the machine.
She nodded and set out for the distant wall at a brisk pace, not wanting to be anywhere near the guard or give him any reason to punish her. As she walked, she thought of Jax, Marcy, and Hunter. They might be somewhere in this room. They would be dressed in their normal Earth clothes, and in the sea of flesh, she thought they would stand out. But she didn’t see any of them.
Each time Brit felt regret for picking up the ilo at the scene of Aiden’s accident, that regret was deeper and more profound. Now despair washed over her at the thought of never seeing Jax again. Surrounded by hundreds of slaves, she cried silent tears as she walked toward the far wall. Through her tears, she didn’t slow or dare to fall to the floor and completely break down as she really needed to do.
She picked up a bin of the gray rock, vaalia, from the far wall and carried it to the first unoccupied cluster of machines. The bin wasn’t much heavier than the bin of clean disks or even the bin of vomit-covered disks.
There was a small chute on the side of one machine, which she dumped the rock into. The machine radiated heat and emitted a constant crunching sound, much like a blender. Tiny red-hot beads rolled out of a tube and into the next machine, which alternated emitting a hissing sound and a whirring sound. From four different tubes in that machine came different shaped clear parts that flowed into the next machine, which emitted constant clicking and then spat out the clear disks into a bin.
These disks were different than the other disks that she had seen only in that they were completely clear rather than a deep shade of smoky gray. When the bin was full, the machine stopped making noise. Brit looked around and saw that other slaves were carrying the full bins to the far wall. So she hefted her bin up and carried it there as well.
Once she was close enough to make out the details, she saw that there were hundreds of large containers of varying sizes with labels in a language she couldn’t read. Some of the containers were blue and some were orange. She walked toward a blue one that nobody was waiting at.
“What are you doing?” a slave asked as she passed him. He was waiting in line at one of the orange containers.
“Oh,” Brit said. “I was going to put the disks in this bin. Nobody is waiting at it.”
“Nobody is waiting at it because it is blue,” he said with exasperation in his tone.
The color of the bin he was waiting in line for turned blue. He sighed and then got in line at a different orange bin. She followed him. When they were nearly at the front of the line, the bin turned blue, and they had to switch to yet another line.
“Where do these bins go?” she asked.
“Each will be used in a different place. Some places need many while others need fewer,” he said.
“What are they used for?” Brit asked.
“They are the vessels of souls,” he said as they approached the front of a line.
This container was not the largest or the smallest, but somewhere in between. Finally, he was permitted to dump his bin into the larger container. Brit watched him walk around the container and out of sight. She stepped up, hesitating in the event the color of the container changed; but it did not, and so she dumped her bin into it as well, then followed the other slave around the container.
At the backside of the container was a small raised platform, and she could see that each of the other containers had that same raised platform and slaves at the other platforms were stepping onto those spots and disappearing in a flash of light.
Disappearing was terrifying to Brit. What if they were being vaporized? Even if it wasn’t lethal, she had heard repeatedly that nobody else here was human and she wondered if it did bad things to humans that it didn’t do to the others. Maybe it would hurt.
“Hurry,” a man behind her said with urgency in his tone. He looked like he was begging her more than demanding anything, as if he was afraid he’d be punished for her hesitation.
She stepped onto the platform and the world around her instantly changed.
Brit found herself in a massive room that was irregularly shaped. The slave who had been in line in front of her was running toward a glowing pinpoint of light. He held one of the clear disks in his hand, and when he touched the disk to it, the disk became gray and both the light and the disk vanished. He ran back toward her and picked up another clear disk from a slot on the wall.
“You should run,” he said to her.
She stepped off the platform she had been standing on and grabbed a clear disk as he had, and then she looked around the room.
There were many small points of light. They were dim enough that, if you didn’t look right at them, they were easy to miss. Brit touched the disk she held to one of the points of lights, and there was a momentary scream that sounded like that of an infant and the light winked out. The disk became gray before it too disappeared.
As she stood there looking at the point the disk had vanished, a wave of guilt washed over her. Had she caused a baby harm or pain? She remembered a slave telling her that the newborns cried when you attached the disk. She hadn’t realized until now that that was what she was doing. If all humans had this done, or even most humans, then it couldn’t cause permanent harm, she reasoned. But somehow that didn’t lessen her guilt.
“Once you’ve captured the soul, you need to get new disks and continue capturing souls until we’ve finished our turn,” the other slave explained.
She ran back to get a fresh disk, pondering what had been said about capturing souls. She was certain that souls were not real. What were the points of light then? More importantly, was she doing them harm by touching the disks to them? She had seen the repeating hologram of Michael and the disk that appeared after his death. Were these disks somehow recording people’s lives? Where did they go when she touched them to the light? She was full of so many questions that she was r
eady to burst.
More slaves appeared in the same spot she had, and all of them ran back and forth across the room, touching disks to the light, causing a round of fresh screams from the spot the light disappeared. They then fetched more disks. After a while, Brit decided to fetch multiple disks at once, but the chute would not let her. After taking one disk, a new one wouldn’t appear until she finally stepped away, much to the frustration of the slave waiting behind her. As she traversed the room multiple times, she realized the room was the shape of North America and Central America. A new light came into being at irregular intervals, but roughly every few seconds, and it seemed to her that this somehow coincided with babies being born. There were a dozen slaves, all running around capturing lights as fast as they could and barely keeping up. The nearly constant crying of babies was heart wrenching, but the thought that she might be killed or tortured for not doing her task was equally disturbing. The mental anguish and attempted rationalization were twisting her insides into knots.
The next time she returned to the slot for a clear disk, none came out.
“You need to move to the next station,” a slave said as he pushed past her. A new disk slid out readily for him.
Brit followed another slave to a platform next to the one she had arrived on and waited her turn. He disappeared, then she stepped on. Moments later she found herself at the entrance to a mine and relief from the sound of crying infants. She knew it was a mine because there were bins of the gray rock, vaalia, that she had witnessed being turned into the clear disks.
There was fresh air here, and she breathed it in and looked at the beautiful landscape around her. A stream flowed down from the mount, and orange and red trees formed the forest edge on the other side of rolling, grassy hills. Standing there, amidst one of the most scenic spots she had seen since arriving on this world, she saw the one man she had wanted to see more than anyone: Jax.
He was fifty yards away, at a different mine entrance, but she was sure it was him. All of the other men were wearing their white napkin-sized loincloths, but he was wearing jeans and a red and blue shirt Brit was sure was his favorite faded Spider-Man tee-shirt.
She ran toward him yelling his name.
He looked at her, and a few moments after their eyes connected, the world lost focus and went black.
Chapter Nineteen
Jax was stunned. He stared at the unconscious woman a few yards away. He knew her. She was his wife.
How was Brit here? He wanted to run to her, but he knew that the donut on his head would knock him out—something he had discovered for himself when trying to make a break for the forest. If he made it to the woods, he would have found a way to survive, he was certain. But he was knocked out cold. At least he knew more about the invisible walls that held him, he reasoned, or maybe rationalized. The cave he had found while mining was something he’d save until he knew more about what the donut could and could not do.
When Brit fell to the ground unconscious, there was nothing he could do for her. He was fairly sure she wasn’t dead, but he didn’t envy the headache she’d have when she woke up. Escaping to the forest was no longer a direct option. He would need to find his way to Brit first, and that only reinforced his half-baked plan of exploring the cave. That section of the mine was still too busy with passing slaves and he didn’t dare start chiseling away a new passage.
He stepped forward to the limit he could advance without also being zapped unconscious. He stood there for long moments as other slaves also watched. He desperately wanted to help her, but there was nothing he could do.
He watched in horror as a black and gold clad guard approached her and dragged her unconscious form back toward her mine.
If Jax ran and jumped, could he span enough of the distance to be unconscious near her? He’d eventually wake up. He studied that distance and knew that, even on his best day, he wouldn’t be able to cross more than a third of the remaining gap between them.
“Get back to work,” a guard next to him said.
Startled, Jax turned and saw that the other slaves were already hurrying back into the mine. He looked back to Brit, and then at the guard. He clenched his fists and began to tremble involuntarily as adrenalin coursed through him. The enkeli was much taller than him, and probably outweighed him by a hundred pounds, but every ounce of Jax wanted to turn this guy into a broken bag of flesh.
“Do you have something to say?” the guard said, a dare lurking below the surface of his serene expression.
Jax swept past the guard to the stack of bins. This was not over. He grabbed a bin and stalked into the mine.
He might try to dig his way to her, he thought. It could take years, and trying to dig an intersecting mineshaft might be impossible, he realized. And if he was off by even a few feet, high, low, or even to the left or right, he could spend fruitless years and not find the other mine. Even if his tunnel did intersect, what if he intersected at a point where other slaves or guards were standing? Years of digging for nothing or possibly terrible punishment. But he needed to do something, and so a long shot was better than no shot at all.
When Jax was sure that Brit was safe, he turned his back on Brit’s unconscious form and returned to his mine. He didn’t want the guards to show up and see him standing there. That might give them ideas that she meant something to him and reveal new ways that they might torment them. He hoped that Brit had the same presence of mind not to mention this. There wasn’t more he could do for her by watching either. Right now, he needed to take action. He needed to find a way to her.
When he reached the lower level, Jax took an abandoned passage. Nobody objected or tried to stop him. His new plan was ludicrous, but effectively, he was going to dig through tons of rock to try to intersect with a cave that he knew existed, but do it from a new angle that he hoped nobody would find right away. The technological chisel worked quickly and easily, and all it would take was time and sweat to move the chiseled-off pieces to build a new passage. This wasn’t like one of those movies where the prisoner dug out of his cell with a teaspoon. He had a high-tech chisel that dug well, and he had all the solitude and determination that he needed. If they caught him, he might be a whole lot worse off physically; but at this point, he knew they had his wife and there was nothing worse than that emotionally.
Up until this moment, he had thought that his situation was bad, but now that he saw his situation was rapidly approaching the worst case scenario, he was willing to take bigger risks. Once he found his way to Brit, he wasn’t sure what he’d do. Even if they were still stuck in the mine, however, at least they would be stuck together in the same mine.
After digging for hours and making piles of rocks in abandoned mine passages, he decided that his halo actually was making his plan easier. Without it, he was sure that he’d be an aching, sore mess too tired to move, but with it he felt fine. He realized that Brit might not be in the other mine when he made it there—and he was determined to make it there—and so he decided that he would make occasional appearances on the surface so that he knew Brit was still okay and still at the other mine.
Chapter Twenty
Brit awoke on hard rock. She had been propped up against the entrance of the mine, and as she looked across the expanse between her mine and Jax’s, she saw that he wasn’t there anymore. The beauty of the trees, the hills, and the river were all somehow diminished by his absence. She had a splitting headache and tenderly touched her forehead and felt the torus on her forehead, which was warm and pulsing.
“Hurry,” a slave said from behind her.
She looked back at him, and then to the place she had seen Jax.
“You’ll be sent to solitary if you don’t return to the station,” the same slave said, a pleading tone in his voice. The slave pointed to a digital screen above the mine entrance where anguished, starving people in dimly lit rooms pounded on blank walls.
Brit clambered to her feet and returned to the mine. She wasn’t sure how long she had been u
nconscious, but it felt like only a few moments. She shook her head to clear the pain and confusion away.
She brushed away the wetness on her cheeks, grabbed an empty bin, and followed another slave into the mine.
Unlike the cave, which had irregular floors and walls, the mine was purposefully carved. The walls were lit by glowing disks attached to the walls with no clear source of energy. A long line of slaves each carried their own empty bucket in and then a full bucket out. The went down high-tech elevators and through many angular corridors until they reached a point where digging was continuing.
For the first time since having the halo put on her forehead, Brit felt hungry and the need to use the restroom. She wondered if it didn’t work when in the mine. Maybe she had depleted its energy when it knocked her unconscious, or maybe this was punishment for getting too far away from her task, or maybe the halo was too far from whatever source powered it. Whatever the cause, her muscles also hurt more now than they had before.
The slaves used a type of glass rod to mine, which she wouldn’t have thought could be an effective tool; but it was powered with some technology that, when jabbed at the rock, caused a small blast and shattered away part of the gray stone they were mining. The tool was basically a high-tech chisel. The work was repetitive, dusty, and the air was stifling, but the chisel wasn’t heavy and it only took an hour to fill her bin. Then Brit was back in line to return with her full bucket to the surface. Carrying away the rocks was the hardest part of the task.
Before stepping on the return platform, she looked around one last time at the peaceful stream, hills, and forest. And she searched hopefully for Jax among the slaves, but he was gone.
Brit appeared in a room where dark gray disks were tumbling into bins from chutes above. As each bin filled, the flow would stop until a slave took the full bin and replaced it with an empty bin from a stack by the wall.