Linda’s not so bad though, the talkative one. She’s amusing most of the time.
Though I will admit I’ve thought, on occasion, that she might be Satan in disguise.
It’s the eyebrows.
Anyway, I slip back through my unopened door, into my white room, where the single chair still sits, undisturbed. The sunlight is to the right of the chair now. It’s almost 4:00 PM, when the building’s excuse for dinner will be served in the crummy cafeteria. The halls will quiet after that, when visiting hours end. The sun will fall past the window, and darkness will descend.
Tomorrow, I’ll experience the same, repetitive world all over again.
* * *
“Angela hasn’t woken up. I can’t make her. The external failsafe has been rendered inoperative by the virus, and in my arrogance, I didn’t tell Angela how to get herself out of the simulation. I’ve tried everything in my power to wipe the virus from Olympus, but the corruption has spread too far. In order to save the program, I’d have to restore the system to base settings. But if I do, Angela will die. If I don’t, Olympus will be destroyed, and fifty million dollars, ten years of work, will be thrown in the goddamn trash. And still, Angela might die anyway. If the virus infects the uplink code, the part accessing Angela’s mind, it’ll kill her in seconds.
“Oh, God. Angela, I’m so sorry.”
— Dr. Ignatius Monroe
Day 21
* * *
Something is different today. It’s like there’s a new force at work in the building, some invisible, growing vibration in the air. I have this itching sensation under my skin, and it drives me out of my white room, drives me to find what my mind thinks is a presence. It’s like I’m under some kind of compulsion to search, hunt, find. I roam the hallways for hours over the course of the morning, hoping to find the source of these feelings coursing through my blood. But I find nothing.
Maybe I’m imagining things? Becoming unhinged like all the corporeal residents?
It honestly wouldn’t surprise me.
The warped sense of time and the never-ending repetitions of day and night and day, Linda’s rants and visitors’ complaints…it could drive anybody mad.
But I give myself the benefit of the doubt. For now.
I head to the lobby. While the beautiful world outside taunts me, the lobby is the best place to watch for whatever mystery presence now haunts the white building. If it’s a strange new visitor of some kind, then they must pass through the lobby to escape. I would have checked here sooner had it not been for the nagging feeling that the presence was moving around the halls. It drew me through a maze of lefts and rights, and by the time I realized it was leading me on a wild goose chase, it was almost lunch time.
Not that I’m hungry or anything. Just annoyed.
I sit in one of the lobby chairs next to an elderly visitor. Like everybody else in the hospital, she doesn’t notice me. It gets old sometimes, being shunned. But I suck it up and wait in the chair and twiddle my thumbs for hours on end, until the sun begins to sink, a flush of orange dousing the world outside and bleeding onto the faded tile floor of the lobby.
Visiting hours are almost over. The elderly woman has long moved on. And yet, the presence remains. I keep my gaze focused on the elevator, flicking it every so often toward the stairs, a few meters away. No one emerges.
Hm. Curious, that.
The usual woman comes over the announcement system and says that visiting hours are over.
The presence is still here.
So the presence can’t be a visitor. It’s something else. But what?
I finally pull myself out of the lobby chair and head back toward my white room to give myself some quiet time to think up new possibilities. When I reach the hallway where my room is, however, I feel the presence strengthen. Slowly, I look to the left and then to the right. But there’s nobody in the hall except Linda, scribbling on some clipboard form as she shuffles along.
I continue on to my white room, bare feet chilled by the cool tiles. I peek into every room I know isn’t a white room, hoping the presence is in a bathroom or a supply closet. But the strength of my gut feeling remains steady, and I grumble to myself in frustration. Giving up, I reach the closed door to my room, then slip through it. I can always sit in my room and “watch” the presence, see if it shifts during the—
I blink.
There’s a girl sitting in the chair in the middle of my room.
I blink again.
And there is not a girl sitting in the chair in the middle of my room.
The presence leaves with her.
* * *
“Robert came again today. I can see the slowly building hatred in his eyes. It’s funny to think that just under two months ago, he was my best friend. But I guess unwittingly trapping his eight-year-old daughter in a corrupted virtual world is grounds for terminating a friendship. And it doesn’t help that I’m no closer to saving Angela. I’ve managed to slow the virus down, but I still haven’t figured out who sabotaged the system—though I have my strong suspicions—or how to undo what they’ve done. I haven’t figured out a way to remove Angela’s mind from Olympus without killing her. Jesus…I’m a right old failure, aren’t I?”
— Dr. Ignatius Monroe
Day 42
* * *
2
But if life has taught us anything
It is that the lost rarely stay so,
And with passing years of ignorance
The mortal coil loops ever slow.
I spend the next long segment of eternity waiting for the girl to reappear. But I don’t feel her presence in the hospital again. At one point, I start to think she was a figment of my imagination, that I am actually going bananas. But I force myself away from that possibility, lock the idea up in a box in the back of my mind. Would a hallucination have settled so far into my gut, like a lead weight? Would an illusion have had such an impact on my feelings?
No, no. The girl was real, very real. Is real. I know it.
But with no other choice, I have to resume my usual activities, do nothing but hope she returns and…
And then she does.
Like with her first visit, I feel her first. But this time, I return to my white room to wait instead of chasing her through the hospital. I feel her presence tugging at my chest, my heart, my soul as she moves throughout the halls, and I can almost imagine her skipping across the tiles. Dark hair flowing free in loose curls. Violet dress illuminated by the usually dull fluorescent lights. A picture of childhood innocence, bright and cheery against the boring white backdrop of this purgatory building. Why would such a girl be here?
It’s not like there’s a question—Heaven or Hell?
Hah. That’s a question for me, the ghost man with no memory, not an innocent girl.
I wait in my room until the sunlight passes the 4:00 PM mark, becoming more and more anxious by the second. I know there’s no guarantee the girl will return to my white room, but I put all my hope in this loitering plan, so I can’t back out of it—with my luck, the girl will show up the moment I leave. Can’t risk that. And even if she doesn’t show, I at least know now that she’ll come to the hospital again. For a while there, I thought I’d lost her for good—
She appears.
Like me, she drifts right through the door, a ghostlike being, her delicate violet dress rustling as if touched by a soft wind. Her flat shoes, decorated with bright purple bows, tap lightly across the floor. In her arms is a book, which she clutches tightly to her chest. Her hair, bouncing against her shoulders, is held back from her face by a ribbon that matches her shoes. Picture perfect.
Without acknowledging my presence, she walks toward my chair and hops into it. She’s so small her feet don’t even reach the floor. Young. So young. Eight or nine years old at the most.
What the hell is a child that age doing here?
I rise quietly from my perch, hesitating to speak, and watch as she opens her book and begins
to read. From my spot, a couple meters away, I can’t make out the title of the book, and I wonder how she came by it. The closest thing to literature I’ve found in the hospital is the average medical chart: chicken scratch hastily scrawled across flimsy, faded forms.
I take one step toward the girl and then halt. I don’t want to scare her. I don’t want her to leave. What if she disappears and never comes back because she’s afraid of me? That and a thousand other fears come to mind. But if I don’t do anything, she’s bound to leave of her own volition, and I’ll be forced to wait, again, and pray she decides to visit a third time. I’m not sure I can take that much waiting. Not without losing what little of my mind is left intact.
And so, with a flutter in my chest, I speak:
“Hello?”
The girl jumps, her dropped book thumping against the floor, and I freeze, expecting her to vanish immediately. But she doesn’t. She slowly turns around, her brown eyes wide, startled. For a long moment, the girl has no response at all to the strange ghost man in the room with her, and I know, just know, she can’t see me either. She’s not so different from the rest after all…
…but then, out of nowhere, a look of joy comes over her young face.
A look of recognition.
A smile graces her lips, eyes lighting up, dimples in her cheeks. She opens her mouth and says, in a high-pitched voice, “Mr. Icarus!”
The name sends a wave of shock through my body, every muscle spasming, blood rushing to my head, heart pounding against my ribs—and for the briefest moment, I make the crucial mistake of taking my eyes off her.
When I look back, she’s gone again.
All that remains is her book.
* * *
Mythology. The girl was reading a book on mythology.
It spans several cultures’ worth of myths, from the Greeks and Romans to the Celts and even the Japanese. Gorgeous illustrations decorate the pages, framed with swirling gilt gold borders and labeled with perfect calligraphy. There are grandiose gods throwing flames and lightning bolts. There are ghosts and demons chasing villagers. There are more creation stories than I can count, and I’m thrilled to read each and every one of them.
I don’t remember the last time I read a book. Must have been when I was alive—still on the assumption that I’m dead, of course—but I only recall the vaguest things from before. I worked in some sort of laboratory, doing what, I can’t even guess. I had a lot of friends and colleagues, but their names and most of their faces elude me. I don’t think I was married or had any children. And…well, that’s where my knowledge ends. I don’t even know my whole name.
Only “Icarus.”
Iccy, for short.
I snort as I turn the page of the mythology book.
Iccy. What a nickname. Pronounced like icky.
Really, was I that bad? I must have been a real dick to deserve a name that awful.
And yet, my only memory of somebody using that name is…happy? Somebody laughing not at me but with me? Friendly, not malicious. How weird.
Icarus must be my name, though, because that’s what the girl in violet called me. So I at least remember one thing from my life. But I wish the girl had given me more. A full name. A profession. A heritage. A role. A hint of the sort of person I used to be before my ghost got locked in this stupid hospital at the end of the universe. The last stop before the pearly gates…or the hot iron ones.
I want to know who I am. Who I was.
I stare at the gold-bordered pages of the mythology book, wondering how all this fits together. My only other knowledge of the name “Icarus” comes from the myths themselves. Some young brat who refused to listen to the advice of his master and flew too high toward the sun with wings made of wax. They melted, and he plummeted to his death.
I gnaw on my lip.
What did I do in life to earn a name like Icarus?
* * *
“I haven’t found enough concrete evidence to take a suspect into custody. But I’m almost positive that it was Ericson who sabotaged Olympus. Who else with a vendetta could know the system so well? But I can’t prove it was him, not yet. And until I can, he’ll walk free. Until I can, he’ll continue slandering me to the press and police. Until I can, he’ll keep pushing to destroy what little I have left. That bastard.
“And Angela, I…There are no words for this. None that even begin to describe how I feel. Every day, the virus gets closer and closer to infecting her mind. I’m running out of time.
“There is, however, one option left. I don’t know if it’ll actually work, and even if it does, there are a dozen things that could go wrong at every turn. But I’m starting to think I don’t have any other choice. If things continue as they have so far, Angela will die, Robert will hate me forever, my colleagues will be left without jobs, careers ruined, a killer will get off scot-free, and I…
“No, I can’t even think about myself at this point. I’m the only one who can stop this. And there’s only one way to do it: the back road to Olympus.”
— Dr. Ignatius Monroe
Day 73
* * *
3
Thus, there is a boy named Icarus
Who flies too high toward the sun,
And though his waxed wings always melt
His immortal toil is never done.
I sit in the lobby for hours on end, watching the beautiful world outside. Its vibrant colors always soothe me, even though they’re shadowed by my envy. I can’t help but wonder what it’s like outside the hospital, what the beautiful world really contains. Are there people? Are there cities? Houses? Oceans? Wonders beyond imagination?
I hold the mythology book against my chest. I’ve read it twice since the girl appeared for the second time. I’ve been waiting for her to show up again, but she hasn’t yet—and she might never. But then, she said my name. She looked happy to see me. Logically, she must want to see me again, right?
It’s the only hope I have to cling to at this point.
The book has made my repetitive life inside the hospital more colorful, sure, but it’s also made me long for the outside world that much more. If I could talk to the girl, then maybe she—
Something breaks.
I nearly fall out of my chair, scrambling to my feet, seeking out the source of the sound.
It’s a window. And it’s cracking.
It’s not anywhere near the doors I can’t pass through, so I approach the pane of glass slowly, hoping the invisible barrier that keeps me in the building doesn’t grab me before I get a chance to investigate further.
It doesn’t, by some miracle.
I raise my hand to the window, fingers hovering over the spider-webbed cracks. Nobody touched the window. Nothing hit it. So why is it breaking? Pressure? A shift in the foundation? An earthquake, maybe, resonating through the ground beneath the hospital—but then, wouldn’t I have felt the quake?
Things don’t break in this hospital. Things have never broken in this hospital.
I touch the glass.
It shatters.
I recoil, shielding my face, but the glass shoots outward into the beautiful world. I slip and fall on my ass, breathing hard, and then blink, confused. The air from the beautiful world slips inside to greet me, warm and fresh. Somehow, though, I know I won’t be able to step through the frame of the broken window, any more than I can through the automatic doors. So I don’t bother to try. I just gaze at the window in awe, feel the breeze caress my cheeks, attention shifting back and forth from the lush vegetation to the shards of glass glittering on the sidewalk.
Minutes pass me by, and I gradually realize that something important is missing from this scene. I turn to survey the rest of the lobby, expecting a crowd behind me. But no one’s there. The visitors in the waiting area sit quietly, absorbed in various mundane tasks. Texting. Talking. Napping. The receptionist at the front desk is on the computer, typing away.
No one noticed the window exploding.
No
one but me.
* * *
I observe the broken window for several days, waiting for something to happen. I return to my white room at night, but the rest of my days are spent on the floor of the lobby, examining the broken glass that no one has cleaned up. I watch a thousand visitors come and go, and no one ever notices the broken window.
The mythology book is still in my arms—I won’t let it out of my sight—and I’ve read it three more times since the window exploded. I consider reading it again, as if it contains some kind of secret message I’ve yet to decode. But like the window, its presence is a mystery I can’t solve without more information.
Or, hell, maybe it’s not a mystery at all. Maybe I’m completely unhinged now, and I’m imagining this whole scenario.
It would be my luck, wouldn’t it?
I glance at the glass scattered across the concrete sidewalk of the beautiful world.
Then again, maybe it’s all too real. Maybe…
I sense the girl’s presence again.
Stumbling to my feet, I rush back down the hall to my white room and pass through my closed door—then I come to an abrupt halt.
The girl has moved my chair. She’s repositioned it closer to the window and now stands on the seat, peering out into the beautiful world beyond. For a brief second, rage beats through my veins—I’m offended, quite frankly—and I open my mouth to scream at her. It’s my chair and my room! What gives you the right to change anything? What gives you the right to…?
Thankfully, I realize how stupid that sounds before any words come out of my mouth.
Because what gives me the right?
The Doomsday Chronicles (The Future Chronicles) Page 37