“So explain,” he said, to whoever felt like answering. It seemed like a great way to fill up the time on what had to be a quarter of a mile downhill.
“I don’t think we can,” Minerva said. “We can tell you what we know.”
“All right, what do you know?”
“We know something’s wrong with this city,” Wilson said.
“You mean other than the alien attack and the helicopters falling from the sky and the fact that all the people seem to have disappeared?”
“Yes, other than that. We started picking up on these things a while ago.”
“Like the dead spaces,” Minnie said. “Times when we were suddenly in a place, and we were supposed to be there, but we didn’t know how we got there. Has that ever happened to you?”
“You almost need to be looking for it,” Wilson added.
“I guess a couple of times, sure,” Ollie said. “But that’s normal.”
Minerva laughed. “Okay.”
“No, it is. The mind isn’t always on, right? We’re on autopilot sometimes. It’s a thing. Happens to long distance drivers a lot.”
“All right, but this is subtly different,” Wilson said. “Imagine waking up in the middle of a conversation and the last thing you remember was being home, and two days had passed.”
“Like an alien abduction or something?” Ollie asked, deliberately invoking the claims of a few of those long-distance drivers who convinced themselves they hadn’t just been half-asleep: time had been stolen from them.
“Well yes, I suppose.”
“Except without the abduction,” Minnie said.
“I mean, we have aliens,” Oliver said. This seemed worth pointing out.
“Yeah but nobody saw them until today.”
“Then just missing time.”
“We think of it as not missing, it just wasn’t ever created,” Wilson said.
“Well that’s cryptic.”
“Oliver, we think the reason for these jumps is that the story that connected the two points was never filled in.”
“I’m not following.”
Minnie, who was leading them down, stopped at the next landing. They were nearly to the bottom.
“Ollie, remember you asked where all the people went?” she said. “And I told you I had a suggestion?”
“But I wasn’t going to like it, yes, I remember.”
“I think they aren’t here because the alien attack was supposed to happen in a nearly abandoned city. Nobody else was written in for this part. Just us.”
Ollie laughed, and waited for the other two to join in. They didn’t.
“But that’s ridiculous,” he said.
“I get it,” Wilson said. “Crowd scenes are incredibly difficult. You never really know how much detail to provide. I can understand not bothering to provide all that background; it just bogs down the action. It’s a good call.”
“But we aren’t talking about a story, Wilson, this is… I can’t believe I even have to say this out loud. This is the real world.”
“Yes, but this real world is missing some important parts.”
“Ollie, look around!” Minerva said. “You know how many people are supposed to be in this city? And we just repelled aliens with technology that doesn’t even exist, I mean, come on.”
“Just because I can’t explain it doesn’t mean your explanation’s correct.”
“A logical fallacy!” Wilson declared. “That’s true!”
He clapped Oliver on the shoulder and started down the stairs again, smiling at Minerva as he went past.
“I told you he wouldn’t believe it,” he said. “He’s too rational. Come on, let’s go find that other guy, I bet he can help.”
There was no other guy waiting for them at the bottom of the stairs, or anywhere along the landing. There also continued to be no other people, and no trains.
Light they had. It came from battery-powered emergency lights along the walls that were just strong enough to create pools of visibility along the darkened platform. It was precisely effective enough to raise concern about what was in the darkness beyond the edge.
Oliver didn’t entirely register how discomfiting the environment was, as he was too busy trying to get a grip on the self-evident nonsense his friends appeared to believe.
The whole thing reminded him, oddly, of Ivor’s story. Ollie’s biggest problem with it—aside from the fact that it was a plot borrowed from The Matrix—was that in order for it to work the characters had to be in a dream and not know they were in a dream.
Oliver had been dreaming his whole life, and not once had he been in one where, at some point, he didn’t recognize that he was in one. Dreams could be emotionally real, but not physically real. Pain, physical exertion, and just basic physics weren’t there, and that was what always pulled him out of the idea that what he was experiencing was reality.
It wasn’t even worth it to question if what he was experiencing was real. The whole it was all a dream premise made for a good twist in a story, but it never really rang true for him, because real dreams just weren’t that substantial. It was a cute plot twist, sure, but not a workable explanation for what he was actually experiencing.
Unfortunately, there weren’t any other good options.
“Did he say where he was going?” Minerva asked, once they’d walked the length of the inbound platform.
“No, just that he was going to push ahead,” Wilson said.
“That’s all?”
“Essentially. There might have been more, but I was occupied with the defense grid at the time.”
“What direction do you suppose ahead is?” she asked.
Wilson just shrugged.
They headed down another flight to the outbound platform. It was even more poorly lit. Minerva took the headlight off her vest and held it up like a flashlight. It improved things only a little. Oliver reached for his own, but discovered it was missing.
More to the point, the entire armored vest was missing. He didn’t remember taking it off, but he must have slipped out of it at the same time he was hurling his cannon pack into the mouth of a roaring alien. That meant the vest was likely spread out over the same vast radius as the insides of that alien. His light was gone, in other words.
“Anybody down here?” Minnie asked.
“Unless he’s playing hide-and-seek, I don’t believe he’s here,” Wilson said.
“I thought I saw something.”
Ollie thought so too. The shadows were surprisingly tricky on this level, and one of them looked almost like a person.
“Let me see,” he said. She handed him the light. He headed toward the ‘person’. It was a cardboard display: one of those human-sized cutouts of a spokeswoman for a monthly wifi package.
“Unless you want to change data plans, this probably isn’t who we’re looking for,” Oliver said.
He redirected the light at the floor in front of her display, because something gleamed in the paving stones when the light caught it. At first he thought it was some kind of moisture, but the ground was dry. There also wasn’t any metal that he could see.
“So what do we do now?” Minerva asked. “Wait for him to come back?”
“Don’t know if he’s coming back,” Wilson said. “And I don’t think we can go back up at this point: nighttime, with only one of those brilliant cannons left, and giant bugs all over the city. We need another way through.”
Ollie knelt down to get a better look. It took some manipulation to get the light pointed exactly right.
“What are you doing?” Wilson asked.
“There’s some writing down here,” Oliver said. “It’s weird.”
“What kind of writing?”
“Just writing. In some phosphorescent paint or something.”
Minnie leaned down to look. She tilted her head three or four times at several angles.
“I can’t see it,” she said.
Oliver put his finger right under the lettering. �
��Here.”
She squinted.
“Nope, I don’t see it.”
“What do these words that don’t exist say?” Wilson asked.
“That’s a complicated question. Can you see it?”
Wilson peered over Minnie’s shoulder.
“If there are words near your fingers, I don’t see them,” Wilson said.
“So I’m either going nuts—some more—or my eyesight is better than both of yours? Or you’re screwing with me.”
“We aren’t screwing with you,” Minnie said.
“Why is it a complicated question?” Wilson asked.
It was complicated because Ollie knew, as soon as the message came into focus, that this wasn’t written in any language with which he was familiar. The letters were vaguely Arabic, but that was about the best he could do in terms of identification. But even as the rational side of his brain understood this, there was something in the language center that decided it knew what was being conveyed. It was like watching a movie that was subtitled in another language and close-captioned in English at the same time. He could read the words lying underneath the ones he couldn’t translate.
Somehow.
“It just is,” Oliver said. “But I think we should go that way.”
He gestured with the light beam down the length of the tunnel.
“Is that what the message said to do?” Minnie asked.
“More or less.”
The message was an annoying bit of doggerel. It read, to go back for the first time, go in the out. Oliver didn’t get the first part, but the second was clearly saying to take the outbound tunnel inbound. It was useless advice unless the trains weren’t running, which was only one way in which this was absurd—there were many others, including what the message was doing there at all, and why nobody else could see it—but he felt instinctively this was the correct interpretation.
A big arrow would have done the trick just fine, of course. If he ever figured out who put the message there he’d have to tell them this.
“Down the tracks, then?” Minnie asked.
“Assuming the electricity doesn’t return subway service to the city any time soon, it’s probably safe,” Wilson said. “Although I’d stay clear of the third rail. That would be a bad way to learn the electricity’s back. Doesn’t look like there’s much in the way of lighting down there, either.”
Oliver took the initiative to drop down from the platform to the tracks. He’d been taking the subway for much of his life, and for most of that time he’d harbored a secret desire to jump down onto the tracks and walk around. He felt this way even when standing at the edge and noticing soot-colored mice and rats scampering around down there. He doubted he was the only one who had these thoughts.
Standing in the middle of the tracks, he held up the light and verified that it did very little to stave off the looming darkness ahead.
“You’re right, this could stand to be brighter,” he said.
And then it was. The lamp in his hand brightened, until it seemed like he was holding a piece of sunlight.
“Well then,” Wilson said, jumping down next to him. “I guess that will do.”
Minerva jumped down last. Oliver tried handing her back the lamp, since it was hers.
“No, no, you keep that,” she said. “I have a feeling it won’t work as well in my hands.”
Subway tunnels weren’t meant for walking, or at least not for walking on two legs. The area vermin seemed to be okay with it. Oliver wondered if the rats had stories they told each other, and if they did, what those stories had to say about the thunderous monsters that traveled down the tunnels a hundred times a day. Did they have to be taught to hide in the walls every ten minutes to avoid certain death, or was it completely instinctive? Did baby rats learn cautionary tales about the trains? Was the 7:07 C Train their bogeyman?
If the rats had mythologies, surely this day—the day when the trains stopped—would be an important part of the legends.
The larger point was that travel was slow going. The sheer amount of dirt, soot, dust and grease was staggering. They were only halfway to the next stop when Oliver started to consider just turning around, climbing back to the surface, and dealing with the rain and the bugs. It had to be better than the coal lung and the rats.
“How’s it going up here?” Wilson asked, stepping up beside Ollie. Oliver had been in the lead because he was the guy with the big shiny light. The others were content to trail behind and follow in his footsteps as much as possible. This was necessary because the ground was uneven, and nobody wanted to deal with tripping. Every direction looked like a tetanus shot waiting to happen.
“Super. I want a shower.”
“So do I. It’s filthy down here.”
“Yeah. Look, I’ve been thinking about this, and I’ve decided I don’t want to go to Pallas with you guys after all.”
Wilson laughed.
“Oh, it’s much too late for that now.”
“That is where we’re headed, though, isn’t it?” Ollie asked.
“Ultimately, yes. That’s still the plan. But now you understand why we left so early. The commute is challenging.”
This made Oliver laugh, which caused the light to bounce around. It seemed as if the entire tunnel trembled when he did that. Footlights along the left and right side of the tunnel were all that passed for emergency lighting in between the stations. They were only there in the event a disabled car needed to be evacuated, or so Ollie assumed.
“So do you want to tell me what’s really going on?” Oliver asked.
“I don’t have a better explanation, if that’s what you’re looking for.”
“You said you started to notice things a while ago.”
“This is true, yes.”
“And that somehow these things are connected to me, in ways that make zero sense to anyone with a brain and a basic grip on how reality works. How did you get there?”
“We thought it was Wilson, at first,” Minerva said, from behind them.
“That’s true,” Wilson said. “But once that was proven wrong, we decided to create the writers’ underground. Took a while, but here you are.”
Ollie shook his head. “I can’t go down that rabbit hole with you. I didn’t even start writing until a few months ago, how do you imagine I’m… I mean, I existed before then. You did too, didn’t you?”
“Well you didn’t write yourself into existence, Ollie,” Minerva said. “We aren’t saying that.”
“I’m not so sure you didn’t,” Wilson said. “Just to be contrarian about this. Ollie, what’s the name of this city?”
“What? It’s… the name is… It’s the city. What do you mean?”
“You know exactly what I mean. What is the name of the city we live in? Don’t look at me, I don’t know.”
“But that’s crazy.”
“I know it is. Where’d you go to college?”
“I went to community college.”
“So you said. What was the name of it?”
He couldn’t remember. He could picture the buildings, and the classrooms, and a professor he was particularly fond of, but whose name also escaped him.
“This is ridiculous,” he said.
“What’s your full name, Oliver?” Wilson asked.
“That I know. It’s Oliver Naughton.”
“Your full name.”
“Oliver Tennyson Davis Naughton.”
Wilson looked impressed.
“Told you,” Minnie said.
“Told him what?” Ollie asked.
“We had a bet you wouldn’t be able to answer that,” Minnie said. “Because other than Ben, nobody else we met could. Wilson has a last name, but that’s it. I don’t.”
“Well that’s ridiculous,” Oliver said. “Of course you have a last name. It’s…”
Then his mind drew a blank again. He was worried if he guessed, and that guess was right, he would somehow be proving them correct in his effort to prove
them wrong: would he be retrieving their surnames from his memory, or creating them on the spot? He wouldn’t know the difference, and maybe they wouldn’t either.
“Okay, but what does any of this prove?” he asked. “I have a name, great.”
“It proves you’re different,” Wilson said.
“It doesn’t prove he created himself too,” Minerva said. “If that’s what you were leaning toward.”
“It doesn’t disprove it either. Plus, look at the consequences. It would mean someone else is involved. Let’s lay out what we’re talking about here.”
They were coming up on another station, and with that came better lighting, from the platform’s emergency lights. Also, it looked like there was another glowing message: something caught in Oliver’s light and glittered back at him.
Wilson continued. “We’re talking about a situation in which an intelligence is actually scripting us, and we think Oliver might be that intelligence, and that’s completely absurd. But now if we don’t allow for the idea that he’s also scripting himself, we’ve got to go up another layer and find out who’s writing for him? Do you see why I don’t want to do that?”
Oliver stopped at the wall opposite the platform. There was definitely another message there, just below an advertisement for a department store. He trained the light on the spot, which was covered in the same dust as the rest of the tunnel. The message came through anyway.
“I think that’s a much more comforting idea, actually,” Minerva said.
“Why?”
“I don’t know; it just is.”
“Why’d we stop?” Wilson asked Oliver. Clearly, he couldn’t see what Oliver could see.
“New message,” Oliver said.
“What does it say?”
It said the good way home is through the home goods and that was nonsense, but Oliver had already stopped puzzling over that and focused on the advertisement above it.
“I don’t know what it means. What stop are we at?”
“Dunston Street, I think,” Minerva said. She was looking at the platform. “It looks kind of familiar, but it’s hard to tell from this angle.”
“Isn’t that the stop with the weird underground entrance?”
“Right, yes, through the basement store,” Wilson said.
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