Pandora Jones: Deception

by Barry Jonsberg

  What did it all mean? The soccer game was important, she knew. As was the evidence of technology denied to them in The School. She bent her head to the window once again and came eye to eye with a face only five centimetres from her own. It was a bizarre moment. Her heart thudded in her chest and she froze. And then the eye blinked. Pan stifled a scream and drew back from the window. The scream that came a moment later didn’t belong to her.

  They ran, though with no idea where they were running to. The river was somewhere to their right, but lights were coming on in many houses. There was a babble of voices raised in alarm, and they ran from everything, darting right and left without any conscious decision. A man appeared from a front door and grabbed at Pan’s arm, but she twisted and broke his grip. He shouted, but she was past him and heading towards a darkness filled with explosions of light. Jen sprinted off towards the right, where the darkness swallowed her. Pan stopped. She gazed around at the village that was coming to life. Everywhere she looked, people stood in doorways, though she couldn’t make out their faces. Somewhere in the distance an alarm sounded. She heard a dog growling.

  There was nowhere to run. And she was tired of running. She waited and watched. No one approached her again. The people simply stared from a distance, one or two with hands to their mouths as if shocked. Faces peered from behind curtains. The drone of the alarm abruptly ceased and silence descended again. Pan stood in the middle of the path and felt . . . relaxed. Even when the men in white suits and masks approached. They formed a circle around her and edged closer. She turned, but there was no gap, no escape. It was unnerving to be surrounded by rows of masks, strange faces behind the glass visors. It was as if they weren’t human.

  Something struck her in the small of her back and she was aware only of excruciating pain, spreading and engulfing her being. Her body hit the ground hard, though she had no sensation of falling. Her muscles convulsed. She sensed, more than felt, her bladder relax and a flood of liquid give momentary warmth. She felt the gravel of the path scraping against her face as it thrashed from side to side, but even that was a dim pain compared to the blaze of agony that filled her. A face loomed before her. Brown eyes, sad somehow, distorted by the glass mask. And then the lights went out and she welcomed a darkness free of pain.

  Chapter 4

  When Pan woke, her first thought was that she had no idea where she was or what had happened. The second was that her body and her mind felt strange, almost dislocated. Every muscle was tight and carried with it a memory of pain, an excruciating pain that was so vivid it took her breath away. Agony was imprinted on her flesh, though her body didn’t hurt. That was a strange thought, a very strange thought. Her eyes were open. She knew that, but blackness pressed against her sight. She registered that she was lying on something soft, a mattress maybe, but even that realisation was curiously distant. What happened to me? she thought. Am I in danger? She reached for memories, but they were slippery and her mind couldn’t pin them down. She tried to sit up, but the effort required was too much, so she stayed on her back and attempted to get her brain to process the situation.

  The trouble was, her brain was processing things at a remove. Slowly, as if nothing mattered anymore, that any effort to work out problems was doomed to failure and, therefore, monumentally futile. I am happy just to lie here forever, she thought. Nothing matters. The past is irrelevant, the future even more so. Drift. Drift forever.

  So she did. Time was elastic and she had no idea if she dozed for a few seconds or a few hours. That didn’t matter either. And, in that curious land of half-awareness and half-oblivion, a word came to her. It floated across her consciousness and she observed it without curiosity. It was a strange word and for a while she couldn’t relate it to anything in her experience. Taser, she thought. I was tasered. But it didn’t matter, because nothing mattered. She drifted off again.

  The next time she woke, there was someone in the room with her. She felt the presence, though she still couldn’t see anyone. There were sounds close to her, someone pulling a chair across floorboards, but even with her eyes straining she could make out only a blur. A person sat in a chair next to her bed. What has happened to my mind? thought Pan. I cannot fix on anything. She felt as if she was far removed from the world, floating high above her own body. That was wrong, she knew, but no matter how hard she focused the curious sense of dislocation remained. The shape in front of her coughed and leaned forward slightly.

  ‘What are we going to do with you, Pandora?’ said a voice. The tone was friendly, good-natured.

  Pan tried to speak, but her throat was coated in cotton wool. She swallowed and tried again, but the sound she made was flimsy, as though it had issued from someone else entirely, someone she knew vaguely but couldn’t quite name.

  ‘I think you will kill me,’ she croaked. There was silence for what might have been seconds or might have been hours. The shape in front of her moved forward again.

  ‘Why would we do that?’ said the voice.

  ‘Because I know too much.’

  There was a soft chuckle. ‘That is precisely what I am here to determine.’ Another pause. ‘Do you know where you are, Pandora?’

  ‘I’m in The School.’

  ‘Good. Very good. And do you remember what happened to you in the village?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Excellent. Tell me about it, Pandora.’

  Something in the furthest reaches of her mind rebelled against the idea. These people, she knew, were her enemies and she could trust no one. She fought against the notion of giving them anything at all, even information they might already possess. But, despite her reluctance, she felt an extraordinary compulsion to tell everything, to answer as fully as she could any question that might be put to her. They have drugged me, she thought. That explains why everything is so removed and unreal. A fleeting memory came to her of a movie where someone had been injected with a drug that forced them to tell the truth. But that was another world and another time.

  ‘I went under the wall and explored parts of the village.’

  ‘Good. Were you alone?’

  ‘No. Jen came with me.’

  The figure in front of her shifted slightly and Pan could hear a scratching sound. My words are being recorded, she thought. She had no sense of anxiety; she simply waited for the next question. That was all she was interested in. Answering questions as truthfully as she could – little else remained other than that imperative.

  ‘Why did you go under the wall?’ the voice asked finally.

  ‘To see what was on the other side,’ Pan replied.

  ‘And what did you see?’

  ‘I saw a man watching a game of soccer on TV. I saw someone else in a chair. I think he may have been working on a computer, but I’m not a hundred percent sure. I saw everyday houses with everyday people in them doing everyday activities. I saw people in decontamination suits approaching me. I saw villagers with fear in their eyes. They were scared of me. They were so scared. Then something hit me in the back and I felt a pain I had never felt before. I think someone used a taser on me.’

  ‘We’re sorry about that,’ said the voice. It sounded sorry, too.

  ‘Not as sorry as me.’

  There was a surprised laugh. ‘Doubtless.’ Another pause. Pan waited. ‘Okay,’ said the voice. ‘Let me summarise what I believe might be your suspicions and then I’ll explain. Is that acceptable to you, Pandora?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You saw technology on the other side of the wall, technology that isn’t available here. This makes you think we are lying to the students at The School. Am I right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All right. Good. And that’s partly true. Old-world technology did not disappear, Pandora. Of course it didn’t. There are televisions, computers, phones, cars, electricity substations, nuclear weapons out there. Probably in their thousands and millions. And there are generators and enough fuel to stock them for possibly thousands of years.’ T
he chuckle came again. ‘At least we don’t have an energy crisis anymore. There aren’t many upsides to this situation, but that is one. What you saw was a man watching a game of soccer on a DVD and a person playing a computer game. Yes, there are generators on the other side of the wall. And on this side. They have electricity. So do we, in the Infirmary and for basic functions around The School, like dormitory lights. We ration it. And we have never lied about that. This is the truth, Pandora.’

  ‘No. It isn’t.’

  There was a sigh. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I believe nothing of what you say. You are lying to all of us in The School. Small lies. Big lies. The odd smattering of truth thrown in. But mainly lies.’

  ‘Why would we do that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Let me try again. Our job here at The School is to prepare you for the world out there. The world as it is now, not the way it was before the virus. The students in The School need to be self-reliant. You need to be tough, you need to be survivors. Luxuries are of no use to you. That’s the old world and it is gone.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  There was silence. The shape in front of Pan shifted once more and she heard again the scratching of a pen across paper.

  ‘Which part of what I said don’t you believe?’

  ‘All of it.’

  ‘Let me get this right. You don’t believe the old world is gone?’

  ‘No. I don’t believe the old world is gone.’

  ‘You think the virus is a fiction?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But, Pandora, you remember what happened. Are you saying you don’t trust your own memories?’

  ‘No,’ said Pan. ‘I trust absolutely my own memories.’

  ‘Well, then.’

  There was a pause while Pan waited for the next question. She felt absolutely at peace. The questions kept coming and it was relaxing to wait for them and answer them, despite the distant jangling of alarm. The figure sighed.

  ‘Can you explain this paradox for me, Pandora? You say you trust your memories, yet you still think the virus was a fiction. How can those two statements be true?’

  ‘Because I don’t trust the memories you’ve given me.’

  The silence settled again, but Pan was comfortable within it. Her eyes were open and she was aware of lying on her side, but the world was hazy, lacking in definition. Nothing appeared to have a firm outline and it was as if she was looking through a lens thickly smeared with grease. She waited.

  ‘You are suggesting we somehow planted memories in your mind?’ said the voice. ‘Do you realise how absurd that sounds?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you think we did this with all the students at The School?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why would we do that, assuming it was even possible?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What evidence do you have for this bizarre accusation?’

  Pan blinked, but nothing became any clearer.

  ‘I remember a child in a white dress, playing with a doll,’ she said. ‘Then I read Cara’s journal. It was horrible. Dead bodies in the streets. People coughing up blood. But there was one passage that struck me especially. She saw a kid in a white dress, playing with a doll next to the dead body of her mother. Gruesome. Appalling. Memorable for all the wrong reasons. But Sanjit – poor Sanjit – he had the same memory. A girl in a white dress, coughing blood. Playing with a doll, next to the dead body of her mother. What are the chances, do you think? Three people with the same memory.’

  ‘That situation must have been played out dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of times. Surely you must have considered that what you noticed was a coincidence, nothing more.’

  ‘No. I think you have given us all memories of a virus that never happened – a whole database of false memories. Maybe there are only so many gruesome memories that you can manufacture so there are students who have been given the same ones. But no one talks about it. If we did talk, then I’m sure we’d find plenty of other examples. Shared memories of things that are only figments of The School’s imagination. It’s one of the reasons students are not encouraged to talk about the past. You get us to focus on the future. Your vision of the future.’

  ‘I see.’ More writing. ‘What about Cara, Pandora?’

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘How do you think she died?’

  Pan thought for a while. There were so many missing fragments, but the question itself was simple enough.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Do you think we were responsible?’

  ‘Probably. I read her journal. She had her suspicions about The School. She knew there was something wrong with the watches, for example. Perhaps you killed her because she was getting too close to the truth.’

  ‘What is wrong with the watches?’

  ‘They are tracking devices, a means by which you keep us all under surveillance.’

  ‘I see. And that’s why you left yours on your bed before you went under the wall?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can you explain why Cara was found halfway up a mountain?’

  ‘I think she was put there as a test.’

  ‘A test?’

  ‘To see if I could find her. To test my intuition.’

  ‘All right, Pandora. I’m nearly done with my questions now. Just a few more and then you can rest. You would like to rest, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have you told anyone else about your . . . theories?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not even Jen?’

  Pan searched her memory. How much had she confided in Jen? Not enough, she thought. Or maybe too much.

  ‘I told her about the watches. But nothing else.’

  ‘And do you intend to spread your ideas among the student body?’

  ‘I haven’t thought about it. Maybe. If I can be sure I can trust them.’

  ‘Okay, Pandora. Now listen carefully. You will feel a small prick on your arm. This is harmless. It is merely to counter the . . . medication we gave you. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Excellent. You will then sleep. When you wake, the door will be open and you will be free to go. I would ask you to consider one thing, however. Should you decide to trust another student or students with your . . . theories, you will not be believed. You will be considered paranoid, possibly a result of grief at the tragic death of your boyfriend. The other students will trust their memories. They will have no faith in the ramblings of . . . forgive me . . . an over-imaginative girl. Believe me on this at least, Pandora.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘Good. One last question. Do you know who I am, Pandora?’

  ‘Yes. You are Professor Goldberg.’

  There was no response. Pan was conscious of only a small pressure against her arm. After that, she was conscious of nothing at all.

  Chapter 5

  Pan had no idea how long she slept, but when she woke the sun was arrowing through the half-open door of her room. She sat up and groaned. There was a chemical taste at the back of her throat and her limbs felt heavy, leaden. When she put her feet on the floor pain shot through her head and she gasped. Memories crowded her mind. People in white suits coming towards her, an ecstasy of agony as something thudded into her back, a strange and distant conversation with someone in a room smeared and blurred. She closed her eyes and forced her heart to stop racing. She concentrated on the pulse throbbing in her neck and willed it to slow. She took deep breaths and, finally, her mind steadied and the drumming in her head slowed. Pan opened her eyes.

  The cell where she had been imprisoned after her first excursion over the wall with Nate. The same dirty windows. Pan tried to get to her feet and stumbled. She put out a hand and rested it against the side of the bed, closed her eyes, waited for the world to stop rocking. The next time she opened her eyes, everything remained still. She took a deep breath and pushed
herself upright. Her legs trembled, but held her weight. She staggered to the open door, and looked out over The School.

  The sun was dipping towards the peaks of the far mountains and the snow caps were taking on a pink blush. Pan glanced at her wrist and then remembered she had no watch. What time was it? The School’s grounds were deserted, but they were often deserted. She tried to collect her thoughts. She and Jen had gone under the wall in the early hours of the morning and she had been captured some time later – no more than an hour and probably less – well before dawn. Judging by the position of the sun at least twelve hours had passed. It must be some time around five or five-thirty and students would almost certainly be engaged in their personal development sessions. Unless, of course, she had been out for an extra day. There was no way of telling until she rejoined the student body.

  Pan stood for a few more minutes until she felt she could trust her body. Even then, she nearly sprawled headlong when she started the long hike to the dormitories. Her eyes hurt and there was an insistent pain between her shoulder blades. Pan ignored the complaints of her body and moved steadily towards her goal. After a few minutes, she felt more in control and her eyes stopped watering. The relative freedom from pain allowed her to examine her memories in greater detail. A man in the cell with her. A series of questions that she answered fully. Her betrayal of Jen. There was only one logical explanation. She had been drugged.

  Why would The School drug her? Again? Because she was getting too close to the truth and they needed to know exactly how much she knew? Well, they’d succeeded if that was the case. What had the man said? They wouldn’t kill her. Maybe that was the truth, but maybe it wasn’t. If Pan had learned one thing it was that the truth was slippery and elusive, that reaching it was fraught with difficulty and dangers. But more than anything else, she couldn’t trust anyone or anything.