by J. M. Clark
Mathew stared out at the road as he drove. He turned the AC on in the car, touching the vents to make sure it was coming out cold.
“There is a quote, Jacob. I can’t think of it exactly, but it goes something like, ‘We want things until we get them, then we aren’t excited about it anymore.’ I’ve never been accused of being a scholar, especially as far as quotes. You get the idea though, right kid?”
Mathew looked over at Jacob to make sure he was following.
“Yeah…I think I do, Dad. I want the PS4, I do. I’m happy to have it. Maybe I’m not as excited as you thought I would be, but I’ve been playing it over at Davey’s house after school, so maybe that’s part of it. I really appreciate it though, and I don’t want to take it back and get anything else. What’s the big deal? Did you expect me to drop tears about it?” Jacob said it with an attitude in his voice and demeanor, turning to look out the window again and mumbling under his breath.
“I didn’t say that, Jacob. I was just making sure it was something you still wanted. As long as you are happy with it, then I’m happy too. Sorry I asked.”
Jacob woke up dripping sweat, his blanket on the floor next to the bed. His tossing and turning had caused him to knock his glass from the nightstand, the water now soaking through the blanket. He sat up in the bed, reached down to grab the corner of the blanket, and wiped his face off with a dry portion of it before throwing it across the bed behind him.
Jacob hated those dreams; they reminded him of a life that felt more like a movie than anything he could fathom today. He knew those memories were real, they were things that he had experienced, but twenty years of a different reality could lead your mind to play tricks on you.
He got out of bed and walked into the dark bathroom. The only light was the moon reflecting off of the bathroom mirror and the glass shower, which gave the entire bathroom a dark blue hue. Jacob stood over the toilet and began to relieve himself.
How long will my life be a flash of MEs, lectures, sexual exercises, and dreams reminding me of what can never be again? he thought while shaking his penis dry and flushing the toilet.
Walking over to the mirror above the sink, he looked at himself and didn’t recognize the person in the mirror. He hadn’t for some time now. There were remnants of the young college man taking courses at Xavier University glaring back at him, but he was different. The once young man was now staring into the eyes of a scared old man, and he was ashamed of himself for so many reasons.
He had become a man who was so satisfied with the chance to live that he didn’t care that he hadn’t actually lived a day since he walked through those Palace doors. He touched the mirror and traced the shape of his face, realizing that for him, “living” had stopped the day he came here.
Sure, he was alive as far as a heartbeat, but he hadn’t accomplished anything. There was a world out there still, and yes, it was all messed up now, but how long would he continue to wait to get into the Greater Understanding Program to see it?
For the first few years, everyone was happy just to be safe, and at the same time wondering if they would get sick. Things were uneasy, and no one had trusted anyone here. The teachers did all they could to bring a bunch of mentally disturbed strangers to begin seeing each other as brothers and sisters. There was so much fear in the beginning, so much confusion.
They were all picked up in big white vans and taken to US Bank Arena, where they were put in lines for processing. The US Army was running the whole operation. After completing forms with their names, addresses, birthdates, and things like that, they were given a vaccination shot of some kind to suppress the flu bug. There had to be at least a thousand people at the arena being processed and vaccinated. Only three hundred of them made it to this Palace. Sadly though, none of those people were Leanne, Logan, Mikey, or anyone else that he knew. Jacob was totally alone, so he didn’t care where they were being taken. He had mentally checked out, still in a state of shock.
There were people at the arena who must have been taken to different Palaces, but no one knew where, and the teachers never talked about other Palaces beyond the fact that they existed.
Jacob went back to his bed to lie down. He stared at the television facing him at the opposite end of the room. “Please Wait” was all there was to see. The constant message had been so very strange for Jacob in the beginning. It was weird having a TV for nothing more than Palace messages and the evening words from Sirus. No TV shows, no new movies, no football games to sit back and watch with a beer. But after a while, even the abnormal could become the norm. He eventually got accustomed to things that would have had him crying insanity or listing his rights in the Old World. He had to if he wanted to survive. And he did.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Trevor
Lying in bed next to the love of his life, Trevor thought about the thing that had come to consume his mind every night since getting out of that van and running inside the Palace. Time was a funny thing here; the consensus was that it had been twenty years, but time in the Palace was like time in any casino from the Old World. There were no clocks, calendars, or anything that would allow you to get caught up in the concept of time at all. Did it really matter how much time had passed anyway? It all meshed together like one big continuous day.
It had been a long time since coming to the Palace, and since the very day he stepped through those metal doors and walked upon the ice-white marble floors, he knew something was off about all of it. They all thought it, but when you were “saved” from the jaws of death, you didn’t ask questions. Furthermore, if you wished to stay safe, you didn’t ask questions. Trevor saw it as running into the witch’s house for fear of the big bad wolf outside. And that witch wanted to cook Hansel and Gretel.
Everyone knew that the government had “plans” in place for situations that could arise: nuclear war, tornado, hurricanes, pandemics, etc. Trevor thought that the precise planning of the Palaces was too calculated. The huge structures seemed to be made specifically for this type of thing, even for this amount of people. It felt like they were all children showing up to summer camp that was already set for them to assimilate.
Trevor wasn’t new to the tricks and vile ways of the United States government. He was a member of the Marine Corps and had heard all about the false flag events of the past from friends while in the service. Nothing official of course.
But would you expect something like that to be official? Trevor thought while rubbing his wife’s back with his right hand. He was lying flat on his own back, staring at the ceiling of their pod. His hand glided over the pale lavender silk nightgown she wore. He could feel every curve and arch in her back, every twitch in her sleep. She was dreaming.
Trevor thought about the false flag with World War II. We wanted Pearl Harbor to be attacked so that we could enter that world. His own father mentioned that to him once. There was another with the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, and the obvious second World Trade Center attack in 2001, which brought the towers down, killing thousands. There were other bullshit events like Sandy Hook, the Boston Marathon bombing, and a few other weird things that seemed to be executed by the government at the time. His belief in these questionable events made him wary of anything that happened in the United States.
There is no more United States. Trevor moved his hand up to Amy’s hair and began playing with it, weaving the dark chocolate strands into a tangled and frayed rope with his fingers.
He had always thought that the sickness was created by the United States government. There was no way that he or anyone else could even know for sure if the rest of the world was truly as bad off as the Order said they were. For all they knew, it was just America that was going through this.
Who did one go to in this situation to report possible foul play? The teachers? Higher-ups in the Order who never showed their faces, other than that weird Sirus who wanted you to watch him eat…While you ate your own food, which is odd on a totally different level. There
was no one. He should just be happy to have a place to sleep, eat, have sex, and learn the same information in a hundred new ways. Trevor thought that it all became overly redundant a few years in, and now they were waiting on a chance to get out.
Why would they construct the Palace in such a way? No public kitchens, so many activity rooms and areas for lectures? It made no sense—unless it was meant to happen. And if that was the case, then he’d been right all along. Trevor sneezed, shooting a hand up to his face to cover his nose and muffle the sound. He didn’t want to wake Amy.
Lying there, listening to the constant humming that made up the sound of nothingness, he wondered if it even mattered. Being right wouldn’t change anything; they were still there, and all they had was each other. Trevor could be in the depths of Hades, and as long as he had Amy, it would be enough. The not knowing had become an itching on the inside of his skull over the years. He wanted to scratch it, but all he had were ideas and rumors. This place was safe, and it was good for his wife. He knew that.
He untangled her hair and rubbed it flat against the back of her skull. Amy tried to find comfort in her sleep, moving and mumbling something that didn’t come out clearly. Trevor knew what she was saying; he knew what she was dreaming about. The dream came for her every night when she finally found sleep. That was okay though, he would always be there for her when she woke. When she was disheveled and desperate for a familiar face, he would be there.
Trevor had these suspicions about the Palace from the very beginning, and the longer they were here, the more apparent it became that the Greater Understanding Program was close to impossible to get into. At least for an old man like him. And since he and Amy were not getting any younger, maybe they would never get in, never be able to leave here. So, the question in his head became: could he stay here for the rest of his life, never knowing what was going on past the quarantine area? The answer to that question was a resounding yes, as long as Amy was there. Trevor rolled over on his right side, put his left arm over his wife, and held her throughout the night, shielding her from the nightmares of a world past.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Michelle
Yesterday, another one died. It was a common thing in the child center, nothing to be alarmed about, but still…another one died. She had been around children her entire life, seeing them, playing with them, sometimes feeding them from a bottle. It was very painful to watch a child lie in a baby bed and die…alone. The idea was for the children to learn to thrive on their own, but in some cases, there were the unfortunate souls who couldn’t find the will to live.
For Michelle, it was easy to handpick the infants that would become candidates to pass away in the first few revolutions of life. They were frequently undersized, had issues latching on to bottle nipples, and had very little going on in their brains.
Not that you could see inside of their brains, but it was all in the eyes for Michelle. She could see the cogs moving through the eyes—excitement for life, a hunger to make a connection. The strong ones in infancy powered through that lack of connection. They were told the babies passed away for other reasons. Complications during birth, or some type of syndrome they wouldn’t understand because they were just children themselves, but she thought there was more to it than that. She thought they were being rushed through a crucial point of any human’s life. She had no idea how she made it this far without a decent amount of human interaction. She was not without her issues though.
There were watchers that stayed in the nursery at all times, coordinating schedules every few hours to fill any holes. For the most part they were there to flip the children from their backs to their bellies periodically through the day, make sure their feeding tubes were connected, change diapers, and perform any kind of resuscitation if needed. All too often it was needed. The nursery was always loud for the first few months of an infant’s life; they cried, reached out for love—then eventually they stopped crying, almost as if they accepted that no one was coming.
Michelle couldn’t remember how many times she woke up to a child being wrapped in a black plastic bag and taken out of the child center. They were taught not to regard the passing of human life as a negative, something about their energy returning back from whence it came. It was sad though, and sometimes she would cry at night about it. In the Old World, a mother would breastfeed her babies, but now they had other ways, more sufficient and safer ways, to nourish infants. Each baby bed had a device that carried a tube from the wall. Michelle assumed the milk was some type of formula. Breastfeeding was said to become an issue for infants because it promoted reliance on the mother, and it was unsafe in the way that the adult female could pass off diseases post-birth to the child.
This she would not miss so much about the child center. She would miss her friends though, her family, all that she had ever known. She would now have the chance to move into a pod and begin learning about the world outside of the Palace, but she wasn’t sure she was ready for that. The thought of leaving still saddened her, so she made sure that none of the watchers knew she was apprehensive about moving on to the next level. She got the feeling, they all got the intense feeling, that they were expected to be happy to leave here at age ten, running into adulthood with no fears or inhibitions.
Watchers were like teachers for the child center. Unlike teachers though, watchers did not interfere unless there was a chance of serious injury (though Michelle wondered about that sometimes). They brought food and clean clothes, collected the dirty clothes, and provided some teachings a few times a week, but it was all very fast and to the point. The children understood that the watchers were there to make sure things didn’t go wrong, and to keep them on the desired path.
This was a far cry from how children were lorded over in the Old World. The approach in the child center was to withdraw the coddling and allow children to figure things out by themselves or together. Like all things, this could go left—and it sometimes did—but even this was to be expected. Watchers often said to the children: “The biggest lie ever told is that everyone has a right to live. Those with the will and the know-how will inherit the earth.”
Michelle sat in a small bed, in a room of identical beds that looked exactly the same as her own. Same size, same bedding, even the colors. About seven beds per room was how the sleeping areas were set up in the child center. The carpet was a plush cherry red, the walls canary yellow. The ceiling was blue, with glow-in-the-dark decals either drawn or pasted onto it. She didn’t know which, but all the children seemed to enjoy it at night.
Michelle had emotionally and mentally outgrown this place. She knew that, but it was all she knew nonetheless. There was a difference between aging out of an institution (for all intents and purposes, this was a learning institution) and being mentally ready to take the next challenge. She felt that she needed more time in this stage before moving on. The Order had government officials in roles that made the rules, and they knew human nature much better than she did, so she followed the rules. Michelle often felt like an oddball for not being ready to move on. That was her secret though. And if the watchers didn’t know this, all would be fine.
Her age group was in the community area of the center this morning. The ten-year-olds spent most waking hours there, learning to delegate tasks and work together. No one decided anything alone; everybody was in on every decision, and that was the way the watchers wanted things. They were taught that everyone is important and has a voice. Being nonviolent and instead using logic and hard work to accomplish things was the goal. Repeating the ways of people before the sickness was a sure way to repeat the events of the sickness in the future. They were given a second chance to try this all over again, and the governments of the world would make sure they did things right this time around. Most times, they fell short of this goal, but that was to be expected. A certain amount of fighting human nature went into the team building and distribution of labor portions. To Michelle, it almost felt natural for some of the kids to be
confrontational, or to want to be the leader.
Michelle stood up and straightened the wrinkles on her perfectly made bed. She had been in a nervous repetition of making the bed, sitting on it, smoothing it back out, and sitting on it again. She was nervous and unsure about the meeting.
What if I don’t end up on a floor with anyone I know from the child center? She scared herself with thoughts of being alone up there. She should not care though; she should simply move to the next level and begin learning. But she did care. How could she not?
The person she had connected with the most here was Morgan. Morgan had moved into the pods about half a year ago, and it had been hard for Michelle to deal with. You go ten straight years of seeing someone daily, learning with them, building with them, coming to rely on them both emotionally and mentally, then BOOM, they are gone, and you don’t speak anymore. Michelle was old enough to know there was an observation structure in the middle of the child center, and Michelle often wondered if Morgan had come down to see her and the others. Mostly her though.
She hoped that she ended up on the same floor as Morgan. Michelle missed her. Missed her smile, her touch, and the way she was always there when Michelle got scared or lonely. She enjoyed memories of her best friend, but at the same time, thinking of Morgan made her feel uneasy, unclean even. She liked many of the kids she grew up with, but with Morgan…she liked her differently. The thought of the way she actually cared for Morgan was troubling because it was a big mistake made by the people from before, and not to be repeated. Every time a decision came up in the child center, it was compared to similar decisions of the ones who brought upon the sickness.