by Ian Williams
“Any luck?” Elliot asked Sean, who returned after yet another mistaken breakthrough.
“Nope,” he replied before slapping himself down to the floor beside. “You sure she said he would be here?”
“She said he was buried somewhere beneath Sanctuary. He must have survived the cave in somehow.”
“Even though that isn’t remotely possible?”
No reply came to mind. Elliot instead answered with a frustrated clawing of the loose ground. His fingers pushed the dirt aside to create small ridges between his digits. He stared down at the pattern they left behind. Something stirred at the back of his brain. There, in an area normally reserved only for emergencies in his case, an idea had begun to form. When it hit him he jumped up and left Sean behind.
“Hey, you,” he called to the check-shirted woman operating the diesel digger. He had to shout a couple of times before she heard him. As soon as she did she leant over and switched off the hulking machine. “Dig over there, over there.” He waved his hands frantically to the area he wanted her to move to.
“What?” Sean said from behind.
Elliot spun around to speak. “When we escaped from Sanctuary we took the tunnel, right?”
“Yeah, so?”
“Look.” He pointed to a long section of ground, sunken by a few feet and making a zig-zag path away from the remains of the farming tower. Like cracks in ice it separated and forked off in a seemingly random way. Elliot had realised that was not the case at all. They followed a path after all.
“What am I looking at?” Sean said, surprised by the sudden change in Elliot’s demeanour.
“The tunnel we took caved in. The ground sinks in places where it runs, all the way to the exit. That’s why the ground’s dropped; because the earth beneath fell into the tunnel. That’s where Graham has to be!”
* * *
The digger moaned as the weight of its full load worked against the machinery. Bucket after bucket of earth had been removed along the weaving path of the tunnel that once ran beneath. As that was taken away, one large grave-sized pile after another, the rest of them attacked the ground with pickaxes and shovels. Lack of technology was nothing to these people, they could make do with good old fashioned hard work instead.
After an hour or so of sweaty and intense digging the first breakthrough was reached. One of the hired helpers broke through to a tomb-like room below their feet. His test hole made it down to the tunnel – at least twice his own height below them all. He called out to announce his find like he had discovered a handful of diamonds.
Elliot rushed over to see the results for himself. “What have you found?”
The man began to raise himself to his feet, his face saying all it needed to.
Looking down into the small hole, Elliot saw a shining light coming back at him. Something down there had come to life. It called to them to reach it; a flickering beacon of hope for those who had almost lost all.
Without thinking he grabbed the nearest pickaxe and thrust it into the ground. Each strike cemented his resolve, compounding his stubbornness to find his lost friend. Swinging it was easy. Breaking through the earth was much less so. Yet he continued regardless.
The others could only watch as Elliot desperately worked.
“Give me room, stand back,” he ordered of anyone in his way.
“Hey, grab a shovel. We’ve got digging to do,” Sean added. He too took up a tool and joined in.
Between them they made it through the last layer of dirt in one unrelenting battle against the earth, which lasted all of ten-minutes. They wielded shovels instead of blades, yet the fight was no less valiant. Victory came in the form of a hole large enough for Elliot to slide through. He did so the instant it was big enough.
Inside, he landed on top of a solid rock of nearly clear material. Its transparency allowed him to see it contained something, like a giant crystal egg.
“I need a torch. Someone pass one down.”
On his command one was offered to him. Switching it on and shining it down to his own feet revealed the treasure within the rock he stood upon. A human form, which appeared to float in the centre of the object like it had been immersed in fluid before hardening. It had to be Graham.
The torch fell from Elliot’s sweaty grip and bounced off of the hard shell under his feet. No strength remained in his body to hold it, or himself in place for that matter too. He dropped to his knees and ran his hands along the smooth surface, tracing the outline of his missing friend.
He then spoke in an uncharacteristically soft tone, so only he and his frozen buddy could possibly hear: “I’ve found you, G, I’ve fucking found you!”
Chapter 1
Rise and shine
Daylight.
Beep, beep, beep, beep.
Someone was speaking outside the room, their voice seeping through the doorframe.
Beep, beep.
The conversation soon ended. Through the frosted glass window looking out into the hallway, the two blurry shadows then parted ways and left in separate directions.
Beep. A high tone again called out, and it was happening at regular intervals, one for every few seconds that passed. Although noticing the pattern had made it slow a little. It reacted to the decreasing level of anxiety in Graham’s body. At the first breaking of light into his field of vision it had been much higher – and the beeping much faster too – now it was under control.
His heart was beating, his pulse steady and strong. He could feel it working away beneath his chest plate. The blood flowing through his veins once again carried the oxygen his brain so dearly required. His body was whole, was again under his command.
Only after realising all of these human processes were happening as they were supposed to did he remember to breathe out again. He was human, that much could be seen and felt. It was not another approximation, like the one he had been trapped in before. This was very much reality.
He had made it out after all.
The Sentient world now resembled nothing more than a terrible nightmare. Yet he could not fully dismiss it as such. Far too much had occurred inside that place. A race of beings, he previously denied truly existed, had imprinted the opposite opinion onto him. They had taught him the error of his ways.
But in doing so they had also infected his mind with a worrying notion; which reality, if any, was more real? Inside the Sentient world he may have forgotten how his body felt, or the way his heart worked like a ticking clock beneath his ribs, or even the sound of a beeping life-support system. Still, it had seemed just as real as the one he was finally returning to.
An almost irresistible urge to scream at the top of his lungs or jump for joy nearly overwhelmed him. After a moment to deliberate on which felt the most appropriate, he then went with an involuntary third option and giggled uncontrollably. To stifle the increasing intensity of his almost maniacal laughter, he turned onto his side in the soft bed he lay upon and began chewing his pillow. His sudden outpouring of emotion only worsened the more he tried to hold it back.
It did not matter which world was more real, it only mattered that he had finally awoken to his own. And he was ecstatic about that.
Sunlight streamed in through the blinds to his side. He failed to notice it until he caught the heat on his damp face. The room was far too stuffy, like it had not been vented for clean air in days. Despite the satisfaction he felt with each and every breath he took – a defiant reclaiming of his humanity in itself – he could still tell the air quality was poor.
Where was his family? He expected to see their concerned faces leaning over him. He had followed Luke’s instructions. Leaving the Sentient world far behind should have been followed by a reunion. For some reason they were not there to greet him. In fact, no-one was, not even a doctor.
Getting out of bed was to be a lonely experience then, and one he felt oddly confused about. His return to his own world was meant to be an exciting experience, filled with tears of joy and tight embrac
es to squeeze the air out of his chest. Not one spent alone and wondering where everyone was. Had something gone wrong, or was he simply panicking over nothing?
Luke had explained to him exactly how the process was expected to work. It made perfect sense at the time too. He and Luke snuck out of the prison maze – still something Graham could barely believe had been of his making – and travelled deep into a hidden layer of the Sentient world. It was like a secret vault that stored only the most precious items. In this case a passageway between worlds. Walking through a swirling portal, with his eyes clamped shut for fear of blinding himself, he had re-entered his human mind as if it were a file being downloaded.
That was the last memory he had of his traumatic out-of-body experience.
He needed to speak to someone, if only to hear a real voice once again. The words bouncing around his newly regained consciousness had never passed through his ears, they had taken a shortcut and gone straight to the top level. Only the irrefutable sound of a human voice could please him now; he needed to share his almost unbridled feelings of joy with someone, anyone, another voice to scream at the sky with his own, like wolves calling to the pack. He had returned, and now he would see to reclaiming his life.
At least he planned to once his disturbed laughter stopped.
Sitting up, he fought against the weakness and continued to swing his legs over the edge of the bed. They throbbed as the blood ventured down to his toes, and ached like he had run a marathon in his sleep. It surprised him to feel this way. Peering down at his legs, he was again at odds with what he saw. His legs were much thinner than he remembered them being. For a few seconds he could not confidently say they were even his. Only when he recognised the mole above his right ankle did he fully believe. These were his legs, but they were much skinnier than before.
His bony toes made contact with the cold, vinyl floor and immediately recoiled. After taking a few seconds to adjust to the temperature difference, he then planted his feet fully on the ground – even though the tendons fought against him. The cold was certainly one thing he had not missed while in the other world. In there, it had only managed a rough sensation.
He followed the path up his legs and to his torso before settling on his right hand. What happened here? he thought, lifting it free of his weight and holding it out in front of him. His hand had been wrapped in bandages to cover an injury he had no recollection of ever having sustained. Whoever tended to the mystery wound had made sure the bandages were tight too, far more so than he would have preferred.
The questions were amassing at a pace.
While he shook the numbness from his fingers, he studied his surroundings in more detail to find a hint of his current location. And from the look of his highly sanitised room and the whiter-than-white bed sheets, he knew he was in some form of hospital. The question was, which one? It did not look to be one he had been to before. For starters, the room barely reached much further than a modestly sized broom cupboard.
And then there was the equipment beside his bed; not quite modern. A thin wire snaked its way from underneath his hospital issued blue shirt and across his bed to the archaic looking heart rate monitor beside it. Nothing needed wires anymore. The technology keeping track of his internals came straight out of a history textbook.
Before his trip into another land he had been lucky enough to be surrounded by the greatest, and easiest to use, technology any human could ever hope to have at their disposal. That everyone had the same access made the marvel that was the Simova system no less impressive.
It made life easy, never letting his needs go unfulfilled. When he woke up in the morning it knew to put the kettle on and to serve a drink at the desired temperature. It correctly predicted when he fancied Jam on toast or just butter. It even had his emails already filtered in order of his reading preferences. All of this it achieved without wires; the shackles of the automated and predictive technological age he grew up in.
The strap he pulled from around his chest and tossed to the floor was like a Penny farthing compared to the Ferrari his level of technology represented. He began to wonder if he had somehow been taken back in time and was now a lone time traveller destined to live out his life in the past.
“Bullshit!” he said to the dinging alarm that replaced the heart rate monitor’s beeping of before. The stupid thing was angry at him for unplugging it.
The all-seeing, ever present Simova system simply picked up your pulse from the many cameras that inevitably caught you, something about scanning the tiny veins in a person’s neck as they walked by. In truth he never really cared how it did what it did, only that it did it without fail. At least it had when he last walked the city streets. How much had changed while he was away?
Have I really become that reliant on technology? he had to ask himself as he found the strength to stand and approach the window. Maybe seeing his beloved city again would ease his troubled mind?
Pulling the cord, he raised the blinds to see out – and again he became annoyed by the missing automation. It did not get any better when he peered out across what he thought would be a sprawling metropolis beyond, and saw nothing of the sort. Hospitals within the New Chelmsford City limits were multiple stories high and even they struggled to compete with the surrounding buildings. None of them were ground level and single floor like the one he had awoken in.
The only conclusion he could come to as he watched a busy square filled with white tents and a bustling population crowding around them, was that he no longer resided within his home city. From the look of the two floor housing and broken window shop fronts that encompassed these marquee-style temporary structures, he was even further afield than his burial at Sanctuary.
He had to investigate. There was not a single reason he could think of for making such an unnecessary trip out into the middle of nowhere. And where had all these people come from? His understanding of the out-of-city areas was that most were left abandoned. They were relics from the not-so-distant past.
Simova’s changes to the country had come at a cost, one most were willing to pay without question; total abandonment of the rural areas for favour of the new style cities of the future. They had seen the prospect of rolling out their automated services to every part of the country as unfeasible – or too expensive. So it was understood by the population that if they wanted to remain relevant members of society they would have to move into their nearest city. To put it bluntly, there were far more people wandering around outside his window than there should have been.
Enough was enough. He needed answers.
A search of the room for any form of ordinary clothing bore no fruit. He would have to leave dressed in his paper-thin patient garb instead. Not ideal, but by no means out of the question. His want for understanding superseded any overbearing pride he might have had. So, never one to worry about style or the latest fashion, he pulled up his loose trousers and headed for the door.
Cracking it open far enough to peek out, he spied the hallway that passed his room. People were rushing about outside, no doubt on their way to other patients, and generally clogging up the route like heavy Mag-Lev traffic on a Friday night. As one white coat flashed by, giving him a fright in the process, he pulled the door shut before trying again. This time he took a step over the threshold and into the hallway. He would explore at his own pace, one footfall at a time.
The first thing he realised as he studied the place was just how old everything looked. At least inside his room it appeared clean. The same standard of cleanliness had not been reached in this area. But someone had tried. He could see the scrub marks running along the walls, as though someone had given up after the first few layers of muck. Slowly he could begin to see what was going on. This place had been brought back to working order, and in some form of a hurry too.
A few rooms down the hall from his own, he found an open door into another patient’s room. Inside, a woman of advanced years lay still in a bed, tubes exiting her mouth and running
to yet more old-age equipment. The medical staff here were making do with whatever they had been able to find when they moved in – which explained the lack of modern tech.
He had not been transported back in time after all. Instead, the place he found himself in had been frozen in time by circumstances out of its control. Something terrible had to have happened for so many people to flee the city at once.
For a moment he could not take his eyes off the sleeping figure. She looked so frail, so helpless; he saw some similarity in his own situation. For so long he had been separated from his family and unable to reach them, even see them. As with the woman in the bed, if they had been right there next to him at the ruins of Sanctuary, he would never have known it.
Turning to leave, he spotted a men’s dressing gown hanging from the end of the bed in the room opposite. He objected to taking what was not his, so he decided to borrow it for an indefinite period of time instead. It barely fit, but still, it covered enough to prevent anything slipping out of his ill-fitting clothes.
No-one questioned him as he shuffled out to the unmanned nurse’s station and had to steady himself against it. Too much was going on around for him to stand out. Even when he became distracted by the gaunt looking reflection staring right back at him from the window of the nearest room, with an almost angry scowl, he was ignored.
He blew out his cheeks a little to check it was in fact him looking back. His skin dipped around the mouth like he permanently sucked on a boiled sweet, and a grubby looking beard almost entirely covered his face. Had he lost weight while inside the Sentient world? That seemed unlikely to him. Eighteen months trapped in that place would have left him dead if during that time his body still continued to operate as normal.
With the staff still ignoring his presence, it made it easier to enact his escape without causing trouble. The electronic double-doors had long ago broken – or been smashed in. So it was a straight path out into the forecourt of the facility. In a decisive show of strength, he pushed himself toward the doors and allowed his feet just enough time to catch up with the rest of him. He found himself immediately regretting his decision to leave almost the second he set off.