Akropolis

by H C Edwards

Still wrangling with panic she closed her eyes tightly and took five deep breaths, each one lasting longer than the previous one, forcing her heart to slow the staccato pace that was making her nauseous.

  When she finally opened her eyelids the spots were almost gone and she was able to lift her head and look around the room. What she saw almost brought the panic back in full swing.

  There were bodies; everywhere bodies, at least a hundred of them, all lined up in neat rows and strapped onto gurneys with black goggles over their eyes, flashes of light emitting from the peripherals, wires and electrodes running from their chests and temples. They were staring unblinking up at the lights but their faces were far from passive. Rather, each person appeared to be experiencing some sort of emotion.

  This was where she had heard the voices. A girl with short cropped blonde hair next to her was pleading and crying, another person at the foot of her gurney was laughing. A boy who couldn’t have been more than twelve was whining about brushing his teeth.

  The voices meshed together into a drone like the buzzing of insects. Claire wanted to clamp her hands over her ears and block out the sound but she was still strapped down. Barely keeping the panic from resurfacing, she used her free arm and patted around her right armpit until she found the end of the Velcro strap across her chest. She ripped it off and popped up into a half-sitting position, tearing away the strap at waist level. The last one she shucked away from her legs.

  With her limbs free she proceeded to rip off the wires and electrodes that protruded from her chest underneath her Johnny gown and then yanked the ones at her temples, tearing out a few strands of hair in the process.

  Claire swung her legs off the gurney and jumped onto the floor, only to have her knees unexpectedly buckle beneath her, sending her sprawling painfully to the floor, smacking her jaw hard enough that it practically bounced.

  The spots of light she saw this time were of her own making. It took a while before she could fight off the faintness that threatened to leave her on the floor exposed. When she finally did, she looked around and found the monitor stand she had been hooked up to. She grasped it and pulled herself up far enough to get her legs beneath her and prop her elbow back on the gurney. Then with the assistance of both, she was able to wobble to her feet once again.

  You got this.

  Claire pushed herself at arm’s length from the gurney and locked her knees. Once she was certain she could stand without assistance she let go of both props and slowly shuffled across the cold hard floor.

  Her first impulse was to reach out to the girl next to her. She was about fifteen years old or so, barely into her teens. It was her crying that Claire had heard first.

  “Wake up,” she hissed in a whisper, grasping the girl’s shoulder and giving it a not too gentle shake.

  The girl didn’t even blink, but she did continue pleading unintelligibly, dried streaks of tears like paint running from the corners of her eyes and to her ears.

  Claire grasped the strobe light goggles and pushed them aside on the hinge they were attached to. She put her face in front of the girl with both of her hands on either side of her cheeks.

  “Hey,” she said louder, smacking the girl lightly on the cheeks. “Hey, wake up. Wake up! Do you hear me?”

  She had a feeling she could have screamed in the girl’s face for all the good it would have done.

  What the hell is going on here?

  This was not the room she had been in when she first went under, and judging from the emaciated form of her legs and the weakness in her knees, this was not the short spell of unconsciousness she had been assured of in the first place. Either something had gone wrong or she had been lied to, and judging by the number of people in the room with her she was almost certain it was the latter.

  Claire stood up, releasing the girl who continued to stare unblinking at the ceiling and mumbling to someone who wasn’t there. She grasped the monitor the girl was attached to and pulled it closer.

  This can’t be right.

  The girl’s vitals were being monitored but by only half the screen. The other half was a direct network traffic monitor of the Cloud, which made no sense at all. They were supposed to be sedated for the vaccinations and for the couple of days it would take for the genome splicing to take place. If Claire was reading the interface correctly, it appeared as if the young girl was in the Cloud and that was-

  “Impossible,” she muttered.

  The Cloud was a storage facility. It housed the profiles of all the citizens of Akropolis who chose to be a part of the reviving process. As far as Claire new, it was never meant to be interactive.

  The dreams…

  Those dreams were so vivid they had almost felt real.

  Maybe because they were actual memories, played back from your profile on the Cloud.

  How long had she been in there, re-living the parts of her life? Days seemed unlikely; weeks then, or even longer? Were there other rooms like this one where people slumbered on, talking and crying, whispering and shouting to friends and family who weren’t there, lost in a whirlwind of random memories that never stopped?

  This was all very wrong. Whatever was going on here had not been what she signed up for, and she doubted very much if any of the other people in this room did either. She needed to get out of here, find her grandfather. He’d put a stop to this…whatever the hell this was.

  Looking around the large room she spotted a door at the far end. Taking care, but with increasing confidence in her weak legs, Claire hobbled from gurney to gurney, doing her best to not lay hands on the people strapped down. She could hear their murmuring voices coming from all around her, an undercurrent of almost dread, as if what she was hearing were the disembodied spirits of the hosts hovering like an invisible cloud over their bodies, bemoaning the state they existed in.

  Keep it together. No freaking out.

  She began to repeat this in her head like a mantra, using the words like a shield against the rising anxiety she felt and the image that kept pushing forward of sorrowful spirits looking down upon their own unoccupied bodies.

  Claire was almost to the door when a young man made a loud inarticulate cry from a gurney right next to her. She jumped and let out a small gasp, falling backwards and crashing into another gurney. Her hands grasped for purchase lest she tumble to the floor again, and found the soft tangles of someone’s hair, who at that moment spoke out in a loud voice.

  This time Claire let out a small scream and pushed off and away, barely staying upright in her shock. She turned to see the source of the voice and saw that in her effort to maintain her balance, she had yanked a woman’s head to the side and away from the goggles.

  “Thank you,” the woman whispered with a tearfully grateful expression on her face.

  Claire felt a rushing sense of relief flow through her that almost made her faint. She regained her senses just in time to catch the woman’s next words.

  “It’s so beautiful…how did you know?”

  “What?” Claire replied, creeping closer while also feeling the euphoria of her relief drain away.

  “I promise to look at it every day,” the woman said, gaze faraway and unblinking.

  Claire felt like crying. Her mouth trembled and her face began to scrunch up.

  Stop that.

  It sounded suspiciously like her father’s voice.

  She choked the lump back down in her throat and wiped quickly across her eyes with the backs of her hands.

  Cry later. Get the hell out of this room first.

  Feet moved, shuffles at first, then with purposeful steps. Her heart was pounding hard when she finally passed the last gurney and reached out to the door, waving at the sensor.

  Nothing happened. She did it again then realized that there was no sensor at all. A laugh, sounding thin and reedy, escaped her lips as she reached over and pushed down on the door handle that protruded instead.

  A blast of cool air ruffled her hair and she almost fell across th
e threshold in her haste to escape the room. Once past the doorjamb and into a quiet but brightly-lit hallway, she fell back and let the weight of her body slam the door shut, closing her eyes against the glare.

  Claire let out a shuddering sigh of relief, the back of her head thumping against the door, the muscles in her neck feeling like two springs that had just given out. She wanted to slide down to the floor and rest. Her legs were trembling something fierce and the short escape across the room had winded her badly enough to birth a sharp stitch in her side.

  Maybe just a short rest…enough to catch her breath…

  Get moving before somebody finds you here.

  Her eyes snapped open and sent a quick glance in either direction down the hallway. To her left the corridor took a right after about twenty meters and also partitioned to half glass at the waist level. It increased her chances of being spotted but she had to see what was out there, get her bearings.

  She had been almost everywhere in Akropolis, even to the restricted areas. In continuing her parents’ work, she had been given access to all levels below the Pantheon, the growing fields, the inner laboratories, containment areas where sometimes potentially lethal experiments took place, and even to the engineering section where great machines like enslaved titans toiled to keep the city functioning properly. But what bothered her was she had never seen something so bleakly white or sterile as the room she had occupied just a few minutes before, or the straight lines of the hallway with edges sharp enough to cut.

  Everything in Akropolis, from the minutest detail to the grandest gesture, was sculpted and created as much for aesthetic purposes as it was for function. The founding fathers realized that human civilization would most likely have to spend a very long time within the Wall, and so had been thoughtful in their design, which was embraced and continued by all citizens.

  The place surrounding Claire; it was none of those things. It was bleak and barren, seeming to drain all color from the world. The dimensions were off in some way she couldn’t quite grasp, the long line of lights overhead alien in their brightness, the floor so shiny it produced a mirrored effect, but mottled and warped, an unsettling effect.

  She limped across to the other wall and put her shoulder against it as a prop, walking and sliding down the hallway to the glass. The closer she came to the window the slower her pace became, invisible weights tied to her ankles. Her conscious mind was rebelling, begging her to turn heel and run in the opposite direction or as fast as run as she could manage in her state. But still she inched inexorably forward, little by little, until fingertips brushed the glass edge and she could lean over far enough to slip one eye past the wall.

  Claire saw a room…a really big room.

  The Confession

  He stood on the edge as he had done many times before, except unlike all those other times he waited in anticipation, this time he did so in desperation, hands stuffed in his pockets and glancing around every few seconds as if she would materialize out of thin air directly in front of him.

  It was three weeks to the day since last he’d seen or heard from her, but he remembered what she said about the last launch. If there was one place she could be it was here on the edge. She wouldn’t miss this unless she had no choice.

  The wind was calm this evening, the first time it had ever been so still out on the Edge, a baby’s breath of a breeze, just light enough to cool the sweat on his brow. The cloud coverage overhead was sparse, also another first. Beams of moonlight shone down between the breaks. It was beautiful in a way, and though he was filled with anxiety he did take time to soak it in and admire the sight. She would have expected him to, and even if she would never know it otherwise, he didn’t want to disappoint her.

  Quentin looked at his watch and realized that Claire would have been here by now if she had meant to, which meant that she wouldn’t or couldn’t.

  Thirty seconds.

  He turned his attention to the edge and counted down in his head. Sure enough almost to the second, a white crescent appeared in the desert landscape, though this one was of a different coordinate, at least a quarter mile to the east of the previous ones, and while the initial appearance was familiar Quentin quickly realized that there was something drastically different about this launch.

  The light was his first clue. The searing white was much larger than any previous times, the moon-shaped opening more than twice the size of the previous cylindrical openings. The rumbling in the ground was the second hint, a massive vibration that rattled the rocks at his feet. Then he heard it, a blaring alarm that echoed across the desert, a sound like the dying keel of an elephant. Red and yellow lights flashed out of the opening and a cloud of smoke jettisoned from the opening hundreds of feet into the air.

  Quentin couldn’t blink. It was like the first time Claire brought him to the edge to see a launch. The plumes of smoke rose high into the air as if it would never stop, cascading down and spilling out across the landscape like a massive entity with the intent of consuming all that lay before it. What erupted from the opening was more massive than he could have imagined, a behemoth of metal that grumbled and growled as if it regretted leaving the bowels of the earth.

  Up and up it rose, until when its engines finally showed fire it was the size of the tallest building in Akropolis save for the Pantheon.

  Quentin stared in awe as it shot past the cloud line, wondering if all in the city had been awoken by the noise and spectacle of what he was witnessing. Through the patches of open sky he could see the object as it shot towards the heavens, the rumbling diminishing until it matched the sound of a small flame flickering in the wind.

  He pondered, not for the first time, what purpose such things merited. What secrets did they carry into the skies? This mystery he was certain would never be answered, and though the curiosity was almost maddening, it paled in comparison to the consternation of Claire’s disappearance.

  The silence left behind was like a vacuum. What rushed in to fill the void was doubt, his insecurity, his fear. Where was she? What had happened to her?

  Before, when she wanted to meet she always sent a message. Their rendezvous were usually on the edges of the Grove or perhaps on the West Pier of the Bay, the library even.

  Three weeks had passed and she had yet to contact him. This was not exceptionally surprising as she had warned him he might not hear from her for a while, but she rarely went a week without sending him something at the least, a flippant text or a picture of her silhouetted against a familiar backdrop, a brief video message of her telling him how boring she found the required reading for her Lit class that day.

  Quentin had waited an obligatory week, then five days of another, and when he started to get an awful feeling in the pit of his stomach he ignored the voice inside his head that warranted caution and patience and began to search for her.

  He made a route and visited the few places they had been to together, at first only in the mornings and afternoons so as not to miss his classes, but after a couple of days he had given up the pretense of paying attention to vapid lectures on display screens and stopped attending altogether. These last four days he had spent making the circuit of their meetings over and over again, all throughout the day and into the evenings, dancing close to curfew each night.

  First it was the Grove, being the closest to his house, then the West Pier at the Bay, the Outer Gardens at the Pantheon, and finally the Portis Reading Hall in the Akropolis library. If he started early enough he could make the circuit twice in one day, but he had a feeling it wouldn’t have mattered if he made it four times a day; she wouldn’t be at any of those places.

  That affirmation did little to deter his new routine, however, and so he kept walking that beat, twice a day, until this evening. On this evening he had known the Wall was his only destination.

  Quentin had exhausted not only his body and mind but nearly a month’s worth of transportation points as well, and though he had enough to make the circuit a few more days he k
new it wouldn’t matter. His last hope of seeing her had been the Wall, and with that hope squashed he was at least grateful to pay witness to the final launch. She would have wanted that.

  He closed his eyes for a moment and breathed deeply. When he opened them again he walked forward until he was mere inches from the edge of the drop off. Leaning over, he saw the blackness below staring back at him. It was the epitome of emptiness, a vast void of lost potential and empty promises, a world that would never be known again. Nothing else compared, except what he imagined death to be like.

  The house was quiet when Quentin walked in. He had wandered a few hours lost in thought before finally taking a transport home. The hour was late but still within curfew.

  He kicked his shoes to the side and peeled his jacket off, tossing it on the floor indifferently. There was a solemn tone he heard in his head. He reached up behind his ear and held down the slight indention until a three beep sound was heard.

  “Sia, I just want to be-“

  “Your father is waiting for you in the kitchen,” Sia responded quickly, interrupting his moment of self-pity.

  “Shit,” Quentin muttered.

  “I heard that,” his father’s deep voice bellowed from the kitchen.

  Quentin reached up and turned off his connection with Sia. He didn’t want an audience for the lecture that was coming, not that the program didn’t have other ways of listening in.

  “Hey, Dad,” Quentin said resignedly, poking his head around the corner of the living room and into the kitchen.

  His father, Griffin, sat at the kitchen table, arms folded across his chest. He was a little grey at the temples and more than a few wrinkles adorned the corners of his eyes and around his mouth, but he was the same man he was all those years ago when his mother had been alive, though now he sported a scruffy beard that never seemed to flow in less than four directions at once.

  “Have a seat,” his father said, pushing out a chair with his foot.

  Quentin did as instructed, not quite meeting his father’s eyes. He wasn’t afraid of the backlash per se. His father was not a violent man nor did he gravitate towards bouts of anger despite his son’s repeated attempts to flaunt the law. What worried Quentin was having to explain away his recent streak of truancy. His obsession was more than a little embarrassing and his actions genuinely shameful.