by Ben Oliver
I crave it like a drug. I know the experience is not real, I know that it exists to pacify and distract my mind, but I need it.
The first part of the Sane Zone is the white expanse that goes on into infinity in all directions. An involuntary sigh escapes my lips as I can move again. It’s a strange feeling, knowing that I am still paralyzed, knowing that I am lying in my bed in my cell and yet being here, in this artificial reality.
All the scenarios in the Sane Zone begin with a memory. That memory can be simply a location that I recall vividly, or it can be a recollection of a day or an event. From there I can take it wherever I want. I don’t know how it works—if it’s nanobots that crawl into my brain, controlled hallucinogens and augmented reality, or some new kind of tech that I can’t even fathom—but it’s flawless.
Slowly, the white expanse around me begins to fade into color: dim gray at first and then luminous scribbles. It takes a few seconds, but I recognize this place as the ground floor of the Black Road Vertical, the mile-high tower block in which I used to live.
I stare in awe at the neon graffiti paint that lines the concrete walls: gang symbols and skate team logos, names and threats.
“There’s hundreds of them!” a voice calls from halfway up the concrete staircase, and the memory floods back to me.
I must be ten or eleven years old; Molly, my sister, is only eight or nine. We used to play here all the time, imagining that the staircase was our own spaceship in which we would battle armies of aliens who wanted to kill humans and mine the Earth for a precious mineral that we hadn’t even discovered yet.
I turn to face Molly, who holds both hands up as though gripping a steering column. Tears sting my eyes as I look at my sister the way she had been before Happy had ravaged the planet, before I had been imprisoned, before our parents had died, before everything.
In the real world, Molly had become a clone: a name given to addicts of a drug called Ebb. The last time I had seen her she was high, unconscious, emaciated. But here, in the past, in my resurrected memory, she was the young girl I used to know, my best friend.
The tight curls of her black hair bounce as she rocks with the movements of the imaginary spacecraft. The hand-me-down T-shirt (which used to belong to me) reaches her knees.
“Did you hear what I said?” she repeats, turning her head frantically toward me. “There’s hundreds of them. What do we do?”
I take a deep breath, fighting off the emotion of seeing her again, and I get into character. “Captain Molly,” I say, my voice coming out young and high-pitched, almost causing me to burst into fits of laughter. “I suggest we retreat; there’s simply too many of them.”
“Retreat?” Molly says, a grin forming on her face. “Luka, I don’t do running away. Charge the cannons.”
“Right away, Captain,” I reply, and move down two stairs to where the spaceship’s cannons are situated.
And then the ground floor of the Black Road Vertical begins to melt away, the Sane Zone works its weird magic, and we’re no longer just pretending to be mid-battle in outer space, we are in outer space.
The concrete staircase melds into the futuristic deck of our ship. Stars and planets dot the black sky through the enormous window in front of us. We appear to be just outside the orbit of a large green planet, and in front of us are hundreds of smaller ships.
“They’re almost in range,” Molly yells, pulling the steering column left, causing the entire ship to tilt.
I fumble with the cannons, winding them into position and pulling the levers that start the charge. “That means we’re almost in their range,” I point out.
“Let them try it,” Molly says, maneuvering the ship through the expanse of space. “Our firepower is too much for …”
Molly falls silent as an enormous mother ship appears over the horizon of the green planet.
“Okay,” Molly says, “now we run.”
* * *
The rest of the Sane Zone is spent in an epic chase through space. We travel at near light speed, warping time around us. We fight off attack ships, and use our cloaking device to infiltrate the mother ship.
For a while I had been waiting for Happy to turn against me and try to manipulate information out of me, but sometimes the Sane Zone is just the Sane Zone, used to keep our minds rational so that the Harvest can feed off our fear.
Too soon, Happy’s voice sounds and tells me that I have five minutes remaining in the Sane Zone. My heart sinks at this, knowing that I have to return once again to the vacuity of the Block.
Molly defeats the final alien, a nine-foot-high insectile monster with advanced weaponry.
I tell her that I love her and that I miss her and she tells me she misses me too.
And then she’s gone.
I’m glad that this was one of the occasions that Happy did not try to gather information from me; I’m glad this was simply a preservation of sanity, an illusion of freedom to keep me sane.
The world fades to white and then the white fades back into my cell. Once again I’m motionless and numb, lying on my bed with nothing but six hours of maddening loneliness and boredom ahead of me, and following that, the energy harvest.
It’s gotten harder to deal with since the escape attempt, since seeing Kina, since kissing her. Somehow that little spark of hope has left me broken. It hurts to accept that there is nothing as cruel as hope, and I should just let go of it altogether.
Today’s offering from the Sane Zone begins with a memory from the Loop.
It’s a Wednesday night, or technically 2 a.m. on a Thursday morning. Every week at this time Happy would shut the safety features down to run diagnostics and upgrades for three hours, during which time we were illegally released from our cells by Warden Wren Salter, the Alt girl I had been infatuated with since almost the first day I met her.
I count from one hundred down to zero with my head against the wall, allowing Harvey—my friend and fellow inmate—to hide. I know where he has hidden because it’s my memory: He is in Malachai’s cell, and in reality Malachai had found him first and yelled at him for knocking over his pile of comic books, but in the Sane Zone, when I enter Malachai’s cell, it shifts slowly into a jungle in which Harvey is hiding high in the trees, no longer needing the crutches that he relied on in life.
It makes me sad to see Harvey again. He was one of the first, maybe even the first, to be infected by Happy’s killer virus. He was turned into a Smiler, and he died falling from the dividing walls of the Loop’s outdoor yard while trying to attack Kina in his altered mental state.
After an adventure in the imagined jungle, running from enormous wildcats, avoiding poachers, and freeing trapped rhinos, I’m returned to the cell I never left and suffer six more hours of paralysis. After that I’m put into the energy harvest. And so it goes, on and on.
I don’t sleep in the Block; instead I go into a sort of fugue state where reality slips away. I think of it as sleep mode.
I’m wrenched out of sleep mode every day by the guards who drag me to the center of the room.
For twelve hours I fight against the hell of the harvest, feeling the sweat pour off me, feeling unparalleled terror, certain that I’m dying, that I’m falling, that I’m burning, choking, drowning.
And then, finally, it ends, and I’m put back into paralysis.
The Sane Zone begins. Today, a memory of my mother. Singing along with our favorite songs, neither of us able to carry a tune at all but not caring one bit. This memory turns into an enormous rock concert with a crowd of thousands.
And then it ends, and I enter sleep mode again.
Twelve hours of the harvest.
Six hours inside the Sane Zone: a memory of school friends jumping into the river on a summer day turns into a scuba diving adventure, exploring ancient shipwrecks and underwater caves.
Six hours of sleep mode.
The same routine …
Day after day …
It never ends.
The si
x hours after the Sane Zone ends, as I wait for the energy harvest to begin … those are the loneliest. If I can’t slip into sleep mode, if—for some reason—my cruel brain won’t switch off, I find myself in a world where time refuses to pass, where my fracturing mind replays the greatest horrors of my life: the boy falling from the roof of the Black Road Vertical; being dragged to the Loop; being almost eaten alive by rats in a train tunnel; being chased through the homeless villages by Smilers; the barbaric stays of execution known as Delays; the war in Midway Park.
The memories run on repeat in my mind. The more I beg them to stop, the more vivid they become, the more I begin to feel the teeth of the rats sinking into my skin, the panic in my heart as the Smilers closed in, the heartbreak as my friend Blue died in the mud.
These thoughts have been cycling for well over a day now. And when the Sane Zone begins, I know almost immediately that the nightmare isn’t over. Something isn’t right.
The white room fades back into my own cell in the Block. There is no needle stuck in me, no paralysis.
I sit up and face the cell door.
“What’s going on?” I whisper into the room, and my breath comes out in clouds of mist. It’s cold in here, ice cold.
My cell door creaks open and Mable slips into the room.
Mable had been the last inmate freed from the Loop. She had been eaten alive by rats in the Dark Train tunnels when I was unable to save her.
Mable walks slowly over to me and crouches into my field of vision.
“Luka,” she whispers, “why did you let me go into the tunnels?”
I want to reply, I want to tell her that I’m sorry, that I wish I had stopped her, but suddenly I can’t speak, suddenly I’m forced by the Sane Zone to silently watch.
“It hurt,” she says, and now lesions are beginning to appear on her arms, her neck, her face. “It hurt when they killed me.”
I see something bulging at her throat, something scrabbling beneath the surface, and then the blood-soaked snout of a tunnel rat pokes through.
“It hurt!” she screams. “It hurt when they bit into my skin, when they chewed my eyes out, when they burrowed into me. It hurt! It hurt!”
I want to scream. I want to look away. I can’t.
Mable’s cries turn into croaks as more open wounds crisscross over her body. And finally, as she collapses to the concrete floor of my cell, she disappears.
Even though I know this is a simulation, even though I know that this is just the Sane Zone, and in reality I’m still paralyzed, lying in this very bed in this very cell, I can feel my heart pounding in my chest.
I wait in the silence, hoping that there is no more.
What the hell was that? I think. What’s going on? Where are the memories? The adventures?
Maddox Fairfax blinks into existence before my eyes, leaning down into my face. The last time I had seen my old friend was here in this very cell. He was the first host, the first human that Happy had managed to upload itself into.
“Kill me, Luka. Kill me, please. You have to kill me, for god’s sake!” he screams into my face, the same words he had spoken to me when Happy had allowed the real Maddox to come up for air.
Maddox then turns to the wall and begins to beat his head against the hard concrete over and over again. I can’t see him, and even if the Sane Zone would allow me to turn my head, I wouldn’t watch. Bits of blood and brains and bone begin to cascade down through my field of vision.
He is replaced by Catherine and Chirrak, two young inmates from the Loop who died as Smilers after being experimented on by Happy. They used to chase each other around the prison when Wren let us out of our cells on Wednesday nights. They had crushes on each other but were too young, too immature to know how to say it out loud, so they resorted to playground games. Inside I’m smiling as I watch the kids run back and forth across my field of vision. And then, when Catherine drags Chirrak to the ground and begins clawing at his neck, tearing open veins with a frantic grin on her face, I realize that—in this vision—they are still Smilers, still trying to destroy each other.
These nightmare apparitions continue to come and go. Blue, Harvey, my dad. All of them distorted and frenzied, mocking and threatening. A parade of insanity sprung like a well from my own mind, broadcast before my eyes by the Sane Zone.
And then, finally, the cell door opens once again.
Oh god, I think, oh god, oh god, what is it this time?
My mother sits down on the floor in front of me. Her smile, her kind eyes, they stop time and for a second I feel happy.
No! I tell myself. Do not fall for it, do not let those bastards get to you.
My mom had been the first of the people I love to die. Killed by a disease my family couldn’t afford to even diagnose. Her body had been carried away in a black plastic sheet by a coffin drone.
Her hands begin to move, signing words to me.
I’m so sorry.
I feel tears coating my eyes. The paralysis lifts, and I’m able to move my hands to reply.
Sorry for what? I ask.
Everything. For leaving you alone, for all the pain you have faced, for all the people you have lost, she replies, her hands moving fast, her eyes never leaving me.
It’s not your fault, I reply. And I’m lost now, barely aware of how far I’ve fallen away from the knowledge that this isn’t real.
I hate them, Luka, for what they’ve done to you, for what they do to you day after day. They are cruel.
And the tears fall from my eyes now, spilling down my cheeks until I can taste the salt of them in my mouth. I don’t know how much more I can take, Mom.
She stands and throws her arms around me. I hold her tight, my body convulsing as I let all the pain of the years since I was imprisoned flow through me.
My mom gently pushes me back and signs again. I can make it go away, Luka. I can make them stop.
What do you mean? I ask.
The harvest, the paralyses, the vicious tricks they play; I can make it all stop. You’ll be a prisoner still, but they’ll leave you alone.
How?
Tell them, Luka; tell them where your friends are. Tell them where the Missing are. I know, I know—it’s not right, it’s not fair, it’s a horrible thing to have to do. But, Luka, in the long run it won’t make a difference. Happy will find them either way, so why shouldn’t you benefit? I love you so much and I can’t bear to see them take you apart like this.
I feel my hands begin to move into the shapes that would disclose the locations of Pod and Akimi and Igby and Pander. I see the eagerness in my mother’s eyes, and finally a voice far off inside me screams loud enough for me to hear. This is not real. My mother died three years ago. This is a projection generated by Happy to trick me.
Go away, I say with my hands.
Luka, my son, please … she replies, her hands moving slower now, sadness falling over her face.
Go away. You are not my mother.
And now it’s her turn to cry. I try to build a wall between us but the sight of my mom crying—even though I know it’s not real—crushes me.
I’m trying to protect you, she says.
You’re not real.
I love you.
You’re not real.
I love you.
I will never tell you where they are.
The vision of my mother stops crying and smiles. She opens her mouth and speaks aloud. “One day you will tell us, Luka Kane.”
“I’ll die before I tell you anything,” I reply.
“No. We will not allow that.”
“We’ll see.”
“We will.”
And with that, my mother is gone, fading out of existence once again. And for the next three or four hours, I sit there in the silence of a replica cell, and wait for the routine to begin once more.
I no longer want to simply let go of hope; I want to kill it, I want to burn it, I want to bury its ashes.
Ever since Happy tried to scare the locati
on of my friends out of me with the apparition of my mother, there has been no Sane Zone. I think it’s been four days, based on the guards’ shift pattern, but time no longer feels real. Hours stretch out into infinity, and the days never end.
I’m a few hours into today’s harvest when I feel my sanity begin to shift and slip. For a brief moment I’m certain that none of this is real. I’m certain that I died a thousand lifetimes ago and this is purgatory, a perpetual punishment for something unforgivable I did in life. The thought makes me laugh, a shrill, shrieking sound that rings out into the glass tube, surrounding me. I grip hold of reality and embrace the chaos and the anguish of the harvest, and then I ask myself why. Why? Just let yourself go.
I feel sad in this moment. Giving up on your sanity is giving up on who you are; it’s a unique kind of suicide.
I tell myself that if I haven’t lost my mind by the end of this harvest, then today is the day I let myself drown in the tube. I have thought about it many times, exhaling all the air from my body at the moment the tube fills up and then waiting for my lungs to reach breaking point. At that moment I’ll inhale the chemical-laced water and die.
Again, a burst of laughter slips from my mouth.
Forty-nine, I think. Forty-nine days is as long as I could survive in the Block.
My laughter subsides into bursts of giggles, sending strings of saliva against the clear glass. I watch the spit forming into the silhouette of an island, and then rolling into amorphous shapes as it falls slowly down the tube.
For a while my mind is nothing but panic as the harvest ramps up. I have flashes of moments in my life, vivid and bright.
And then the panic subsides and I’m left, drained and depleted, on the floor.