Darklandia (10 page)

9

Nyx pushed a button on the wall next to a door near the end of the corridor.

“Speak quickly,” a gruff female voice boomed through a speaker.

“Hispa, it’s Aaron.”

The door buzzed loudly before it slid open. I followed him inside the office where a slender woman with glimmering silver hair stood behind a desk manipulating something on a large touchscreen built into the wall. The door slid shut behind us, but the woman did not turn around. She pinched and swiped her fingers across the surface of the screen, which looked like the touchscreens used in the classrooms at Fillmore, only larger. She seemed to be working on some type of math problem that I couldn’t make any sense of.

“No progress on the algo?” Nyx said, pointing at a chair for me to take a seat.

“You’d think I was trying to solve the meaning of life,” Hispa replied. “This algorithm is tighter than a blue ribbon on Rapture Day.”

Nyx’s eyes flashed toward me as a shock of pain surged through my chest. “Hispa, I’m not alone,” he said, casting an apologetic look in my direction.

The woman turned around and fixed me with a puzzled expression. “Sera Fisk?” I looked back and forth between Nyx and Hispa before I nodded. “Beautiful! Nyx, why didn’t you tell me Sera was here. Oh, you must think I’m such a brute. Nyx, I should beat you properly for this.”

“You don’t have to beat him,” I said.

Hispa laughed heartily. I had never heard anyone laugh so hard in my life. “Oh, dear, I’m not really going to beat him,” she said, noticing the frightened look on my face. “Look at you, scared as a seal in a shark tank. I apologize. I hope you didn’t take any offense to that ribbon comment. What happened to your great-grandmother was a tragedy.”

This woman had absolutely no language filter. I found her negative words, spoken with such candor, both frightening and exhilarating. I immediately glanced around the ceiling for cameras.

“There are no cameras here,” Nyx said, as he took a seat in the chair next to me. “Hispa’s work for the Department of Felicity is a secret to everyone, even the angels. Hispa is supposed to be working on a new algorithm for the security cameras to pick up on code words used by rebels.”

“Rebels,” Hispa replied, with a huff. “At least, that’s what the bastards
think
I’m doing. If I had a drop of water for every lie I’ve fed those idiots, I’d have… well, I’d certainly be able to offer you a shower.” My eyes flitted toward the filth crusted beneath my fingernails and I tucked my hands between my legs. “Oh, don’t be ashamed. It’s not your fault.”

Now that the subject had been broached, I began to notice how dirty I looked compared to Nyx and Hispa, compared to everyone and everything in this building. How did they keep everything so clean?

Nyx reached across the distance between us and pulled my hand out of hiding. A chill passed over my skin as he held my hand up so we could both get a better view of the dirt under my fingernails. “It’s a horrible feeling the moment you realize you’ve been sleepwalking through life, isn’t it?”

“Sleepwalking?” I had never heard this word. It wasn’t possible to walk and sleep at the same time. Was it?

“Sleepwalkers: All the people out there who’ve been anesthetized with drugs and lies,” Hispa said, as she took a seat on the corner of her desk. “You can pity the sleepwalkers, you can even empathize with them, but don’t envy them. For the love of numbers, never envy the sleepwalkers; even the ones who wear clean clothing and shower every day. They’re just as dead as the rest of them.”

“I was a sleepwalker,” I said, realizing this is how they must have referred to me before I stopped drinking my ration the day before yesterday.

“Yes, and we’ve been waiting two years for you to open your eyes,” Nyx replied, as he placed my hand gently in my lap.

“Are you ready to walk amongst the living?” Hispa asked.

The lights in the office flickered with my resolve as Nyx and Hispa stared at me. Nothing about the past two days seemed real and according to Nyx this experience was only going to get more painful. I desperately wanted to know what had happened to my father. I wanted to know what happened to all those who had been purified.

“Sera, if you choose not to go any further we will understand,” Nyx began. “But we won’t be able protect you from the angels. They will come for you, just like your father.”

I thought of the look on my mother’s face as my father pitched his blue Felicity pin down the garbage chute. She didn’t appear upset or even shocked. The look on my mother’s face that day was one of pure, blissful ignorance; ignorance of the ramifications of what my father had done.

Ignorance.

That was a filter word we learned in school to describe the darklings and their inability to understand the principle of Felicity. That word belonged to them, the sleepwalkers.

“I want to see everything,” I said and Hispa wrapped her arms around my shoulders. I tried to swallow the painful lump in my throat. It was my first hug in more than two years.

After Nyx and Hispa spoke briefly about the mathematical algorithm on the touchscreen, while I composed myself in the corner of her office, he led me down the corridor again toward the elevator. The health specialists paid us no mind, which made me wonder how often Nyx brought people here for the “grand tour”.

“There is only one stop on our tour today,” Nyx said, as he stabbed the elevator call button. “Level 17.”

“What’s on Level 17?”

The doors slid open and I entered behind him.

“I’m going to show you what a purified human looks like,” he replied, as he punched the number seventeen.

My stomach twisted inside me as I imagined what I would find on Level 17: humans with half their heads missing.

“Are you all right?” Nyx asked, as the elevator came to a stop.

I nodded my head, trying to shake loose the gruesome image. “I’m fine,” I said, as we stepped out into yet another corridor.

“Okay, when you see what I’m about to show you, you’re not going to believe it, but I need you to promise me you won’t make a scene,” he said, as he guided me briskly toward an iron gate that blocked off the entrance to another corridor. “No matter how unbelievable it is, you cannot yell or scream. You have to stay quiet. Do you understand?”

I nodded as he scanned his sec-band and the blue flash was followed by the clack of the lock. The gate swung open and quickly shut behind us after we entered. We turned a corner onto another darker corridor, this one lined with dozens of doors. Nyx stopped at the first door on the right. He scanned his sec-band again and the door slid open. He placed his hand on the small of my back to usher me inside.

The door slid shut behind us closing us inside what appeared to be a grimy concrete prison cell with no bed or toilet. The cell was empty except for a single pod.

“I thought you were going to show me someone who’s been purified,” I said. “There’s no one here.”

“Have a seat,” he said, pointing at the open pod.

The once glossy white surface of the pod was smudged with dirt and other filth I didn’t want to speculate on. The fabric that covered the gel-cushioned seat, the armrests, and the leg-rests was frayed and worn thin. With no toilet in this cell, I didn’t want to imagine what kind of foul mishaps had occurred inside this pod.

“I’m not getting in there.”

“Then we’ll leave,” he said, and he immediately made for the door behind me.

“Wait.”

He stopped next to me and a strange feeling filled me; my skin tingled as I breathed his scent. That must be what soap smelled like. He gazed down at me and, though he was at most five inches taller than I, he was a giant in this room. He knew everything I wanted to know; yet, he refused to force this knowledge on me. This was my choice.

I sat in the pod and willed myself to ignore the musty scent as the gel cushion conformed to my torso. The neuro-gel was equipped with electrodes, which sent electrical impulses throughout my body to stimulate my tactile senses and gave the perception of movement.

“Remember what I told you: no panicking. This experience has been known to cause episodes.”

I nodded at his reminder and took a deep breath as he manually lowered the lid on the pod. The gel pads in the lid of the pod conformed to my arms and legs; swallowing me whole. My head was the only part of my body not encased in the neuro-gel. The headrest behind me pumped a steady flow of oxygen into the small space where my head was free to move in the blackness. Within seconds, the feed flickered around me, assaulting my eyes, and Darklandia came to life.

I was in my living room. I called out to my mother, but no one answered. I crossed the living room carpet, no longer wet from the wash, and entered the kitchen. A dirty glass sat on the counter next to the ration dispenser. I peeked inside the lavatory and found it empty. My grandmother’s bedroom was also empty. I crossed the living room again toward my mother’s bedroom. The door stood ajar a few inches. I pushed it inward slowly and found my mother standing in front of her mirror braiding my hair.

I had never seen myself inside Darklandia. I studied the smile on my face as my mother ran the brush through my hair and a memory came to me. My mother once pulled my braid so tight that my scalp bled. I didn’t notice until I found the blood stains on my pillow the next morning. The numbing agents in my rations had masked the pain.

I desperately wanted to share this memory with my other self. Instead, I watched in silence as her head jerked backward every time my mother tightened her braid. Her smile never faltered. My mother tied a blue ribbon around the dangling end of her braid and sent her away.

She bumped into me as she attempted to exit the bedroom, but she couldn’t see me. I moved out of the way as this other version of my virtual self exited the room with a bemused expression.

“Wake up!” I shouted at her, but she continued toward the kitchen as I followed closely behind.

She reached for the glass and I knocked it out of her hand. Her eyebrows crinkled together as she stared at the shattered glass on the kitchen floor then she opened the cupboard and reached for another glass.

This couldn’t be the past. My father and grandmother were both gone. This couldn’t be the present because the real me was inside the pod on Level 17. Unless, I wasn’t really inside the pod.

Then I remembered something Nyx said.
“I’m going to show you what a purified human looks like.”

He was showing me a purified human and the purified human was me.

10

The kitchen faded to black as the feed died and the pod hissed open. Nyx stared at me from across the cell as if he were waiting for me to explode into a fit of panic or disbelief.

I shook my head slowly at first then more vigorously. “That doesn’t make sense. If I’m purified, where is my father? Where are all the people who’ve been purified?”

“First of all, calm down.”

“Calm down! You’re telling me I’m purified! Do you think I’m stupid enough to believe that?”

Oh, no.
The episode was coming. I could feel it happening as my body flooded with an uncontrollable urge to scream and strike out, just like all the others who’d had episodes and ended up purified—no, not purified. What happened to them?

“Sera, before you can understand what I’ve just shown you, you need to understand what Darklandia is,” he continued calmly as I took deep breaths to mimic his composure. “Darklandia is
not
a way for you to ‘exorcise your darkest thoughts’ as they would have you believe. Darklandia is the hand of the government reaching inside your brain and rearranging your thoughts to suit their reality. Why do you think you’re forbidden from speaking about what happens inside Darklandia? Do you think it’s a coincidence that you see your father every single time you serve your hours, except today?”

“Are you saying my father was never purified?”

“Sera, the father you knew only exists as an observer inside a memory inside Darklandia, and that memory isn’t even accurate. That false memory only exists to remind you of what happens when you disobey the government.”

“Has my father been raptured?”

“Lose the filter, Sera. You can say killed,” he replied, obviously annoyed with my narrow-minded questions. “No, your father isn’t dead, but he may as well be. Your father is being kept on Level 16 with the other high-profile cases. Most people who are detained are kept on the other levels as lab rats. Only the ones like your father, the cases they label as ‘challenging’, are kept on Level 16.”

“Challenging? What are they
doing
to him?”

“Keep your voice down,” he said, but his face relaxed as he stepped forward and knelt in front of me. “I don’t know what they do on Level 16, but I know it’s not good. That’s why we need you. We need you to attempt to communicate with your father inside Darklandia. We need you to get the algorithm he worked so hard to get before he was detained. If we get that algorithm, we can wake everyone up.”

I stood from the pod and Nyx hung his head as he knelt in front of me. He wasn’t kidding. They really
were
waiting for me to wake up. They needed me to get this algorithm.