Limbo (The Last Humans Book 2) (13 page)

I
’m back
in the corridor, next to three measly green doors. I shudder at the thought of what the next Test scenario will bring.

“How much longer do I have to do this?” I look at the multitude of remaining doors on both sides. “How high does my score have to be?”

“So high it’s best you don’t think about it,” Phoe responds. “Let’s focus on the positive: since the designers didn’t expect anyone to get too high of a score, I suspect they didn’t plan enough unique scenarios either. That means that at some point, these Tests will repeat themselves.”

“Why can’t someone else get a super-high score?” I wonder. “As disgusting as that last scenario was, the rule of ‘always save the most people’ isn’t hard to figure out and mindlessly follow. I’m sure some Test takers did just that.”

“I don’t think you’ll just face moral dilemmas here,” Phoe says. “Just keep going and we’ll see.”

T
he next two
scenarios are also moral dilemmas. They deal with a lifeboat and aren’t as disgusting as the last scenario. After Phoe tells me what I have to do, I decide I can manage them myself. She claims these scenarios are also based on ancient moral dilemma classics, and I take her word for it.

The sixth scenario is something I recognize. It’s called the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and I choose ‘cooperation’ even before Phoe suggests that as the way to score the point.

When I enter the seventh door, things are a little different.

For one, I fully remember almost everything about myself, just not how I arrived here, in Instructor George’s class.

No one else is here except the two of us. There are three strange-looking doors at the front of the room.

“Find the door that leads out of here, and you can skip the next three Lectures, Theodore,” the Instructor says. “Go ahead, based on a hunch, which of these would you open? You can choose it now, but don’t open it yet. I will give you an option to change your choice.”

I point at the rightmost door.

“Here’s the twist,” Instructor George says. “I’m going to toss this coin.” He shows me the ancient artifact as though it’s the most natural thing for him to be holding. “If the coin lands on heads, I’ll open the middle door and show you if it’s your winning door. If so, you’re obviously out of luck.” He tosses the coin.

“It’s tails,” he announces while opening the leftmost door. Pointing at the red wall behind the door, he says, “This door is a losing choice, so it all comes down to this: Do you want to switch your choice from the rightmost door to the middle one? I will allow you to switch, if you so choose.”

I look at the two doors. No one is getting killed this time, which is good, but I don’t fully get the point of what’s going on. It’s a fifty-fifty proposition, and I might as well stick with the rightmost door, since I feel attached to it.

“No, Theo.” Phoe’s thought is disappointed. “Choose to switch.”

“I want to switch,” I tell Instructor George.

As suddenly as I utter those words, I return to the Test hallway.

The door I just went through is green, but I don’t understand why.

“Because the logical thing to do was switch to the door with the higher chance of being the winner,” Phoe explains.

“What are you talking about?” I object. “It was fifty-fifty either way.”

“No, it was one out of three for your first choice, but two out of three in the case of that middle door.”

I frown. “No, it wasn’t.”

“Trust me.” Phoe’s thought is amused. “It’s called the Monty Hall Problem, and you’re free to look it up in your leisure time, assuming such a thing will ever happen. Don’t beat yourself up for not understanding it. It’s famous for its counter-intuitiveness, and I suspect it’s problems like these that answer your earlier question about high scores. Many people would’ve gotten this wrong, and the Test would’ve ended.”

“Fine. I don’t want to argue. I’m getting tired of this, and I want it over with.”

“I’m sorry to break it to you, but it won’t be over for a very, very long time.” Phoe pauses, then thinks at me, “It’s not too late to quit.”

“No, we proceed as planned.” I walk confidently toward the next door.

The scenario is a moral dilemma again. It’s a twist on the first train situation I encountered. The single difference is that I remember living in the same house as the person I have to sacrifice. His name is John. This leads me to not want to flip the switch, but I do. In the next situation, it’s the train scenario again, but instead of John—a stranger I theoretically knew—I have to sacrifice Liam. Flipping the switch on my own is too hard, so I ask Phoe to take over my body.

The next few scenarios, according to Phoe, come from an ancient IQ test. In every case, I mentally tell her what I want to do, and she tells me if I’m wrong so I don’t fail the Test.

After what feels like hours, I gaze at the row of at least a hundred green doors. “Will I eventually get hungry or thirsty?” I ask Phoe.

“This place wasn’t designed to give you a chance to do these Tests long enough to feel those urges,” she responds. “In your special case, since I have access to the resources the Test allocated to emulate you, I can adjust things so you don’t feel hunger or thirst. It’s akin to how I was able to give you that watch.”

I look at my hand. At this point in the real world, Theo has finally gotten his head off the pillow, and his feet are on the floor. In other words, a few seconds have passed in the real world, even though I’ve been taking this Test for ages.

“That is why I advise you against looking at the watch in the future,” Phoe says. “In general, avoid any references to the passage of time. You’re going to be stuck in this Test for so long that it’s best you don’t pay close attention to what’s going on outside. I can make you alert, but even I can’t help you if you get fed up.”

“No looking at the watch, check,” I think and confidently walk to the next icy door.

This time, the logic-testing stuff merges with the moral dilemma scenarios. I’m presented doors, and opening them saves or kills people. After this, more of the previous Tests get mingled.

I take Test after Test for what feels like a week. Maybe it is a week. I don’t know because I refuse to look at my watch, as Phoe suggested.

On the next iteration, I’m faced with the original Trolley problem: five people on one side, a single person on the other, and a switch.

“Looks like the Test has come full circle, like you predicted,” I think.

“Yes,” Phoe agrees tersely. “But—”

“Does this mean we’re almost done?”

“I knew that would be your next question. No, we are far from getting a high-enough score for a buffer overrun. I’m sorry. What’s worse is that I doubt I can convince you to quit.”

“What makes you so sure?” I ask, knowing full well she’s right.

“I could say it was your answers during the sunken costs scenario, but really, it’s because I can read your stubborn mind.”

Instead of responding, I walk to the next door. The scenario is the one where I have to push a guy off the cliff.

After I do the full Test circle a few more times, I realize a month, maybe even a few months, have gone by since I last looked at the watch-Screen.

I allow myself the guilty action and look. Guard-Theo is walking outside, with Guards following him.

“What happened?” I think at Phoe. “Are they trying to catch us again?”

“I had to run an errand on the side,” Phoe explains. “They caught up with me afterwards. I’m about to have us jump on a disk. With your attitude toward heights, you might not want to look at the watch for a while.”

“I could live the rest of my life and be happy if I never, ever have to fly again,” I think at her. “I’ll focus on the Tests, but I’m beyond bored now.”

“We’re not even one percent done—”

“I won’t quit,” I think before she suggests it. “So let’s just go on.”

I do a series of at least a few hundred more Test cycles. Most of the time, Phoe has to intervene in the gruesome scenarios like she did before, but when it comes to logic-leaning Tests, since I learned all the answers, I do them on my own.

After I push the guy off the cliff again and get back to the corridor, I think at Phoe, “I don’t want to see that hospital room again. Can you take over my mind from here?”

“I can, but it would be safer to—”

“I think it’s worth the risk,” I think wearily. “You took over for me so many times already, and nothing happened. I’m just so—”

Phoe must do her takeover thing, because my mind blanks, and I’m standing next to a green door.

“Wow, that was so much easier.” I grin. “Can you please, pretty please, do a bunch more? If I experience another—”

“Fine,” Phoe thinks before I get the chance to finish, and I black out again.

When I come to, I’m standing next to another green door.

I look to my left and have to rub my eyes in amazement. The row of green doors reaches the horizon, same as the ice ones on my right.

“How many Tests did you take without giving me back control?” I ask Phoe gratefully.

“Too many,” she answers sullenly. I expect her to ask if I want to quit, but she doesn’t.

“Can you do that again? Pretty please, with sugar on—”

My mind goes dark again.

This time I come to on the cliff. The giant guy is there, so I assume I’m about to hear the train and the screams.

“Figured you’d want to do the honors.” Phoe’s thought sounds gleeful. “This is the last scenario. Once you push him down, the score will finally reach the number we need. From there, I’ll take care of the rest.”

I feel a huge wave of gratitude toward Phoe for sparing me the need to do these Tests for the months or years I had left. I didn’t want to admit to myself how much I wanted this ordeal over.

On a whim, I raise the watch-Screen to my face, wondering what I’m about to return to, and my insides turn to jelly.

The real-world me is falling. Guard-Theo is frozen in the middle of clutching the disk to his chest as he plummets into the forest.

“It’s all under control.” Phoe’s thought enters my mind defensively. “I warned you about looking at that damn Screen.”

“You mean I’ll fall to my death after all this?” I can’t help but subvocalize. “Is that what you mean by ‘under control’?”

“There were Guards chasing your body, so that maneuver couldn’t be avoided. As soon as the Test is over, you’ll experience me using your muscles to resolve the situation, or if you prefer, I can do what I did here: ride your body without you even being conscious at all. This way you’ll regain awareness only after I make sure you don’t hit the ground. Hell, I can have you come to
after
all the flying is over.”

“Or I might never come to at all,” I mumble. “Not if you get me killed.”

With effort, I tear my gaze away from the frightening image on the watch-Screen, and at that moment, something catches my attention.

It’s the very familiar back of the about-to-be-pushed-off-a-cliff guy. Unlike the thousands of previous times we’ve gone through this scenario, he’s acting differently. The giant is turning toward me.

Shocked, I stare at his front. It looks like it’s made out of molten clay—assuming someone used that material to create a monster from a nightmare.

As I blink at him uncomprehendingly, the creature points a giant finger at me and opens his ginormous maw.

I half-expect projectiles to launch at me from the gaping hole of his mouth, but instead, I hear an ear-shattering voice say, “Intruder.”

His throat clearly wasn’t made for talking, which explains the laconic message.

“Fuck,” Phoe says out loud. “It’s the anti-intrusion algorithm.”

“
I
t’s my fault
,” I think frantically. “I shouldn’t have subvocalized earlier. And I should’ve been conscious for the Tests instead of—”

“Shut up and focus on this threat,” Phoe says, her tone clipped.

The giant steps toward me. His movements shake the ground under my feet.

I take two uncertain steps back, then a few more. When my back is to the edge of the cliff, I hear the train below.

“Shit,” I think at Phoe. “When the train hits those five people, I’ll fail this scenario, and all this work will be for nothing.”

“We’ll start with that then,” Phoe responds mentally. “Turn around and jump.”

Before I even get a chance to express my incredulity at that command, I turn around and jump. For a second, while I’m weightless, I’m uncertain if I jumped because Phoe took over my will or because I now trust her to the point of insanity. Before I fall, a disk materializes under my feet. My shoes transform into the white boots of a Guard, and I connect with the disk. Looks like Phoe wants to make sure I’m magnetically attached to the disk to allow for crazier flight paths.

“I can give you things you encountered in the past,” Phoe explains as I whoosh down, heading toward the screaming people. “Like how I gave you the watch.”

I do my best not to dwell on the flight down or that the real-world me is actually in a worse situation than I am here, and look back toward the top of the cliff.

Instantly, I wish I hadn’t.

The giant is flying behind me. His disk is a copy of mine, but given his size, I wonder if it would be able to carry him in the real world.

Looking forward—or down, if I wanted to be a stickler—I note that the ground is approaching faster than I anticipated. I tense, cold sweat sliding down my back. When we’re about six feet from crashing into the railroad tracks, I hear a roar to my right.

I turn toward the sound, thinking my giant pursuer has already landed, but it’s worse. The train is literally seconds away from steamrolling over us.

My heartbeat almost drowns out the rumble of the train. In what I assume are my last moments in the Test, I focus on our original targets: the five unfortunate people tied to the rails. I notice details about them that I hadn’t before, like how they’re tied together by the same thick rope.

“We’re jumping off,” Phoe informs me when the bottom of my disk is about two feet off the ground.

A bunch of actions happen so fast I have a hard time keeping up, even though I’m the one performing them. I put my fingers together to disable the magnet and jump off the disk. Then I grab the disk by its edge and rush toward the soon-to-be victims. I can’t help but notice the handle on the very bottom of the disk, which I didn’t see there before. The handle makes the disk look like an ancient shield.

“I improvised a little,” Phoe explains.

The train is getting closer.

Stopping next to the tied-up people, I manage to grab a couple of the loose pieces of rope binding them together and tie a tight knot around the shield’s handle.

The train is a leap away, and the noise is teeth shattering.

I hover the disk right above the five people, handle down. In a continuous motion, I jump on top of the disk, and as soon as my feet connect with it, I point at the sky.

With five people attached to its bottom, the disk doesn’t rocket upward as fast as it usually would, but it does move. Someone below me screams as the chimney of the engine whips by.

Behind me, I hear something that sounds like a mix between a maniacal laugh and a 9.0-magnitude earthquake.

I dare to glance back and see that the giant is about seventy feet away from us.

“I was hoping you would do that and you did.” His words sound like tectonic plates colliding. “Now you have no escape.”

To highlight his words, he raises his ginormous arms to the sky, and lighting strikes two inches away from my right shoulder.

“He might have a point,” Phoe whispers in my ear. “I was hoping that saving these people would register as a pass, but we missed a step: him getting killed. I bet the bastard didn’t know that until it happened, but—”

“So we kill him,” I think desperately. “That’ll get us out.”

“You can try,” the giant booms, and at the command of his arms, two giant tornados form in the distance. “But you
will
fail.”

To punctuate his words, he flamboyantly gestures at the tallest mountain, and its peak explodes in a savage, volcanic eruption, with lava, smoke, and debris spewing all around it. Some of the volcanic rock flies into the nearby tornadoes, changing their color from cloud white to murky black.

“He’s too powerful,
and
he can read my thoughts,” I scream at Phoe as I zoom away on my disk. “How can he read my thoughts?”

Before Phoe can answer, I look back. The giant figure is shimmering and warping as his disk closes in on us. My passengers scream below me, their heavy bulk slowing my disk.

“Oh no. He’s accessing the resources that the Test allocated to emulate you.” Phoe’s the most worried I’ve ever heard her. “He just performed a preliminary scan of your memories and is changing his shape in response.”

“I will be your worst nightmare,” a familiar voice shouts from behind me.

“And
I
will make you wish you were dead,” yells a different, yet also familiar voice.

I glance back again, and my stomach sinks. The giant is gone—or more accurately, a creature more savage and terrifying has replaced him. Its arms look like they’re made of burned meat, and it possesses two heads. The faces on these heads explain the familiar voices. One is Jeremiah’s white-haired visage, while the other wears the canine scowl of my second-least-favorite person in Oasis: Owen. Below the lesions and boils of that horribly twisted double neck, the being shimmers as though its body is made out of small particles that move about.

“Bugs,” Jeremiah says with malice that’s extreme even for a man who tortured me.

“Centipedes, maggots, locusts, bot flies,” Owen adds in his signature hyena voice—a voice now twisted with the same uncanny malevolence. “You name it, I’ve got it.”

“Shit. I knew this thing was buggy, but I didn’t expect it to manifest so literally,” Phoe says, her mental voice drowning out whatever else the Jeremiah-Owen thing might’ve said to frighten me. “This is bad, Theo. If I allow him to keep leveraging your resources, he’ll know your every move before you make it. He’ll use your worst fears against you, as he has already begun to do. We’ll lose in minutes, if not seconds.” Before I can completely panic, she says, “I want to do something, but I want you to be okay with it. Since part of him is inside your allotted resources, I can fight him there on an algorithmic level, but it would eat up my measly share of those same resources. That means you’ll have to fly away
and
figure out how to kill him on your own. My hope is that battling me on that second front will also limit his control over our surrounding environment.”

Pushing aside my panic, I study my nemesis as we streak across the sky. Jeremiah’s face looks concerned, proving that the creature can and did read my mind and knows what Phoe proposed. He waves his hands at me, and two things happen at once: the distant tornadoes move toward me at increasing speeds, and multi-armed creatures that look like a cross between snakes and spiders swarm the nearest ravine. Thousands upon thousands of the freaky things appear, each holding various weapons in their many appendages.

My breathing goes into hyper speed as I focus straight ahead. “It’s not a real choice, Phoe,” I manage to say out loud. “Do what you have to do. Just give me something to fight with before you disappear.”

Even before I’m done speaking, an object appears in my left hand—a sword that looks like a bolt.

“I guess I didn’t have to experience something for real for you to be able to grab it from my memory,” I think at Phoe, but she doesn’t reply. Her abstract battle with the anti-intrusion thing—Jeremiah-Owen—must’ve begun.

I peek back at my pursuer to see if there’s a discernible change. Owen’s face—the face I’m most familiar with—looks like it did long ago, when we were little, after Liam ripped out a huge chunk of the would-be bully’s hair. That expression, plus the fact he
isn’t
waving his arms to make new forces of nature appear, is a good sign.

Unfortunately, the tornadoes he manifested are getting closer, as is my terribly disgusting two-headed enemy. The people hanging from my disk scream again, and I realize I have to lighten my load to increase my speed.

Swerving, I fly toward the nearest ravine, ignoring the guttural screams of the snake-spider ‘people’ that Jeremiah-Owen created. To keep my passengers alive, I have to get within a reasonable range of the ravine before I drop them off.

That’s my first mistake, because even flying six feet above the snake-spiders’ heads is too low for
my
safety. With a whirl of slimy skin, a large snake-spider specimen jumps up, and a few of his smaller friends follow.

In a flash, I take in the abomination. It has eight limbs like a spider, with two hind ones that are longer, serving as makeshift legs, while the front six are more like arms. Its skin looks slimy like a snake’s, but its head makes it look like a typical member of the arachnid family. The creature grazes the side of the disk with his mandible, sparking the unpleasant sound of teeth against metal. The smaller half-breeds grab onto my passengers, whose voices are now hoarse from screaming.

“Don’t kill those five patsies,” Jeremiah’s head orders the snake-spider team from a distance. “That will let our guest escape.”

He’s right. If I get these five people killed, I’ll fail this Test, but at least I’ll be out of this mess. But what if failing this one scenario is all that’s required for the Test to kick me out completely? Then we’ll have accomplished nothing. Gritting my teeth, I sit down on the disk. With a careful swing, I use my sword to cut the rope connecting the cargo of scared people to my disk.

With one final ear-piercing cry, the people drop into the almost-caressing tentacles of the snake-spiders. The monsters pass the people along to one another, like the ancients did with stage divers at rock concerts. The five people inevitably make their way to the Jeremiah-Owen creature, which takes them by the rope and flies off. I assume he took them somewhere safe, because he doesn’t want the Test to end just yet.

I look down, assessing my next move, and realize the second reason that getting close to the ravine was a potentially fatal mistake.

Bows and arrows are among the many weapons the snake-spider monstrosities are wielding. They have their bows raised in my direction, and sunlight is glinting off a myriad of steel-tipped arrows.

“At least I looked,” I think at Phoe out of habit and, suppressing my fear of heights, I point my hand directly at the sky with a pumping motion.

As the disk propels me upward, I hear the whoosh of thousands of arrows. It’s as though a giant waterfall is chasing me. My harsh breathing drowns out the sound as I increase my speed with another spasmodic jerk of my hand.

Despite my whiplash-inducing velocity, the arrows are quicker. A hundred or so fly by me on every side, and I hear dozens of them hit the bottom of the disk with a loud metal-on-metal
thump
.

And just when I think I’m in the clear, pain sears through me.