Solipsis: Escape from the Comatorium (33 page)

Time
stands still.

This
is it.

Death.

What
is that?

Renee
looks down on a robot that lies face-down on the Comatorium floor.
Paul stands over this robot.

That's
me.

Renee
looks down at her own lifeless body from the ceiling.

Seth!

Renee
spots his refracted image floating in a series of vats. She flies
over to him, finding him sitting against a vat that has a crack,
leaking cerebro-spinal fluid that covers a whole side of the glass.
Seth's back is soaked in it. He holds his hands over his badly
bleeding stomach, head down, eyes closed, defeated, dying. His skin
grows pale. Renee hovers right over him. She looks carefully at his
wound.

Looks
like it hit his pancreas. He better get help soon.

Renee
feels a warmth on the back of her neck. She looks up at the
Comatorium ceiling. The dull metal, covering in condensation, begins
to glow read with heat. Renee feels an intense beam pulling her
upward. The ceiling grows perilously close, she tries to turn away,
but the indefatigable tractor beam has her.

No!

She
reaches the searing heat of the ceiling, but passes harmlessly
through it. She finds herself on the Simulation Floor, a layer of
dead bodies and robots covers the floor. She continues upward, to the
Animatron Floor, through an aisle of docking stations, now mostly
empty.

She
continues upward, through the Vivisection Floor, past the living
quarters, and up into the glass atrium that caps this ocean-going
pyramid.

The
atrium echos the pounding waves washing up ten meters up the glass. A
storm brews overhead. The splatter of heavy rain droplets echo from
the acres of glass walls. Renee continues upward, through the glass,
into the elements, pelted by the heavy rain and gusts of wind. She
sees a large boat docked at the south side of the platform. Two cult
members rush out of the dock and onto the boat, starting it up in a
hurry and zooming away into the stormy seas.

A
hole opens in the thick clouds. The brilliant sun sends a shower of
rays, splitting the slight hole wide open. Renee dries, her clothes
seem to turn into a warm blanket. She feels an intense joy, a deep
happiness that permeates her entire body, making her sub-consciously
smile. Everything feels just right.

“
Renee,”
A voice says from the light. The sun doesn't seem to be millions of
miles away, but very close, as if it is a ball of plasma just ten
kilometers high, growing larger and brighter, but not blinding.
“Renee,” the voice beckons. A hand emerges from the
yellow glowing plasma, offering her an open palm. “Come on in,
everything's going to be alright.”

Renee
slowly reaches out and takes the welcoming hand. Though she moves
slowly, she is not at all reticent, not worried or even caring about
where this might take her.

She
passes through a membrane and into the light.

“
We've
been waiting for you,” the voice says. Renee recognizes the
voice, but doesn't want to succumb to any trick of wishful thinking.
The face emerges from the glow. It's Percival.

“
Dad?”

“
It's
okay Renee, come on, this way, they're all waiting for you,”
Percival replies. He takes her hand and flies away, leading her into
a tunnel of light.

“
Aren't
you dead?” Renee says. “Am I dead?”

“
It's
okay Renee, don't be afraid, it's alright, everything's fine,”
he says.

“
I
know,” Renee says, offering no fight or struggle. The tunnel of
warm light beckons. “Is this what love feels like?”

Renee
wakes up in her bed. She doesn't open her eyes, but senses her body.
This is the real her, the avatar of her mind, the flesh-and-blood
Renee. She recognizes that she is in her own bed. A faint scent of
tulips wafts in through her cracked open window thanks to her
mother's garden just outside. This is the room she grew up in.

A
strange sound echos off the open door, coming from downstairs. It's
some kind of music. There's a high-pitched melody and through the
pillow she feels a rhythmic thumping. It's all very soothing,
synchronous, euphonic.

Renee
emerges from bed, her steps feel so light, automatic, almost like she
isn't in control of her legs, but she has faith that they will lead
her where she wants to go. She tiptoes down the stairs, finding
Medved, her mother, and her father sitting around the kitchen table.
Percival smokes his pipe and flips quickly through a newspaper.

“
Would
you stop?” Gwen asks.

“
What?”
Percival responds, feigning ignorance.

“
I'm
getting a breeze over here from your
reading
,”
Gwen replies sarcastically.

Medved
stirs a large mug of coffee he holds close to his chest. “Good
morning honey bear.”

“
Good
morning,” Renee says, sitting at her usual seat at the end of
the wooden table. A plate of strawberry pancakes awaits her. Butter
melts over the moist pancakes. A glass with warm syrup sits at the
ready. Even the plate radiates a warmth. She douses her pancakes with
syrup, then picks up the fork and cuts off a bite three pancakes
high.

“
What's
on the agenda for today?” Percival asks Renee.

“
What
agenda?” she says while chewing.

“
With
Patrick, what are you studying today?” Percival asks, looking
up from the back of the newspaper, over his reading glasses.

“
I'm
meeting Patrick?” Renee asks, surprised.

“
Why
don't you just look it up on there,” Medved points to the table
and a hidden display that is just wood at the moment.

“
I
know I can look it up, I want to talk about it with her,”
Percival replies. “Geez, what's with you two, trying to give me
a hard time this morning?”

“
It's
fun,” Gwen says with a chuckle.

“
So
what's on the agenda?” Percival says again.

Renee
looks to the table, below her plate. She flicks her fingers across
the grain and the display turns on, she finds her calendar.
“Astronomy,” Renee reads.

“
What
specifically?” Percival asks.

“
Kepler's
laws of planetary motion.”

“
Haven't
you done that one before?” Percival asks.

“
I
don't know. Maybe we did the beginner's one already,” Renee
responds.

“
Why
don't we cancel that and go sailing,” Percival asks. Gwen and
Medved nod in agreement. “Come on, it'll be fun, you can bring
Patrick along.”

“
Alright.”

Renee
lays out over the front edge of the sailboat as it skims along the
calm surface of the lake. The warm breeze counters the mist of cold
water. She looks back and sees her family, happy, enjoying a day on
the lake. It's all shattered in an instant. She plunges into the icy
water. The cold is debilitating, her body stiffens, her blood vessels
freeze over and harden, expanding beneath her skin. She sinks into
the lake. She tries to fight, but can barely move her arms and legs.
The water pushes her down faster and faster, the surface races away,
disappearing into the haze.

Renee
screams out, clawing at the water for a grip, she's drowning. A
purple glow emanates beneath her. The purple ball seems to have a
black hole at its center, pulling her into it like a drain. She
swirls around inside the purple tunnel, passing through a membrane.
She finds herself inside a purple-red orb. She is still submerged in
fluid, but not drowning, instead, suspended serenely, as if in utero.

She
presses her hands against the warm wall of the purple orb. It presses
back, it's tense, springy. She stares into the wall of the orb, it
seems at first to be a solid color, but on very close inspection, it
seems to contain very small, slight details. She has to focus her
eyes intently on one spot, then she sees motion, little circles and
squiggles, almost transparent shapes, shadows. If she moves her eyes
at all, they disappear. She focuses harder, finding that the
translucent shapes seem to be moving in strict lines, as if following
an invisible road, like ants marching home. The shapes don't move at
a constant speed, rather they rush ahead, then slow to a stop, then
rush ahead again, like they're in a traffic jam that moves in short
bursts.

Just
as the shapes finally become really visible, the purple background
fades to black and everything disappears. She panics, but within
moments, the background light returns faintly.

The
orb seems to twitch and move, revealing a bright opening by her feet.
Renee looks at the opening, a slit of light beams in, blinding her.

Renee
grabs the side of the slit and pulls herself through, coming out the
other side she finds herself in a brightly lit canyon, perched on a
cliff.

The
bright canyon dims and Renee can finally make out the detail. There's
a series of trenches, clearly man-made, in fact they look metallic,
more like bridges over some black darkness beyond.

A
giant, a man a kilometer tall, crashes to the canyon floor in
slow-motion. His impact sends a visible shock wave along the metal
bridges, which vibrate in tune with each other as the shock wave
passes.

The
scale suddenly changes, the immense becomes tiny, the giant becomes a
man. Renee is lying face down on the Comatorium floor, in her
flesh-bot animatron. She presses her hand weakly against the grated
floor, struggling mightily to raise herself. Paul lays face down, his
blood drips onto the metal panels a meter beneath them. He's been
shot.

Renee
looks left and right, her neck refuses to move up or down. She sees
nobody around. The bomb sits in the opened rubber panel, the clock
ticks:
15:10,
15:09, 15:08.

Somebody shot Paul. Somebody
saved her. But who? Seth is gravely wounded, unable to move. The
neural-net is down. Who is it? Who would help her? Foot steps
approach, clinking across the wet grated floor. The footsteps clearly
belong to an animatron, too metallic to be human. The feet approach.
Renee's glass eyes dart to the edge of her rubber eye sockets, but
her damaged neck can't raise her head. The feet stop right in front
of her, a hand reaches down and picks up the bomb.

Lazarus
lies frozen to the icy rocks. Mutilated and in pain, he writhes in
agony, clenching his teeth. In an instant he goes limp, his mouth
hangs open, he's still. The avatar has lost connection to the brain.
In
the real world, his brain has been utterly destroyed. His avatar
remains, floating over Solipsis.

Down
the remnants of the steep mountain, across the desert plain, under
the ring of orange suns, Gwen is trapped in a stockade. Blood seeps
through the cracks in her leathery skin, floating away in
zero-gravity. She's delirious. Her cracked lips mouth ghostly words
over and over. All around her, others are locked in place, suffering
extreme agony.

A
flash of light catches Gwen's eyes. She looks up through the wall of
burnt hair hanging in front of her face. The display system has
turned back on.