The Desolate Guardians (12 page)

Was I losing it? “Yes.”

I’ve been thinking about your situation. I
enjoy puzzles, and you’ve got the mother of all puzzles on your
hands. We're going to think you out of this situation.

"Alright…" For some reason, I actually
believed there was hope. He seemed sensible, and a fresh
perspective might see things I couldn't.

Let's start with the basics, then. Do you
have hands?

"What?"

Do you have hands? Simple question.

I looked down… at my outstretched hands,
fingers poised over my keyboard. "Yes."

Are you breathing?

I suddenly became aware of my own breathing
as my chest rose and fell.

What about your eyes? Are you blinking?

If I hadn't been before, I certainly was
after thinking about it. "Damnit, stop," I said, annoyed at
suddenly having all sorts of bodily functions brought to my
awareness.

So we can reasonably guess you're alive,
right?

I froze. "You think I might be dead?"

Well, no. From what you told me, that
mind-entity used a different word to describe you. In a way, it
specifically listed doomed and dead as things that you were
not.

"So I'm not dead…" Aware of them as I was, I
took a moment to widen my eyes with surprise. "And I'm not
doomed!"

Right. You're vwaal, whatever that is. If
you're not dead, then you're not a ghost, or a spirit, or some
other nonsense. If you're not doomed, there's still hope for you
yet, in some small amount. And you drew the attention of that
entity by thinking very loudly, so you've got a real mind.

"Of course I've got a mind," I responded,
typing the words out on my keyboard. I stretched my hands, suddenly
aware that they must be tired from my endless days of working.

I said a real mind,
my author contact
wrote.
I suspected, from the details of your situation, that you
might be an artificial intelligence. Possibly a backup system,
since you don't mention anything prior to a few weeks ago.

Still consciously aware of my body, I
swallowed uncomfortably. He thought I might be an artificial
intelligence? A computer? I blinked, and clenched my hands. I felt
floaty and disconnected at times, trapped here in the dark for so
long, but I knew I was alive. I
knew it.

Which brings me to my next question,
he continued.
How long have you been working there?

"Two or three years," I replied. "I remember
it well."

Right, that bright day of training.

I frowned.

Where do you live?

I looked down at my hands for a moment. "An
apartment on the west side."

Alright… hmm.

I waited for two minutes until his next
question arrived. I wondered why he was asking about
me
rather than my situation.

Here's one that might disturb you: what's
your name?

I laughed. "It's -"

My mouth hung in place, open at the end of
its last fading syllable.

I was worried this might be the case,
he wrote slowly.
It's not just the building, and your coworkers.
There's something wrong with you, too.
He paused again,
probably thinking.
Do you have a personnel file?

"Maybe," I said, struggling to remember my
own name. "But without my name, I wouldn't know who to look
for…"

Frustrating, isn't it? Perhaps by design.
Now there's one detail I've been hesitant to mention as yet. You're
not going to enjoy it.

"What is it? Tell me. I have to get out of
here."

Alright… it's the phones. You said there
were people screaming on the phones.

"Yes…"

We have a tendency, as people, to dehumanize
traumatizing things like that. I don't know how often I've read
stories where strange screaming is used as a background scary
detail. But, you know what? A scream requires a person behind it.
Someone conscious, awake, and in pain.

I let my face go slack as I realized the
truth of what he was saying.

I suspect you're not alone there at all. I
hate to say this, but your salvation may lie in the most basic of
all horror questions: who was phone?

I gave the message a long - and deserved -
dour look.

Then, I jumped up, and ran out of the server
room. Heading for one of the cubicle farms I hadn't destroyed in
one of my despairing rages, I brought a landline phone down from a
desk and sat in front of it, steeling myself. Alright, let's do
this…

The screaming began the instant the phone
left the hook.

Heart racing - I was so aware of it, I felt
it in my head - I lifted the phone to my ear. My ear, too, seemed
very vivid to me, running chill with the office air conditioning. I
began experiencing a drilling pain as I brought the screams close,
but I fought through the pain. "Hello?"

The screams changed tenor and tone, briefly,
as if the people in pain had heard me.

"
Hello?
" I shouted.

A choir of agonized shouts turned toward me,
in an aural sense, and I almost recoiled. "Shut up! Just shut up!"
I screamed back at them. "One at a time!"

I caught my breath as they went silent.

One voice - hollow, trembling, and pained -
asked a single word. "Heath?"

My entire head suddenly tingled with fire and
electricity. A flood of images and associations washed through me,
too much to comprehend, and I smiled haggardly at the cubicle
wall.

Heath. Heath, from I.T. - had the weeks
trapped here in the dark, alone, made me temporarily forget? "Yes,
it's me," I said into the phone, suddenly acutely aware that I'd
found something else very important. "What's going on?"

"Oh my God, oh my God," said an unknown woman
whose voice I thought I vaguely recognized. "You're still there. We
thought we'd lost you. Heath, where've you been?"

The first man's voice added to hers. "Heath!
Are you alright?"

"Am
I
alright?" I asked, growing
confused. "You're the ones screaming!"

A moment of silence echoed loudly between
us.

"He doesn't know," a teenage male voice said,
almost sadly.

"Where do you think you are, Heath?" asked a
wise, slow, and older voice.

A second woman commented, too, her voice
overlapping with the other speakers. "Heath, you have to wake
up."

That drilling pain from the screams had
lingered in my forehead, and now seemed to intensify, forcing me to
wince. That's what the eldest boy had said to me a few days ago:
Man, you gotta wake up. Somethin's wrong with you.
What was
I missing? What part of me remained shorn away, as if I lay
dreaming?

"We've been trapped like this for over a
year," the first male voice said again, his words evincing the
growing pain of that imprisonment. "Heath, you have to end
this."

I thought back to the piles I'd seen on the
security feeds. Why had the children battered them with weapons? It
was obvious, now that I thought about it: they were ensuring, out
of a sense of anything-goes precaution, that they would not be
attacked by zombies. Hadn't their protector - my only friend - told
them that zombies weren't real?

I supposed it might never have come up in
casual conversation.

I knew who the voices on the phone were.
"You're my coworkers."

"Yes."

I sat for a moment, just feeling my
breathing, before I said it aloud: "You're dead."

"Not quite," the man answered. "But we'd like
to be."

"We've all agreed," the first woman chimed
in, almost hopeful and relieved. "This is no existence."

I lolled my head back and stared up at the
ceiling. My disbelieving gaze followed the white square patterns
above. "You're vwaal…"

"Where did you hear that word?" the old male
voice snapped. "No matter. You have to snap out of whatever's wrong
with you, and end this. You have to kill us."

"No," I sobbed and laughed. "I'm alone. I'm
alone. I can save you. Maybe -"

"Nobody's coming, are they?" the second
female voice asked. "I've got my son here. There are children here,
trapped with us. It was
bring your kid to work day.
If God
exists, he's a bastard for this."

"Keep it together, Marjorie," the older male
said. "We've got to get Heath to kill us, or who knows how many
years we'll spend like this? The nuclear reactors could power this
place for centuries."

"God, why?
Why?
"

"Heath -"

"Mom, is that the guy?"

"Heath!"

I clamped my eyes shut as they began shouting
at me. "Tell me what's happening," I insisted, repeating my words
until they stopped clamoring.

Finally, the first male voice spoke to me
again. "Heath, where do you think you are?"

"I'm in a cubicle right now… I can't get out
of the building… and the whole place is underground…"

"I see. Is there a server room?"

"Yes, I work there."

"Good. You need to go there and look around.
I believe it will be behind your desk, on the wall. Please, hurry.
There is nothing more maddening and painful than being awake,
aware, and helpless every single second of every single day."

I lowered the phone back into place, my eyes
functioning, but my gaze unseeing. Blankly, I got up and walked
back to the server room. I moved through the server stacks,
enjoying the breezes from their fans on my skin. I approached my
desk, but did not sit. Instead, I looked at the wall.

It was right there - it had been there the
whole time. I'd been aware of the poster on my wall, but never
looked at it, never comprehended it. It had just… been there. There
were a dozen other posters in a dozen other cubicles and break
rooms I had never looked at, either.

READING THIS?
it asked.

If you're reading this poster, then
something has gone terribly wrong. Undoubtedly, you feel trapped,
scared, and/or confused. It's important that you calm down and
understand your situation.

First: provisions have been made for this
situation. You are not trapped here.

Second: you are not being held against your
will.

Third: you are not dead.

Proceed inside.

I felt weak as I read it, and nearly fell; I
caught myself with a hand to the wall. The smooth white paneling
felt cool to the touch. How many new sensations had I felt since
the author had made me aware of my body? So strange, that I'd been
oblivious to so much…

…including a door, apparently.

There was a door in the wall that I'd never
bothered to think about.

Right next to the poster sat a nondescript
white door.

Pushing through, I found myself in a vast
rectangular space designed to look much like a server room - except
this one was white - startlingly white, bright, and clean. Large
white cubes sat at regular intervals. Each had a monitor set into
the side, and I moved from one to the next, watching individuals I
began to recognize as coworkers as they moved around blank white
rooms much like the one I was moving through.

As I passed one, a haggard-looking man with a
foot-long peppered beard leapt up to the feed. His voice came in
quietly over the speaker. "Heath?"

I faced the monitor. "You can see me?"

"We've been screaming to try to get your
attention for months," he breathed, clutching the camera with an
overjoyed grin. "Or, at least, that's why we started…"

"What
is
this?" I asked.

"You don't know?" he asked, narrowing his
eyes. "How much do you remember?"

"Bits and pieces," I said, shaking my head.
"I feel… scrambled. I've been spending most of my time here alone,
coordinating local defenses against the Crushing Fist."

He stared at me for a moment, and, then, his
eyes softened. "I suppose that's an appropriate name for it." He
looked to his right. "Heath, we need you to turn us off."

"Why can't I just save you?" I asked,
frustrated to the point of near-crying.

"You always want to help. If all else fails,
you still keep going. That's why I knew we could count on you.
That's also why it'll be hard to accept this: we died, buddy. We
died over a year ago." He gave a long sigh. "We didn't have much
time when the shit hit the fan here, so we tried to upload our
consciousnesses to the system. I mean, it worked… but without
bodies, without admin rights, and with nobody coming back to save
us, we just managed to create our own private hell."

I frowned, full of heat and anger and
frustration and confusion and anguish. "But the poster says I'm not
dead…"

"You're not," he laughed. "By
we
I
meant
us.
The forty-eight of us that worked here. We're just
computer simulations, now. You're not like us."

I almost didn't want to accept the faint
sliver of hope growing inside me. "I'm still alive?"

"Of course, buddy. I sealed you off so you'd
be safe. Last thing I ever did… if I'm really me, that is."

I took a deep breath and stilled my heart.
"What do I do?"

"There's a switch at the back of the room. I
can almost see it from here. Maddening, right? Just turn it off.
The blue one. That'll kill the processing power for all of us.
We're probably eating up most of the system resources. Then… the
green and red switches are for you." He smiled sadly. "If you want
out."

I walked past them in a surreal fog, watching
each of my former coworkers rage, cry, and rock back and forth in
their blank prisons. Had they been here, screaming, the whole time?
Of course they had… and I'd been oblivious… for some reason…

I looked back.

They each watched me from their monitors,
praying, laughing, and cheering. I remembered each one, only now,
as if their faces had emerged from haze.

I flicked the blue switch.

The monitors went dark one by one, and the
room first got louder as exuberant shouts filled the air, and then
quieter, as those voices went dark.