The Solution (5 page)

“What the hell?” Randal muttered.

On the oak desk t
here was a plate of T-bone steak, potatoes and broccoli waiting for him along with a tall glass of iced sweet tea. Christopher M walked into the doorway, peering at him with a mixed look of disgust and pity.

You better?” he asked
.

“I don’t know.”

“You should be. You’ve been doing this for three weeks. That’s plenty long. We took the chip out of your wrist. You didn’t feel anything, and if you did you sure don’t damn remember it, do you? No. Anyway, there’s some food. Eat it. It’s warm, just cooked. No, we didn’t poison it. It’s ok but I don’t know why their wasting steak on you, but whatever. Then Alex wants to see you.”

“I feel we
ak,” Randal said.

“Yeah you’r
e not the smartest, huh. Put some calories in your body. You’ll be all right. It’s warm. Suck it up.”

Christopher
M extended an arm to shake Randal’s, but Randal already had an aversion to the stocky man—it could have been his lopsided smirk or sardonic intonations, and Randal simply didn’t even know if he could trust these people. There was a positive, though, or it had the potential to be positive; Randal wasn’t certain yet. It could go either way. This whole ordeal would be the best or worst that had ever happened to him—Randal realized a part of him seemed reprogrammed. He felt things, such as Dysfunction Anger, Dysfunction Distrust, Dysfunction after Dysfunction more than he ever had with potency almost more alive than the room he stood in.

“What’s going to happen?” Randal said.

“Holy! You’ll starve if you don’t eat, brother. That’s what’ll happen. I’ll be back in a few. Hurry up. Take your time. I don’t care. Let’s just make sure you get to Alex.”

Christopher
M left. Randal sat down then ate and drank. The flavors, while on an ordinary day would have been bland, Randal found them to be phenomenal. He finished the whole plate by the time Christopher M came back in, and his stomach felt like it was going to pop it was so tight and full. There was a Function—a Function which, Randal recalled in a Solution doctrine not to become fanatical of—called Joy. Randal felt Joy at a full belly. And Joy there torture no longer scoured his veins any longer.   

“Let’s
boogie,” Christopher M said.

Randal followed him
out of the room and they walked down a corridor. Randal couldn’t help but to notice the cleanliness of the place, considering. He conjectured it to be an abandoned hotel or office building due to the plain, non-offensive paintjob and dirty, faux marble floor which was rather mangled in areas. Also the place smelled deserted and there was a hint of fustiness lingering but covered with a fresh lavender scent. The bottom line, Randal deduced, was that the facility was a dump that someone attempted to make pretty. The dump’s exact proximity within the City, if in the City at all, he was clueless and wasn’t sure it mattered. What was he going to do, realistically, he wondered, escape?

Randal and Christopher
M made their way to the end of the corridor and under the threshold which lead to a cavernous, dark lobby. The ceiling reached higher than Randal expected, and the floor space must have been roughly 2000 square feet. What interested him most was, near the middle of the lobby, a purplish red luminescence flickered like a digital spirit. He saw a chubby shadow of a man sitting behind the purplish glow; the glow, Randal then understood, emanated from a holocomputer—which he had seen Solution officials, City residents, and his boss at work use, but they were not always available to the nationwide public.

This chubby shadow
typed on the holoboard and a few other shadowed people stood near him. All of them studied the holocomputer’s monitor where delineations of the All’s schematics appeared and were accompanied by frequencies resembling a haywire cardiograph.

“Come on
,” Christopher M said to Randal, cutting his eyes. “You ain’t the first and you ain’t the last. It’s like ‘effin clockwork.” 

When the two made
it to the holocomputer, the shadows took on human features, revealing Alex Treaty as one along with the chubby man and another, feminine figure. Randal experienced the Dysfunction Nervous to the point of anxiety, but no one would notice. Randal kept it hidden, his body still. There was Plum Charlie, the chubby man behind the computer and a woman named Georgia—the same woman that chauffeured Randal from the alleyway and from death. Randal hardly saw Plum Charlie or Georgia as threats. His anxiety lessened.

“Here,
Mr. Treaty,” Christopher M said.

Alex t
urned away from the holocomputer, purplish glow highlighting his face, saying to Randal, “Fantastic. I see you’re well.”

“What makes you think that?”
Randal said.

“Because you’re still alive, for one.”
Alex grinned and his eyes brightened.

“Yeah.”

“Do you realize what’s happening?” Alex asked. He stepped closer, placing a hand gently on Randal’s shoulder. Randal shrugged the hand off and stared Alex dead in the eyes. Randal never had this degree of aggression building inside him. He wanted to hit something. Up until this point in time, he had been rather content with his life. What was wrong with coming home from work to a small (but neat) apartment and watching TV? Tending the fern? Reading a book? Absolutely nothing. To the contrary, Randal wrestled with, what was wrong with hearing voices in his head, being attacked by a nightmarish creature and held hostage by some outlandish people he’d never heard of telling him he’d been streaming something called the All and he had to go through a series of purgatory to withdrawal from it? Quite a bit.

“I don’
t think he does.” Georgia said. She had an athletic frame and long brown hair, big and deep brown eyes, Her face was square-shaped and her lips looked to be perpetually pouting. Randal liked the way that her right hip poked out, and her jeans and gray jacket. Her black boots. She looked surprisingly clean and well-kept considering the way she’d probably been living, Randal thought.

“Do you?” Georgia asked
.

Before answering
, Randal scanned the dark at the edges of the lobby. He saw outlines of around ten more people.

Randal answered
, “Not exactly.”

“
Well, Mr. Randal Markins, I’ll tell you the deal,” Georgia said, “Your life has just begun.”

Chapter 5

Expansion

For a lifetime Mr. Spires
studied the universe, time, and why the two work in such puzzling ways; and what, exactly, is time for that matter. The “what” factor had always been easier for Mr. Spires to discern, but the “why” was something else entirely. Because at this point in time, as he and two operatives escorted Elizabeth into the All’s entrance (a building that looked like an ordinary skyscraper from the exterior), Mr. Spires wondered why Elizabeth didn’t appear to him earlier in life. He’d searched for ones such as her since the State of Chaos, and found none with her potential on his own efforts—there were others like her, but he hadn’t been the Consulate to locate them. But, Mr. Spires finally did find her, and believed there’s a deep down, random perfection to it all.

All doorways will open. All will connect that’s supposed to connect. He had
run a psychological examination on Elizabeth, to insure the “Dysfunction Monsters” (as he and colleagues jested and called them) were in check, until his routine work culminated into what could be a fantastic discovery. But he must keep his Joy under control . . . Elizabeth could help change how everyone experiences reality, time—everything. She could lead the human race to unimaginative experiences beyond the reach of comprehension. It was possible she’d help open the doorway to the Ultimate Reality and expand the All’s scrutiny.

One of the
Solution operatives swiped his wrist over the wall-reader and opened the glass entrance doors. The building was spacious, black-and-white checkered marble floors and a single RMS stood to the side of lobby. The RMS was a bipedal, robotic conquest standing seven feet tall. It looked—no,
felt
—Elizabeth believed, as if it were made of the dark and twisted thoughts of men, from the recesses of the psyche no one wants to mention. Its metal was fashioned deep grey and purple code flashed in its chasse. This RMS had no visible weaponry, but it was lethal nevertheless—and she wondered what exactly its weapon might be. Mr. Spires had mentioned to her that RMS eat nightmares, dreams, and take away everything human.

A
tall and heartfelt operative with a bucket chin manned the desk. He saluted Mr. Spires and the operatives and let them go to the elevator. When doors slid shut, there was silence with the exception of the moving elevator. Elizabeth looked at the operatives, then to Mr. Spires. None of them had spoken much on the ride here, though Elizabeth had overheard someone call the smaller operative Tread and the big one Mix. She had asked only few questions, and there were few answers from Mr. Spires.

“Why
are we here?” Elizabeth said with her eyes flickering wonderment.

Mr. Spires said,
“You’re someone of great value. I mean you no harm, Elizabeth. But I think you understand that.”

She did and she didn’t.

The elevator ascended forty
stories then stopped. A few minutes after trekking through a labyrinthine series of the All’s corridors, passing a few offices guarded by armed RMS, Mr. Spires and the operatives guided Elizabeth down a long, isolated hallway. They came to a large mechanical doorway. Mr. Spires ran his wrist across the wall-reader, the door slid open and closed behind them. Room 432. The room was dim and compact, which made Elizabeth uneasy. Plump networks of cables, analyzers, medical apparatus, and monitors waited with a dreary expectance. These networks, Elizabeth noticed, were connected to a console in the backrest of a stainless steel chair that was loaded with data ports. It surely wasn’t the
Comfort Zone
.

“Wait, wait. What is this?”
she said.

The
n the smaller operative, Tread, grabbed her by the arm. For his height he had a powerful grip.   

Mr. Spires
, seeing this, darted his eyes downward as if to avoid the question and the potential for a situation. He walked to a near bare metal desk by the wall, grabbed and held up a blue hospital gown as gently as if he were picking up a baby and said, “Elizabeth, you’ll have to put this on.”

“Why?”

“Elizabeth, I advise you to cooperate,” Mr. Spires said grimly.

Tread
’s hold tightened around her bicep. The pressure of his grip hurt, and Elizabeth felt something like a temper igniting inside her. “I just want—”

“Elizabeth.”
Mr. Spires came closer to her, placing his weighty hands on her shoulders. She could see the graveness in his brown eyes and she began to understand the situation might be dire.

Mr. Spires said,
“I’ll tell you, but for now please just put—”

But
all this took a moment too long. The operatives shoved Mr. Spires away from Elizabeth and took control.

“
What’re you doing?” Don’t hurt her,” Mr. Spires yelled. “She came here on her own free will. No resistance. She just wants to know—”

“
That’s enough.” Tread said with a metallic voice, metallic because his larynx had been reconstructed a year ago due to a wound during the State of Chaos. With a black gun in his hand, Tread spun around and pointed it at Mr. Spires’ forehead. He recognized it to be a plasmagun, which would burn a violet-colored beam of energy through his skull and everything Mr. Spires knew and everything he was would be no more than fried pulp on the floor and a singed hole in his head. If the Ultimate Reality incorporated the discorporate, Mr. Spires would find out indefinitely (or wouldn’t know the difference at all) if he went against Tread’s will. Mr. Spires could only imagine that both this operative and the big one called Mix had more experience than the sun does at casting shadows. But why are they doing this? The Solution abhors violence, he thought.

“Stop
resisting,” Tread said, “We don’t want to hurt you.”

Mix
restrained Elizabeth. Both he and Tread stripped her naked and slid the blue hospital gown over her. Mix pushed her onto the chair and strapped her arms and legs down with nylon belts.

After the operative
s finished their work, Dr. Temple entered the room like a cool night breeze and commanded the operatives to exit, and, obeying with gratification, the operatives did with the exception of Mr. Spires.

“Dr. Temple, I want to—”

“Calm. Find your center, Mr. Spires,” Dr. Temple said as he raised his hand, a gesture relaying the message, ‘do not speak.’

Mr. Spires didn’t. He didn’t want anything bad to happen to Elizabeth, but he also knew his place. 

The doctor moved close enough for Elizabeth to smell his breath, which at first was sweet. He peered into her green eyes, as if searching for a deeper, more meaningful world behind them. 

“Hmm, anything change, Elizabeth?” Dr. Temple said, “What do you feel now?” His voice was soothing, like a lullaby almost or her favorite melody.