“So much cooler than movies,” Bennett stated with assurance.
“Without a doubt,” Amber agreed.
“Wait, people make mazes?” Brynn asked skeptically.
“Not like a physical maze to go into. It’s a virtual maze. You put these little brain receptor things on your head and it makes you feel like you’re in the maze.”
“But it’s all just in your head,” Bennett finished. “You can walk around in the maze, touch things, talk to people and everything but none of it’s real. You’re just sitting in a chair.”
“So it’s like a dream?” Brynn asked, finding the idea of a dream that didn’t make her want to jump off a cliff quite appealing.
“It’s better than a dream because someone else made it and they can make sure it doesn’t suck,” Amber clarified proudly.
“And it’s like a real maze? Are you supposed to find the center or what?” Ty asked.
“That’s what’s so great, they can be anything. Some people just make it look like you’re out in the wilderness and you have to follow broken tree branches or fight through fog until you get to a certain marker,” Amber said. “I can’t believe you guys really haven’t heard of these.”
“We’re not as up to date as you guys. Living off the grid will do that to you,” Brynn admitted. “We haven’t really had much time for fun out here.”
“We should totally do one tomorrow,” Bennett said excitedly. “Some of them are just plain old mazes where you’re looking for a way out, but most of them are like puzzle games. You have different things you have to find and turn on to get yourself out.”
“It actually requires strategy,” Amber agreed.
“How do you guys know so much about them if you’ve never done one?” Ty asked.
“We looked up all the fun things to do here on our train ride over,” Amber explained. “It was a long trip.”
“I think it sounds great,” Jonah said, his need for adventure and excitement never quite quelled.
“It would be great if we had time to do it,” Brynn said slowly. “But we need to try to get on that train tomorrow, right?”
She was trying to elicit a certain response from her friends. She could see that she was losing them to the idea of a fun-filled day in a maze when all she wanted to do was find the Worker train before she lost her nerve or before her continent exploded. Whichever came first.
“You two have turned her into a workaholic,” Amber said dryly to Ty and Jonah.
“Very funny,” Brynn shot back. “You guys can go ahead and spend the day in the city if you want. There’s always the chance that the Worker train won’t even be there or we’ll have complications getting on.”
“Yeah, right. There’s no way we’re not coming with you. You’d just better promise us we can do a maze when we get back,” Amber said.
“Deal,” Brynn agreed. “If we make it out of this alive, stop the planet from being destroyed, and manage to shut down A1, then you can go in a maze.”
“Sounds easy enough,” Amber said, giving Brynn’s hand a shake to seal the deal. “Bring it on.”
That night, Brynn fought to stay awake as she lay silently on the couch. Adding Amber and Bennett to the mix had shaken up the sleeping arrangements a bit but Brynn insisted that they refrain from ordering more beds or upgrading their room, not wanting to draw attention to their large group. Ty slept on the ground next to the couch, his soft calm breathing urging Brynn to sleep even as she tried desperately to keep her eyes open. The last thing Brynn needed right before boarding a Worker train was a head full of Eris doing horrible things to her. Nothing would shake her resolve faster.
Brynn rolled over on the couch and looked down at Ty’s peaceful form, jealous of how easily sleep came to him and how enjoyable his dreams must be. All of the worrying he did during the day had to wear him out enough to put him right to sleep at night, she thought. She wished silently that her sleep was as restful as Ty’s before closing her eyes and letting herself get pulled into what she was sure would be another frightening memory of Rachel’s.
The odd thing about dreaming in Rachel’s memories, was the way Brynn would open her eyes in the middle of a situation and feel as if she had been there all along. She could come in midsentence and know exactly what she and another person had been talking about for hours.
This instance was no different.
As Brynn sat in a large white room full of long white tables with scientists working over them like little bees buzzing around a hive, she felt a sense of purpose; as if she had a perfectly good reason to be in that room right at that moment, though she had no idea what that reason might be.
Without thinking about it, Brynn reached into her lab coat pocket and pulled out a sugar cube, popping it into her mouth like she did so often when she was awake. Encountering this odd trait in her dream made her start, and she wondered if her recently destabilized dreams were starting to mix Rachel’s memories with her own real-life experiences.
“Your addiction to sugar is sick, you know that?” said Maxwell, walking up to Rachel’s table and smiling over at her as he adjusted his glasses.
“How so?” Brynn found herself asking, leaning closer to Maxwell as if this was something she always did.
He glanced quickly around the lab to see if anyone was looking, before placing his hand on the table and leaning against it in a relaxed manner, suddenly looking much less like an important scientist and much more like a boy trying to impress a girl he liked.
“You do realize that the gas we’ve developed to terminate each society is sugar scented right?”
“I can’t be around that smell all day and not crave sugar. Let’s be honest,” she said, laughing as she pulled another sugar cube from her pocket and pushed it into Maxwell’s mouth, letting her finger rest against his lips a moment too long.
He made a face at her that strongly reminded Brynn of Ty for a moment before sarcastically saying, “Thank you for that,” and attempting to swallow the sugar cube without really tasting it. “Oh and if you’re smelling sugar all day long, that’s probably not a good thing. You know… gas leak and all that.”
“There’s not a gas leak,” she reassured him, instantly reminding Brynn about her recent dream where Eris had told her that all of Rachel’s colleagues had been killed by a gas leak. “My lab just happens to be right next to where they manufacture that smell.”
“Which actually reminds me, have you talked to Eris yet?” Maxwell asked Rachel in a low voice.
“I tried to explain to her that the backers of our project weren’t expecting us to kill off the human test subjects after we were done with them,” she stated lamely.
“And?”
“And she said sometimes unfortunate measures have to be taken for progress,” she finished, sounding like she didn’t agree with that conclusion at all.
“But it’s not necessary,” Maxwell said indignantly. “There’s absolutely no reason to kill off an entire planet of people just because we’re done learning about them. It’s wasteful. And besides Halcyon, they’re pretty self-sustaining, we wouldn’t even have to interfere. We could just leave.” Maxwell’s face had become red as he tried to contain his disgust with Eris.
“Trust me, I’ve tried reasoning with her,” Rachel told him, still keeping her voice low in the room full of scientists. “I’ve even tried to think of ways to alter the gas so that it won’t kill anyone, but she’s kept that room under lock and key. I can’t get in.”
“Tell her they’ll cut our funding,” Maxwell insisted.
“I’ve threatened her with that too many times. She just keeps telling me that what the backers don’t know, won’t hurt them.”
“Well we have to do something about Eris. She’s completely out of control,” Maxwell began just as something unexpected caught Brynn’s eye.
Through the glass door that separated the large white room from a hallway, Brynn saw a boy walk by. She had only caught a glimpse of the side of his face b
efore the walls of the facility flickered, letting her know that her dream was slowly falling apart.
His black hair and blue eyes were so familiar to her that she would have automatically assumed it was Jonah, had he not looked just slightly off. His skin wasn’t sun kissed and he didn’t wear the mischievous grin he normally sported, but something about him reminded Brynn of Rachel. Of how Brynn could see someone that looked exactly like her but acted totally different. Maybe this was the evidence Brynn needed to conclude that Jonah was just like her; a scientist from A1 whose DNA Rachel had stolen to create a person from genuine human tissue.
Her head ached as she contemplated this possibility, ignoring Maxwell’s rant until one word brought her back to the reality within Rachel’s memory: programmed.
“What did you say?” Brynn asked, feeling as if it were really her asking and not Rachel.
The more control she felt over the situation, the more the walls flickered around her. She felt a tremor beneath her feet as if her entire dream were about to collapse.
“I said ultimately we can’t blame Eris for all of this since she’s just doing what she was programmed to do. We should have been smart enough to know that she would find a way to complete her task no matter what the cost.” Maxwell repeated, so nonchalantly that Brynn couldn’t believe he had just taken what Brynn thought she knew and cracked it wide open.
“Programmed?” was all Brynn managed to say, her voice coming out low and muffled as if it had been recorded and played back to her while she wore earplugs.
The walls flickered once more, the entire facility going dark for a moment before the white lights illuminated everything too brightly. Brynn had to squint against the sudden overwhelming brightness in the room as she struggled to hear Maxwell’s answer.
“I think Eris is broken.”
Chapter 8: Façade
Standing in a room filled with people dressed as Workers would have been enough to put Brynn on edge on a normal day, but constantly replaying her dream from the night before had made her practically unstable as she bit her short fingernails and stared at the floor.
“Brynn you’ve got to pull yourself together if we’re going to do this today,” Ty said to her as he adjusted his dark brown wig.
Looking up at her friend with paper white skin, brown hair and purple eyes did nothing to silence her nerves.
“You’re really creeping me out right now,” was all Brynn managed to say to Ty whose presence wasn’t comforting her for the first time in her life.
“At least we know we did our job,” Amber said happily.
She hadn’t bothered to change her hair’s conspicuous color, despite Brynn’s pleading. None of her friends looked like themselves and finding herself in a place surrounded by almost familiar faces was hitting too close to home for her taste.
Her shock at seeing who she thought might be Jonah’s DNA donor in her dream the night before didn’t even come close to her shock that she had been right about Eris all along.
She wasn’t human.
She was some sort of computer. Brynn had tried to convince her friends of this fact though it wasn’t going over as well as she had hoped.
“I’m pretty sure a few wigs and some makeup aren’t going to fool a thousand year old super computer,” Brynn mumbled loud enough for Ty to hear.
“We still don’t know that she’s a robot or whatever,” Ty said in exasperation, having already had this conversation three times that morning.
“Think about it,” Brynn began, everyone in the room letting out a collective sigh at what they knew was coming. “She’s been alive since the beginning of this ‘program’, she has impossible strength and speed, and she’s entirely unfeeling. Sounds like a robot to me.”
“Well,” Jonah began slowly, eliciting a stern glance from Brynn. “I’m just saying she’s not unfeeling. Rage is a feeling isn’t it? Malice. Hate. Sadism. Psychosis.”
“Psychosis?” Brynn repeated skeptically.
“Okay, that one’s not a feeling but it’s an attribute that she definitely possesses.”
“I’ll say,” Ty agreed, shooting a furtive glace at Jonah’s scarred cheek.
“I bet they’re all robots,” Brynn said, not for the first time that day.
“Here we go again,” Amber sighed in exasperation.
“I just want you all to admit that I was right about the Workers all along. They’re probably some crazy super computer people.”
“What does that even mean?” Bennett asked.
She was dusting blush onto her cheeks to make them seem more angular, puckering her lips at the mirror as she did so.
“It means that the second we step onto the Worker train, an alarm will probably sound because they have some sort of technology that tells them other non-computers are boarding.”
“Okay, now you’re just making things up,” Jonah said.
His short white wig was slightly askew on his head and Brynn noticed more and more how pitiful their attempt to disguise themselves was. Now that she knew what they were actually up against, it seemed pretty obvious that they would get caught if they thought some wigs and makeup could hide them.
“We don’t have to do this if you don’t want to you know,” Ty stated.
“Does that mean we get to do a maze?” Bennett asked, perking up at the suggestion, even if it was made by her.
“No, we’re doing this. We’ve come this far, we’re not just going to turn back when we might finally get some answers,” Brynn answered with certainty.
“Well then, let’s get going before you come up with more farfetched theories about all the ways we’re going to get caught and die,” Amber said, holding open the door for the first victim to pass through.
Brynn stood with her hands tightly clutching the edge of the granite counter top in the bathroom. Her head was tilted towards the floor and her eyes were closed. She tried to keep her breathing even, but every movement brought back into sharp focus the fact that she was knowingly leading her friends into a bad situation. She had told herself a few times that they had their free will and she wasn’t forcing them to come with her. But at the same time she had to admit that they didn’t believe a word she said about Eris and the Workers actually being dangerous robots, or whatever they were. They couldn’t exactly knowingly be walking to their deaths if they didn’t believe that the danger was real.
So again, it came back down to Brynn and her responsibility to protect her friends from the things they didn’t even know they should fear.
“You’re kind of a terrible person,” she told herself in the empty bathroom, the sound of the fan whirring soothingly above her head.
Her reflection in the mirror didn’t respond. She hadn’t expected it to, though with how crazy her life had become as of late, she didn’t doubt for one second that it could. She looked herself over in the mirror, shuddering at how frightening Amber and Bennett had made her. It was as if she were looking at someone else reflected back at her.
Her skin was as paper white as Eris’s though her lips matched the pale tone in an attempt for her friends to conceal them. She wore a tailored white dress that came to her knee and hugged her figure in a way she was sure a Worker would not appreciate. Her long white wig set pale curls cascading down her bare shoulders. But the worst part of the entire disguise were the bright purple eyes that stared back at her.
She’d had some trouble getting the contacts in and asked if she could just skip them altogether. Her idea had gotten shot down surprisingly fast for a group of people who didn’t even believe they should be wary of the Workers.
Now, looking at her reflection in the mirror, Brynn felt as if she were staring down her nightmare face to face. She brushed the white bangs away from her forehead and stared at the bright purple eyes challengingly, drawing courage from her fear of Eris and the Workers.
“I can do this,” she said to the empty room with surety.
Brynn had been designated as the last of their group to leav
e. A large group of Workers walking towards the beach would have been slightly conspicuous and so Ty, in his infinite wisdom, had decided that they should leave one at a time, agreeing to meet near the entrance to the Worker train.
Though Brynn volunteered to go first, Ty insisted that he lead the group, obviously worried that she’d get onto the train without them and try to take off to Panurgic on her own.
As she left the hotel alone, she almost had the urge to stay behind and let her friends do all the dirty work involved with saving the world. Ty would never believe her if she told him about her mutinous thoughts, though she had no intentions of letting her cowardice become publicly known.
Keeping her eyes trained straight ahead and trying to avoid making eye contact with anyone on the street, Brynn gave herself a mental pep talk, reminding herself that no one was looking at her. After all, she was the only one who paid any attention to Workers. Everyone else ignored their existence unless their tablet broke and they needed someone to fix it.
She let herself relax a bit until a familiar flash of red hair passed by her, instantly reminding her of the red haired girl she had been seeing around Eastern Metropolis. She turned to stop the girl, wanting to ask her why she’d been following Brynn, but the second she turned around she was met with an empty sidewalk.
Not only an empty sidewalk; an empty city.
The once busy streets of Eastern Metropolis were suddenly silent, casting Brynn into an eerie nightmarish space.
It was odd to find yourself in surroundings that should have been chaotic only to find that you were suddenly the only person there. The whole scene was off, like listening to music under water. Brynn couldn’t make sense of it and wondered fleetingly if Eris had finally come up with the perfect way to kill everyone off; complete silence and no cleanup.
Walking tentatively down the silent sidewalk, her heels clacking on the pavement and glancing into café windows and shop fronts to confirm that she was, in fact, alone, Brynn felt her panic rising. Her initial response to the odd situation had been one of confusion but now that it was wearing off, the logical panic was beginning to set in.
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