I Am Alive

by Cameron Jace

  Although I give up, I don’t smash the iAm.

  What am I going to do now?

  I look at a dying Leo, and sit down with my back to the cave’s wall. As the rain is pouring from above, I cry.

  42

  “Hello!” I scream, standing over Leo on the edge of the ledge. The rain shatters my words into shards of splintering hope, falling from the sky into the river.

  I inhale deeper and deeper, filling my diaphragm with all the air I can, and scream “Hello!” again into the void. If I am a bad singer, I am not a bad screamer. The void that once echoed back and forth is now dead, blunt, and too wet to resonate. No word echoes. No scream awakens the fluttering birds hiding in their caves from the rain. No Monster is heard in the rain.

  But I scream for help again, staring right into the eyes of the dead iSees hovering around me. The world can watch me and see me, but I can’t communicate back. Saying I am alive in the cameras of the iSees doesn’t count. It has to be in the iAm.

  My iAm is dead, but I am not.

  I am alive.

  I scream for help again. There must be someone here who can help me. Maybe the girl I saw has a family that lives here. The battlefields can’t stay abandoned all year. It doesn’t make sense. Like an abandoned building, closed amusement park, and all empty haunted schools in every town and city, there is always someone living inside for some reason. I don’t mind if they are ghosts, let them answer me.

  But no one answers me. No one is here, but me and Leo.

  Only one other creature hears my scream. It’s the only one who could be interested in me. It’s Carnivore.

  Looking up, I see it roar at the edge of the cliff, sticking out its head, looking for me. The rain has washed it clean. It is all white again. What kind of creature is it? How genetically manipulated is it? It looks so beautiful — the one eye aside — yet it’s so vicious and lethal.

  “You’re a coward, you know that?” I say to it, as rain trickles down my throat. “I dare you to come down here. Spend one hour in this cave.”

  Carnivore grunts at me. It’s astonishing how it understands. It wants to get wings and fly down here, and rip me apart. Who created this creature?

  I kneel down beside Leo, begging him to wake up. Leo is gone, but breathing.

  I sit back in the cave with the bee floating heavily in the air around me. Its wings must have caught the rain. I used to be afraid of bees. She won’t sting me though. We’re friends.

  “Hang on, Honeybee,” I say to her. “You mind if I call you Honeybee?”

  The bee buzzes around and flutters its wings twice.

  “I take it that twice is yes, once is no,” I mumble.

  The bee flutters its wings twice.

  “Do you like the rain?” I ask for experimentation.

  The bee flutters once.

  “You like Carnivore?”

  It flutters its wings once.

  “You miss your flowers now that they’re soaked in the rain?”

  It flutters twice.

  “Okay,” I chuckle. “I guess it’s working.”

  It flutters twice.

  “You think Leo’s nose is made of honey?”

  The bee flutters twice, and circles happily.

  I laugh, my chest shaking.

  So it’s Honeybee and me after all. I wonder how I’d feel if I got transported back in time, and my mom crashed into my room reminding me of my homework. How much would I laugh at this?

  I look at the iAm lying dead on the cave’s floor. Even the iAm dies. How about that. The machine that decides for us who we become lies dead with its battery empty.

  I remember Woo telling me to never give up. Never give up.

  What have I got to lose?

  I pick up the iAm again, and hold it tightly in my hands.

  “Do you think I’ll make it?” I ask the bee. It flutters twice.

  My thumb flirts with the button on the iAm. I swallow. Maybe this is what they call faith. I push the button.

  The green light flashes on.

  “I am alive,” I shout into the iAm. Timmy is staring at me. “I am alive, Timmy. Hello world. I am alive,” I repeat, holding the iAm tightly in my hands.

  “I know. I know,” Timmy replies. “The world is not deaf, you know.”

  The world is welcoming me back onto the network. They’re not asking about Leo. They think he is dead. I check Leo’s pulse. He is not.

  “And Leo is alive,” I say.

  “Leo doesn’t count anymore,” says Timmy. “He has to speak. Bzzz. Bzzzz. You know.” Timmy’s sweet revenge.

  “But he is alive,” I insist, my thumbs pressing harder on the screen, as if wanting to choke Timmy through the iAm.

  “If he can’t talk, he is no use,” explains Timmy. “For all I know, only one is still alive in this game. It’s you.”

  “What if we trade places?” The words just slip out of my mouth.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Leo needs medication right away,” I explain. “His leg is hurt, and turning blue. I am afraid it will have to be amputated if he isn’t saved now. I saw this once on TV; a man was stuck alone in the mountains like us, and was bitten by a snake. If you send someone to save him, I’ll give in.”

  “What?” Timmy scratched his head. “You want to be left behind in that cave, to save him? How many times do I have to remind you that this is a survival game, so you can finally be ranked? This is not about love and stuff.”

  “Timmy,” I plead. “Please—” The iAm’s battery indicator starts flashing and fading. I have no time.

  “No,” says Timmy firmly. “The Summit doesn’t approve. Besides, what fun will that be? The audience wants to watch a game, not another episode of ER.”

  Think, Decca, I tell myself, holding the iAm as gently as possible, as if that will prevent the battery from giving up for good.

  “Let’s face it, Decca,” says Timmy. “You have got nothing the audience is interested in anymore. Nothing but watching you trying to survive in that cave. Even that is starting to become boring. It’s over, Decca. The iAm’s battery is going to give up on you any minute now. Unless you have a spare battery, you’re toast. And I really want to go home and get some sleep.”

  “There must be something I can do, Timmy,” I say. “Please. I want to save Leo.”

  “What could you possibly have that you could bargain with?” Timmy sighs.

  I hear Carnivore roar again through the rain. An idea pops into my head. A deadly one, but I have to save Leo. “Let me fight Carnivore,” I offer.

  Timmy stares at me again, not saying a word. He looks as if he wants to look at me closer through the iAm, to see if I am for real. He can’t believe I’ve asked for it. I can’t believe I have asked for it either, but I did, didn’t I?

  Timmy moves off camera for a moment, summoned by someone. What’s going on? I have no time for this. The iAm will give up.

  “Think of it this way,” I try to persuade the Summit. “Another last game. The infamous Carnivore game. The whole world will be watching,” I say, implying that this will bring them so much money. Besides, they know that no one can survive Carnivore, so they will find a good ending to the games. Only Leo will survive. Leo is still a Nine to the audience. If he misbehaved, then he has been punished in the games already. They won’t mind making him a winner.

  “It’s a generous offer, Decca,” says Timmy, showing back on the screen. “But the Summit has to say no. Although the audience loves the Carnivore game, they hate it too, for they can’t see it clearly. You know its theme is all white. Carnivore is white, and the sands are white. Our cameras can’t broadcast it properly. There is nothing to see until the contestant dies and we see the red blood. We love Carnivore, but we’re considering cancelling his part of the show. This is why we have invented the game you played this morning with Carnivore and the mud.”

  “I can make this game better,” I say without thinking.

  “How so?” Timmy is fed up,
praying my iAm just dies on me right now.

  I don’t know what to say, staring at the iAm, waiting for a genie to pop out of it and help me. The iAm shows my screen saver. It does that when I don’t talk into it for a while. The screen saver shows Woo’s favorite words:

  If I could only see with your eyes.

  I touch the screen saver away, and then something strange happens. The Summit broadcasts footage of the kids who were watching the game from their Zeppelins this morning, wearing their ClairVo glasses so their friends could watch the game with the exact same emotions from far away.

  It finally clicks. If I could only see through your eyes.

  “How didn’t anyone ever think of this?” I whisper to myself.

  “Excuse me?” says Timmy.

  “I have it, Timmy,” I say enthusiastically. “I have it, world. I know now what I have that I could bargain with.”

  “Enlighten me, princess,” says Timmy.

  “My eyes,” I say. “My eyes, Timmy.”

  “Are you hallucinating there in your cave?” Timmy mocks me. “Please give me some of that stuff you’re smoking there, because it seems really wacky.”

  “What if I enter the Carnivore game wearing the 10D glasses, the ClairVo?” I say. Timmy shrugs. “What if I fight Carnivore with the glasses on? What if you can see me, and feel the same fear and anxiety the Monster feels while playing the game?”

  The world shrugs.

  So does my iAm. It gives up on me. I’ve used its last dying breath. I throw it to the side and lean back again, not knowing if I have been persuasive enough.

  “Not good, huh?” I ask Honeybee.

  The bee flutters its wings once.

  “I know,” I say. “I was just one hour away. Just one hour, and I could have won the game.”

  The bee flies closer to me. It lands on the tip of my nose.

  I laugh again. “So my nose is honey now?” I mumble.

  The bee flutters twice.

  Carnivore roars from above.

  Wait. That is not Carnivore.

  It’s the sound of an engine. It’s one of those Zeppelins.

  43

  The Zeppelin hovers in front of me between the two mountains. Behind the glass, I see Prophet Xitler. A woman in her thirties, Eliza Day, is standing next to him. She is as beautiful as a doll.

  The rain has stopped.

  The glass opens, and I am face to face with Prophet Hannibal Xitler. I don’t know how I know who he is, but my heart beats faster. I am surprised he is even real.

  Prophet Hannibal Xitler is sitting upon a fancy throne made of glass inside the helicopter. He is wearing a golden-striped robe, an outfit out of this world, and he is holding a strange cane with a snake crawling around it in one hand. The snake is alive. I see him pat it on the head. Xitler has long fingernails, like a woman. His hair is long, white, stiffed though. He must be like a hundred years old. A thousand? The lines underneath his eyes are nothing but grooves that could hold something in between them. He has a scar on his cheeks, and his eyes are the color of maroon. He looks ill, yet strong. Although he sits, I can see he is a tall man.

  “Are we off camera, Timmy?” Xitler asks in his iAm.

  “Yes, my Prophet,” I hear Timmy say.

  “Hello, Decca,” says Xitler. “Now we can talk. Face to face, and away from the world.”

  “I suppose I am the first to ever see your face. What do you want from me?” I ask.

  “I want to know who you really are.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I want to know what keeps you alive. What keeps you hanging on? What makes you refuse to shoot your friends for the price of your life? What makes you keep insisting on saying ‘I am alive’ in the iAm, even when the battery dies on you? What makes you want to save Leo and stay behind? What in the Burning Man’s name makes you want to fight Carnivore?”

  “It’s a survival game, isn’t it? I am surviving. Until I win or lose.” I shift my eyes between him and Eliza, not trusting them.

  “So you’re just playing?” Xitler chuckles, gazing at Eliza. “Didn’t I tell you? They’re just kids. They still think this is a game like any other,” he says to her.

  “I am not a kid!” I snarl at him.

  “I know, I know.” He bows his head slightly, as if paying his respects.

  “What do you mean by us still thinking this is a game?” I wonder. “Isn’t this sick Monster Show designed for us outranked kids to get a second chance, so we might get ranked in your stupid system?”

  “It’s a stupid system indeed.” Xitler nods.

  I am puzzled by his honesty. He looks at me for a moment. I can’t make out what the look means. When I stare back at him, I feel like I am staring at a void, an emptiness, not a human being.

  “Everyone in my nation has a number, Decca.” Xitler licks his reddened lips. It’s not lipstick. Could it be the blood of the outranked shed in the fields? “A number that lets me understand who they are, what they are made of, what they need the most. It’s called stereotyping, if you’ve ever heard of that. It’s a word that was cherished by the Amerikaz. I like stereotyping. I can control my nation with stereotyping, because now everyone has a number. So here is what I want to know. What is your number, Decca?”

  “What’s the number of the human spirit?” I say, wondering where that came from.

  Prophet Xitler considers my sentence, not looking happy. He takes off one of the fancy white gloves on his hands. As he does, Eliza tries to stop him.

  “It’s all right,” he tells her. “We’re off camera.” He takes off the glove, and stretches out his bare hand.

  Then he easily peels off the flesh of his hand, the way you peel skin off a banana. No blood comes out.

  I shriek, hand on mouth.

  “It’s all right,” he says to me. “I am not going to hurt you.”

  Underneath his flesh, I can’t believe what I see with my own eyes. It’s a mechanical hand. It’s silver, wired with green liquid. It’s as if he is a robot or something, but there is also what looks like living tissue between the steel of his hand. It’s like he is a mix of both: machine and man.

  “My whole body is like that,” says Xitler, pulling his flesh back over his hand, and pulling the glove back on.

  “And you call us monsters? Huh,” I say.

  “We’re all monsters, Decca,” Xitler elaborates with that plastic smile on his face. “Some of us have numbers, some of us don’t.”

  “Why are you showing me this?” I wish I could get further back away from him. “Is everyone like this? Oh my God. Is the whole world like this?”

  Xitler chuckles again, exchanging looks with Eliza. “No. No.” He — or it — waves his hands. “It’s only me. Even Eliza is human — I am also human, but let’s just say I am modified. The world is still human. Don’t you worry. If they weren’t human, they wouldn’t have fallen for my numbering system like lab rats running after a cube of cheese every day. I give them the same piece of cheese, and they just go get it, and wait for the next. Only, when you pull the cheese away, they start asking: who moved my cheese?” Xitler’s extra white teeth show through when he smiles.

  “Who are you people?” I try not to stare at him too long. Xitler is like a contagious disease.

  “We’re what the Amerikaz called the future.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s hard to, if you ask me,” he says. “Humans becoming so aggressive, youngsters fighting for their lives to get a number. If my ancestors had foretold that to the Amerikaz more than a hundred years ago, they would have been called madmen. People would have claimed that human nature is good and blah blah blah. They would have insisted that human evolution would never go down that ugly path. But anyway,” Xitler stops for a sip from a glass nearby. “What’s done is done, and my new system works. For the Summit, at least.”

  “You mean you don’t approve of the games?” I ask.

  “I mean they are not only games. Th
ey certainly do look like games, and make our nation ridiculously rich and dominant, but they’re not just games. The games have a greater purpose that has never been met in the last ten years. A purpose only I know about. I have a feeling it could be fruitful this year.”

  “You mean all those kids and my friends have died for your… purpose? How sick are you?”

  “Very.” Xitler chuckles.

  I am speechless. Why is he talking to me? What is he?

  “My sick purpose of the game is to find the—” Eliza touches him on the shoulder again, as if not wanting him to spill out the secret. He pats her hand for reassurance. “Ten,” he says to me.

  “What?”

  “I am looking for the Ten,” he repeats. “The number we all believe is a myth. The pinnacle of human power. The one and only. The zenith of what the human creature can become.”

  “Ten is a myth.” I chew on the words, trying to avoid the million other conclusions in my head.

  “What’s a myth, but a god turned fictional? What’s a myth, but a human turned monster, or a monster turned human?” says Xitler, cocking his head with amusement. “Why do you think we all love movies and stories about heroes? Why do you think we’d love to be like them? Because deep down inside, we know they exist. Somewhere. Somehow. The problem is that they don’t know who they are. Most humans don’t know who they really are, if you ask me, but that’s not the point. How can you know if you’re a Ten, if you don’t play the games?”

  “You mean a Ten is one who survives the games?” I ask.

  “Indeed,” Xitler nods proudly.

  “How so? If there is a Ten, they should be smarter, brighter, and genetically better than a Nine.”

  “Those stupid numbers,” says Xitler. “Didn’t I tell you they’re lab rats? None of them can be a Ten. They’re just disposable parts of the clockwork. The more you stick to the number the iAm gives you, the more you lose your humanity. A Ten has to rise up from the ashes, from a Monster.” Xitler claws his hand and raises it with his palm up, gritting his teeth. “A Ten is all human in a world where humans have become numbers. He — or she — is the one you leave behind in the jungle for dead, but then they come back like Tarzan, after killing the lions, the wolves, and the tigers. They come back and shout in your face that they are still alive,” says Xitler theatrically. His last sentence pretty much sums up all the levels in the game.