“What have you done?”
The question, this time, felt closer to home. What have I done?
A digital chirp called from one of the rooms, followed by the hum of generators. Marcus waited and listened.
“Who’s there? Jamie?”
Chirp.
It was coming from the recovery room, where they woke up. He struggled back, listening again before looking inside. The computers, dead when he woke, were alive. An individual station was dedicated to each bed. The far monitor flashed in time with the singing chirp. An aluminum post leaned against it.
A cane.
That wasn’t there when he woke up.
He lunged from bed to bed, resting on each one, the padding still warm. His bed, however, was tainted with sour sweat. An image of Raine was locked into the corner of the far monitor. Marcus leaned on the counter to read the status.
Transfer aborted.
He pecked at the keyboard. When nothing happened, he thought-commanded. What happened to her?
No response.
He cleared his throat and said, “What happened to her… what happened to Raine’s transfer?”
The status changed. A response appeared. Connection lost.
“Where is she? Is she still on the Settlement?”
Presence lost.
That was a different answer. Presence was different than connection, suggesting she was lost mid-transfer. That would explain the transfer abort, the degradation of the body. Did she get halfway here and snap back to her body, her identity tethered to it on an ethereal bungee?
No. The presence was lost.
You’re an angel, she had said.
If she was still on the Settlement, if she woke up, they would know where Marcus, Paul and Jamie went. They could follow the coordinates left on the computer network, they would find them on the island. That thought should’ve stirred panic in the pit of his stomach, but instead it bloomed hope.
They’ll come for us, take us back.
He would be rescued, get back to his former body. Then he saw the bottom right corner of the monitor, the present date and time in small script.
Impossible.
The computer could be wrong. The process should’ve been instantaneous. The recovery would take a few days at most. Not a year.
According to the computer, they left the Settlement over a year ago. So where were they in between? Bouncing in nowhere? There was no sense of passage between those two points in time, like they’d taken a wormhole shortcut.
“Why am I here?” Marcus shouted. “Who did this? Where are the ones that did this to me?”
There were no answers. The computer was dedicated to Raine, and all it knew was she wasn’t there. Presence lost.
Paul’s monitor (his picture in the left corner) revealed a successful transfer, all memories intact. Jamie’s station held the same status.
“Show the memory log… Jamie’s memory. Let me see it.”
Her monitor flipped screens. A root directory appeared in several columns of code. He couldn’t access her memories, not like this. Her memories of death might hold the answers, but that was before he arrived on the island.
Before he’d become this.
Before was what he would come to refer to the time before the transfer, before the arrival on the island when all would be revealed. Before he knew the truth.
A door slid open with a quiet whoosh.
Marcus waited. There were no footsteps. He listened to the hum of electronics, the ticking of a ventilation vent.
The elevator was open.
Chirp.
Another computer called, this one closer to him. He turned his upper body, his neck too pained to twist. It was across from the bed he woke on, his image in the left corner. A placid expression looked back at him. He shuffled three steps to the desk on which it sat.
He leaned closer.
What little strength he had left vanished. He fell forward, grasping the ledge of the counter to lower himself to the floor. He banged against the wall, new blood warmly flooding from the clotted wound on the back of his head. He tried to make sense of it all, tried to bring his breath under control.
The computer explained why he’d become powerless.
Paul
The windows were clean.
That detail was not lost on Paul, that the island appeared to be in perfect working condition—buildings with power, food in industrial-sized refrigerators—but no one was there. Daily life should have dulled the windows, dust and rain and bird shit (there were birds on the island, big macaws that watched from the palms), but they were transparent-clean.
Paul no longer wondered on such mysteries.
He stood at the bay window that overlooked the campus-sized courtyard and watched Cali emerge from the forest. She passed beneath a heavy branch, a pair of white birds preening within reach. Beyond her, nestled deep in the palms, was the rounded roof of a building, a small dome-like structure.
A sundial was set in the middle of the field, a lone gray sculpture with a triangular wing pointed at the sky. She ran her fingers to the point and stopped. From that distance, the details were fuzzy, even the color of her hair was hard to discern.
But it was her.
He could feel it. Could feel her.
He saw her during the day, hallucinating her from a distance. The hallucinations had invaded his dreams. Dreams! Dreams never happened to Paul, but now he was seeing the farm and the horses in the few hours he snatched at night, and watched her mow the back pasture, haul hay on a tractor.
Three nights had passed, and three nights he dreamed.
And now he saw her in the grassy field, wide awake. The hallucinations felt different. They had changed, felt more present. Solid. He thought, perhaps, if he stood beneath that branch, she would appear to him and he could reach out, he could touch her. Even if she was an illusion, a dream that evaporated, he might feel her for a moment.
He touched his face, rubbing the bristles on his cheeks.
“No, no, no, nonononono!”
Paul tripped on the corner of a leather duvet and sprinted across the lobby. The first door in the hallway was propped open, Jamie sitting up in a bed with a sheet clutched to her chin, eyes wide and blank.
“It’s all right, it’s all right. You’re awake now. You’re awake, Jamie.”
Her breath punched through a tangle of fear, gulping at the room’s stale air, tears falling from eyes that wouldn’t blink.
“Be here.” He stroked her short crop of hair wet with perspiration. “Be here, Jamie. Come back, look at me.”
She blinked once, twice.
He leaned in front of her, held her clammy cheeks with both hands, and steered her vision into his eyes. Focus dialed her blue eyes on his. Her breathing slowed. She held his wrists, climbing out of the pit of a nightmare.
“You here?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“The dream again?”
She swallowed. Nodded.
It wasn’t really a dream. She was remembering.
She wiped her forehead with the sheet and threw her feet onto the floor. She was sleeping almost twenty hours a day, waking for half an hour before wilting. That wasn’t unusual for a new fabrication—sleep gave the body time to acclimate. So why am I hardly sleeping?
“I was in the building,” she said.
The dream started like it always did: Marcus Anderson guiding her to a bench in Atlanta’s Centennial Park, pausing long enough so that she would remember him. The old man swore he wasn’t there, but she remembered it as clearly as she had seen it. Then she sat there alone, watching the children in the fountains until the biomite hijacking. It started in her bones.
“They took me to a room.”
“Who?”
“Just some technicians, I think. One of them was wearing a baseball uniform or something. The other one was in charge.” She swallowed, hard. “They were getting ready to…”
She took a cleansing breath, but the t
ension remained. She was reliving her death every time she closed her eyes.
“I got to get out of here,” she said. “Need to walk.”
“You sure?”
“I’ll jump through a window if I don’t get some fresh air.”
“Let’s get something to eat first.”
“Paul, relax. I’m fine.”
He started to protest. She hadn’t been more than twenty feet away from him, not since she collapsed on the beach. He had carried Raine’s body to the water and dug a shallow grave with his hands. It would’ve been wiser to send it out to the ocean, but he didn’t want to see it wash ashore. It’s only a body, he told himself. An object that was never her. She never arrived.
But it was all he had. Giving it a proper burial lifted a grain of guilt from a heap of regrets. But it was all he could do. And when Jamie collapsed—walking in the ankle-deep surf one moment, face down the next—he was determined to not turn the heap of regrets into a mountain.
It already felt insurmountable.
“Why don’t you get cleaned up first,” he said. “Then we’ll go.”
“Nothing’s going to happen to me, Paul.”
“No, I mean you need a shower.”
“Whatever.”
He stood in the hall until he heard the shower running then made his way toward the cafeteria. The U-shaped building was a dormitory, the rooms clean, beds made, clothes in the closets. It was sort of like waiting for the three bears to return. But no one came looking for porridge.
The walk-in cooler was filled with jugs of milk and cartons of orange juice. There was a pantry of canned goods and a freezer of meats and frozen produce. Paul scrambled eggs and nuked strips of bacon, cleaning up the dishes and leaving everything exactly as it was. If anyone was following or watching, they’d notice the missing food but not the dishes.
Jamie was at the picnic tables at the edge of the grassy field, a long toss to the sundial. She was wearing boy shorts and a T-shirt (all the clothing was for boys) and destroyed the breakfast when he put it down.
“The old man come out?” she asked.
“No.”
Paul hadn’t seen him. And that was a good thing. He could still feel the old man’s windpipe in his hand, imagined crushing it like a cardboard tube.
“Let’s explore one of the buildings today,” she said.
“Let’s give it a minute, see how you feel.”
“Why wait until I’m tired?” She shoved a corner of toast in her mouth. “I’m all right, Paul. It’d be good to walk around, get outside and shake the dream off, you know.”
“The old man wants something from you.”
He could feel him watching from the tower, sense that bulging eye follow them when they stepped outside.
“Of course he does,” Jamie said. “We were both after the same thing, sort of.”
“The powers-that-be?”
“No, no. I was looking for someone to help with Raine’s dreamland, looking for someone to help with overturning the Settlement. I wanted the big fish who was behind all the absurdity. I mean, the last twenty years have been crazy, the stupid halfskin laws and then the Settlement. Someone’s behind this lunacy. I wanted to help you.” She dropped the remaining toast. “The old man did, too; said he would set you and Raine free if I helped, said he would set the whole world free. And I believed him.”
“He said he wasn’t in Atlanta.”
“Well, he’s lying about that. You have a point.”
“He manipulated your thoughts, made you believe him.”
“Listen, I know he got inside my head. I’m not stupid. But it made sense, Paul. Even now it makes sense and he’s not messing with my head. And you’re free.”
“And Raine is dead.”
“We don’t know that.”
He looked away. Raine died because of him; it was easier to accept that, to lug the heap of guilt onto his back now rather than hope she was alive and have the trapdoor open beneath his feet.
The tower loomed over the dormitory. The rising sun reflected off the shiny bands that separated the floors (solar panels, he guessed). A dark shadow moved past a window on the third floor.
“He can’t hurt us,” Jamie said. “Something about him is different.”
Yeah, but there was still a world of hurt out there. And they didn’t wake up on this island on accident.
______
The island was shaping up to be a summer camp for the insanely wealthy.
There were classrooms and a game room. The only structure they didn’t explore was the dome-shaped building buried in the palms. That oddball building was different than the others and in the other direction. But everything else was orderly, the doors unlocked or open, chairs pushed in and trash empty.
But there aren’t towers at summer camp.
It was at the third building they explored that Jamie began to fade. She’d been awake for two hours, the most since leaving the tower. Now she stopped on the top step and touched her head, riding out a bout of vertigo.
“I’m all right.”
“We need to go back.”
“Just this last stop, I promise. Then we’ll go.”
He gave in and opened the large glass door. The stale wind of paper met them. Shelves and shelves of books lined the open hall, long tables with short lamps interspersed throughout. Paul remained a step behind her.
“There, look.” She pointed behind the front desk.
A computer was stashed on a bottom shelf, the first one they’d seen since leaving the tower. A second wind filled her. Paul looked around as she pried open the laptop; the thrumming sound of an awakening computer filled the hallowed halls. The screen went black.
“Where are we?” she said.
He was about to answer (obviously a library) when the computer came to life. Images of the island began playing.
“How’d you do that?” he asked.
“It happened in the tower, all the computers were voice-activated.”
“Where’s Raine?” he blurted.
Jagged lines of static interrupted the scenery. Blackness returned.
“I don’t think it knows,” she began to say when cabins emerged from the foggy screen.
The Settlement.
“No.” The urge to slam the computer with both fists reached inside him. “I’m going to—”
“Is she on the Settlement?” Jamie asked.
Another scramble of static. A room appeared. It was the dream disease lab. Authority figures were there. Not the green-jacket monitors, these were the federal types, the men and women wearing gloves so as not to contaminate a crime scene. They were removing equipment, hauling it out on carts with all-terrain vehicles.
The beds were occupied by black skinsuits, the hoods pulled off to expose the sunken faces—the sharp cheekbones and purple lips. Two men stood over the one on the right, the hood bunched beneath Raine’s neck, her scalp glistened with the electrolytic gel. Her flesh was muddy, her bruised tongue a puffy slug swelling between cracked lips. They lifted her onto a gurney and carted her off with the computers.
She’s not there.
A stir of relief cooled the hot grit of guilt piling on the bottom of his stomach. He’d rather she be dead than on the Settlement alone. We don’t know she’s dead. She’s just not here.
“What happened to them?” he asked. “What happened to the Settlement?”
A view of the laboratory appeared from above. All the windows on the first floor were boarded. The front door was barricaded. The windows on the second and third floor were dark, some cracked, dirt and grime layered in the corners.
No smoke puffed from the chimney.
They shut it down. Oh, fuck, they shut it down… we did that to them, we took it away from them.
Paul stalked off and ran his hands over his stubbly scalp. The guilty weight buckled his knees. How could he carry all of this? This was his fault. Everyone suffered because of him. First Cali, then Jamie, then Raine… now the entire S
ettlement. They had nothing to live for.
“Paul.”
“We got to get back there,” he said. “We can help them.”
He was standing by the tables, the furthest from Jamie he’d been that morning. She was still behind the counter, the computer’s glow in her eyes.
“Paul… there’s more.”
A stream of images filled the screen in separate frames, scenes of hospitals, of protesters picketing the wealthy dream centers (Stop Dreaming Now!), of arguing politicians, dead bodies pulled from houses, hotels, cars and curbs. City streets were mostly empty.
“Dream disease,” Jamie said. “It’s out of control.”
The computer responded with a news reporter at a desk, her lips silently moving above the headline that read, No Cure in Sight.
And there they were again, a picture of the dream disease lab on the Settlement with their bodies still on the beds.
“Holy shit,” she said. “They think we did it. They think we started a dream disease plague.”
Something wasn’t right. This was happening too fast. All they did was transfer into new bodies.
“Do you believe it?” she asked.
He shook his head. “I don’t know what to believe.”
“I mean, this is just a computer. It could all be made up. We don’t know where we are.”
“We’re on an island.”
“But where? Why?”
“I don’t know, but we have to get back.”
“Back to the Settlement? What’s that going to do?”
He couldn’t help anyone on the island. At least he could pay his debts on the Settlement, suffer for his sins. He would drag the old man with him. That he could do. At least they would have someone to pay.
“No.” She fell into the high-backed chair. “We’re here for a reason, Paul. Whatever Marcus had planned has changed. He’s not the same, you feel it. He’s weaker, doesn’t have something. Even he doesn’t know what’s going on.”
“This could all be a disaster.”
“Or something bigger.”
“People are dying, Jamie. We might be responsible.”
“We might be the answer. Marcus was after the truth. He said if he found it, then he’d find the powers-that-be. He thinks that’s where the dream eater is. What if this is it?”
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