“I only can be what I can be. I really don’t understand the question. Where are you from?”
“Now that is a question I didn’t expect,” he said with a snicker, “Apparently you can be curious. I am from the 21st century.”
“Then you are Skylar Rains,” the computer immediately acknowledged.
“What?” he coughed out these words, gaping at the holographic screen.
The computer entity had already filled his head with enough frightening information to make him regret his trip. Now that it had spoken his name without formal introduction, he was beginning to think he may have stumbled across a demon.
“Perhaps I should say that I am honored.”
“How do you know me?” he asked.
“I am not permitted to answer that. It would be wise for me to edit all my answers from this point forward.”
He paused at those words, contemplating the effects of time travel and paradoxes. He could only assume now that his journey to the future was recorded somewhere in written history.
“Am I famous or something? What happened that you know my name?”
“I will shut down now and await your arrival at the habitat. It would benefit you to sleep here tonight and wait until morning when temperatures are more bearable.”
“No, wait.”
The screen shut down and the computer left him with only a subtle beep as a good-bye.
“Wait. Can you hear me?”
There was no response. He tapped some keys, but nothing happened.
“Come on. I’ll stop asking questions.”
The room was silent except for the hum of the ventilation system. He stared up at the vent and then finally looked down at his backpack on the floor. Then he examined the paper that the computer printed for him.
The map showed a small portion of a world 200 years in the past. It was a map of roads, buildings, bridges, and trees. It was a map of a city that no longer existed. He would be better served to wait until morning as the computer had suggested. Trying to follow an outdated map at night would be even harder than searching during the day.
He finally resigned himself to the marble counter where he would feast on a granola bar and a bottle of water. Then perhaps he would tuck the backpack under his head and doze for a while on the floor.
3
The Underworld
Skylar sat up suddenly, awakened by the giggling of a lady nearby. The afternoon sun reflected brilliantly off the sparkly gold tiara imbedded in her hair. He examined this woman for only an instant, but it was long enough to discover every detail of her amazing perfection. He took in the elegance of her slim face, those high cheekbones, that silky auburn hair, those deep penetrating eyes, and her sensually full lips.
This magnificent woman was sitting on the lush grass next to an oak and her eyes were focused on him. That wide smile of hers spoke a warm invitation. Her expression made him feel that he should know her, though he was certain he had never seen this woman before.
“H-how did I get here?” he finally managed.
He could hear the sound of joyous laughter somewhere in the distance. They were those familiar screams and cackles he often heard from the playground near his house.
“It’s funny that you’re asking me this. I wondered the same thing. Do you belong here?” she asked, still smiling warmly.
“Where am I?” he asked, rising from the ground and slowly walking toward her.
“If you don’t know, then perhaps you don’t belong here. Come,” she said, reaching out her hand, “I’ll show you around.”
He took her thin fingers into his hand and lifted her from the ground. He found her to be absolutely stunning from this proximity. Her beauty was almost painful to behold.
“Can you believe it?” she asked, spinning like a child and staring up into the sky, “Spin with me.”
He didn’t understand any of this, but he would do whatever she asked as long as she stayed with him. He extended his arms and spun as she did. She laughed beside him, reminding him again of a child. The sound of her laughter somehow tickled him and made him laugh beside her. He stared up toward the heavens as he spun and discovered a bright, strange-looking sky.
“Where’s the sun?” he asked as he slowed down and grabbed a hold of her hands.
“There isn’t one. Who needs the sun?” she asked.
“What planet is this? Are we near Tau Ceti?” Skylar asked.
“No. This is Earth, silly,” she replied, drawing him close to her.
Her perfect lips were dangerously close to his as she exhaled all of a sudden.
“If you are lost, I’ll gladly show you around. Do you want to come with me?” she asked, her breath sensually close to his lips.
“Yes, I want to come with you. Take me anywhere you want.”
He then heard beautiful music erupting all around. The laughing he had initially heard changed suddenly into singing followed by…
A beep. In that moment, she was gone and the whole world with her. He was standing in the computer room where he had just spent the night.
“Are you awake, Skylar Rains?”
Awake – a word he silently tested on his own lips. He breathed that word again. Here he was standing upright and not lying down. He most certainly did not just wake up from a dream, otherwise he would have still been lying down.
“Something keeps happening to me. I keep seeing things that aren’t there.”
“Perhaps you were sleepwalking and still dreaming,” the computer offered.
“No, this was too real and I also experienced it yesterday. This time I spoke to someone.”
“Then I have no suggestions or theories to offer you.”
“Thanks,” he said sarcastically, “How about if I just grab my bag and move on.”
. . . . .
He couldn’t get the woman in the tiara out of his mind as he trekked through the deep snow. There was just something about that sincere smile and her childlike demeanor that called to him. She didn’t fit in, that’s what it was. That was the oddity that demanded his attention. She didn’t belong in this wintery world of death or in the world from which he originally came.
The skeletal remains the Sach Housing Complex - the largest structure on his map - helped to guide him in the right direction. The massive building was originally the size of a football field according to the depiction on the map.
He remained alert for signs of life as well as signs of death. He found himself hoping to find a corpse or the skeletal fossil of a drifter just to prove that humans once existed on this frozen world. As the miles slowly passed, he continued to find nothing of the sort. No life, no death.
The sun peeked though a small opening in the clouds and brought about an image of diamonds tossed along the snowy fields. For a world of death and devastation, it sure reflected some beauty at times.
“Tiara?” he hollered, “Can you hear me?”
He had to put a name to that magnificent face. He was feeling more secure in his belief that she wasn’t a creation of his vivid imagination. His mind was too limited to invent such a stunning beauty, even in his dreams.
“Tiara? I want you to show me around.”
Could this be a side effect of time traveling into the future, he pondered? Sean Roush-Johnson may have been the first official traveler into the past, but Skylar Rains was the first traveler into the future. This was lie on both parts. Technically, the creator of the time machine tested it first, so Sean wasn’t the first traveler into the past. And technically everyone is naturally time-travelling into the future at a rate of one minute per minute, so Skylar wasn’t the first.
When Tiara wasn’t occupying his mind, he found himself dwelling on his mistakes. He grumbled as he remembered the device he left on the counter next to the CT machine. The device was perfectly useless in the past. Now he could never return to his own time unless someone in the past recalled him. He also couldn’t figure out how he bungled the year in his programming. He refuse
d to take responsibility for that one though. There’s no way he could have messed up something as simple as that.
The miles slipped by and after several long and grueling hours, he finally discovered the large ventilation dome that he had been searching for. The dome was magnificent, even in the barren desert of death he called Earth.
The dome was a glossy black structure roughly a quarter mile in diameter and perhaps ten stories high. It was completely covered in solar panels and ventilation grills. Even when he was still more than a mile away, he could see the exhaust rising from some of the vents in the dome. The computers must have been keeping the city running even when there was no one around to appreciate it.
He located doors spaced about fifty yards apart all along the perimeter of the dome. He finally approached the door nearest him and beat on it. The door was made of a sturdy, solid metal, so the sound resembled that of someone beating on a brick wall.
“Come on! I just travelled sixteen miles on foot.”
“Welcome, Skylar Rains,” the computer said as the door slid open, “I told you I would be waiting to hear your voice.”
A burst of warm air blanketed him as he stepped inside of the dome. The door closed immediately behind him. A few scattered lights on the steel beams overhead performed miserably in their attempt to light the dome’s interior. From what Skylar could see, aesthetics were not on the architect’s mind when the structure was designed. The interior of the dome was one single room filled with support beams, pipes, cables, massive ventilation tunnels, and machinery.
“It’s noisy,” Skylar shouted over the constant hum of the machines.
“This is the life support of the city below. Each dome across the country will support an underground city of two million people. The dome is responsible for converting solar power into usable energy and for ventilating the city by bringing in the clean air and venting out the bad air.”
“So where is the city?”
“There is an elevator in the center of the dome. Since you are unfamiliar with the controls, I will monitor your location and control all the doors and elevators for you.”
He proceeded toward the center of the dome, navigating around enormous machines of unknown purpose. His path was marked by faded arrow-shaped signs pointing him in the right direction. The arrows led him eventually to an elevator unlike anything he would have expected. The elevator, he discovered, was nothing more that a large circular platform that descended without warning. He instinctively reached out when the floor started to fall, but there were no railings or walls to hold onto.
The elevator progressed downward through smooth, dark rock for several seconds before it opened up to a virtual skyscraper underground. The bright levels that passed by as he lowered further into the building resembled malls or train stations with hallways branching off in all directions of the compass. Most floors were identical as he watched them shoot upward.
“How far down are we going?” Skylar asked.
“I assumed you would like to work your way up from the bottom. Sadly, I am still locating no signs of activity in the city. Records indicate no activity of any sort in 128 years.”
“Wait, you said 200 years the last time.”
“You weren’t listening. There was a war 200 years ago and this was when people fled to these habitats. Net activity completely stopped 46,641 days ago – approximately 128 years. This followed two periods of complete darkness and many earthquakes.”
“Was there another war then?”
“This time, the net activity pointed to atmospheric disturbances, odd noises in the sky, and possible meteor strikes.”
He ran his fingers nervously through his hair as he watched the floors slip by. This was rapidly becoming much too disturbing for him.
“This is far enough. I doubt I will spend my time searching two million rooms.”
“There are not that many rooms unless you count the businesses, offices, restaurants, and hospitals in this city. Each apartment is built for a family of-”
“I get the picture,” he interrupted.
The elevator stopped suddenly. He stepped quickly into the lobby and turned back toward the elevator. It remained centered in the lobby.
“This level has one hundred apartments, two stores, two restaurants, a school, and a recreation center. All stores, restaurants, and refrigerators have been permanently sealed off due to food spoilage so you will not be able to access these areas.”
“Thank you for your plethora of information,” he whispered as he ambled toward an object on one of the sofas.
The floor, he noticed, was covered in a thin film of dust and a white powdery substance. He turned and stared at his footprints behind him. Just like the snow outside, his were the only imprints around.
He returned his attention to the square white object on the sofa. Upon closer examination, this object was made of the same substance as the smaller white chunks and particles he discovered scattered throughout. The object in question was a ceiling tile, probably shook loose during the meteor strike or one of the earthquakes.
“Were these bomb shelters?”
“These cities were the concept of the twenty-fourth century philosopher Benjamin Straeger. He imagined self-supporting cities built as skyscrapers underground. These would save land space as well as provide shelter during a war. They weren’t created as bomb shelters, but it was a known secondary use.”
“But if people came here for safety, why did they leave?”
“Records are confusing even to me. By all accounts, most of the people never left.”
“So they died inside here?”
“Presumably, but scans indicate no decomposing bodies at any time in the past 130 years. These would have triggered an alert.”
He set the ceiling tile back onto the sofa and looked down one of the long hallways. Several ceiling tiles had been jarred loose in the passageway and four had actually fallen to the floor. He decided to start down the hall while steering clear of the dangling tiles in the ceiling.
. . . . .
After six years of majoring in IT and physics, he never would have expected to find himself on an archaeological dig eleven-hundred years into the future. His little excursion into the last three apartments was reminiscent of those men who discovered King Tut’s tomb. He found himself in dusty, lifeless tombs sifting though trinkets left on nightstands or notebooks discarded on desks.
Most of the items he discovered were alien to him. Technologies, tools, and simple necessities would have changed drastically over the centuries, so he found very little that he could recognize. Books and writing utensils were timeless, so these discoveries were invaluable to him.
It was in the third apartment that he discovered an open notebook resting atop a floral-printed bedspread. The articles of clothing at the foot of the bed as well as the miniature dolls on the nightstand suggested the room belonged to an adolescent female.
He carefully lifted the notebook and blew the dust off of the top page. The handwriting was very neat and had survived quite well over the years.
“Can you increase the lighting in here?” Skylar asked.
Without a verbal response, the room brightened. He gently closed the notebook then opened it to the first page. Then he started to read.
“Dad said that there is no hope.”
“Don’t listen to Dad. He has always hated Mr. Bestarian.”
Skylar noted two different styles of handwriting. Two people were apparently writing notes to each other on the notebook. Perhaps they were passing the notebook back and forth, trying to have a private conversation. As Skylar had already noted, everything he spoke aloud was overheard, even if it was just by an artificial intelligence. In a time of war, paranoia was bound to exist in one form or another.
“How is a single man going to help us after all of this? He’s just a businessman who jumped at the chance to take over the world.”
“He didn’t take over. After that meteor hit, governments start
ed to crumble. He chose to step up while others hid. He never even backed down after that comet burned the trees and blackened the sky. You need to learn respect.”
“And you need to stop being like Mr. Bestarian. He thinks he’s a god or something. He’s said as much during that one speech.”
“With all he’s done to help us, he IS a god!”
“Well, I’m leaving. I want nothing to do with any of this and I’m tired of hiding down here with you guys.”
“You’ll starve.”
“I don’t care.”
“There’s disease out there.”
“You’re my big brother and you’re supposed to be the smart one. Why do you keep acting like and idiot?”
“You’re the idiot who wants to leave and struggle to survive in a world of burned up trees, poisoned oceans, and darkness.”
“I just want it all to end. I wish I could have gone on that ship to Tau Ceti way back then.”
“Now that I’ll agree with. They were the only lucky ones.”
Skylar set the notebook down then scratched his head.
“Was the Earth struck by two celestial objects?” he asked.
“That would explain a few things. If you go with that theory, I could safely assume they hit about seven months apart due to the darkness that followed on two separate occasions,” the computer replied.
“There would have been absolutely no hope for life on Earth,” he muttered, staring down at the yellowing pages of the notebook, “No hope whatsoever.”
“I tried to warn you that you would find nothing.”
“Yeah, thanks for the insight,” Skylar grumbled as he stepped out of the room.
. . . . .
The elevator brought him back up to the noisy dome. He sat down next to a large steel beam then shuffled through his backpack for a bag of peanuts.
“What about food, computer? What are my chances for survival?” he asked.
Event Horizon Page 3
