by Erik Hyrkas
Adriel’s expression softened and his eyes showed genuine concern. “I’m sorry that this is your fate,” he whispered. “I wouldn’t wish this upon anybody born with freedom. If you wish, I can grant you a painless death now and report that you resisted and it was necessary. Once you leave this room, you will die here eventually; but there is virtually no chance that it will be painless.”
“I will not die here,” Brit said through gritted teeth, and the fact that her words sounded as determined as Michaels and nearly echoed his made her immediately realize that she was, in fact, going to die there just as he had.
Adriel’s expression grew sad, but he nodded. Then he looked at Marcy, who shook her head. He must have taken her gesture to mean that she didn’t want to die either because he sighed and then walked to the door.
“Servants of the High Lord, please follow me,” he said.
Brit smirked at the title “High Lord,” wondering if he was into marijuana or other illicit drugs. She looked at Marcy to see if she found it amusing, the way she might look at Jax in the same situation she realized, and saw that Marcy only looked afraid and miserable. Brit decided that she was herself beyond fear at this point. Death had always been inescapable, and if it would come sooner in this place, then she would spend as little of her remaining time as she could manage fearing it. Now her greatest hope was that they didn’t see Jax, that maybe the “others” that Adriel had referred to had found him and he was safe. Her own fate seemed straightforward at this point, and though she had denied it to Adriel, now that she had heard her own words echo Michael’s, she accepted that this was inescapable.
Adriel led them through a large well-lit hall with white glossy floors and white glossy walls with etched gold symbols that Brit didn’t recognize. They descended a flight of broad white stairs with delicate gold highlights outlining each step. At the base of the stairs, the wall opened to the outside for the width of the entire hall with no supports, windows, or doors. As they passed some point under the outer wall, the air grew distinctly warmer and the sounds of the outside world reached Brit’s ears, as though she had passed some invisible barrier that kept out the sound. She glanced back and saw no barrier.
Squat buildings of many shapes, none more than three stories tall but each unique and interesting in their own way, were all around for as far as Brit could see. There were no cars or other vehicles, and no sidewalks. The buildings’ entrances merely opened directly to the street where hundreds of people were moving with the purpose. Each of the people wore either white loincloths or black wetsuits similar to the ones that Adriel and Raguel wore, except rather than gold patches on their obliques most had blue or red patches. Everybody in this place moved with the determination of somebody five minutes late to an important meeting with their boss.
Adriel was no different. He led them at a merciless pace through the bustle. Neither Brit nor Marcy had had a proper meal or slept well recently, and Brit wasn’t sure she could keep up much longer. Her legs trembled and her stomach hurt, and she began to think that she would soon pass out from exhaustion when Adriel entered a broad building four stories tall, the tallest building she had seen so far.
Again, as in any other building she had seen, there was no door. They simply passed through open air and the sound from outside was gone and the air felt cooler. The entry they walked through was well-lit and there was only one person standing at a desk in an otherwise unadorned room. Brit couldn’t help but feel sorry for the man, who seemed to have nothing better to do than stand there. He had glossy mahogany skin and no visible hair anywhere. Brit was reminded of a black Mr. Clean.
“Are these the new servants?” the hairless man asked.
Adriel glanced back at Marcy and Brit. “Yes. They are malnourished and sleep deprived, and so maybe the Lord will be gracious enough to give them a few hours to rest and recover.”
The man smiled. “Do you presume to give the Lord orders?”
Adriel’s face whitened. “Of course not,” he said. “I was merely…”
“You were merely overstepping your bounds,” the man interrupted. “You may go.”
Adriel bowed and, without a glance back, briskly walked away.
The man watched Adriel walk away and waited until they were the only three in the room. “You should be grateful to him. You only live because he is among the Lord’s favorites and requested that you were not disposed of unless necessary.”
“Unless necessary? What is that supposed to mean?” Marcy asked in alarm.
Brit had to agree. That wasn’t reassuring. Not at all.
“Tsk, Tsk,” the man said.
He tapped on the blank surface of the desk a few times, then gave a last, dramatic swish of his finger, and Marcy gasped. Brit saw the panic in her eyes, and she knew that Marcy was somehow restrained from talking again. These people were real pricks, she thought. She now wasn’t sure that death wouldn’t be preferable to a life of working for them.
“Your privilege to speak when not directly ordered by a master has been revoked for the day. You must learn that it is your position to listen but never speak. When given an order, you will bow. You will never look a superior in the eye, and you should know that everybody, even other slaves, are superior to humans.”
Brit and Marcy instantly stopped staring at his face, which was pretty hard to do when all you wanted to do was think about the different ways you might give him new permanent scars.
“Good,” he said as he walked away from the desk and then slowly around the two women. Brit found it hard not to watch his progress around them. She felt like prey that need only move to prompt being pounced on by a predator.
Chapter Fifteen
Jax scratched the stubble on his chin. Brit was definitely going to be pissed at him, he decided. He was supposed to pick her up at Marcy’s house, and he hadn’t even called to say he was going to be late—let alone by more than a day.
Mining sucked. They gave Jax a tool, basically a glass stick, which emitted a pulse of energy strong enough to chisel rock right off the wall without too much effort. The laborious part was carrying the rock back to the surface. The air was stale and the lighting bad, and he was only on the surface long enough to remember that there was such a thing as daylight.
With each trip to the surface, he saw a massive digital screen above the mine entrance that showed different people in dimly lit rooms. Those people were gaunt and wore pained expressions. He knew these must be the people serving as examples for anybody who didn’t follow orders.
Jax was having a hard time tracking time because the sun still had not risen above the horizon after many trips to the surface now. He was certain that it didn’t take a full day to mine a single bin-full of minerals, but the sky always looked the same. He knew that planets like Venus rotated so slowly that a single day on it would take over two hundred Earth days. Jax thought of how he had appeared here, and despite the similarities with Earth, he had to consider the possibility that he might not be on Earth. He had been called “human” many times now, and it never sounded like a compliment.
Now, as he dumped another bin of minerals, a rock the other slaves called vaalia, he wondered how he’d get out of this place. In fact, it was dawning on him now that he might never leave, but certainly not without effort anyway. He needed to start working on a plan. There were no fences, and though he saw the occasional black and gold wetsuit-clad guard, there were plenty of opportunities to make a break for the forest. He thought of how baby elephants were tied up with a thin cord that they couldn’t break, and that even as they grew large enough to easily break it, the fact that they hadn’t been able to break it when they were little meant that they stopped trying. Is that why the other slaves kept working? Maybe they assumed they couldn’t escape, and so they didn’t. Or maybe that forest was full of critters that would eat them and so nobody was going to take that chance.
He had asked another slave about the forest, and that slave only looked around with a scared
expression, like somebody might be listening, then tapped the donut glued to his head. Jax wondered if the slaves were somehow monitored via the donut, if it was recording them. He hadn’t been hungry or thirsty the entire time he had been there, and more disturbingly, he hadn’t needed to take a shit. When he asked another slave about that, the man had also tapped the headgear. That donut was definitely not natural.
Now that he thought of donuts, he really wanted one. He wasn’t hungry, but a trip to the small downtown bakery called Glam Doll to buy a dozen Dark Angels and Pinup Girls dominated the better part of his consciousness for hours. That shop had the best donuts in the Twin Cities, as far as he was concerned. Fucking amazing, he thought. Better than the stale air that was all he tasted right now.
He was brought back to reality when the last bit of vaalia he was chiseling fell away, revealing emptiness beyond. He had inadvertently dug into some kind of cave. He looked around to see if anybody had noticed his discovery. It was too dark to see much, but there was enough light filtering in to see that it was definitely some sort of natural cavern. The ground was uneven and looked like a giant crack in the ground.
The hole was only a few inches big, barely large enough to look through properly. He wanted to make it bigger, but he was surrounded by other slaves and wasn’t sure if they’d narc on him. Then he thought of his donut and pondered whether he was being watched. He dragged his bin further along the wall they were mining and worked on a fresh portion of the wall that had much more vaalia. He would come back to this spot later. He wasn’t sure when, but this sort of discovery might lead to freedom if he was careful. He’d need to take his time, figure out how the donut worked, and learn more about the surrounding area.
A plan was forming in his head; admittedly it was not yet a good plan, but having any plan at all was a start.
Chapter Sixteen
“Follow me,” the hairless man said, and he began walking.
The back of the room had a series of evenly-spaced floor-to-ceiling vertical seams every five feet across the entire width of the room. The wall was well-lit, and it wasn’t until they were close enough that Brit realized the floor also had a horizontal seam across one of the gaps and that the gap was actually a door. She had to study the place the wall beyond the door met the floor to even find that point. The illusion that there was no space to walk through was strong enough that it wasn’t until the man leading them stepped into it that she was confident it was there.
After leading them through multiple empty halls, they came to a dead end. The guide placed his hand on the empty wall and the floor shimmered as a broad disk materialized. He stepped onto it and then looked expectantly at the women, who each hesitated before following him onto the newly formed disk that was large enough for all three of them to still have personal space while standing on it.
For twelve seconds of pure terror, they plunged downward through alternating darkness and bright light. When they finally came to a gentle stop hundreds of feet below where they had been, Brit considered that this might have been scary enough to make a mediocre ride at an amusement park similar to those rides that shot you straight up. But instead this one plunged straight down and gave you no notion of when or if you were going to have your legs broken by the impact. That they stopped gently was a surprise as she hadn’t noticed the deceleration that allowed them to stop without any jolt. One moment lights were flashing by at an alarming rate, and the next they were standing, still on the disk, in a new room.
There were dozens of people in this large room, each working on different tasks. All were burly men wearing barely more than napkins over their lower bodies. Two men were carrying a shiny bin, possibly made of glass, and it was full of the small black disks that Brit recognized as the type of disk she found when Michael died. They dumped that bin onto a table where six men were organizing the piles of disks into two new bins, distinguishing between them in a way that Brit couldn’t yet perceive. Two pairs of men waited by each of these new bins, and when a bin was full, one pair hauled the disks away and the pair that had initially hauled in the full bin then stood with their now empty bin waiting for it to be filled. As the pair that had hauled away the full bin left, a new pair of men came in with a full bin.
The work looked dull, boring, pointless, and worst of all, endless. This didn’t matter to Brit. She saw this mindless idleness as a chance to think and plan. She would find a way out of here. She was certain of it.
On the wall was a digital screen with images of starving people trapped in dimly lit, blank rooms. Those people looked desperate. Each image only showed for a few moments before it changed to the next. Some of the people had disfigured hands and blank eyes.
“This will be your first work station,” their guide said. “Do not fail in your task.” He gave a slight nod to the screen.
He walked to the table and looked over the work, nodded, and then turned to the two men holding a nearly full bucket. “Instruct them how to perform their duties at this station.” Then he stepped back onto the disk that had brought them there and disappeared into the ceiling.
The moment he was out of sight, the two men holding the bin handed it to Brit and Marcy, then walked away. The bin wasn’t too heavy, maybe as much as a full laundry basket, but with two people, it didn’t seem like much of a problem.
“Where are you going?” Brit asked.
“To get a new container,” the one man said as they disappeared down a long hallway.
“Who is going to tell us how to do this job?” Brit asked.
One of the men pushing glass disks into the bin they were now holding laughed. “It isn’t hard. When it is full, carry it to the end of that hall. There will be somebody there. Do as you are told and move to the next position.”
“How long will we do this?” Brit asked.
The man shrugged. “I’ve been doing this my whole adult life.”
“I mean, before we get a break,” she said.
He gave her a confused look. “What is a break?”
“When do we sleep, eat, go to the restroom?”
He smirked. “Never.”
“That’s not possible,” Brit said, exasperated.
“You are human,” he said. “Those needs will have been eliminated for you. You may feel some fatigue and much pain, but you’ll recover your strength while working some of the lighter tasks.”
Brit realized that she didn’t feel as hungry as she had when they first boarded the aircraft, and yet they hadn’t eaten. Then she realized that, while tired, she should have been on the verge of passing out. She felt alert enough to comprehend something had been done to her body.
“Is it the thing they put on my forehead that’s doing this?” Brit asked.
“Yes, the halo provides for your needs,” the man answered. “Your bin is full. Haul it away now.”
“What is your name?” Brit asked.
“I don’t remember,” the man said with a small sad smile. “Go before you disrupt the flow and cause everybody problems.”
Brit and Marcy carried the bin away. She wanted to discuss everything with Marcy, but as Marcy couldn’t speak due to the restraint that had been put on her jaw, there was no point.
The hallway was ridiculously long and took many seemingly pointless turns without any doors or stairs. They had walked for nearly an hour, and Brit was on the verge of setting the bin down to take a break when she finally saw a person in the distance. They were maybe two hundred yards away. She wouldn’t have realized it was a person, except for the flesh tones and movement, at this distance; and she wasn’t even sure she wasn’t seeing things until they were a hundred yards away.
“These people seem to have lots of technology. I wonder why we have to carry these things so far,” Brit pondered aloud.
Marcy gave a long disheartened grunt.
“Sorry,” Brit said, regretting that she had spoken. Being silent is one thing, but being forced to be silent had to be maddening. She didn’t mean to remind Marc
y of that.
The bin felt much heavier than when they started, but Brit speculated that it was fatigue catching up with her more than any change in the contents. When they were still thirty yards away, she wanted to call out to the man who watched them with anticipation. She wondered why he didn’t come to help them, but then she noticed that he was performing his own task: he was taking the glass disks from a bin, holding them up to a device that made some glow gold and some remain the same shade of deep gray, then placing the gold ones in a small bin and the others in a different bin.
The man looked up from sorting when they were ten feet away, gave them a double take, and then spoke. “Humans?” he asked.
“Isn’t everybody?” Brit asked.
“Definitely not,” the man said. “We see a few from time to time, maybe once every century or so, but not often. I saw a male human yesterday, but now two females. You must have done something bad to deserve this.”
Brit wasn’t surprised to hear that the man didn’t think of himself as human, despite every appearance that he was. Certainly the man was large and muscular, like every man here, but beyond that, he seemed no more alien or fantastic than a TV wrestling star.
“Who was the human male you saw?” Brit asked, thinking immediately of Jax.
“I think he said his name was Axe or something like that,” the man said. “We don’t use names here—there’s no point. Talking at all is discouraged, but most of us still do. Maybe it’s to keep from going crazy, and if you are wondering, lots of people go crazy after a century anyway.”
