Would I get in trouble?
Silencing my breath, I waited, listening. There was nothing around. It seemed absolutely deserted. I was all alone.
I swallowed back my fear and widened the hole, the crumbling tile spilling at my feet and inside. Now there was a desperate need in me to peer in and see what was there. It only took a few minutes to widen it to just larger than the size of my torso.
I could crawl into it if I wanted.
My entire body shook with fear, excitement. I squatted down until the hole was eye level and peered inside. It was completely black.
“Hello?” I whispered.
The word echoed and bounced. It was empty, just waiting. So easy to imagine people moving through here as they worked.
I needed to tell Marshal.
I’ll be back, I said to myself. Then I turned and made my way to the other side of the rails. There was a strange buoyancy in my step, an eruption of glee that had overtaken any sensibility.
I’d found it.
Chapter 10
“Whatever your aesthetic pleasure, the Machine is able to accommodate your every need. Enjoy music? Sample an infinite number of delights by simply asking for them. Artwork on any subject can be visualized promptly on your screens. Even poetry is no problem—simply tell the Machine what you’re seeking, and it will be piped into your pod immediately.” ~ The Book of the Machine
When I got back to my pod, I was both relieved and nervous to find a waiting message from Marshal, simply saying he’d missed my call and wanted me to call him back. The temptation to bring his image up on screen and hold our conversation that way was surprisingly strong, seeing as how I was having such a difficult time regulating my emotions at the moment.
But I didn’t want to cheat him or myself. He deserved to hear my thoughts in person. I wanted to see the nuances on his face.
I called him back. When he answered, I steadied myself and said, “Hi, Marshal. Can you come over?”
He nodded. “I’m leaving right now.”
The time between that call and his arrival at my pod stretched into eternity. After turning on isolation and changing to manual control, I paced the room, brimming and simmering with all the words I wanted to say, sorting through them in my mind. The perfect phrasing to convey the intensity, the starkness of my hurt, my fear. It was suddenly very important that I express myself with care.
His knock crashed them all out of my mind.
I swallowed and answered, scrambling to recover my thoughts. “Please, come in.”
His face was difficult to read, his eyes serious, intense as ever.
“I just wanted to—”
“I’m sorry—”
We both stopped, giving an awkward laugh.
Before I could even blink, Marshal walked over and wrapped his arms around me. The gesture was stilted, stiff at first. Completely foreign and one hundred percent forbidden. But we both melted into each other’s warmth.
Marshal’s heart thudded erratically against my brow. His fingers absently stroked the arch of my lower back, and my body hummed in response, a small fire igniting in my lower belly. I allowed myself the luxury of gently, tentatively touching him in response, just for a moment.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispered raggedly, his breath caressing the top of my hair. “I’ve been beating myself up all day. I wanted to talk to you but you told me to leave you alone, and I was afraid of pushing you away even more.”
Tears bit at the back of my eyes. “I’m not a coward,” I said. “I know I’m not perfect, and I mess up, but you’re my best friend. When push comes to shove, I’d never back out on you or let you down.”
“I know. I was wrong.”
I sighed. “No, you weren’t. I was a coward. Still am. I’m being watched, Marshal. The Committee is keeping an eye on me. My mother told me.” Remembering her last words to me caused a bubble of sorrow to clog my throat. I swallowed several times, trying to shove it down. “I have to be careful from now on.”
“I’m sorry—I didn’t know. We’ll be extra cautious.” He paused, pressing his fingers against the dip of my spine. The gesture set off a ripple across my skin, and I suppressed my strangely excited shiver. “I don’t mean to push you. I promise, I won’t make you do anything you don’t want to. I’m just…I’m scared too. All the signs are adding up, and I’m worried something bad is going to happen, soon. But if you don’t want to explore the surface, I understand.”
“I went up there,” I blurted out, pulling back to look at his face, away from the temptation of his body before I did something embarrassing. “I mean, I went to the railway level and I think I found a tunnel.”
Approval was written all over his face, along with admiration and a flash of something else I didn’t quite know how to read. “That’s amazing. Tell me all about it.”
I did, including the strange dripping from the ceiling.
“Hmm.” He rubbed his chin. “I think we should talk to Kuno about this. Sounds like the repair mechanism isn’t paying much attention to that level anymore.”
“That’s what I thought too.”
“Let’s plan to go see him tonight. If you want to, that is.”
I shot him a toothy smile. “Of course I do. Wouldn’t miss it for anything.”
Marshal looked down at me, a resonance of caring in his eyes that warmed my soul. “I’d better get going. I have some stuff to take care of before tonight. So…I’ll see you then? Want to race to his pod?”
“You bet.” I gave him a sly wink. While I was of course disappointed that our intense moment was over, I was also partially relieved. I needed time to process my feelings. “But I hope you’re ready to lose again. No crying this time, either.”
He laughed, shaking his head. “You wish, Cally.”
* * *
“I’ve started the process to become impregnated, since I was recently approved to have a child,” Tessa said, her dark skin smooth and unmarred on the screen as she gave a courteous smile to her lecture listeners. A smattering of applause greeted the statement. “Thank you. I’ve decided that once I complete the entire procedure, I will be providing lectures to young men and women hoping to do the same someday. Perhaps they can learn from my experience.”
Tessa sounded even less like herself than she had before, the last time we’d talked. She came across as arrogant, even cocky in this lecture. She hadn’t even begun the process yet but she was already planning speeches around it? And weren’t there already enough people who’d done them on this topic? I hadn’t seen any, but I was certain about it.
“Anyway, back in the time of the ancients, childbearing and rearing were a very different process. In my studies, I’ve discovered they were incredibly hands-on and intrusive in their care of young babies and children. Procreation typically occurred due to an excess of physical interactions, not because of careful planning for population control. There was little to no genetic screening done ahead of time on potential parents.”
“Tessa,” a young woman in her twenties interrupted, “why did these ancients choose those methods of reproduction?”
She perched her hands on her lap. “Well, there are a number of different lectures I’ve attended that have questioned that very thing. The consensus is that ancients tended to let emotions carry them away—the sentiments of having a child, the emotions of love made them jump into being a parent without fully weighing the consequences on the family, the society and the planet.”
I drew in a shaky breath. There was that word again—love. It made me think of Marshal’s smile, the scent of his skin when he’d held me earlier today. The lung-squeezing, gut-twisting certainty that I craved his company in a way that went well beyond our friendship.
If love still existed, if it was possible to experience that most forbidden emotion, I was certain that was what was wrong with me.
I loved Marshal.
“So, if there aren’t any other questions, that ends the lecture portion. But I’d love to kn
ow if anyone has heard any new ideas.” Pause. “Cally? I saw you on here, right?”
Shoving aside thoughts of Marshal, I steadied myself and said in a firm voice, “Yes, I’m here. Hello.”
“Cally, do you have any interesting ideas to share?”
“Um, I heard the stars used to be shapes,” I blurted out, thinking about Kuno’s stars, something I’d never had a chance to share with Tessa before. “Ancients used to gaze at the sky and find patterns and shapes in the stars. Like people, or animals, or objects.”
“Shapes?” someone muttered. “Sounds ridiculous.”
My face flamed.
“Well. That sounds…unusual, I guess, though a little too original for my tastes,” Tessa said, stiffness pouring from her voice. “I don’t really find any ideas in the stars, but that’s probably because I don’t bother with air-ship transportation. Okay, thank you all for attending. All praise the Machine.”
I quickly hung up, not even wanting to talk to Tessa after her lecture, which was our usual practice. She’d humiliated me in front of all those people. Made me feel stupid, awkward, when she was the one who’d put me on the spot in the first place.
What had happened to the person who used to tell me we’d get through this together? All my intentions to make amends with her, all the realizations that came about from my conversation with Sirama, disappeared in a trace. I didn’t want to grovel, apologize.
Standing up, I stripped down to my underclothes and dropped to the ground, using my arms to push my body up. It seemed fitting to help me get rid of this anger. Try to shove it out of my head. I didn’t recognize Tessa anymore.
She sounded like my mother. Like the Committee. Like every other nameless face I saw at lectures, posturing and pretending they were perfect.
My arms shook, my muscles crying out from the effort. The trembles, the slow burn were a perfect distraction. Sweat started to form on my skin.
I didn’t need her.
I could get by without her.
She obviously didn’t need me either. She had her adoring audience, her lectures, the child she’d be birthing soon enough.
Arms too weak to hold me up anymore, I collapsed, gasping for breath, cheek pressed against the cool floor. Tears plopped from the corners of my eyes onto the ground. I was losing people one by one because of being different. It hurt.
It made me angry.
I let myself feel the pain for another few moments. After that, I got up, cleansed and changed into new clothes. I couldn’t sit here and wallow in misery. That was just not who I was or how I wanted to be.
“Machine, please put on some poetry. Form, please—rhymed, with a meter. Any subject matter is fine.”
I hadn’t listened to poetry for days; I’d been too busy with everything going on. When I was younger, freshly transplanted into this pod and craving that intangible element I’d come to realize was creativity, I would listen for hours, secretly imagining how it was for the ancients, who used to craft them by hand. No Machine offering clever turns of phrase or refined passages.
A soft hum, and then the words started. I settled into my chair, ready to let the words soothe my aching heart.
“I sit in the dark, silent, listening to—” Pause. “Listening to—a birth—a bird—there’s…there’s…” A longer pause this time. “I sit—I sit…”
My heart rate thrummed hard beneath my skin. What was going on? This wasn’t right. The words were supposed to smoothly flow.
There was a screeching whine and then the words suddenly jarred to a stop.
I shuddered, trying to shake off the resonating echoes of that piercing sound. Then I pulled up the Poetry Committee on the screen.
“Thank you for calling us,” the representative said in a light, tinkling tone. Her hair was thin, gray and slicked back from her forehead. “How can we help make your day as good as possible?”
“There’s something wrong with the rhyming mechanism,” I told her. I hadn’t reported the food incident, but now I was thinking I should have. Because between that and the music and the poetry going glitchy, there was definitely an issue that needed to be addressed.
“I’m very sorry to hear that. Please describe the nature of the incident.”
“It kept hiccupping as it was rhyming and then it let out this horribly squeaky sound and stopped.”
“Thank you.” She looked down, pressing some buttons. “We have logged your complaint. Thank you for calling. All praise the Machine.”
“Wait,” I said, frustration starting to bubble in my gut. “Don’t hang up yet. When is this problem going to be fixed? And did you know that the food was bad too? And the music?”
“You’ll need to report those incidents to their individual committees. As for this, we’re backlogged on complaints, so I don’t know when we’ll be able to address your particular concern.” She gave me a wide smile that even without the filtering screen I could tell didn’t reach her eyes. “Cally, is there anything else you wish me to note in your report?”
“No,” I said sullenly. What was the point?
“Thank you, and have a good day. All praise the Machine.” She clicked off.
The widespread realization of what was happening hit me, and I felt unsettled, nervous. Obviously this was an issue for more people than just me. Things were messing up regularly now.
In the grand scheme of it all, music and poetry weren’t that dire. But food? What was next? Was this going to be it? Would there be more?
I pulled out the Book to make sure I’d done everything I was supposed to do. Yup—I’d logged my complaint. I closed it with a dissatisfied sigh, trying to ignore the other deep, lurking emotion I was feeling.
Fear.
Chapter 11
“If there are moments where you need to remove yourself from the constant stream of the Machine’s communication system, such as during sleep times or when taking care of private necessities, it’s easy. Use the isolation switch to connect and disconnect at will.” ~ The Book of the Machine
I woke the next morning, stretching my arms over my head. My muscles were still sore from yesterday’s push-ups, plus the running. But it was a good ache, one I’d come to crave.
“Machine, please bring me a glass of water,” I said.
A hand came out of the wall, bearing a cup, which I took. As soon as the edge of the cup got close to my nose, I whiffed a foul odor.
“What is this?” I said, peering at the glass. The liquid was murky, not clear. I saw small, wispy things floating in it. It smelled stagnant, rancid.
I put the glass on the table, my stomach flipping over. I’d almost drank that fetid water. It would have caused me to vomit.
“Machine, take the glass away.” Even having it in the room was making me ill.
There was a strange clicking sound. The arm thrust toward the table, back into the wall then out again. In a jarring shuffle it grabbed the water and dumped liquid all across the smooth floor.
Luckily the water was absorbed instantly, like the accident had never happened.
I jumped back, away from the arm, which swung left and right like a strange sort of worm as it worked its way back into the wall.
What is going on? A st rong surge of fear was coursing through me now. The Machine was seriously having issues. Why wasn’t the repair mechanism fixing things?
I turned off isolation. There was a brief, piercing whine that bled into my brain so strongly I had to clasp my hands over my ears.
The sound finally stopped. After a moment I dropped my hands down, shaking all over. I was sick and nervous and very, very afraid.
My screen lit up, dozens of messages waiting for me. All of them discussing the same things. All of them threaded with my same panic.
Water wasn’t working. Isolation was messing up. There were a tremendous number of glitches happening. No one knew what was going on. It was chaos like I’d never seen before, and I was overwhelmed.
Even Sirama, the person who was most cool
and collected about everything, had sent me a message to make sure I was okay…and her voice sounded a little worried. That alone frightened me more than I could admit.
“Cally,” Odeem, one of my colony members said when I picked up her call, a definite tremor in her elderly voice. “I tried to summon bath water this morning and it was filled with…slimy things. And it smelled so badly, it made me vomit when I drank my water glass. Have you heard anything?”
I blinked, fighting back the urge to ask her why she would drink it if it smelled like that. Because I sure hadn’t. But that was how our society was—blindly trusting of anything the Machine handed to them. And while Odeem had always been kind to me, she was a product of our times.
Keeping my voice steady so as not to give away my panic, I said, “I’m sorry to hear that. I recommend you purge your stomach and cleanse your mouth before you get too sick. I’m sure the Book can help you out more. I’m experiencing some issues in my pod too.”
Odeem nodded. “I’m hearing some other disturbing things too.” Her eyes, normally wide anyway, were so large I could see the whites around her pupils. They matched the pale white of her feathery thin hair. “They’re saying someone is sabotaging the Machine. Making all these problems happen.”
“What? That’s ridiculous,” I blurted out. Why would someone want to harm the Machine? We all depended on it. Having it go haywire would cripple our civilization.
Her brow furrowed, ripples of lines waving across her forehead. “It’s the most reasonable idea I’ve heard so far today. What’s your explanation then? Why are all these things happening to us?”
I bit my lip. Honestly, I didn’t know. But I was scared, and I didn’t know what to make of what was happening to us.
Hanson had to be petrified. Alarm fluttered in my chest.
“I’m going to try to find out. Odeem, I need to go. I have to call my brother and make sure he’s okay.”
“Poor thing.” Empathy poured through her voice. “I hope he’s well. All praise the Machine,” she said, ending the call.
Ten Days Page 8
