by Leito, Chad
“Keep walkin’, nothing to see here. Forward you go! Just keep stepping.”
They kept moving, deeper and deeper, with many slowly curving hallways so that by the time they reached a room with the kiosks, Asa was extremely disoriented. The room was expansive with high, rough stone ceilings. Multipliers were barking orders.
“Hurry up! We’re on a time frame! Each of you, get into one of the kiosks, and follow the commands!”
Hundreds of kiosks lined the walls. They looked similar to portable lavatories, except constructed of chrome, not plastic. Asa found one with the word “Vacant” above the doorknob on the outside, and entered.
“Welcome to the Task,” came an electronic female voice from no particular area inside the machine. “First, say your last and then first name.”
“Palmer, Asa.”
“Palmer, Asa,” repeated the computer. “Six feet, one inches, second semester, Winggame team is the Sharks, Winggame captain is Roxanne Hurst. Is this correct?”
“Yes,” Asa said.
“Welcome, Asa. Take off all your clothing, including your suit, your armband, and your shoes, and place them into the slot.”
A small chute opened inside the kiosk and, reluctantly, Asa stripped naked and discarded his clothes. As usual, the heat had been turned up on his suit. Now that it was off his body, he began to shiver.
“Hold your breath,” the machine said. Without questioning it, Asa obeyed.
Piercingly cold water gushed over his body and down a drain that opened up in the floor. The water then grew hot so that it scalded Asa’s skin. He couldn’t take it, and tried the doorknob, but it was locked. At first, the water was soapy, but after a few moments, it was clear. The water stopped as fast as it had begun, and steam came up from the ground, burning Asa some more. After a few moments in which Asa cried out in pain, these things ceased, and a vent brought the humidity back to normal. Fans blew from all over, drying Asa. When he was dry, the fans stopped and the voice came back on.
“Bathing is essential to ensure that you do not transport any outside skin bacteria into the Task environment. Here is the suit you will wear in the Task,” said the voice, and a drawer opened. Within, Asa found new clothes, which were still warm as thought they had just been gotten out of the dryer. Asa reflected that it was odd how small things like the feel of warm fabrics made him miss his mother so immensely.
He put on the suit, the shoes, and the new armband. All of these things were the same as his normal suit except different colors. His shoes, suit, and armband were all made of digital camouflage, which was comprised of small, interspersed pixels of color. The dominating color was deep green.
“Sit,” came the next command, and a metal, cushionless chair rose out of the ground. Asa obeyed once more, and straps automatically whipped down from over his shoulders and latched into sockets beside his hips, so that the straps made an X over his chest.
Then, Asa’s stomach lurched and he started screaming. Without warning, his seat had dropped through the floor and he was falling in a dark cave, in which he could not see the bottom. Other students’ screams joined his, and he felt the air flutter around him as he counted the seconds he was falling in his head.
One-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, three-Mississippi…
By three, the descent had slowed and a chopping sound was pounding the air overhead. Asa could now dimly see the floor half a mile below him; people with flashlights were walking over stone ground. It appeared, though, that he wasn’t going to the ground. He had now stopped moving towards the floor, and was now moving sideways, towards one of the walls of the great cave.
He looked upwards and saw that his chair had spawned helicopter-like propellers from the top of the headrest. These blades whirled so fast that they appeared to be one circular object. A motor hummed beneath him, presumably powering the helicopter blades.
The cave was riddled with dozens of wide tunnels. Without Asa delivering any instruction, his flying chair moved into one of these tunnels while other chairs flew in adjacent ones. With the speed at which everything had changed since the Winggame match, he hadn’t had time to think much. One moment, he was watching Roxanne trying to defend their last goal in anticipation, and now, thirty minutes later, he was riding on a flying chair through a tunnel he hadn’t known existed. He had expected to be in the locker room, reviewing the game with the rest of his teammates by now, but that’s not how the Academy works. You’re not permitted to always get what you expect.
And what could this Task be? He recalled climbing King Mountain for last semester’s Task; he remembered how the Academy had taken the students that had died earlier that semester, rejuvenated them like Dr. Frankenstein had rejuvenated the monster, and somehow programmed them to want to kill. He hoped that there wouldn’t be undead creatures again.
But where am I going?
Asa wondered if the flying chairs would play a role in the Task. Judging by the entrance, Asa guessed that the Academy had spared no cost in creating this semester’s challenge. With the Academy’s advanced genetic recombinant technology and its seemingly endless supply of funds, Asa didn’t think that there was a limit to what the Task could contain.
Maybe the undead are the least of my concerns.
Asa sensed that the flying chair had ceased advancing forward, and was now flying upwards. As the blades chopped and his feet dangled in pitch-dark air, Asa’s mind worked with nasty images of what the Task could possibly hold. In his mind’s eye, he saw all of the Sharks being thrown into a metal room with another team. The last team with surviving members wins. He imagined them fighting another group of teenagers to the death. He imagined the Academy forcing them to take other lives without the clinicalness of a weapon like a machine gun. Robert King and the other perverse minds would want them to get their hands dirty. The Academy pitted students against each other. It made students see death, and become very familiar with it. Maybe they think that if we hear bones crunch beneath our hands, that if we slit our friends’ throats so that the blood shoots out onto our faces, our bellies, our forearms, that they’ll break us. Maybe the theory is that if they can put us in situations where we have to kill our acquaintances, that when we graduate and they ask us to kill total strangers, we won’t be so adverse.
Asa didn’t know the true reason, and couldn’t figure it out because he couldn’t understand the Academy. Whatever moral code the place hadn’t squeezed out of him yet had made it so that he was unable to imagine kidnapping fifteen year olds and training them in murderous, mind poisoning ways so that they’d later be soldiers. Asa was beginning to feel nauseated.
Again he reflected on the scenario with the metal room and two Winggame teams being forced to kill each other with their bare hands. Yes, that would satisfy all of the rumors Asa had heard that this Task was going to be something like the gladiator fights that used to be held in the coliseum, but no, the metal room situation wasn’t something the Academy would do. It was too simple, too sane. If they were going to do that, why dress all the students in new suits and create flying chairs to transport them? Why not just set up a simple office building, lock fifty kids in there, and not open the door until the screaming stopped? That seemed to be the logical way to go about it if you wanted to do a simple gladiator-style fight to the death.
But that wasn’t how the Academy worked. At the end of Asa’s Fishie semester, the Task didn’t involve just climbing the back of King Mountain, but you had to do it while your undead friends chased you down, trying to kill you. The Academy always liked to throw in a twist.
Asa’s mind went even further into how appalling he thought the Task would be. Maybe they’ll put us in situations where we have to sacrifice our own teammates. Maybe they’ll ask us to throw our teammates into a furnace, or they’ll fill the room we’re in with poison gas. Or, maybe instead of using dead people from the Academy, they’ll find dead people from our past.
Asa had a sickening image of being face to face with his mother again�
��except it wasn’t his mother. The Academy had dug up his mom’s grave, taken her DNA, and made some woman look like the woman who had died from the Wolf Flu a few years ago. Maybe they’d tell her that if she memorized a script and said it to Asa that they wouldn’t kill her. “Please, Asa! I love you! Please don’t kill me!” She’d be crying, because even though her identity would be false, her fear would be real. And they’d tell Asa to kill her.
He shuddered in the cold metal chair. The flying chair’s ascent was slowing, it seemed. Not even the Academy is that messed up, is it? They won’t use the love of my dead mother against me, will they?
Before he could think of these questions any longer, his chair was lifted out of a hole in a white, tile floor. After he was through, the hole disappeared and the chair clattered to the tile, but didn’t topple over. Above him, the propellers had stopped spinning.
He was in a large, open, white room. Across the expanse of tile floor upon which his chair now sat other holes were opening and his teammates were appearing. Jen shot out, looking cocky as ever (Asa was beginning to suspect that her brash attitude was a shell, a defense mechanism that came when she was most frightened). Then there came Bruce Thurman, Stan Nuby, Janice Curnsworth, Juan Chavez, and Roxanne Hurst. The rest of the team was already seated, including Boom Boom and a third semester student named Lilly Bloodroot.
Lilly Bloodroot’s eyes were a deep, unmistakable purple. Asa did not know whether this was the result of a mutation, or if she was merely an anomaly who was born this way. Her hair was as white as milk, but as thick and healthy as a horse’s tail. In Winggame practice it had been hinted at by some of the older students that she had received a remarkable mutation after climbing King Mountain as a Fishie. Asa had never seen her do anything extraordinary, and did not know what her ability was. Something about the unnatural appearance of Lilly’s eyes and hair made Asa wonder if she could read minds. He didn’t think it was possible, but seven months ago he thought that humans couldn’t fly…
Asa’s fellow teammates all looked around the large, white room in befuddlement. Asa saw that every student in the room, including himself, had a small golden shark logo on the left pectoral of their camouflage suits, to indicate their team. No one said a word, and all was silent except for the call of birds and the chirping of insects outside.
Asa then gazed outside. Incredibly large windows that looked out onto a spectacular landscape dominated all four walls of the massive room. The white room that they sat in was ten stories above the ground below. Spread out around them were miles and miles of green, lush landscape. There were areas where thick, leafy canopies ran for thousands of acres at a time, and then large fields with knee high green grass and the occasional tree dominated other regions. There were clear blue bodies of water, and fast moving brown rivers with white, foamy rapids. Judging by the temperature of the room, it was hot here. Every few miles in the distance there were facilities that stood just as tall as the one that now housed the Sharks. These were dispersed evenly across the landscape. Directly below them, Asa could see a strange animal grazing in the grass. They looked similar to a buffalo, but were completely out of scale; they each were the size of half an elephant. Instead of the rough red-brown hair you would expect to see on a buffalo, these animals were covered in feathers of such color and variety that you would expect to see on a male peacock. They were grazing in the tall grass, beautiful in the sky’s light that came off of them.
Oh, God, oh, Jesus! Asa thought as he saw the dead pair in the grass. The animals were enormous, well muscled, and with large horns that were clearly visible even from Asa’s distance. And yet, two of these animals lay dead in the grass, their blood spilling out around them in a ten-yard diameter. Their legs, and their heads were untouched, but their torsos had been gutted like a human might gut a crab. Their rib cages remained intact, but the contents of it, as well as their entire stomachs, were missing. Rainbow feathers were spilled around them.
The other animals seemed to not be at all disturbed at this sight, and continued to eat around the dead. There was no sign of the perpetrating carnivore.
What could have done such a thing? Asa thought. What would have been big enough to take out two of those animals?
A chime sounded, and then a hologram of Robert King was projected into the middle of the white room. He had his hands in the pockets of his gray suit, and his pupils were bigger than ever. His head jerked involuntarily to the right. Something about his huge pupils makes him look more like a shark than a human; the eyes make him look hungry.
“Greetings. Welcome to the Task,” the hologram said to the surrounding group of bewildered Academy students. “It’s a pretty remarkable view, isn’t it?”
Asa was taken aback by the hologram. It looked so real, as though Robert King was actually in the room with them.
“The first thing that I want to address is the glass that makes this view possible. You might not have yet had time to look at it, but it is very thin. Don’t touch it! It breaks very easily, and you don’t want to be in here when it does.
“I know what you’re thinking: No, if you break the glass, you won’t be thrown outside by some strong gust of wind. Here in the Tropics, that’s what we call this place, the weather is nice. It’ll remain around ninety degrees most of the day, then drop into the lower eighties at nighttime. The winds won’t ever get above twenty miles per hour. No, the reason that you shouldn’t break the glass is because of the pterosaurs, but we’ll get to those later. Right now, I want to address more general things. Why are you here? How can you survive? What is the point of this Task?
“Well, like all things in the Academy, the point is to weed out the weakest students so that they’ll never have a chance to perform poorly in the field as graduates.”
That’s not the only ‘point,’ Asa thought angrily. You also want to disturb us, change us. It’s not just a weeding out process; it’s a molding process.
Robert King’s hologram walked around the room, turning on occasion, his hands in his pockets. At times, he walked straight through students and their chairs, but went on as though nothing had happened. The hologram licked its lips with a dry tongue and then its head jerked to the right once more.
“It saddened me to hear from a little birdie of mine that there were rumors circulating about the nature of this semester’s Task—correct rumors, at that. Now, doesn’t that take all the fun out of the surprise?” He shrugged. “There will still be plenty of surprises, I suppose.
“But, yes, as the rumors have suggested, this semester’s Task will be similar to the gladiator fights of the ancient Romans in that one group of people living may mean the death of another group. However, there will be many differences from how the gladiator fights were conducted. Many of these are made possible by new technologies; I’d like to think the Romans would be proud of these.
“If you would, please run your hand over your left shoulder.” Asa did. There was a small, Velcro-concealed packet there that he hadn’t noticed before. “This is where your suicide pills are kept. Notice the positioning: It is possible for you to bend your head over, removed the pack with your teeth, and begin to chew. No hands required. The poison will seep through the covering into your mouth. Once the drug touches the vascular markings on the inside of your mouth, you’ll die. The death will be relatively painless. For certain, it will be much more painless than being tortured to death by your fellow students; this is a scenario that undoubtedly some of the students would have to experience if not for the suicide pills. Gratefully, Dr. Gene Gill thought that not providing you with a clean way to leave this planet would be cruel. I slightly disagree, but compromises must sometimes be made, even by the most powerful of us.”
His too-dilated pupils seemed to twinkle at the mention of his power.
“These new suits you are wearing are not merely for camouflage, although that is one of their uses. These suits are lined with thousands of tiny batteries; these batteries are so small, in fact, that the
y are impossible to perceive with normal human senses.”
As Asa watched the hologram of Robert King moving around the room in his gray suit, he began to feel claustrophobic. He felt that his suit was too tight; he wanted out of it. He began to sweat.
“These batteries have no other purpose but to administer shock to students at certain times. For instance, it you attempt to remove your suit, you will be shocked. Not to death, probably, but the shock will be very substantial. If, after the initial shock, you continue to attempt to remove your suit, you will, indeed, be shocked to a sure and painful death.
“Also, look at the center of this room. Hovering four feet above the ground you’ll see a blue, transparent sphere. It’s a force field of sorts. Drifting inside of this force field is your team’s Killing Electronic Emitter, or KEE, as an acronym. Like a door key.”
Asa looked at the floating blue force field and saw the object, the KEE, slowly rotating inside. It was a silver statue of a shark, about the size of one of Asa’s feet.
“This KEE is very important to you. If any part of your body penetrates this force field, you will be shocked with enough voltage to kill an elephant seven times over.”
Now Asa was really sweating. He felt trapped. What if the suit malfunctions?
“However, every student who is not a Shark will be allowed to reach within this force field and remove the Shark KEE, no problem. Likewise, you will be able to remove any other team’s KEE without being electrocuted. In short, you can only reach within a blue force field if it belongs to another team.
“Adjacent to the blue force field, you will see a red one: At this time, all teams have an empty red sphere in their Home Base.”
Asa could see Stan’s face on the other side of the red, transparent ball that floated in the room. Outside, the beautiful feathered creatures continued to graze in the tall grass.
