by Glenn Damato
EIGHT
The door shuts behind me.
A cement room about four meters wide. Dim light reveals people scattered across the floor. University-age, in blue scrubs, eleven of them. Plus one person standing. The light’s too weak to see clearly, but his profile is broad and solid, like an athlete. He’s smiling.
Yes, smiling.
“Welcome to the Ninth Circle.” His voice is raspy but oddly cheerful.
“Ninth what?”
“Ninth Circle of Hell. You know, abandon hope ye who enter.” The smile widens to a grin. If he’s a fútbol player, he’s the kind who’s never as funny or as entertaining as he thinks he is.
I’m wacked-out and starving, so I take everything in slowly. Except for the wiseass, everyone is asleep or shifting position as if half-awake. There’s some kind of hand-drawn chart on the wall. A black plastic bucket in the corner—the toilet smell? At least there’s a cover on it.
“Pay no attention to him,” calls someone from the floor. A deep, full-grown voice. There’s reddish chin stubble and an ample stomach. “Ryder crossed the line into clinical insanity yesterday morning.” He rises on unsteady legs and bows from the waist. Despite his voice he can’t be much older than me. “Eric Rahn is my name, systems engineering my game.”
“Cristina Flores.”
The grinning athlete bobs his head toward Eric. “Two days ago we couldn’t get a word out of him. Now he just babbles nonsense.” He extends his hand. “Ryder Lawson.”
His fingers swallow up mine. Probably not clean fingers, as there’s no sink for washing. I ask him, “How long have you all been in here?”
“I estimate approximately seven hundred years.” Ryder turns and his knees buckle.
Eric says, “Sit for a while. Pace yourself.”
“Shut it,” Ryder responds. “Too excited to sit. Too energized! Time and space lose all meaning here in the Ninth Circle.”
This crowded, stinky place must be affecting his brain.
“Does anyone know why we’re here?” I ask, making my words louder than necessary to maybe wake the dark heaps still dozing.
“They’re testing us,” Ryder replies. His voice grows more hoarse with each word. “I’m proving my staying power. Mental and physical stamina. And I’m not claustrophobic at all!” He scans the ceiling as if looking for something. “You get that last part?”
“Think they’re listening to us?”
“Oh, sure, listening and watching. This is a test, a filter. Will we break down or keep functioning? Look at me. Still functioning pretty good, considering.”
A blond girl with delicate features comes up behind me and pours me a cup of water from a jug. She has a look of innocence, as if she’d been sheltered her whole life from everything nasty. I nod thanks and gulp the water down. We touch hands.
Her lips tighten with sudden hurt. “Your face. What happened?”
“A short but painful fight with a kitchen floor.”
“That’s funny. I hope you taught that floor not to mess with you. My name is Alison, by the way.”
“Alison, a doctor told me this is a way out. What do you think that means?”
Before she can respond Ryder says, “The new girl ponders the big question.” He waves his hand toward the chart of words and numbers on the cement wall. “We all have certain things in common, and those commonalities might help us crack the mystery. Cristina, is it? Ready for some questions?”
Ryder uses a short little tube—a marker—to write my name on the wall, and he spells it correctly. He’s good at the useless ability of drawing letters by hand and probably never misses a chance to show it off. My eyes are adjusted to the dim light and I can make out most of the chart. Horizontal rows of information labeled with each person’s name.
“Ask away.”
He points the marker at my face. “Age?”
“Seventeen.”
He writes it down next to my name. “Profession?”
“Not tracked.”
That draws a rude grunt from Eric. Here I am, not caring what he thinks.
Ryder taps the marker against his chin. “Never attended university?”
“Is that a crime? I have the credits for Peking, GAO composite two fifty-six. GAO math—”
“Alright, we get it,” Ryder says. “Some kind of malcontent, huh? What’s your Score?”
“Two oh eight.”
Eric snorts. His way of expressing admiration, I guess. “A new record.”
“Join the club!” Ryder cries. “The troublemakers’ club! You’re a troublemaker because you don’t want to live under their control, right?”
“Take a wild guess.”
His voice softens. “Maybe we’ll all get a chance, a way out. They said that to me, too.”
Eric yawns. “They said that to everybody.”
“We’re on a list,” Ryder says to the sleeping figures on the floor. “A list of smart, educated troublemakers, all together under this hospital, where the Autoridad can’t see us, at least for a little while.” He jabs the marker at my face. “Parents? Siblings?”
Most of the others stir into wakefulness, thanks to Ryder’s not-so-quiet voice. I reply, “Is that question necessary?”
He slaps his wall chart. “We’re searching for commonalities! You want to figure this out, don’t you? Are you like the rest of us, no close family?”
Family. Another word Harmony stole from us, because Harmony is the best and greatest family possible. He uses the word boldly, without hesitation. What was his Score?
“My father passed. My mother, I never met her.”
“Brothers, sisters?”
I shake my head. Ryder draws an “X” by my name, same as everyone else. “No family to miss you.”
My fists clench.
Alison grabs my left wrist and lays her fingers over mine. “But you had people you loved? You were part of a close group. You’re not a loner.”
My fingers go on top of hers. “Kids, two kids, not mine. And their mother, I . . .”
“Watched out for them.”
I face Ryder. “How did you know?”
“Just a guess. I had my own people.”
Eric says from the floor, “We’ve shown we can work within a small group. None of us hate other people.”
A dark-haired girl pushes herself upright and rubs her eyes. “Except me. I despise every person in this room.”
Ryder ignores her and gestures toward my stomach. “You still have ovaries?”
He’s asking about Regalo. “How could that figure into this?”
“It’s an unlikely commonality. Everybody here has intact reproductive organs. In a group our age, professionally educated, that’s not likely to happen by chance.”
Eric says, “And, almost all of us are scientists or engineers.”
I study Ryder’s chart. Alison is a botanist. Other names show physicist, medical doctor, biomedical engineer, chemical engineer, mechanical engineer, and molecular engineer. Ryder, the grinning jock, is an applied engineer.
Harmony tracks the most intelligent and diligent students to university at age thirteen, sometimes even younger. They’re enrolled in accelerated professional programs at top schools in Mumbai, Fukushima, Beijing, or Seoul. They get there with a GAO composite lower than mine, because they’re better at keeping their mouths shut.
The sleepy dark-haired girl clears her throat. “Have you geniuses noticed there’s twice as many females in here than males? And we’re close to minimum reproductive age. I’m thinking somebody wants to make a lot of babies, fast.”
“Interesting theory!” exclaims Ryder. “Want to test it out?”
She throws a cup at him. Ryder fills the cup with water but instead of drinking it he hands it back to her. “You need this. Haven’t seen you drink in hours.”
“Maybe has something to do with not wanting to piss into a bucket in front of a room full of people.” Her voice is simultaneously harsh and fragile.
“We
promised not to look.” Ryder points at me with the marker. “Mikki, this is Cristina. Not only are Cristina’s ovaries intact, but she didn’t go to college.”
Are those now my primary qualities? Along with no parents to notice I’m gone?
Mikki is a compact girl with a heart-shaped face and defiant eyes. She drains the cup and says without looking at me, “Take my advice, bang on the door and ask to leave.”
“Why don’t you?”
“I would, if I had any brains. But I have too much suffering invested in this shithole to throw it all away.”
“It’s a filter, like he said,” Eric tells me. He lies down flat on his back, belly sticking up as if he’d swallowed a fútbol. “You should have been here the day before yesterday. There were twenty-six crammed in here before some of them started losing it.”
Ryder throws up both arms. “We who have lasted, be proud.”
Is he dopefaced on fatigue?
I ask him, “Who, exactly, is testing us? Is there evidence they’re Autoridad? Or some other section of Harmony?”
“No chance!” declares Eric. “Whoever brought us here, they can’t be Harmony.”
“Whoever they are , how could they just . . . turn off the Stream? Even in a limited area?”
“They infiltrated the Stream! They hacked it. Don’t ask me how. But you know what? They have access to every bit of information in the world. They know everything about every person alive and dead. They can do anything they want. Covertly. Quickly. The possibilities boggle the mind.”
“You’re probably right,” I tell him. “But what happens if they’re caught?”
Alison sits back against the wall. “We can’t answer that before we figure out why we’re here. Hours of talking and guessing and all we’ve established is it involves human reproduction.”
I touch my abdomen. “How do you know that?”
“Simple probability,” says Ryder. “Around half the university students our age are already sterilized. Almost all the rest get cut by the time they’re twenty-five, if they want to win favor from Harmony and land a decent job. Twenty-six people passed through this room, all late teens, not a single one sterilized. The odds of that occurring randomly—”
“Two to the negative twenty-sixth power,” reports Eric. “Less than one in sixty million, or actually about half of that, now that we have another girl.”
I ask, “How many engineers did we start with?”
Ryder scans his wall chart. “Eighteen, counting those two flakes who ran out when you got here.”
“Solid majority engineers,” I tell him. “I agree we’re supposed to build something.”
Ryder adds, “And make babies. Lots of screamin’ babies.”
Alison points out, “Maybe a self-sufficiency thing. Such a wide range of fields.”
Ryder waves his marker at me, again. “You’re the wild card. No university degree.”
“So what? And quit pointing that thing at me.”
“You messed up our perfect list,” he says, still brandishing the marker. “Not an engineer, not a scientist, not a physician. You don’t belong here!”
My face heats up and I dig my nails into my palms.
“She’s clearly intelligent,” offers Alison. “No pattern broken there.”
“Not intelligent enough to walk out the door,” Mikki mumbles.
I growl, “Maybe I’m here to raise the average level of maturity.”
Ryder hoots and claps his hands.
A different girl sits up and pushes her thin brown hair away from her face. Her pout says she’s going to scold us before a word leaves her lips. She turns to Alison. “I’m a biomedical engineer. Whatever the purpose of our being here, it had better be over quick. You hypothesize a relationship to reproduction. Has someone found a way to speed human gestation by three orders of magnitude? I doubt it. We’ll never have time to produce offspring.” She looks at Eric. “If they infiltrated the Stream and the other Harmony systems, how long do we have before discovery?”
“A few days, Tess. Couple of weeks, max.”
“Certainly not years. Forget about reproduction.”
Alison says, “Unless they have someplace for us to hide.”
Mikki counters, “Hide where? Harmony has the whole planet under surveillance.”
Tess adds, “I’m skeptical these people aren’t working with Harmony.”
Eric folds his arms. “You mean Occam’s Razor tells us to assume they’re Harmony until we have a valid reason to think otherwise?”
Mikki says, “And if they’re Harmony or Autoridad, we’re dead. Nothing we do—”
I can’t stand it. I scream, “Wait!”
They stare back at me. “Can anyone prove they’re Harmony and they’re going to kill us? Did you get a good look at these people? They’re exhausted, all of them, and most of them are nervous, anxious, and hurried. Did you notice? So when was the last time you saw Harmony scared and rushed?”
None of them can answer that, and they know it.
I’m not done. “For what little we know, this may be . . . a chance . . . ”
Blank out.
Ryder finishes my sentence. “For something magnificent.”
The silence hangs for a while. “You feel it, don’t you? You could leave, but you’re still here. So quit planning our funerals while we’re still breathing.”
Ryder shakes his marker at my face, again. “I like her.” He sinks to the floor and closes his eyes, still smiling.
◆◆◆
My fingers reach out to scroll a Stream that isn’t there. Reality creeps back—a damp, reeking chamber full of strangers. I’m sleeping on a floor, as usual. My head rests on Alison’s hip. She had insisted.
Is it day or night? Time and space lose all meaning in the Ninth Circle. Orderlies have been taking people out. Mikki is gone. Eric is gone. A boy named Marc and a girl named Kim are gone. Kim and I shared a few words before sleep; she hadn’t said a word to anyone, so I broke through her shyness by offering a cup of water, the only thing of value we could give each other. She was exhausted and starved, she admitted, but not ready to leave. Three words sustained her: A way out.
Our energy level is near zero. We’re talked out, at the limit of what we can deduce by thinking alone. Not unlike SERCENT, we wait for higher powers to tell us what to do.
I drift back to the edge of sleep, but the door opens and the sudden light burns my eyes. A young man, maybe a few years older than me, wearing standard blue scrubs. He carries a clipboard, but he’s not one of the regular orderlies or one of the docs. There’s a subtle difference when he inspects us. The orderlies don’t care. This hombre does.
We gaze upward at him from the floor.
“You’ve been through an ordeal.” His voice is crisp, almost musical. “Does anyone want out? You can have a shower, hot food, a bed, right down the hall. But remember, if you leave, there’s no reconsideration.”
Ryder asks, “Who are you?”
“Jürgen Morita.” The name matches his face, a striking blend of Asian and Caucasian features. Almost too handsome. He carries authority, but not in a bossy or threatening way.
“What are you?”
Jürgen lowers his clipboard. “I’m a geologist.”
Ryder punches the air with his fist. His smile is back.
Jürgen lowers his voice as if telling us something we aren’t supposed to hear. “It’ll be worth the confinement and hunger. You’ve all held together under stress and deprivation. You’ve earned the right to what comes next.”
He closes the door gently. Somehow, his brief presence makes the room less stinky and ugly.
Ryder breaks the silence. “I volunteer, yes I do.”
I turn around. “Volunteers for what?”
Tess sits up and twists toward Ryder. “You think you know?”
“Oh, I do know.”
She snarls, “Going to tell us?”
Ryder appears as if he’s about to do just that, but he
replies, “No, I don’t think so. Not unless you ask much nicer.”
Tess sighs and lays back down.
But soon afterward the door opens again. This time we all sit upright together. A Chinese orderly ushers us out of our nasty tomb.
Which is good. But the corridor echoes the sounds of arguing and crying from close by.
Yes, crying. That’s not so good.
The orderly leads us toward the turmoil. Jürgen’s distinct voice rises above the others. Four teens bolt through a doorway, muttering in angry tones. Muttering about dying. That’s not good, either.
Ryder still smiles. What’s wrong with him?
We enter a spacious room filled with chairs and people. Smack in the center, Jürgen speaking and gesturing. I catch two words, peril and promise. He stops and faces us. His eyes are excited.
“We’ll come back to that,” he tells the audience seated around him. There are at least forty, all in blue or green scrubs, none older than nineteen or twenty. As usual, most are female.
We’re directed to sit. I pass the girl named Kim; she’s crying softly and wiping both sides of her thin nose. She smiles and whispers to me, “Happy tears, happy tears.”
All eyes follow Jürgen as he walks to the front of the room. Seven gray-haired men and women stand along the wall apart from the seated teens. Dr. Ordin is among them, still in her white coat.
My feet stop, my hand goes to my cheek. At the far end of the room is Dr. Mike. He stands erect and unflinching.
He’s a part of this. Of course he is. That makes sense.
Dr. Mike wears a brown leather jacket with a cloth patch on the left breast. A colorful patch, colorful and familiar.
Is it even possible? I squint to be sure.
A NASA patch.
I’m not dreaming, not imagining. There’s the blue circle, the white letters, the red curve. NASA. Exactly as the logo appeared in my Apollo book—only this is no book. This is real.
Dr. Mike returns my gaze and locks on my eyes. He brings his right fist away from his body and sticks his thumb straight up.
I thrust my own right fist forward and stick my thumb up and hold it there, exactly the same way, fearless and bold, without taking my eyes off his.
NINE
