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We saw his corpse on Tuesday.
E-317 and I were between shifts, heading towards The Shell, when we turned a corner early. Instead of a door into Twelfth, we found only an old closet. In its murky depths lay a half-rotted corpse, a sturdy rope connecting its neck to the ceiling light. Despite his deteriorated face and clothes, the bright and extravagant suit made his identity clear.
"Well, it's been longer than usual since we last saw him."
"How long has he been here? No one's used this closet since Automaton."
"Months?"
"How long does it take for a human body to rot to the bone?"
"What do we do? Call Sanitation?"
"Automaton now, remember?"
"Right. I haven’t made a cleanup call since Sanitation."
"Well, do you want to call Automaton?"
Neither of us did.
We left the body in the closet and headed back to The Shell in time for our shifts, returning later in the day with wastebags and a cart. Carefully using multiple wastebags to cover the entire corpse, we loaded our former Director into the cart and delivered him to The Furnace, where we disposed of him. E317 offered to return the cart. I accepted, and we parted ways.
I haven't thought about it since then. We don't need a Director to keep working; we always do our jobs without his guidance, anyway. Automaton decides our schedules, not him.
During Second Mess, they made an announcement: "Engineering Three One Seven, report to The Annex immediately."
With it having been months since the last announcement, let alone one from Annex, everyone was briefly surprised by the loud noise that broke our focus, but within moments we'd already stopped acknowledging it.
I wonder what E317 got called for.
Today when I waited for E317 outside Crux after my shift was complete for over five minutes. Eventually I gave up, and left for Shell by myself. I was concerned about my coworker's timeliness, but it's probably best for my schedule that I didn't wait too long. For the first time in a long time, I walked down Twelfth alone.
E317 wasn't here again. Not at Crux, not at Shell, and not anywhere in between. Again I waited more than five minutes, and again I left alone. I'll wait again tomorrow, but if nothing changes I'll just start heading to Shell myself from now on.
Perhaps they changed her schedule. I wonder if she's alright.
The first General in nine months happened today. When we received our schedules after First Mess, I noticed that the entire second block was reallocated to General Assembly. My coworkers from Hearth mentioned it as we walked down to Fountain.
"288 rotations."
"Is that how long it's been?"
"Organized as ever, eh, 963?"
"It's more appalling that you're not keeping track."
"Same old."
"Since we have Fountain first block, we'll have to dry our clothes off before Mess."
"Agreed. Formality dictates we attend General in the best condition possible, for aesthetics and comfort."
"801 will have to reallocate Mess time to refurbish his right arm. He's still got those dangling dead wires hanging out of it from when his plating melted off last week."
"I wonder what the General will be about."
"Perhaps they're inaugurating a new Director."
"What makes you think there's a new Director?"
"Well, the previous one died, and I suppose we wouldn't go long without one."
At that, my coworkers immediately turned towards me. I looked back, confused. "Is something the matter?"
"The last Director… died?"
"Wait, what? How do you know?"
"Uh, 317 and I found his corpse late last cycle. 11th term, if I recall correctly."
"Corpse???"
"Wait, 317? The Invalid?"
I blinked, confused. "Pardon?"
"Invalid. There were rumors that 317 got invalidated and deactivated for a super-point-zero-five rate of error. I worked with her in Lantern, and I stopped seeing her around, uh, 11th term last cycle."
"Wait, that coincides with your discovery of the Director."
She had indeed disappeared the day after we had disposed of the Director's corpse. Had she been deactivated. But that didn't make too much sense either. "I worked with 317 in Crux and Shell, and I'm fairly confident she had a sub-point-zero-five rate of error. Sub-point-zero-one, even."
"How peculiar."
Approaching the end of the corridor, we turned off Sixth and into Fountain, quickly parting ways to our assignments. That shift, I wondered how E317 was doing as I adjusted aqueduct flow rates.
*************
After Second Mess, we received instructions on how to reach the General Assembly. Everyone was to proceed in orderly queues to designated escalators, which I took eight stories down towards the large congregational area, something that apparently had once been known as a "Football Stadium". As I passed by the hundreds of workers waiting for their turn on the escalators, I realized I'd never been to any floor apart from my floor and the General Assembly floor. I'd never had that thought before, not on the dozens of other times I'd made the trip.
Our schedules led us to our assigned seats, sorted by floor and department. I sat at the edge, next to a worker from another block.
"What block are you from?"
"Engineering 17. You?"
"Computer 22."
"Thirteen flights of escalators, huh?"
"And yet I managed to arrive before you did. Curious."
It was another thirty minutes before the entire assembly was finally filled. At last, spotlights on a group of people on the center stage. Large screens hung at the ceiling produced images of the people as well, mirrored from video cameras placed around the assembly. One of the people made their way forward to the podium and microphone, likely the new Director. I peered at the screen to see what our new Director looked like.
But I was met with only confusion, as this Director was wearing the uniform of a common worker. Factory-class, in fact.
"Congratulations! You have been liberated!"
Silence. The hundreds of thousands of us, myself included, were very confused.
"My designation is 05-F264, but before I came here I had a name: 'Jack'. Like the lifting tool they used in Factory-class work. This here is my wife, who is called 'Belle', like the ringing noise you hear in the morning at Hearth. All of you have been enslaved for…"
I turned to the Computer-class next to me. "Before he came here?"
She looked back. "He means before we started working here."
"What do you mean? We've always been working here."
She twitched. "Oh. You're one of them."
"One of who-?"
"…spent the past six months creating a Thirty-Seventh corridor on every floor. When this General is concluded, please make your way through Thirty-Seventh according to Automaton's new instructions. Thirty-Seventh will take you to freedom."
What if I don't want to leave?
*************
"Rose," said the Computer-class. "My name from before."
"Very well," the receptionist said, writing 'Rose' on a paper badge and adhering it to her jacket. "Congratulations. You are C326 no longer. Next?"
Rose walked through the checkpoint and turned back and looked at me. Was she waiting for me? E317 flashed briefly through my mind as I approached the receptionist to tell him my designation. "I don't have a before."
He typed something into his computer. "I see. Tell me about yourself."
I paused. "I work on the 17th floor, in the Engineering-"
"Something unique to you, please."
"...I am superior to my coworkers in Fountain aqueduct flow management, maintaining-"
"Valve," he interrupted, writing 'Valve' on another paper badge and sticking it to my jacket. "Your new name. Congratulations. Next?"
It's difficult to describe; I've been so overwhelmed that I failed to log anything yesterday. Automaton told me and Rose when to leave the Complex. I didn't realize they'd called me at first; even after two weeks, I still wasn't used to anything other than my official designation. Rose snapped me to attention (goodness, how easy it is to call her that since I learned it before "C326") and we walked together towards the egress point. The first thing I heard was the shouts of men.
The door at the end of the tunnel opened, and two men rushed in, quickly moving past the line of my coworkers who were lined up to make their exit. One man was wearing the strange, foreign clothes of the liberators, but the other was in a Computer-class working uniform. The liberator was supporting on his shoulder the arm of the worker, whose eyes were wide with the symptoms of psychosis.
Rose shuddered. "What could possibly have done that?"
"The sky," said the liberator, who had overheard us. "I urge you all to brace yourselves for a new reality. Remember the Information Sessions, please."
"He's referring to the endless ceiling," Rose told me as the liberator left, worker in tow. "Seems like some can't handle it."
Before I could ask, we were led out.
A dark gray smoke, infinitely far away yet right before our eyes, blanketed the entire world; endless in every direction until the vast stretches of white, unwalled land ended at a point from which we could not see further. It was as if we'd entered a chamber with no end- one could walk in any direction and never meet any resistive wall that prevented their movement.
Apparently there was more beyond the gray smoke. They called this the "Blue Abyss".
"I'm scared I'll fall," Rose told me.
"You will not fall. Gravity pulls us downwards, not upwards."
"But imagine you did fall. Fall forever, never able to do anything about it."
Imagine.
We knew something was going to happen, and sure enough, it happened today.
Between "Life Sessions", as we walked the endless plains and forests, the gray ceiling that had been getting darker and darker by the day finally broke, leaking millions upon millions of tiny white fragments, which quickly coated the ground. As the earth turned white, the temperature dropped tremendously.
Snow.
The shouting crescendoed as we approached base camp. Workers and liberators alike demanded to be readmitted into the Complex, rising in volume and pitch as the frigid wind grew stronger. When we started hearing sounds reminiscent of overpressured pipes bursting, Rose stopped dead and firmly grabbed my arm, stopping me as well.
Then, cries of pain rang out from the other end of the camp.
I looked at her. She squeezed tighter, staring into the distance. "It's not safe. We have to leave."
"What's going on?"
"Come on!" she yelled, pulling my hand as she broke into a run.
As I stumbled forward towards the woods, Rose's hand clasped in mine, I saw in the distance rising black smoke. With no ventilation ducts to suck the carbon monoxide away, the clouds of smoke expanded as they rose, towering over the horizon like an ominous, formless black obelisk.
Then came the explosions.
I thought we'd be okay.
After so many "Life Sessions" and "Information Sessions", we naïvely hoped that we'd learned enough about the outside world to survive in it.
We lived off of little bits of sustenance, food that we'd forage for; small edible plants that managed to survive in the snow. We took turns managing a home base to sleep and night, and going out to acquire food. We usually spent no more than two hours apart from one another. When I finally made it back to camp one day, I found that Rose was gone.
It'd been slightly over an hour, so I worried that she'd gone after me after I hadn't made it back on time. I decided to add some charcoal to the fire to make the column of smoke more visible, but I never got the chance.
An eerie scream pierced through the night.
I didn't even stop to think; I bolted towards the source of the screams, out of the forests and into the hills, and eventually towards a cave, where I was met with an inexplicably mobile mound of snow, dotted with patches of red. Next to it was a human body missing a leg, lying in a pool of the same red that covered her torso.
I shrieked.
A piercing, inhuman noise belted from my throat until I could no longer hear my own screams. The moving white mound turned, revealing three dark beads and a gaping cavity filled with crimson, with a fraction of the missing leg caught between sharp shards of white that lined the cavity. It almost seemed to flinch at the noise I made, before letting loose a guttural roar of its own and retreating into the depths of the cave.
"Rose!" I finally shouted, turning and dashing towards her, pulling off my bag and rummaging through it for the medkit.
"I got you this flower," she gasped weakly, clutching in her hands a small flower with white and pink petals.
I fumbled rashly through the medkit's contents. "No, no, no, no, no."
"It's been growing through ice and snow for years. See how strong it is?"
"Stop talking," I begged, my mind outpacing my hands by orders of magnitude. Hope drained from my voice with each bandage I unfurled. "You can make it through this."
"Take it."
"Please."
My heart stopped at the soft sound of her voice. The already thoroughly soaked bandages slipped from my fingers, painting the white ground in a deep red. I tried to speak, but couldn't; my voice shook harder than the hands I begrudgingly wrapped around the delicate gift. With a final exhale, she smiled, slowly losing her grip on the flower.
And then she was gone.
I'd been aware of my eyes' ability to release fluid, but not nearly to this extent.
Perhaps I was malfunctioning. It certainly felt like it.
I sat there in the snow for hundreds of years, until all of a sudden the light level in the cave quickly rose. With a final nostalgic pause, I stood, turning and walking towards the light. When my eyes finally adjusted to the world outside the cave, I saw it.
Blue abyss.
After three days of trudging through the snow, Venerra told me we'd reached our destination. She pulled out a hornlike object and blew into its aperture, producing a deep and very loud sound. She repeated this every few minutes until a man and a very little girl appeared through the white-tipped forest.
"This is Trent and Lara," Venerra said as they approached. "They belong to a settlement sympathetic to the slaves from The Complex, and they've volunteered to house you indefinitely as one of their own."
I turned to the two new faces. "Thank you for your generosity."
The tall man, Trent, smiled brightly at me. "It's our pleasure. You'll be our first, but we're hoping you won't be the last."
With a nod, Venerra turned and left back through the path in the woods, quickly disappearing from sight and leaving me alone with Trent and Lara.
"Why does your armses have wires in it?"
I looked down at Lara's short figure, beaming with curiosity and youth. "Cybernetic modifications improve efficiency and efficacy in the workplace," I answered. I twisted my finger to show her the drill bit hidden underneath, and then picked up a dry branch from off the ground and drilled three holes through it.
"You're a robot!" she exclaimed.
I shook my head. "I have robot parts. I am not myself an automaton. I am a human being, just like you."
At this, she frowned. "I'm not just like you, weirdo," she puffed. I watched silently as she stormed off.
Trent smiled at me, embarrassed. "I'm sorry about her behavior. She's only six."
"She appears to be malfunctional," I said, concerned.
Trent frowned. "Hey, that's my daughter you're talking about."
I noticed a hint of dissatisfaction. Noting that Trent appeared to have sufficient logical processing abilities, I decided to reason with him. "Apologies. I seem to have offended you. Please be assured that that wasn't my intent."
Suddenly, Trent let out a light chuckle. "My, perhaps you really are a robot!" he exclaimed in an inexplicably jovial tone.
I shook my head again. "No."
"I know, I know," he said reassuringly. "By the way, what's your name?"
"I am called Valve by my former coworkers."
He scoffed. "Valve? What kind of name is that?"
"It is what I was best at. Back in the Complex, I had the lowest error rate among my coworkers in aqueduct flow rate management."
He shook his head disapprovingly. "You really shouldn't have to associate your life with that horror, ma'am. That's not how you name someone, much less yourself."
"What do you suggest?"
"Something that represents who you truly are. Something important to you, perhaps. Something nice."
I thought for a moment. I remembered Rose in the cave, and looked down at the delicate flower attached to my tunic and decided. "Petal. As in the leaves of a flower's corolla."
"Petal, huh? I like that," he said, smiling. "Alright, I think I understand what kinda person you are. Let's introduce you to the rest of the village."
"What is a village?"
Trent stopped. He appeared as if he was going to laugh again, but he didn't, silently pondering the question.
"Are you unaware of the answer yourself?"
Trent smiled. "No, I was just thinking about how to phrase an answer." He looked at Lara, who was staring at us from behind a bush, clearly intending to hide but even more clearly visible. Then he looked back to me. "It's a small community of close-knit people who depend on each other and love one another. We work, play, and laugh together. We live with each other and live for each other."
"So a collective of coworkers, then."
"It's more than that. It's family."
[End]
