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Chapter 6 – Flywheel
I was a child when I came here. My father brought me. He told me my mother stayed behind and it was years before I understood what that meant. She stayed because it's where she'll always stay. Her body's buried there, and he just didn't want to say the words out loud.
I can't fault him for it. He did his best. He tried as hard as he could to make a good life for me, and he didn't always fail. I was sometimes ungrateful. I didn't understand why he did things a certain way. I ignored him, I thought he was old and that it didn't matter what he thought.
But that's the way of it, is it not?
We are only ashamed when people die.
I am in a forest. I've been turned around more than one too many times and everything looks the same. I'm getting tired. I've been walking for too long. My feet hurt, and I'm not getting anywhere new. This group of trees looks the same as all the others and I look behind me and I can barely see a branch I remember breaking but there's another broken branch and I don't know which is mine.
I've become unhitched. There are no bearings to take in a place like this. My bird flew up into the branches to see if there was anything but something moved up there in the darkness and I felt a kind of severance.
I don't think it's coming back.
He warned me. He said, Mitsuko, don't you play in forests. I thought, why should I be scared of trees? What can a tree do to anyone? It sounded wonderful. So many growing things, away from the smog and the stench of the city.
I understand now, father. You didn't do too badly, even though the lesson came a little late. I think you died, do you know that? There was something wrong with your hands and the car was spinning, and... it hurt. I woke up here when the pain stopped.
It's a different place. There are barely any people; I'm alone now, but I wasn't always. There were two boys; you'd have been upset with me just for talking to them, but they were only trying to help. There was some kind of creature hunting us, and I had to run away.
They didn't find me.
I couldn't find myself.
But you shouldn't feel bad about not being here to protect me. You've done all I could ask. I didn't have a bad life, and you know I loved you. If you're up there looking down, don't worry. I can't walk anymore. I have to rest, I have to sleep, and this patch of ground is as good as any.
I hear things, though, in the forest. I've been hearing them for a while. If I stop moving as fast as I have, whatever's making those noises might find me.
I might not wake up.
I don't know how long it's been. I don't even know if I would see sunlight through the trees. It might have set, or it might just not reach this far down.
I'm going to close my eyes, I think.
Have I done that already? Is that why it's so dark?
I can almost see you.
We had to cross a lake, and there were these boats in the shape of swans just waiting for us. It didn't make sense, but why should it when nothing else did? I'd found nothing that could explain the payphones, the traffic lights. What were the power lines for? Why did they stretch across a desert when we couldn't even find the people who used that power, let alone the ones who must have put them there?
I didn't get it. No one else even cared. They were all too busy being happy or scared or sad, fighting monsters, looking for magic jewelry because some projected recording of an old man told us it might be a good idea.
He knew I was suspicious, I could see it in his eyes, but I played along because there was still something to learn. He was giving us a narrative with no underlying logic, but it was better than nothing. Even if every word out of his mouth was a lie, it was a point of data I didn't have before, and the more I knew, the more I'd be able to know.
Maybe that strikes you as overly optimistic. Maybe you're like them, one of the happily stupid kinds of people who never try to learn anything and think they'll be fine without that knowledge. When you wander into an obvious trap or take something for granted that you shouldn't, when you die, I'll be over here laughing because no matter what the others say this place has rules. Even if they aren't like the old ones, they're real.
I got a glimpse of them today.
The boats were fine, even if they didn't make any sense at all. I couldn't see or hear a motor, there weren't oars, they just took us there like they were on some invisible rails I couldn't see. None of them wanted to hear how ridiculous this was. They were boats, of course they went places! That's what boats did! These people and their little minds!
I'm embarrassed to say I didn't see it when it happened. I had my head out the window, trying to drown out their insipid conversations about past lives and what they'd do when they 'got home', like it was some kind of guarantee that they would, that our home even existed still. I was angry, and I wasn't looking. The first I heard of it was the splash.
Matt's little brother, the stupid kid we've been tugging around—because it's that or leave him somewhere and even I'll admit there's nowhere safe—was acting like he'd seen something in the water. No one was looking too closely, and after this... moment of frozen horror, Matt was yelling at everyone, and the boat was still moving and none of us knew how to stop it—because of course there were no controls, with no visible method of propulsion why would they expect there to be any controls?—and suddenly this became my problem, like it was my fault no one appointed a babysitter and I'm supposed to have all the answers to everything exactly when they need them and shut up the rest of the time because thinking makes their brains hurt.
For a moment I wanted him to drown.
A moment.
Because at least it would teach them a lesson, at least then they'd realize the kind of fucking world we're in and start trying a little harder and—Matt was saying his brother couldn't swim, that he'd never learned, and Sora was crying. Tai had his arm around her but wasn't doing much better. Joe—of course it was Joe—fiddled around with his bag and then dove after him while everyone was busy being sad.
He was fine, of course. Joe's giant narwhalrus cut through the water like a knife and brought him to shore just a little ahead of us. We all ran out to see him. Some of them embraced him, all teary-eyed happiness and relief, but I hung back and watched.
Something was off.
He didn't look scared enough. He wasn't reacting like he should and I didn't know why until I talked to him later, when the novelty of terror had worn off and the others went back to ignoring him most of the time.
He apologized to me then. He said he didn't understand before. He didn't know how dangerous it was because he'd never been in deep water and he didn't know that he needed air to breathe. He said Joe told him but that it sounded weird because he hadn't panicked or anything and he was pretty sure he'd taken a breath or two while he was under the water, looking around. He said there were plants and fish and all sorts of things he'd never seen before, and was really excited to tell me about all of them before he remembered that—according to Joe at least, who knew more about these things than he did—he'd almost died.
He said he was sorry, that he'd be more careful next time. That it wouldn't happen again. That we didn't have to worry about him, he wasn't a baby and he could take care of himself like the rest of us.
He didn't know he was supposed to be drowning, so he didn't drown.
It made sense.
Koushiro Izumi, September or so
I was back to running missions in two weeks. There weren't enough of us. I should have had more time, but that's always the way of things; they push those who don't push back. The truth is I didn't mind. Another day, another second of staring at white walls, at diagnostic screens, and I think I'd have gone mad.
That's a joke.
You're supposed to laugh.
Joking helps cover up the horrible thing I did. It makes it easier if we laugh. That way you're not staring at me when I'm not looking and wondering if I'll break, who will die the next time I falter.
They tell me the reprogramming will hold. That everything is fine. It happens to the best of us. Nothing to worry about. A routine, perfectly executed procedure.
Then why (why why why) is there a name in my head when I've surrendered it? Why am I still seeing things that can't be real? I've lived here all my life. They found me in a reclamation zone when I was three months old, next to the corpse of my mother. I do not remember that. I do not remember her. I remember years of this place. So why is it fading away?
It's Sam, if you were wondering. The name I can't forget. And the things I see are grey and ragged faces, things barely made of flesh, pumped full of pulsing intravenuous cables and surrounded by machines.
And you don't care. And I'm rambling. They say it sometimes takes time to take hold.
I'm flying to the mountains. They say there's activity in the Hive that can't be easily explained. They're asking for a set of eyes.
No one really thinks Izumi's alive, not after all this time.
It's probably nothing.
A/N: This is about a third of what I was going to post. I came back to this story with a clear idea of what I wanted to do; to paint a picture through a series of snapshots of everyone and everything that's going on. Reading back through this story, a lot of it feels haphazard and incomplete, especially because of how long I go between updates. It's lacking coherence, and I wanted to fix that going forward. Unfortunately, the next scene involves the introduction of two new characters, and it's getting so big that it doesn't fit well in that model. The snapshot thing only works if the scenes are pretty close in size, and... well, they aren't.
Chapter 7 will introduce two new characters and also catch up with Alex and Terry.
Chapter 8 will follow up on everyone mentioned in this chapter and most likely feature its original ending. Maybe other things, too.
Chapter 9 will be what Chapter 7 would have been.
Hopefully I'll be able to include something from every parallel story in every chapter from that point forward.
This story is the best I can do as a writer. It's so sporadic because I refuse to give it any less than my best, and it's patchy in places because my best a couple years ago wasn't that great, but I'm proud of the quality of writing and the ideas behind it.
It'll only get better from here.
~08/29/14