Chapter 39: Tranquility Lane
The glass dome slid down slowly in one fluid motion. Eleanor pressed her face to the glass and waved.
"Stay safe! I love you!" Her voice was muffled through the dome.
I nodded and flinched when a static screen shot out in front of my face. The static cleared and a black and white aerial view of a cul-de-sac flashed onto the small screen. It looked peaceful and relatively safe.
A shock shot up my body to my head, followed by an excruciating migraine. I reached for my head, but hadn't noticed when shackles protruded from the armrests and locked around my wrists. I shut my eyes as hard as I could physically manage. My blood ran cold under my skin and despite my panic, my heart rate was slowing back down.
When I opened my eyes again, I was sitting on a bench surrounded by black and white everything. Analyzing the area for possible threats, I noticed I was much closer to the ground than I should be. I looked down and what I saw made my stomach drop.
My legs were much shorter, and chubbier. And covered in skin. I was a small person.
"What the fuck happened to me?" I whispered to myself.
"Whoa there, little man! Do you kiss your mother without that mouth?" A boring looking man in a vest and what looked like khakis asked from the sidewalk.
"Who-" I started, but then spared the headache of an existential crisis. I settled on taking a different approach: guilt. "My family is dead."
"Oh, well I'm terribly sorry to hear that. Still, that is no reason to have such a potty mouth." The man put his hands on his hips like Eleanor when she's upset.
"Have you seen anyone new lately? A middle-aged Caucasian man?" I asked, deciding it was useless trying to hold conversation with him.
"Well, I can't say I have. You should go play with Betty. She's on the playground over there." He pointed to a girl with a water pail and an emaciated dog in the center of the neighborhood.
I looked around at the rest of the neighborhood, making my way around on the sidewalk. Shorter legs meant everything took much longer. The girl named Betty had not taken her eyes off me for a split second. Something about her made my feel... wrong. She made me feel like I wasn't even in my own skin.
A boy stopped me on my route asking if I wanted lemonade. I declined, but he asked again. I declined again, less polite than the first time and he grumbled an apology. I asked if he had seen a new person around, but he only mentioned the dog. I ignored him and kept on. I stopped in front of one particular house that was far less kept up with than the others. It's windows were cracked and the grass was uncut. It looked like one of those haunted houses that I used to fuck around in with other kids.
Something in my mind told me to look at Betty, and I regretted it. Her face was slightly distorted, twisted in poorly hidden frustration and anger. The dog beside her whined and seemed to be trying to say something. When she noticed I was looking at her, static swept across her face and it returned to a plastered, creepy smile.
I shivered and tried to ignore her too. A stranger's hands wrapped around my shoulders and I spun around, ready to fight. Instead, I was met with a frightened old woman.
"You shouldn't be here! You've been asking about a man so you must know this is a simulation! No one else believes me, they think I'm crazy" The woman shook my shoulders and stared with bloodshot eyes. "You need to get out of here while you still can. And stay away from Betty! She's evil."
I gathered my thoughts the woman had shaken out of me. "What does she do?"
"She murders us and then she resets us so no one remembers it. She controls everything here!"
"Do you know of any fail safe to the simulation? There has to be one." I looked back at the dilapidated house.
"It's in there." She leaned in closer, but not suspiciously close. "I almost activated it once. But then Betty caught me and killed me. I thought that would be the end of my punishment. It wasn't! She made me the only one aware of everything so everyone thought I was crazy!"
I nodded and risked a glance at Betty. She was still looking but trying to not be so obvious about it. The dog had taken to lifting its head up slightly, lowering it, and then raising it again as if to point to the house behind us. Then it dawned on me. That had to be Eleanor's dad.
The woman backed off and nodded towards the house nonchalantly. I nodded back and ran back around another house. I noticed a watch on my wrist.
"Oh, that's nice. Mickey Mouse. Great." I huffed.
The back door beckoned me and I succumbed to its call. I opened the door and slipped in. The boy from before was playing in the living room with a truck. Hopefully, sneaking would be easier in a smaller body. I kept to the wall by the stairs and sneaked into the bathroom connected to the kitchen.
I locked the door and kicked the step stool in front of the sink and crawled onto it. The boy staring back at me was the child I hadn't seen in over two hundred years.
Even in black and white, I was clearly a redhead. My face was chubby and freckled, my hair was shaggy and down to my jaw. The simulation even managed to get my awkwardly spaced teeth, with the single chipped front tooth. Fucking Richard and his baseball.
I looked down to see a striped polo tucked into cargo shorts that looked like they had been pulled up to my armpits and small light up sneakers. I looked like a tiny dickhead. I untucked my shirt hastily and pulled my shorts down to where they rested naturally. As for the light up sneakers, I would leave them. They were sort of cool.
I looked down at my skin and ran my hands along the smooth expanse. Two hundred years without it really made you miss it. It was soft of flabby, like a regular child's. I could make out small scars, each one a distant memory. A gash from falling off my bike, stitches from Rosy tripping with a pair of scissors, and the list went on and on.
Looking at my scars had brought on a wave of nostalgia that felt like a kick in the stomach. I would never get to experience this again after this simulation. These memories I had forgotten long ago felt like a dull knife in my side, painful and nagging. And then, a new feeling altogether hit me. As I stared in that mirror in this monochrome world, I realized that I had a childhood worthy of story books before they took me away from my family.
Another mixture of emotions that I was so used to before Eleanor: anger and sadness. I was angry at the world for allowing something like the Institute to happen and sad at the loss of my life. No matter how hard she tried, Eleanor would never be able to fix me. I was definitely broken. I was a killing machine that was taught they were incapable of being loved.
But Eleanor loves me. She loves me and I love her and that baby. Everything Eleanor has ever done for me goes against the programming, and even though it can be excruciating pain, I would rather die before losing her. I jumped when a knocking on the door brought me out of my thoughts.
"Jimmy? Are you in there? It's almost time for dinner." A woman's voice called from behind the door.
I wasn't staying in this simulation much longer so I might as well have fun and fuck with these people. I jumped down from the stool and moved closer to the door.
"Yes, mom! I'll be out in a minute!" I called back, barely containing my laugh.
The woman was silent for a moment. "Who is this?"
"What ever do you mean, mom?" I snickered as I moved to the sink looking for the mother's makeup.
Drawers and cabinets were full of useless junk like bath toys and hair curlers. The woman asked what I was doing with her things and I ignored her. I riffled through the bottom drawer until I found a stick of eye liner and tilted my head back to draw a line across my neck, swooping at the ends to touch just under my ears. I stuffed the eye liner back and returned to unlock the door.
The door swung open and the woman tried to confirm her suspicions. "Where are your parents, young man? I'm sure they would be very displeased to hear you have been breaking and entering."
"But mom, it's me, Jimmy. I'm just wearing a mask I found. See?" I lifted my chin and pointed to the eye liner.
Her face repeated what Betty's had done. Static shrouded her face and once the static cleared, she donned the same plastic smile. "Okay, Jimmy. Go play with Betty until it's time for dinner."
I shook off the unsettling feeling on the back of my neck. "Yes ma'am!"
And with that, the woman turned on her heel and returned to the stove. On the counter next to her, I spotted a tray of chocolate chip cookies. I couldn't remember the last time I had a cookie. I think it was before the Institute. Mom used to make the best in the ghetto.
I tiptoed out of the bathroom and crawled under the table where the mother couldn't see me. I settled in between two chairs and waited for the right opportunity. She bent over to pull a stereotypical looking pie out of the oven. I lunged out from under the table, rolled to the counter, jumped up with outstretched arms, grabbed two handfuls of cookies, and sprinted to the backdoor. The woman hollered and reached for my wrist on the doorknob. I swung the door open and jumped into a bush.
The leaves scratched my face and neck uncomfortably, but the bush was big enough to hide me completely. The door slammed behind the woman and through the leaves, I could see her dress sway around her knees as she searched for me. I stuffed one of the cookies in my mouth greedily.
What the hell? It tasted like air. Of course, food obviously wouldn't have a taste in a simulation. There goes the rest of my happiness for the next few years.
"Jimmy, that was very naughty! Why would you do that?" The woman angrily cried.
I stood up from the bush and stepped over it towards her. "You can have them back, lady. They taste like shit anyway."
My face swept to the side and my cheek felt hot. The bitch just slapped me. I turned my head back to her slowly.
"You watch your mouth, Jimmy. I didn't raise you like this. You father is to blame, if he wasn't such a horrible figure, you'd be a proper young gentleman."
I grabbed the woman's wrist tightly, glaring at her as I sunk my teeth into her skin. She thrashed and hit me wherever she could reach, all without breaking eye contact. She yanked her wrist away and hurdled to the ground. I dropped the cookies down next to her and hopped the fence.
"Get fucked, bitch." I flipped her off and ducked behind another house.
I forgot what an awful child I was growing up. That's probably why I ended up being the best trained in the Institute. I had received the most "correctional treatment" out of the entire group of "specimen".
I crept along the back of the run down house and wrapped my small fingers around the creaky knob of the back door. I turned it and was met with a clunk and resistance. Of course it was locked. It's a a fail safe. I would personally be offended if it wasn't locked.
I searched around the backyard for something to break the lock. There wouldn't be any bobby pins in a simulation. Their hair probably just sticks wherever they put it. The only thing I could find was an old garden gnome. I sighed and picked it up. I hated garden gnomes.
The lawn figurine stared at me with the creepy grin that everyone here wore. I shivered and brought it down on the doorknob. The gnome shattered in my hands and the knob fell to the ground in a dented, rusty mess. I kicked the door open with a swift motion and stepped in.
The house was dark and musty like a metro, but without the ferals. I scoured the house for terminals, but came up empty. I triple checked the house, my panic rising with each pass around the house. It had to be here. I couldn't be stuck in this simulation. This place is fucking awful and Eleanor needs me.
I sat back for a moment to catch my breath. I looked around the living room at the strangely placed junk. An idea struck me and I stood up again. I dusted my hands off on my shorts and hovered my hand over the glass pitcher. My heart beat out of my chest at the thought of never getting out of this place. My fingers grazed the pitcher and I jumped back at the chime it produced. A moment later, it noise that many computers used to make when you got the owner's passcode wrong.
This was it. This was the passcode for the fail safe. There was a sequence that, when properly input, would activate the terminal.
It took over ten minutes of trial and error and plenty of frustration before the final chime sounded and the wall to my right flared up in static. The static hadn't cleared after a few seconds and I was beginning to worry. I tapped at the static and my fingers felt numb. The static quickly cleared to reveal the terminal and keyboard.
I tapped away at the keyboard, flipping through all the files and skimming over the entries. Betty was just Braun in disguise as a child and this hell had been going on in different scenarios and environments even before the war. He locked these people in here three years before the bombs even dropped.
I switched to the fail safe and my finger grazed the enter key. The door slammed open off its hinges and hit the staircase. Braun entered the house through a wave of destruction. The clutter flung across the room as if trying to get away from him.
"What ze hell do you think you are doving?" Betty lunged for me as my finger dipped down and punched in the fail safe.
"Years of verk vill be gone because of you!" He clung to my arm.
I could feel my blood stop in its veins. The bastard was killing me. I slammed my fist onto the enter button one more time to confirm the fail safe. My blood flowed again as he lost all control over my body. He screeched and crawled out of the front door on all fours cursing everyone.
Vertibirds buzzed outside the house and people were screaming in Chinese. I ducked down and peeked through the curtains of the old shattered window. Chinese soldiers slid down ropes extended from the vertibirds down to the asphalt. Flashbacks of Anchorage blinked through my mind, bringing up memories I really wanted to forget. Jackson had a fucking family.
Seeing these Chinese soldiers brought out the sudden, long gone urge to kill on sight. I pushed that feeling deep down and hurried outside where a flickering door had materialized in the center of the play ground. The dog was scratching at the bottom of the door eagerly.
As I ran through the soldiers gunning the residents down in the streets, I noticed none had even looked at me. I reached the door and pushed the dog aside. I swung the door open and jumped through it, the dog following me.