JMJ

Chapter Eight

Underground and Overhead

Before Lise went bouncing about like a bouncy ball, Haddler grabbed her by the foot and floated her to a root sticking out of the wall. Where these roots came from was only the root of the city and no real tree that anyone knew of for sure. Instantly she grabbed it and threw Haddler a very deadly-looking glare. Her teeth clenched enough to be a fist for a punch— splashing the drink into everything around it.

All Haddler could do in response was let go of the root he was holding onto. Crossing his arms he let himself drift into the weightless space. He crossed his legs too as though seated somewhere normally on the ground. Everything stayed on, of course. The hat had no reason for leaving, and everything else was too attached already to his person.

Lise shook her head with a downright growl as she pushed off as though from the wall in a swimming pool towards the heart. Instantly she went about like a doctor inspecting a sick whale.

Thrwock throok, thrwock throok. It sounded like a clock under water.

Haddler stopped his floating by putting his hand gently against the round wall and hooking his foot along another root coiling out from below him, but both he and Lise were upside down from where they had begun. It did not matter which way they were oriented. It was fairly the same all the way around. The only way to measure any sort of equilibrium was the shape of the heart and the coils that came out like arteries, which however metallic and however chugging like a machine in every gleaming bolt and every humming raspberry glow, was shaped and worked just like a human heart.

Steam hissed in and out, but it was never quite like how it was on the way here. The dryness of the outer rim sucked most moisture all away. The smell was not oily but was sterile in a synthetic sort of way.

"Aren't you going to ask me 'why'?"

"'Why' what?" asked Lise not looking up from her work. "Why there's no gravity so you can act smart again?"

Despite the impatience in her voice, she could not hide a tinge of sympathy and even sympathetic amusement. It was the sympathy that startled Haddler. He already knew she was amused by him and trying so hard not to be, but either way he quickly opened his mouth to answer.

"This is a very grave matter," Lise said sadly, but she quickly regretting the vocabulary given the company and the circumstance.

"One that you haven't quite explained to me, I'm afraid," admitted Haddler closing his eyes, "and it might be a good one to tell if it's a matter of digging up such matter even if we're at the heart rather than gray matter, but it might be better if you wish to speak with Time, to actually introduce yourself and have a conversation, Lise."

"Not until five forty-five."

"Ah, so you are a stickler for Time. That should get you into some good ticks with him," said Haddler. "But another thing he isn't always fond of is whittling about the minutes. It's like etching graffiti into someone's fence pickets. It would have to be very pretty etchings to make one forgive you."

He popped out his tea cup again and poured himself some tea— hot this time instead of iced. It was delicate oolong. For it was obvious that the duration of this whole affair was going to be groaningly longer and more delicate than he thought. The liquid flowed in a gentle stream and splashed pleasantly into the cup, but it would escape if he did not drink it right away. He had a few crackers to go with it for digestion, and one needed good digestion in a place like this.

Lise sighed. She could not understand how he could think to eat at all in this dizzying atmosphere, but she tried not to look at him.

#

There was a rush that felt like a gushing flow of water through every cell in his body, but Hakuto knew it was not any more real than the burning of a hot pepper in one's mouth. It was all a trick. All fancy, as some may put it, albeit simulated fancy. The senses had no alternative but to give into it, except to ignore the memory as anything but artificial once his senses returned to his sovereignty.

When he opened his eyes and shook his head, he was almost surprised that what was on his head did not flap like the ears of a rabbit. He was not a rabbit, after all, but very much a human.

He took the heavy helmet from his head and scratched a little at his sweaty thick hair. He took the blinders off with them in the dark humming sterility. Though, in this small space he could not see himself very well, he knew his way around. The heat of machinery and the dryness of static was close as he tiptoed off the Rabbit Hole Platform, but it was not anything like the closeness of the steam in Heartland.

Heatland more like it, he thought.

His shoes clapped crisply on the floor gleaming like a sheet of ice in the rest of the blackness. The sheet of light led to a door, which he opened. Then he was met with what for some might have been as disorienting as the previous artificial rush he had been through to get here like being strapped on the front of a bullet train.

Now he was met with the universe. Stars twinkled, vastness was like an open mouth of a behemoth. A single solar glow emanated from a solar system brighter than the rest.

There was no sense of awe in Hakuto's pinched face. In fact his face sagged with a very dull disappointment.

"Hello?" he said doubtfully. "I hate to bother everyone, but I need assistance."

The pantheon did not greet him just as he could see that they would not. As he shifted his eyes from side to side, he knew that he was alone and forgotten for sure.

With a sigh, he reached up a hand and fingered a switch. Although it was invisible it was quite a normal light switch to the touch such as the kind in any room in any house. As he flipped it on a light turned on overhead. The universe lit up in quite the same revealing way as shining a flashlight on a monster under the bed only to find a pair of old dusty shoes.

This vast solar system was but a white circular room. Large though it was, it was not even a school gym in size. White tiles adorned the ceiling and white tiles adorned the floor. Along the walls were screens and desks and buttons and wires. Not a window was to be found but there was a series of doors evenly spaced to be twelve in all. In the middle of the room there were nine desks in a U-shape, each with a computer mounted before it on a sturdy pole from the ceiling. Each desk was set with an ergonomic swivel seat. In the center of the U, also mounted from the ceiling, was an orb of light from which warmth flowed; though it was dimmer now as it was no longer holding up a universe.

However, Hakuto found that he was not as alone as he had originally thought for from one of the seats could be seen a bobbing head like a chick fresh from an egg and a pair of squinting eyes through a pair of glasses winkling above a pursing pair of lips and a wrinkling nose as it peeked out from behind the computer in front of it. A little wiry woman belonged to it all. She was the only person shorter than he was on staff. Although not much older than thirty, she had a sort of feel like an old woman from a strange hut in a fairy tale as she huddled inside a long bohemian-style hooded jacket that was a size too large for her and patterned in purposeful tatters in the colors of Mercury from spectroscopic lenses.

She looked more like a baby who had just woken up from sleep to Hakuto, though, with her blank moon-shaped and moon-pale sleepy face.

"Mercury!" said Hakuto marching up to her.

"Mph…" was all Mercury said while blinking back the sudden blinding whiteness of the room after the comfortable starry atmosphere.

"There's something funny about Lise."

"Oh? Good," said Mercury.

"Where are the others?" asked Hakuto trying his best to ignore her lethargy.

"I'm keeping watch for now," sighed Mercury in a most forlorn manner. "Horizon wanted to speak with Jupiter unexpectedly."

"That wouldn't require everyone, would it?" asked Hakuto.

"I'm here," said Mercury.

"So they're taking a break?" said Hakuto.

Mercury frowned and turned back to her screen.

"Well, then could you tell me where that stupid AI is so that I can do my job or whatever before I quit!"

"I took a kettle large and new

Fit for the deed I had to do."

She was reciting from Carroll again.

"Please, Mercury, I beg of you to speak plainly," Hakuto moaned.

But Mercury went on:

"My heart went hop, my heart went thump

I filled the kettle at the pump.*"

"Thanks for nothing," huffed Hakuto and went to one of screens himself to see if he could find Lise.

Sure enough he did and although it annoyed him, he knew exactly that Mercury had told him where Lise was through her silly recital.

"It's in the center? How did it get there? Well, I'm not following it there," said Hakuto. "There's no way. You follow it."

"I am following Lise," Mercury told him sullenly.

"Then why did I have to follow?" snapped Hakuto.

"For the patients' sake."

"Well, I think Lise has been compromised, and I don't care about your pride or your fanciful farce. You know there's a mistake somewhere as a qualified scientist not a novelist. I for one don't need a doctorate to see it, and I know you do see it too. I don't think it's a glitch. I think it's a hack!"

Mercury blinked unconcerned.

"Cyber warfare!" Hakuto snapped. "And if I'm not mistaken, that virus-thing has one of the patients in tow. Do you want to lose another one?"

"We'll lose them all if we don't take risks, Hakuto," said Mercury calmly. "But if you are worried about the patient, then please go and get him."

She turned her sleepy eyes to him, but the look within them at a second glance was quite deep and disturbing. He could not tell if it was because she did not care or if she cared too much or if it was all in his head from playing this game too long.

#

"It's so real…" Lise muttered.

"Isn't it, though?" shrugged Haddler. "It does pump out a good deal of energy, enough to keep this whole place alive and well as much as any body."

"Yes… what time is now?"

"It says right here on the heart," Haddler pointed out.

#

Shaking his head Hakuto looked at the screen. "Mercury! Lise is gone! She—"

"There's always a blip at Five forty-five."

"Always!?" snapped Hakuto turning sharply back to the woman.

"See," said Mercury quietly and balmy. "She's back again."

Hakuto turned to the screen again and huffed. "Always at five forty-five?"

"And again at six o'clock. It doesn't affect the patients, really, which is probably why you've never noticed, but it can affect the assets. It makes it more difficult to retrieve specific information in the time in between."

"Why don't you fix it? Fifteen minutes is fifteen minutes. Anything could happen."

Without looking at him Mercury smiled, a warm, lazy, and a disturbing sort of smile like the smile of a snowman before the expression slides off its face in the melting sun. "What do you think they'd do, Hakuto? Escape?"

Here she actually giggled, and that was the last straw for Hakuto as though he was alone with a mental patient. His hair was downright standing on end.

"How come I was never informed about this situation? I'm going to file a complaint to Jupiter this moment!"

"The whole system would have to be restarted to fix it, and we're almost through with our lease anyway…" sighed Mercury. "Our Alice…"

"But what are they even doing?"

"It's the Hatter," Mercury shrugged. "Perhaps he wanted to introduce his Alice to Time."

"But there is no Time!" Hakuto retorted; he had meant "they" as in the other planets, but now he paused. "I— I mean not as a patient or an asset!"

"To the Mad Hatter he's real and that is his reality."

"Don't you start with me with his or her reality!" snapped Hakuto. "I'm not one of your duped patients!"

"I don't know," sighed the wistful Mercury more a personification of her own hooded sweater than a person the way she sunk into its collar. "If you think about it we're all patients of Horizon, and all reality is relative. It only shows itself more keenly when being sucked down a black hole."

Hakuto rolled his eyes and wondered again if it might not be better for him to go hunt down Jupiter for himself or at least to go on break, but he did not like the idea of leaving Mercury alone. It was his opinion that Pluto was not the main concern around here, except when he sided with Mercury. Mercury was the weak link. The unwitting antagonist.

Genius though she was as a programmer and no matter how critical she had been to the operation at the beginning, the rest of the planets could take it all from here, he was sure. Her brain was melted.

"She took the bait," cooed Mercury.

Hakuto was just about to take the door latch when she spoke this last bit, and he leapt sharply round to her once more.

"What do you mean?"

"Well," said Mercury with a steady eye to him as she slowly swiveled her chair after her face, "she followed you, and I don't think you want to interrupt Jupiter speaking with Horizon to tell them all that an Alice followed a White Rabbit into the system when he was being sloppy in his accesses."

Hakuto stared. At first he almost did not comprehend what she was saying. Had he heard her wrong? Was she speaking absurdity? She spoke it in the same slow dreamy manner she spoke everything; her face revealed little, but he knew with a chill down his spine that she meant what she said, but had she truly said what she meant?

He blinked and shook his head. Stupid Alice in Wonderland references will be the death of me!

"How long have you known that there was a hacker?"

He looked at Mercury steadily back with mouth gaping as he took his last assessment. He mustered his way through his fear to see something else wrong with what Mercury was saying.

"Wait… you mean you baited these people yourself…with me…" he breathed. I knew her mental instability would doom us all!

#

"Well, what are you waiting for?" asked Haddler. "Time waits for no one, you know."

"I am speaking with Time," said Lise.

"Psychically?" asked Haddler with a raised brow.

"I'm speaking with the day/night cycle to be precise," said Lise, "and now I think I have to keep my promise to you."

Haddler took a bite out of a cracker with a shrug. He leaned into the weightlessness around allowing himself to float at leisure.

"Well, you've been keeping it well enough," Haddler remarked idly with a hand behind his head. "How about releasing it now. My fare offer still stands judiciously."

"Come down here then," Lise said.

Opening an eye pretending to not be as interested as he felt, he shrugged and put his floating things away so that he was no longer looking like a demigod of a tea. With a patronizing sigh, he floated downwards with a slight push off the wall nearest him. Down he went until he could hook his foot along a rail at the base of the Heart of Heartland. Then once he was beside Lise with hands holding onto the rail he turned to Lise expectantly and smiled.

"I don't have time to fully explain things, but you have to remember a time before you came to live here in Heartland," she said.

"I was born and raised here, Lise," said Haddler. "I know nothing about where you came from."

"Nothing about cars on roads and computers to type on?" asked Lise. "You seem to understand my references to such things."

"And you understand references to ravens and writing desks," shrugged Haddler. "I doubt you've seen either in person."

"I've seen pictures and videos with them in it," said Lise.

"So have I," said Haddler.

Lise paused and frowned, studying Haddler a moment. "And that's your case?"

"What do you want with it? More tea perhaps?" asked Haddler motioning to his pack.

"I knew I shouldn't've bothered," Lise sighed. "But I didn't want the shock to your system to be too great."

"Oh, no, it wouldn't be a bother," Haddler insisted popping out the cup he had given to her earlier. "My system's designed to be used unlike cheap devices in stores."

"Exactly!" said Lise. "You do know what I mean, and you're pretending not to. Look. My name isn't Lise. It's Esther. Esther!"

Haddler frowned.

"I won't tell you my last name in case this plan still doesn't go well," said Lise with a choke now. "Pretend all you want, I know you understand me more than you want me to think. You all do, but some of you are in more denial than others."

"Some of me is in conflict and some of me specifically isn't," Haddler agreed. "You see right through me that way. I don't know if I would call it flat out denial, though."

Lise smiled ever-so-gently. "But you did notice something about me that if anyone else did they did not bother to pursue it."

"You came to me."

"I hacked into the AI LISE. The Little Isolated Synthetic Essence was programmed by a group of people who call themselves the Pantheon working for an organization known as Horizon which secretly and unethically experiments in the name of scientific discovery for what they claim is the untapped potential of humanity, especially the human brain. They believe that humans can become gods if the brain is reworked in just a subtle way and with a little help from computer technology. You are part of that experiment, Mr. Haddler."

She turned back to the heart thrwocking and throoking in its way. The vast monotony of it was beginning to annoy Haddler. He cocked his head slowly to Lise dancing her fingers along dials, knobs, and keys. She knew what she was doing, and she knew that there was going to be no Time. She had been saying so all along. It had all been a trick, is what this all had been, to get him to come. This wasn't about Time, it was about the heart.

"I can't prove it here," Lise went on, "but I can prove it before six o'clock if you let me show you somewhere else."

"Where else?" demanded Haddler.

"Someplace safe," said Lise. "You'll understand later."

"Ah, but you promised me understanding now," said Haddler. "Actually earlier. At tea time, I do believe."

"And it's still tea time," commented Lise; then about the heart she went on, "This system is complicated. More complicated than it needs to be. I find it more ridiculous than anything that we can see in this place. It's almost as if it's programmed to make people believe this big virtual ball we're in is an actual machine floating in the air somewhere like some impossible steam punk device!"

"Over the boiling sea," offered Haddler leaning on the rail so that he could rest his chin in his palm, and he clicked the roof of his mouth.

"You're following me," she chided almost wryly.

"I haven't said either way about going safe or else."

"Put your hand here."

Haddler looked to where she pointed to the pulsing heart itself. He suddenly felt rather repulsed, though whether by her demand or the realistic movement of the giant metallic thing, he was not sure at all. Right then, he decided that he did not like anything about this. "'Twas beauty killed the beast", was a quote he recalled well, and if this young woman was beauty then surely this heart was the beast. He was not sure what that made him, but he wanted no part in this.

Besides, it came as a sudden chill to think that it was even possible to stop the Heart of Heartland. Was it?

"Please, Mr. Haddler," Lise insisted, the intensity in her eyes was more than at the six o'clock bongs yesterday.

She was consternating in her constricting face, her tightening hands, her rigid shoulders. Her face looked about to burst asunder. He could barely stand to look at her, but as he turned away, he felt something reemerge from his mind that he had been trying to keep down. It was more than curiosity; though it did have a bit to do with it. The more this all went on the more curious he became, but it was perhaps advanced curiosity. He could not recall the last time he felt it. Part of him rather would have gone home and helped a customer at his shop, and it was not enough to be quelled by a mere sense of adventure in some sort of early midlife crisis. He was thirty-something as far as he knew, and he planned to live to 128. It could be a midday crisis, but it was almost evening not almost noon. It was a twilight twinkling if anything.

And it was such twinkling that had ever haunted him since O'Hair's tea party, but what about before that?

"Just put your hand here," Lise was saying meanwhile.

A twinkling before that too?

It was as if Time had decided not to stop but to condense itself upon him like the shutting up of a telescope, and so he could not see or remember when or where on the timeline things happened as though it all happened at once. There was certainly no order to it. Though the telescopic words she meant to convey to him were difficult to decipher for certain, he suddenly remembered something else.

"First tell me," he insisted. "How do you shrink and grow?"

Lise nodded impatiently. "I have a sort of cloak that I can use at certain times and certain ways in the flaws of the system, and in these spots I appear in this virtual world to be shrinking and growing."

"Don't you find that odd?" asked Haddler.

Lise paused. Fear prickling her. Haddler smiled briefly in his short victory, but her fear was something more than before, and he could not help but take it seriously.

"Look, look, I'll do as you say. I'll put my hands on the heart, but first tell me why."

"So that we can discover where your body is," said Lise.

* From Humpty Dumpty's poem for Alice in Through the Looking-Glass