Chapter 21

 

I could hear thunder still in the distance.

By some form of modification or other undisclosed benefit of being a shift lead at the Port, Rob's outer lock only needed 45 seconds to cycle from inner to outer door. I made a mental note to ask him about it later but made no comment as he quickly and efficiently led us downward.

After a number of unconventional turns, angles, and paths, he led us to a location I likely couldn’t find again if you were to ask. As his head swiveled to and fro, Rob kept a watchful eye out for any roaming patrols before taking possession of the work bag I'd carried in addition to the sack-like backpack he'd had me wear.

"Stay here," he said softly as he stepped away, a specter in the chilly air as he disappeared.

The thunder rumbled again.

It drew me back to where I was standing, between two adjacent stacks that formed a metal and plastcrete canyon. I surveyed my surroundings with new eyes. Not with the mindset of bored routine and familiarity, but with the unique view of new circumstance: This wasn't home anymore.

I expected hurt. A surprisingly neutral indifference emerged instead as I swiveled around casually. The towering sections of walkways and railings acted like laddered striations along a parallel cliff face; the single narrow passage flanked between them.

Like an animal, suspicious but still locked into following a path of least resistance, my eyes traced along the natural lines of the artificial canyon. The Stacks were staggered in such a way the ending of the path made it appear as if they led to a dead end. It was an optical illusion to render the mental impression of standing inside a large rectangle rather than an open passageway. It was unnerving.

Above, the grey-black sky was bleak and shadowed, cut as if it were a rectangular skylight. The view was not entirely dissimilar to the single window within the Pods. The triple glow of neon color radiated within a portion of the opening, allowing me to identify the position of the Spires behind me.

I felt boxed in. Nervous. I had a severely limited ability to see in any direction. Even playing Blue Bell Winter, I'd never come to such a stark realization of how limited our options were for choosing a direction. Most of my strategies involved going up or down...never through. It was stifling. The tunnels, even lacking any breathable air, didn't feel anywhere near as constricting as the specters of choice now around me: locked lines within lines within a box.

A maze.

I'd always loved poetry but never practiced since I was actually pretty terrible at it. The word "maze" made the memory of an impromptu poem, more in the style of a quote, boom within my head as I tried to ignore my new discomforting observation.

"What is my place in the universe? Is it where my body lies? My eyes see? Trapped within the maze of my own components?"

If anything? I butchered it; I can guarantee you I did.

Like many random sayings throughout the years, I'd somehow retained it enough for it to be dredged up with a single mental trigger. I tried and failed to think back to where I'd first conceptualized it but could only remember...words. Scattered within code in an odd pattern. I had no other time-related details.

Rob approached, hands tucked into his pockets with the work bag no longer in sight.

"Walk with me casually," he said, pointing with his head and eyes to his right side as we assumed a languid pace toward the end of the passage, "And memorize this line: 'The Blue Haven Deltas are on a spree again.'"

We began walking, but I was busy trying to figure out what he was saying.

"The what?!" I whispered. The phrase was nonsensical. My brain had issues holding onto the words as I focused not to stumble.

He repeated before having me recite it several times again, ensuring the area was clear as we kept our pace. It wasn't until perhaps the sixth or seventh time I'd repeated it without error that he was sure I wouldn’t forget. That's when he told me, “Make sure you only tell this phrasing to Sam or someone else named Frank. No one else, got it?”

I had no idea who Sam or Frank were and filed their names away for later use, acknowledging the request with a curt nod.

The rain hadn't reached us yet.

Though we’d remained hidden, it still felt like the clouds were hovering, looming just on the horizon, ready to torrent at a moment’s notice. Before recently, I used to love walking in between these areas when it fell. The cold wind bit into my face as we entered another T intersection, which opened up into another lane.

The warmth the new clothing provided in combination with my undersuit was a monumental difference to the way I'd felt wearing the Outeralls. I shoved my hands into my pockets like Rob had, which unexpectedly felt like the interior of a comforting mitten. A stray memory flittered past, one of tiny hands, flippered smiles, and childish giggles as my heart ached from the nostalgia.

We walked in silence for a while. Rob was an ace at looking indifferent as he scanned our surroundings. There was an audible buzz to the west of us, in the direction Rob had chosen to lead us toward. It wasn't the sound of an insect or electronic source, but more of a low general murmur of voices merging together at a distance.

He was the one to break the silence. "You want to talk about it?" he asked.

We were now crossing one of the marked zones at the end of each Block as it became the entrance to another. We were leaving M and entering N. There were no easy-to-see geographical features or structures to mark the borders except a striped series of yellow lines, each four inches across and arrayed in a hazard warning pattern. Why these dividing lines were marked as a hazard, I had never been told, but they were rather identical to the markings at the Port for clearance zones in the loader lanes: the ones Karl ran past and directly into...

I mentally shook myself. Even though I'd already moved past it, enough to keep going for now, I wanted to say aloud, "It's never going to go away, is it?"

Instead, I tried to keep my voice light as I felt a pang of deep regret. I'd deal with it later.

"About what?" I said it aloud.

"You looked like you were thinking pretty hard when I showed up back there," Rob said, sparing me a sideward glance without turning his head fully. "Something bothering you? Talking normalizes our body language while walking, so don't worry about a need to be quiet."

That caught me by surprise. "Wait," I said, "Do you do a better job blending if you're loud rather than quiet?"

Rob gave me a lopsided grin. "Yup. Sometimes the best thing to do when you don't want to be seen is to be obvious, but that's for another time. Quit stalling and spit it out."

We continued walking as he led us on another series of turns, each one still leading toward whatever was making the murmuring noises, now steadily getting louder the further we went.

"Yeah." I said, "Back there? I just had a sudden realization of how boxed in we are living here."

Rob didn't speak as we walked for a few moments more; I think he sensed I had more to say.

"There was a thing I remembered seeing once when we were at the port, you know? It stuck with me for some reason, and the idea of being trapped in what started to look like a maze was what made it come up." I shifted my eyes downward; the border lines were leading away from us.

"Oh?" he said, curiosity lacing his voice as we turned yet again, "Enlighten me."

I spoke the quote aloud.

Rob did one of his "Hmm" noises as he rubbed his chin. "That was in a code buffer, wasn't it?" He asked after some time.

"Yeah," I said.

"Those things can be funny sometimes," he said, "get filled with all kinds of gibbered wordage if you don't keep a keen eye on them." He lifted his hand up, fingers clawed like he was unscrewing a mechanism from his temple, "You remember why we swap them out when they do that?"

"Yeah, yeah," I said, reluctantly, "the synthesizer protocols go haywire, and they eventually refuse to work. Still doesn't mean the words might not have a meaning for me, though."

The noise was growing. Rob didn't seem perturbed as he began speaking again.

"Ever heard of the term 'apophenia'?" he asked, still in a casual tone.

I shook my head. "Not really familiar, no."

"It's a tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things. Like seeing patterns in numbers, or—

"Quotes in random phrasings?"

He pointed to me with one hand, "Bingo."

What he was saying was probably right. The combinations of words and stray concepts were just unconnected sections of code buffer store. The command modules expelled instructions in preparation for the next set, and sometimes fragments of code would stick around. The words to make the poem had come from a random chance where they'd aligned just right when I'd looked at them to make me ponder on a meaning so my mind would run away with them.

"Then what about constellations?" I asked.

Rob slowed. Thinking. "Okay. What about them?"

"So if the argument is it's potentially pop...uh--" I faltered, not remembering the exact word he'd used.

"Apophenia." Rob said, filling it in for me.

"Right," I said, grinning, "then what about the constellations? Observers of the past supposedly looked up, saw the stars, and...what? Saw patterns? Only imagined they saw patterns? Made up stories because they saw dots that just so happened to match what they were speaking about? Or were they just inspired by something? Doesn't that have to count sometimes?"

Rob froze, stopping in his tracks to actually look upward as I turned back to face him.

The sky was far too brightened to see most of the easily identifiable constellations, but there were a few I could trace the edges of with my eyes, even if only a trailing end or pieced section. Orion, "The Hunter," was low on the horizon, his extended leg the only major portion visible above the top height of a Stack beside us.

"Huh." Was all he said as I watched his breath plume upward into the overhead lights, reminding me of when I'd walked home oh-so-many hours ago.

While it was still very much early in the morning, the Stacks, All Stacks, have a certain flow of life about them. Differing Blocks and their assignment zones tended to centralize around specific shift rotations. It was an organic schedule all the inhabitants followed, like bats to a nocturnal sky. The Blocks between my living quarters and Rob's were third rotation, which covered a decent wedge between sundown and sunup and were designed around it.

The source of the noise was further west, straight ahead, toward the canal line. I looked around in surprise, now only noticing there were people out and about on the railings above us. While it wasn’t rare to see people out, enjoying a quick smoke, technicutical nebulizer, or cup of caf before needing to be ready for their own rotation. We were still several hours away from the end of third rotation and the beginning of first. It was therefore notable to see people loitering about or lounging attentively around when they could've been sleeping.

"Let's put a pin in this one for now." Rob said, turning to resume our pace, "Follow my lead and stay ready. Something's up."

We circled back out carefully as I returned to my position beside him. I still couldn't tell you who or what Rob had been prior to now, but what I can tell you is he was amazing. One moment he’d be casually walking, taking on the appearance of someone without a care in the world. The next he would duck us onto a differing path or into the shadow of a building, often in the nick of time to evade wandering eyes and patrols.

For what felt like hours, but really wasn't, I became a fish trying to stay in the shadow of a much larger and faster one. It was Rob’s show.

When to stop.

When to go.

When to kneel down into the cover of a building.

When to engage in random conversations as we came across more and more people. Some waved in greeting or stood in clusters in front of their homes and along railings.

We reached one of the second rotation areas, far more well-lit than it should have been considering the hour. Initially we came across smaller clusters of people, most bundled in blankets and holding cups of steaming caf as they discussed things among themselves under the illumination cast by the Pods above.

As people rose, they activated their entry lights. It made it easy to determine Pods with occupants against those most likely empty as their curiosity led them outside.

I could smell food. Not warm protein pucks, nutrient mixes, or sloppy breakfast packs, but hot, honest-to-goodness food.

My stomach grumbled in envy as the source of the noise and smell was unveiled.

An open-market grand plaza lie dead ahead, relatively close to one of the nearby greens and flanked on one side by a bordering canal. I was gawking and had to stop when Rob signaled for me to close my mouth; this was beyond anything I'd ever seen anywhere within Block M. The railings above acted as balconies. Combined with the sound of rushing water from the nearby canal and the smell of moisture from the moving current, I had an uncanny impression of being adrift on some giant, luxury passenger vessel. The kind I could never, not in a million decades, be able to afford. It was a drastic difference from the maze-like corridors of the crawl we'd just left, and I had to wonder just why—considering how adjacent we were—I had never even thought to come in this direction.

"Weird." I said to myself as I finally identified the source of the wondrous smell.

Several food carts were surrounded by groups of people standing in lines around them. The conversations around us ebbed and flowed, also confirming it as the source of the murmurs from afar as Rob halted, turning to me with a signal to join one of the lines behind him.

"We're here."