Muffled footsteps echoed in her head as a shadow loomed over her. Her knife was easier to draw and so she tried, but another surge made her convulse into blackness. The spasms seemed to crush her body from the inside, keeping her lungs from finding air.
Lilly could no longer fight the darkness. She knew she should have been worried about being helpless in the Fringe, or about what her attacker was going to do to her, but instead she remembered an old woman, running through an alien landscape, cradling a baby.
Two
“Before the Fissure, there had been decades of obsession over what the world’s devastation would be caused by; a zombie apocalypse, total black out, annihilation by aliens, and of course God, were all favorites.
For those of us more grounded, the threat of nuclear war was omnipresent, and societal and economic collapse seemed equally inevitable. Natural disasters and overpopulation were beyond our control and had been increasing exponentially.
Many were terrified of the future, but all of these fears magically faded into nothing on August 21, 2036. A small group of independent physicists and biologists revealed that they had discovered a connection between the grey matter in our bodies, and the Higgs Boson, or “God Particle”. They had also identified the properties of the space that made that connection and said it was possible to connect the two manually. Apparently, we humans had the inherent ability to control everything, we just had to ‘hook up’, and so the race to create the “God Machine” began.
The possibilities were endless. There would be no more pollution, no more hunger, no more disease, and no more energy needs. There had not been a more hopeful time in the history of this world, but ironically, the very machine that we created to save it was the very thing that destroyed it.
The walls of the Theonicorp Medical Facility were white, sterile, silent, and William hated them. Before, the silence had always made him feel safe, but now the walls mocked him. Murderer, Coward, they whispered.
He had walked down this corridor every day for the last three years, but this was the first time he noticed his reflection in the polished metal door at the end. Moving closer, he watched the distorted figure transform into someone he barely recognized. His shoulders slumped as if his spine could no longer allow him to stand up straight. His eyes were dark and hollow. There wasn’t much life left inside the man looking back at him. At the beginning, he had so much hope and passion for his work, but now his countenance proved there was nothing but turmoil and shame.
The insurgents, known as Catalyst, promised that they were working on a way to free him and his family. They insisted there was a plan, but for now, he would have to continue to stall. He feared Yeong was suspicious, and William was running out of ways to give the appearance of progress without actually finishing his work.
He wished he could just turn around and go home to his wife and daughter and forget about what he had created, but if he stopped now, they would be killed. All he could do was trust that the insurgents would follow through with their promise and get him and his family out.
Clutching the security badge, he closed his eyes, let out a slow breath, and reluctantly held it against the panel. The door silently slid open, and William walked into the waiting room where two fully geared Nucrean guards with assault rifles stood motionless on both sides of a double door. The guard on the right leaned in and opened the door just in time for William to walk through.
The main room was dark except the lighted glass cubicles that held pale, hairless women and men. They were each strapped to a bed with optical cables running from the ceiling to the base of their necks. Some of the beds were rotated so that the patients were face down with their arms extended to the sides.
William’s project had begun with the promise that there would be solutions to the effects of the Fringe. There would finally be the possibility of living a life outside the walls of Nucrea. There were promises of a longer life, enhanced abilities, little to no effects from the radiation in the Fringe, and also a large amount of credits for each participant upon completion. After three years of the volunteers’ imprisonment, all the excitement, and the expectation of these promises had vanished right alongside their freedom.
William used to spend time with each one of the volunteers daily. He would reassure them of how their enhanced future would be the beginning of a new earth. After a while, he was sure they all knew they were never going home, but they seemed to feel better listening to his vision of a better future anyway. Eventually it became clear that there was not going to be that type of future, just one of slavery, and there was no reason for any of them to pretend anymore. There was resistance from some of the patients, but that stopped when soldiers had killed them in front of the others. Slavery seemed better than death.
William walked between two rows of the glass holding cells towards a woman who was waiting under a light outside the main operating room door. He stopped and stared blankly at the empty holding cell on his right. She expected him to keep coming, but William just stared at the empty medical bed and dangling cables.
“Doctor.”
William didn’t hear her, and if he did he was not ready to acknowledge her.
“Doctor?”
She smiled at William as he slowly came out of his trance. Stoically, he looked her up and down. She had straight brown hair, soft hazel eyes and even softer lips. She was tall and thin, and to him, her smile couldn’t be more annoying. Her white medical uniform looked as if it were impossible to move in, but she somehow gracefully moved closer to greet him. William stopped just short of running right into her and ignoring her outstretched hand.
“Capener, right?” he asked without looking at her and reached for the crystalline tablet she was holding.
“It is a pleasure to work with you, Doctor Glastow.”
She waited for a response as he took the tablet from her, but it never came. William swiped through some medical charts and graphs, still not saying a word, and then handed the tablet back to her.
“Has he been prepped?”
“Yes.”
“After you, then,” William said, making sure she was aware of his annoyance.
The room was small and mostly crowded with machinery, displays and cables. In the middle of the room, a man was suspended vertically on one of the medical beds. Restraints held his limbs and head tightly to the frame.
William adjusted the controls for the bed. It twisted smoothly on its vertical axis, and then the base slowly slid upward. The bed stopped midway, with the man facing the floor. William sat on a small stool next to him, and removed the gauze pad from his neck. There was a tattoo of the Korean word for slave, and in the middle of the tattoo, bright blue lights blinked around a metallic ring.
William pulled down a suspended cable from the ceiling, and held it just above the metallic ring. Groups of small fiber optic wires pushed their way out of the cable and connected to the ring. The monitors and machinery turned on and began to analyze data. William looked over the readouts, and after being satisfied with the results, took a small box out of his pocket. Inside was a computer chip made of more fiber optics and an organic platform that looked like a mixture of skin and glass. The frame was made of quartz and a pewter colored metal that matched the ring that was embedded in his neck. After he typed in a short command on one of the monitors, the biological chip activated, and neon blue dots raced in random directions.