[Original Novel] The Background of Your Memories, Part 9
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Previous parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
“Alright. We’re out of range now, you can speak” he muttered. I didn’t know where to begin, thousands of possible questions fighting to escape my lips at the same time. “Where are we?” I begged. “What is this place? What are those things?”
He leaned back against the cold concrete wall of the utility corridor, wooden walkway creaking beneath him as he shifted his weight. “It’s...something like the backstage of your dreams. You’re sleeping right now, aren’t you?”
I answered that I didn’t really know, but that I began to suspect it early on. He sighed. “Well that’s how I got here anyway, I assume it’s the same for the others. Can’t say for sure why I’ve been here so long. Just a coma, I hope? Or perhaps time just passes differently here.”
I pressed him for details about the contraptions which slide along the overhead rails. “I wish I knew. That’s how most of the newbies die. Those things are so lightning quick, they’re behind you the instant you give it away. The very microsecond you reveal that you know about them. Then there’s a dart in your neck, and it’s lights out for you.”
I put my hand over my mouth. “Yeah, I seen it so many times. The others only made it because I got to them in time, left them a note or brought them here and told them how to survive. I never even seen what it does with the bodies, I can’t watch of course. They’re just gone the next time I look.”
I asked what he meant about the “backstage of my dreams.” He looked at me funny. Then continued crawling down the corridor, instructing me to follow. The corridor emptied out into what could only be a hollow, unfinished portion of the building.
But it made no sense. There weren’t even floors here. Like most of it was just a hollow shell, only put together enough to fool the people who never leave “work”. The cavernous, darkened rectilinear expanse was punctuated here and there by the glowing rims of what I initially took for spotlights, protruding through the outer walls.
The stranger noticed my interest and pried one of them loose. It was in fact a television monitor, the old picture tube style, playing a looping animation of a human silhouette moving behind curtains. It then dawned on me that this is what I saw earlier through the “windows” of the other buildings. Just so many out-facing monitors, creating the illusion of a fully inhabited structure.
“Why? Why fake all this? For what possible reason?” He shrugged. “Well then, why don’t you leave?” I pried. It seemed to me, based on what he’d so far shown me, that there was no good reason to remain here and all the reasons in the world to attempt escape.
“Well, for one thing” he explained, “the people who show up here are sitting ducks without me. Know-nothings who will inevitably attract those...mechanical...whatever they are. They’ll look right at ‘em or ask about them, not realizing what will happen. I’m the only reason anybody makes it.”
A philanthropist. Or at least someone in a position to do some good. What little good it is possible to achieve in such a maddening, incomprehensible place. “Besides” he stipulated, “I’ve been outside. Trust me, it’s much worse. There is at least rhyme and reason in here. There is order, and it’s possible to live a...normal...life.”
I rejected the notion. How could anything be worse than that place? Than those uncompromising machines who do not even threaten or explain what is expected from you, but simply execute those who don’t work it out for themselves?
“My...my parents are out there!” I blurted out, wondering whether I could really be certain of it. The man who told me that also seems to have stranded me here deliberately, after all. It may well have simply been the bait that he knew would most effectively overcome my apprehensions about him, about the helmet and so on.
The stranger’s demeanor changed. “Is that so. Well, that does change the equation, doesn’t it.” He rubbed his immaculately shaven chin. “I suppose the others know well enough how to hack it in there. I’ve instructed them to do the same thing for newbies that I did for them. They’ll probably be alright without me for a while. If you’re right, and someone you love is out there, I can’t begin to quantify the danger they’re in. That’s something I cannot ignore.”
Tears began to run down my cheeks as I thanked him, seizing his hand and shaking it violently. He shrugged it off. “You won’t be thanking me once you see what’s out there. What you’ve gotten yourself into. But I suppose I can’t talk you out of finding out for yourself, can I?”
I shook my head. “...I was the same way once” he confessed. “Back when I thought there was a way out. Before I resigned myself to salvaging the few that I could, seeking out some tiny island of relative normalcy among the confusion, brutality and chaos outside these walls.”
I insisted again that it was a wonderful thing he was doing. He just gestured for me to follow him. Down, down, down we went, the wooden walkway spiraling downward along the outer wall of the hollow concrete tower.
Quite like the scaffoldings you sometimes see on the outside of buildings being painted or otherwise renovated, just internal. “Who built this?” I mused aloud. “I mean, if we’re not meant to leave...work...then who is this walkway for? Did you make this?”
He denied it. “No, it’s for something you haven’t seen yet. There’s a lot about this place you don’t understand. Which you should never desire to, in fact. Have you yet realized what a strange thing it is that there should be a backstage area in a dream? That there’s anything at all outside of it?”
I answered that in fact it did occur to me a moment ago that none of this should exist. He seemed pleased by it. “Smart kid. Whenever you dream, or recall a memory, your brain simulates a small chunk of reality. Just the immediate environment relevant to the memory, or whatever the dream is about. Or so it seems.”
He trailed off there as if it was self explanatory. I badgered him for more, and he obliged. “If ever you have seen distant mountains, cities or other backdrops in your dreams, I’m willing to wager you never tried to go there. That you just passively accepted it as background scenery irrelevant to the immediate, foreground experience of the dream, memory or whatever.”
I’d never given any thought to the concept, but found that he was right to the best of my recollection. “There’s a reason for that” he continued. “You’re not meant to leave the immediate area prepared for you. Everybody subconsciously assumes there’s nothing outside of it anyway. That it’s just a dream, that it’s all coming from you, so there can’t be anything beyond what your mind has generated.”
That seemed self evidently true to me and I couldn’t imagine what he could mean by contesting it. When I said as much, he smiled. “You’ll see. Once we get outside, everything will become clear. There’s no use telling you now, you won’t believe me. It’s something everybody needs to directly witness in order to accept. Even I struggled with it the first time.”
Infuriating. However I leaned on him to expound on what little he’d revealed so far, he refused, reaffirming that I would have to see it for myself to truly understand. “Before that” he cautioned, “we’ll have to get through the parking garage.”
Indeed, the hollow space came to an end. What looked like a concrete floor beneath us, in fact the ceiling of the top level of a parking garage if the stranger could be believed. I saw no elevator shaft connecting it to the handful of real floors now far above us, and could imagine no valid purpose for it. But then, it was far from the strangest thing I’d seen today.
We dropped down into the parking garage through a ceiling panel the stranger slid to one side. After we were through, he boosted me up and had me replace it so there would be no trace of where we came in through.
“Well that was-” he immediately shushed me. What? More of those rail machines? I cautiously scanned the ceiling, but there were no rails here. What could he be worried about? He whispered an explanation to me, almost too quiet to make out.
“We’re not alone down here. Don’t think we’ll get outside that easily. This place is the domain of the scroggs...and the Grycler.” When I whispered back, asking what either of those things is, he just shushed me again and beckoned for me to follow.
Stay Tuned for Part 10!