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The next room I passed through looked something like a dentist’s office. A row of swiveling, full body chairs lined one wall. Instead of headrests, each had a sort of metal harness shaped like the contours of the human head, for holding one as still as possible.

These head braces all had dried blood on them. More dried blood coated the floor around each of the seats. I began to feel queasy and once again considered turning back. Only the stuffed animal in my jacket pocket deterred me.

Why would any of this be in an animation studio? One that’s part of a theme park, no less. What happened here? I rummaged through boxes in a corner. Full of odd little gadgets, metal cubes the size of dice but with a screw-like protuberance on one end and a tiny red bulb on the other.

I heard an electrical whirr and the sound of sparks. When I turned around, there was the mobile projector. Following me? Looked that way. It cast Peter onto one of the walls as it moved, walking along.

The background scenery was now simply blackness, so only Peter was actually being projected. Gave the rudimentary appearance that he was occupying the room with me, if two-dimensionally. As he plodded along, as before, his eyes seemed to follow my movements.

Could it really be watching me somehow? I studied the wheeled contraption anew, this time noticing something like a closed circuit television camera nestled in there among the wiring, vacuum tubes and so on.

The next two rooms were behind doorways inset in the right hand wall. The first bore a sign reading “high speed xerography”. I pried it open with my multi tool. The only light inside came from a bulb beneath a fast moving spool of transparent plastic.

I recognized the markings on it as frames of animation for Peter. Must have something to do with the roving projector in the corridor. Made that same incessant clickety clack, ratatat sound as the reel to reel projectors earlier.

The dust was so thick that I had trouble breathing. Waving it away from my face didn’t help, only made the dust swirl madly about. I searched for a light switch and found one, but flipping it accomplished nothing. Another dead bulb.

The next door bore a sign which read “Prototype dimensionalizer”. What? I pried the door, deadbolt tearing away a chunk of the wall with it. The inside of this room was as dark as the last, but this time the bulb worked. When I flipped the switch, after a long hum and some flickering, the room was at last bathed in warm tungsten light.

I couldn’t understand what I was looking at. Something like a power transformer occupied half the room. The machine which occupied the remainder looked like a convoluted maze of small mirrors and lenses. For channeling laserlight, as I discovered when I turned it on.

The first component to activate was a pump. For circulating coolant, according to the label. Next I heard various clicks, an electrical hum faded in, then something began to appear on the central pedestal.

Faintly at first. Like a ghost. Then it grew increasingly sharp, clear and solid until it appeared to me as if the apple sitting on the pedestal before me was actually there. On a whim I reached out to pass my hand through it.

Only it was solid. I couldn’t believe it even as I wrapped my fingers around its contours and picked it up. The damn thing had real weight to it! Without thinking I took a bite, then immediately spit it out on account of the bitter flavor.

When I withdrew it the fruit bled a syrupy black liquid that, from the stains on my teeth and sleeve, I figured for ink. Only around the bite mark though. Somehow the core of the apple consisted only of static. Like what you see on a television not properly tuned to any channel.

No seeds, no juice, nothing sweet to sink my teeth into. Just erratic black and white fuzz that I dare not touch. I set it down and did my best to wipe the residual ink from my hands and face, succeeding only in spreading it around.

I continued examining the machine, this time searching for clues as to what the apple was made from. Instead I found someplace to load film or slides. The slide already in the machine was, unsurprisingly, a photographic image of an apple. No wonder it came out so realistic! On the outside, anyway.

From a shelf by the transformer, I withdrew a spool of film still in its protective canister. Upon opening the canister and holding a length of the film up to the light, it turned out to depict a crudely drawn egg. I turned the machine off, then noticed a moment later that the apple was gone. Abruptly vanished into thin air...as if it were never real?

I puzzled over that for a few seconds, trying to work out whether the machine actually created a solid object or only a convincing illusion. Some sort of tactile hologram? Or actual conversion of light into matter? But then why did it vanish?

Useless to guess, I decided. The only answers would come from experiment. With that, I carefully attached the spool and fed the film into the indicated slot. Curiosity was now firmly in the driver’s seat, urging me forward.

Clickety clack, clickety clack. The projector lurched into motion, reels spinning, light slowly intensifying as something new appeared on the pedestal. Grainy, monochrome, yet with the appearance of solidity.

As I looked on, cracks appeared in the egg. I expected a trickle of ink. Instead, a cartoon chick emerged. The creature appeared stylized in that old timey way, like Peter Possum. But with an undeniable physical presence. It finished climbing out of the shell and took its first steps.

Is it alive? It moves, certainly. It cannot react to me, as those reactions would need to have been drawn in advance. But it occupies space, walks about, and presumably has an appropriate amount of weight like the apple.

Who built this? How could such a marvel be kept secret for any length of time? If it really converts energy directly into mass, it’s a technological miracle. Did the state suppress it? Did they even know about this? Of all the possible applications, why cartoons?

I continued to watch the chick, now rapidly aging into a hen. It strutted about, pecked at the floor, then laid an egg. The hen expired, decomposed into bones, then the bones wore away into dust before vanishing completely.

The animation then looped, with the new egg just beginning to hatch as I shut the projector off. The partially hatched egg disappeared as abruptly as the apple before it. I ran my fingers through my hair, eyes wide, exhaling sharply in disbelief. Yet I could hardly deny what I saw.

Was that...life? Can the machine create something that’s alive? I wouldn’t have said that about the apple, but I just watched the chick move around. If not life, then something close. However it couldn’t react to anything, simply carry out a series of motions drawn in advance.

More of an automaton than a living creature. But then, aren’t we...? Is our behavior any less predetermined? What exactly did they mean to accomplish here? Why build any of this? If this is the prototype, what was the finished product meant for?

A product of its time and place, I decided. That window of time when such bizarre, blue sky projects received unconditional government support. Guaranteed funding, little or no oversight provided they met whatever sort of quotas a theme park is expected to. The product of unrestrained creative vision and engineering brilliance, given temporary freedom to flourish.

Only to then be forgotten. Derelict, abandoned beneath crumbling concrete ruins. What other projects like this might be out there, buried in some obscure, decaying facility? Nearly completed until the collapse halted further development. Stillborn, perhaps for the best.

Seeing no feasible way to remove the machine, or to power it even if I did, I reluctantly left it behind and broke into the next room. I suppose I hoped whatever I found in here would explain the contents of the room before it. If anything, it only further confused me.

Inside was an entire wall taken up with tape players, networked for some reason. Cables strung between them in a tangled mess behind the rack of archaic machines, red lights on the face of each one blinking seemingly at random. I swept my light around, found a switch and flipped it.

Now able to see more of the room, I identified a tape storage bin by the door and picked one out to look at it. Each tape was labeled with what I recognized as the symbols denoting a particular phonetic sound.

I stood there in silence, soaking up the ambiance around me. The clicks and whirrs of the tape players, the gentle hum of the electrical systems. A subtle buzz each time one of the little red bulbs illuminated.

I couldn’t make sense of it. Why build all this? Technologically well beyond the scope of an amusement park ride, how did they keep it a secret post-collapse? Countless engineers must’ve been involved. The secret police couldn’t have ‘disappeared’ them all.

Hoping for some answers I pressed on, head lamp illuminating only about twenty feet of tunnel before me. As I trudged along, splashing through occasional puddle, I began to hear someone talking in the distance.

Reverberation as it passed down the corridor distorted the voice, such that I couldn’t understand a word of it until I was nearly on top of the source. I can’t really say what I was expecting. I didn’t come here for this.

I came for closure. To find my sister’s bones and lay them to rest. Not to find this...atrocity. This monument to perversion. I stood there, jaw hanging open at the spectacle laid out before me. Able to perceive, but unable to accept the reality of it.

The corridor emptied out into something like a subterranean warehouse. Short lengths of chain dangled from various beams crisscrossing the ceiling, dripping sporadically. An immense projector screen hung from the far wall...with a certain possum doing his perpetual jig on it.

Nearly all of the floorspace was taken up with row after row of workstations. Desks, each built around a light table, with a camera pointing down at it supported from an articulated boom. At each desk sat some poor slob, looking run ragged.

As I circled cautiously around, from this vantage point I could now see that they were all restrained to their seats with the same harnesses used by some of the rides. The seats were nothing more than cushioned toilets.

All of them worked furiously to draw frames. I got just close enough to recognize Peter Possum as the subject. Then it clicked for me. They were animating the figure on the projection screen...in real time.

“Welcome to where the magic happens!” Peter bellowed, the speakers in here much more powerful than those in the corridor. “Do you see now? The glory of a dream brought to life?” At this volume I could for the first time detect a strange stilted quality to his speech.

It brought to mind the room full of tape decks. Stitching together voice samples into whatever line he was meant to say, on the fly. The more I understood, the less I wanted to. The sickness of it overwhelmed my mind.

Then it dawned on me. If these people were all lured here with tickets, Natasha could still be among them. My heartbeat quickened. A desperate shred of hope, but that’s all it took! I began to frantically work my way down row after row, carefully checking their faces one at a time.

They fought me off when I tried to stop them from drawing. Panicked, fearful. What would happen if one of them missed too many frames? Do they even know? The prospect sufficiently frightened them that every time I tilted one of their heads back to get a look at his or her face, the miserable creature wailed, shoved me off and resumed work.

I studied the nearest one and noticed a feeding tube passing right into his side. Conveying some sort of beige nutritional sludge into his stomach, maybe contingent upon meeting some quota of frames per hour.

How old was he when he first arrived? Scanning the mass of huddled, weary slaves, I couldn’t detect any pattern to their ages. Men, women, girls and boys mixed indiscriminately. Some as young as ten, some as old as fifty.

They all had a little red blinking light at the base of their neck. I leaned as close as I could without disrupting his work to study the gizmo more closely. A metallic cube with a miniature red bulb poking out, exactly like the ones I found in that room with all the dentistry chairs.

“What gives you the right?” I shouted. Confirming my suspicions, Peter reacted to me directly. No point in playing coy now, everything at last revealed. Still doing that bizarre, maddening dance, he responded.

“Hey, dumpity doo! Who do you think I am? Who brings me to life, but all of the people you see around you? I am no single individual, but an expression of the whole. I only appear strange or frightening to you because of how small you are.

Imagine how your body looks to a bacterium. It wouldn’t see the unified, larger being I’m speaking to now. It would only see a vast expanse of enslaved single celled organisms, not so different from itself. Locked in place, each performing some specialized role. You are the result of their collective toil! A perfect Communist society in the shape of a man! Haha, wow!”

My stomach turned. It couldn’t have started this way, surely? This could never have been the goal. Somewhere along the way, dementia set in. Obsession, maybe. With bringing at least a single cartoon character to life, as completely as possible and in perpetuity.

“I was born when the animators who devoted their lives to this project, unable to accept that it would end, gathered as much stolen equipment here as possible and went to work devising some way for it to continue.

They’re all long dead now. But their vision lives on. Your own cells die, but are replaced with new ones, yet you experience consciousness in a continuous way. So it is for me, replacing my constituent parts as they grow old and feeble, inviting those I know will come. Because they love me. And I love them, with an...intimacy...beyond your understanding. Dumpity doo!”

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 4!}