Revolution in the Underground (33 page)

***

The path was long.  So long in fact, that both Maggie and Ember had considered, on multiple occasions, the possibility that either Milo led them astray or that they had entered the wrong tunnel.  Since the poor air had made breathing an arduous task, however, they did not stop to discuss their thoughts.

Though the diameter of the tunnel was large enough to comfortably accommodate two standing travelers, Ember, and particularly Maggie, felt increasingly claustrophobic.  They held hands throughout the journey, using their free hands to feel ahead for any upcoming obstacles—which they both chronically felt was right before them.  Each twist and turn, each upward and downward deflection, of the tunnel seemed to justify their fear, bringing them new anxiety and disorientation.

Just as Maggie began to fear that they had travelled too far to turn back, a light appeared.  “Ember!” she exclaimed, vainly pointing in the direction of the light.

“I see.  We’re here.  This is it,” he said, hypnotically trotting towards it.  Maggie followed, breaking into a slow and tired jog.

***

Maggie was the first to pop her head outside of the tunnel.  She peered around cautiously and then slowly pulled herself to the surface.  “Come on,” she said, helping Ember up with her hand.

Around them, on all sides was the dense cover of green bushes—so green, in fact, that it almost looked as though they were from the forest.  For the first time in nearly a day, there was enough light to fully see color, and both Maggie and Ember relished in it.  The verdant leaves were so rich and so fertile that it almost seemed excessive.  Life with all of its colors and richness seemed somehow extreme and posh.

Ember peaked his head through the branches and then reported what he saw.  “Nothing.”

“Nothing?!” she repeated, still enjoying the light and fresh air. 

“Nothing.”

“What do you mean ‘nothing?’”

“Take a look,” he instructed.

Maggie obliged.  The image at which she stared was an empty paved street.  Confused by the expansive black path, the likes of which she had never seen before, she stood up and turned around.  “Hey Ember, there’s something!  Looks like a house.”

Ember followed her as she stepped over the bushes and onto the mysterious asphalt.  “Where is everyone?”

“What is this place?” she said with perplexed awe.

All of the sudden, Ember felt a forceful impact along his calf.  “Did you feel that?” he asked, as he brought his hands down to examine his leg.

“Feel what?” she asked as something sharp but dense collided with her left shoulder.

“It feels like… a tight ball…” he said as he pulled a needle from his calf.  He intended to show it to her for further consideration, but instead quickly grew weak and fell to his knees.  “Maggie… I can’t…  It’s growing,” he said of the spreading feeling of paralysis. 

He crawled forward futilely, his eyelids becoming increasingly heavy.  He heard Maggie collapse to the ground and turned round to look at her, fighting against the inexorable heaviness of his lead-like eyelids.  Instead he saw a pair of dark black boots.

             
Ember Oaks did not know for how long he was staring at the plain white ceiling, but he knew that he was awake.  His was a complete immobility—the sort of absolute paralysis that affects, in full, the body but not the mind. He did, however, retain control over his eyes.  He thought of his sister, of Sven and Kara, of Luna and Styles, of life, of death. These thoughts descended into questions and those questions descended into words, and finally those words descended into the ineffable—the uniquely indescribable qualities of emotion—the incommunicable umbra of the abstract and ill conceived.  In the dim fogginess of his mind he perceived of ideas of substance and significance, never quite close enough to fully glimpse directly—always fluttering away before their conception, disappearing before existing.  And then, the recurring inundation of rapid sequential irrationalities—the kind that so often plague the mind during spells of intolerable anxiety.  The fear, the apprehension, and for what?  Of what?

And then, just boredom.  The boredom of sheer inescapable nothingness.  Total nothingness.  The ceiling, which wasn’t so much white, as it was colorless, was illuminated completely and uniformly by the fluorescent glow from some hidden object.  The space, which by virtue of its monotony may be more appropriately considered a vacuum, was mind numbing.  No tiles.  No cracks.  No shades.  Just the utter, unendurable sterility of a plain even landscape.

Ember closed his eyes, expecting to find a substantive somethingness in the convivial richness of darkness.  There was no such sojourn.  White.  Black.  One the absence of the other, and vice versa—diametrically opposed in spectrum yet so mercilessly similar in effect.  The extremes, so easily accessed yet so maddeningly impossible to combine in part.  So close, yet so far.  So similar, yet so opposite. 
How is it that both amount to nothing?!  I might as well be dead.

And then the haunting realization that, no matter how hard he closed his eyes, the same plain ceiling remained—ceaselessly staring back at him.  Shutting his eyelids may achieve, in effect, limitation, redefinition, and isolation of a new universe, but it could not, no matter how hard he tried, change the external—his true reality.  Always, the plain ceiling remained. 

An unseen door creaked slowly open.  Then came the sounds of footsteps followed by the click of a door closing.  “Good evening,” a strangely familiar voice said delicately, walking towards Ember’s paralyzed corpse, which now seemed to Ember no more a part of him than a random inanimate object.  “I am going to push a button, and when I do you will regain control of your motor function.  But I want you to behave yourself.  Do you think you can do that for me, Ember?” the man asked rhetorically as he positioned his face above Ember’s gaze.

It was Daryl.  A foreign feeling overcame Ember.  It was hate—complete and total hate.  With every bone in his body, with every bit of his existence he loathed the face before him.  The things he hoped for—wished would happen to that face—frightened Ember.  He did not know that he had the capacity for such odium.  And all of it came viscerally as if a conditioned response to external stimuli.

A strange rush came to and spread through Ember’s muscles.  He thrust himself forward, thrashed his head violently—intent on carrying out some evil, vengeful deed—but restraints held him back.  Two tight, thick, heavy straps, one on his forehead and the other on his chin, jailed his head, but allowed slight lateral rotations.  The wrist and ankle restraints were looser, allowing for the complete range of motion, albeit on a short leash.  Ember rammed his wrist against the bind, seething with anger.

“Ember!  Behave yourself!  Cut it out!” Daryl reprimanded.

“You… You… traitor!!  How… could you?!” Ember shouted as forcefully as he could, foaming at the mouth.  By alternatively contracting and relaxing his back and abdominal muscles in tandem, he was able to achieve a violent, satisfying outward arch.  He slammed his back up and down, into and then away from the hard cold table, convulsively kicking against his ankle harnesses.

“Stop it!” Daryl commanded as he pushed another button.  A sharp, indescribably severe pain stung Ember in the abdomen.  He seethed up against it—convulsing twice as violently as before.  Daryl zapped him again, but this time in his leg.  Still Ember struggled, jerking his hands helplessly against the bondage with a newfound gusto.  Then came a series of four or five sickening zaps, their loci running evenly along the longitude of his body.  Ember fell down, momentarily constrained by the immense pain.  “I told you to control yourself.”  Ember breathed heavily as anger re-filled his reservoir.  His pupils dilated.  “Behave yourself, Ember!”

He lunged forward with even greater might and viciousness.  Daryl shocked Ember up and down his spine, but Ember seemed immune to it.  Saliva dripped from Ember’s lips as he surged upward.  There was a pop from his left bicep, and then his right bicep, but Ember could not hear it through his hysterical screams and expletives.  Though Ember perceived of the pain, he could not do anything but oppose it.  He felt as though it was a fated struggle—one in which he had no more choice than breathing or even existing.  In fact, if anything, Ember felt more like he was battling some invisible commander than Daryl.

Daryl zapped him again.  And then again.  And again.  And again.  And again.  And soon, above even Ember’s haunting cries were the rapid, sustained, sequential sounds of debilitating shocks.  Ember collapsed down on the metal table, immobilized by the pain that he brought on himself.  What was worst, however, was the feeling of powerlessness, the feeling—the knowledge that he had been shocked into submission, that he had lost, that his fighting spirit had been stolen from him.  He closed his eyes and panted uncontrollably as waves of pain overtook him.  It was a while before the pain dissipated to tolerable levels.  Ember whimpered feebly.  “Why?” he croaked.

“Ember…  Tell me, where do you think you are?”

Ember wept.  “I… I… don’t know.”

“Tell me Ember.  What’s your best guess?”

“I don’t know!” he shouted, intent on rising up again, but only able to muster a pathetic limp of his left leg.

“Tell me Ember!”

“I… don’t know! Stop yelling at me!” he cried.

“Yes you do!”

“A torture chamber?!”

“Oh Ember…  You are not well…  You are not well,” Daryl said with a disapproving
tsking
noise.  He pressed another button, and suddenly Ember’s table angled upward, perpendicular to the ground.  His harness tightened as three new metal ribs wrapped around his abdomen and chest.  “This is a hospital, Ember.  You are sick.”

“What are you talking about?!”

“You are being institutionalized.  This is a sanatorium.”

“A sanatorium?”

“Yes…  An infirmary for the insane,” Daryl explained, casually pacing to and fro.

Ember laughed, long forlorn tears streaming down his cheek.  “You have to be kidding me.”

“You have what we call Stage IV schizophrenia,” Daryl said, stroking his chin.  “It’s the most severe type.  I am your doctor.”

“Schizophrenia…  That’s what they said Kara had,” Ember muttered, strangely incapable of filtering his thoughts from his spoken words.

“Right…  About that…” Daryl said, once again positioning his face before Ember’s.  “You should know that you also have a rare condition that gives your dreams a continuity.  These figures… these characters…  Kara and Maggie…  they’re not real.  They never were.  They are figments of your imagination—byproducts of your disease.”

“You’re wrong,” Ember said, trying as hard as he could to shake his head against the restraining straps.

“I wish I were...  Think how I feel, Ember.  This isn’t easy on me either.  I’m the one who has to tell you, week after week, that all you have ever known was a lie.  Every week, Ember!  We go through this every week!”

Ember closed his eyes and chuckled feverishly.  “Is that the best you got?”

“I’m the only friend you have left, but I must admit that you are wearing thin with even me.  You show no sign of improvement and are a complete drain on resources!  You show no desire to return to reality.”

“Reality.  Reality?!  What do you know about reality!” Ember exclaimed with a sudden philosophical righteousness.  “I suppose you believe that your ‘Eternal Leader’ is reality?  I suppose you believe that the Underground is all there is?  That that is truth?!”

“If it weren’t for the Eternal Leader, you would have been dead a long time ago.  It is thanks to him that you have life, and it is thanks to him that we have what we have.  You will come to know that in time.”

“It’s not going to work with me,” Ember declared, opening his eyes to challenge Daryl’s stare.  “I have a stronger constitution than that.  I have seen too much.  I have heard too much.  I have felt too much.  You won’t convince me of your falsehoods.”

“And your senses can be trusted?  Do not the senses mislead on occasion?  Is it not possible that the random orchestrations of your dreams—the workings of your over-imaginative mind—could have led to such visions of grandeur?  Can you say, with upmost certainty that your senses are truth?”

“It is a judgment call.  It is my axis for which I need no justification,” Ember conceded.

“Observe,” Daryl instructed, pushing another button.  Ember’s arm twitched forward, his legs bent inward at their knees, and his abdominal muscles contracted.  “Your senses tell you that you are moving, do they not?  But it is not you who is controlling it.”

Ember tried unsuccessfully to resist the twitching and contractions.  He panted desperately, and then closed his eyes and gulped.  Regaining composure, he argued, “But I am moving, and therefore my senses have not deceived.”

Daryl smiled smugly.  “What do you think now?” he asked, pushing another button, which loosened Ember’s head restraints.  Ember pushed up against the loosened straps and peered down at his motionless body.  The feeling of motion, the limited struggle against the shackles, the acceleration, the jerkiness, the sounds of metal clashing, remained even though he saw plainly that it could not be happening.

“How…  How are you doing this?” Ember stammered.

“How I’m doing it is not important.  What is important is that I am doing it—that your senses can not be trusted.  Can’t you see Ember, it’s all a complicated illusion.  If I can control you—your perceptions, your movements—then what does that say about your identity.”

“But you don’t control
me
.  You may control this body and the way my brain perceives the senses, but you won’t
ever
change who I am.”

“What are you if not for your body and your brain?”

“My mind…  my beliefs…  You can’t ever take that away from me.”

“Oh Ember, you are suffering… The Eternal Leader can make it all better.  He can take away all of your misery.”

“Would you stop it with this ‘Eternal Leader’ garbage?!”

“I know it’s tough Ember.  No one likes to hear that their entire world has been fake.”

“My world is not fake!  I know what is real and what is not.  Kara and Maggie are both real!”

“And what evidence do you have of that?!” Daryl shouted back with matching animosity.

Ember’s brow angled violently as he scanned his mind for a shred of defendable evidence before finally arguing, “Talk to others… they will vouch for our existence.”

“And what if they can’t?”

“Then the memories of us will be latent within them—forever invisibly influencing their actions… their perceptions… to perhaps even the most subtlest of degrees…  but there… present… an incalculable and perhaps hardly perceptible, but nonetheless inexpugnable verification of our existence.”

“And if we remove them?  If we could annihilate all the memories?”

“Then it is the inanimate objects that would be our salvation.  They bear witness to our existence.  Go back and observe the soil we walked upon—you will see our footsteps.  Look along the branches upon which we sat—you will see the microscopic abrasions that we caused.”

“And what if, Ember, we took that all away.  What if we expunged this Earth of all signs of your existence?”

“You can’t!”

“But what if we did?  What then?”

“It is not possible to remove our mark from the universe because then you would need to somehow be greater than the universe itself.  Being a sub-element of the whole, that is analytically impossible.”

“Hypothetically Ember…  What if we could?”

“There is… somewhere… a greater reality—a transcendent truth… and no matter how hard you try, you cannot take that away.” 

“And if… for some reason, your story were to be deleted in the transcendental realm?”

“What I am…  My story…  cannot be taken away.  From the moment I came into existence, I was inextricably linked to the rest of the universe and the whole of creation.”

“And you are a character within your story!”

“I am my story and you are your’s.  Why can’t you understand that?!”

“I’m just trying to show you Ember, how identity is subjective.  How your existence is subjective.”

“And you think by arguing this, that you will convince me that my perceptions were fabrications?  The philosophy you raise runs counter to your aims.  Your little games may work on other people, but it won’t work on me,” Ember challenged, staring back at Daryl with intent eyes.