Someone to Remember Me: The Anniversary Edition (33 page)

An eerie silence followed as Seven realized that he was still alive. Eight clung tightly to his arm, her fingers digging into his skin. The helipad was in ruins, the helicopter was a burning wreck far in the north, and the MoNITOR drones made no effort to assist them.

Seven and Eight were left to listen to Grand Cross as it hummed with electricity.

“What was that?” Eight finally asked, releasing her grip on his arm. “Why did it listen to you? That’s twice that you’ve exerted some type of control over it.”

Seven sighed.

“It was just a feeling. I thought since I fought it off last time I could do it again.”

Dissatisfied with his answer but unwilling to push the argument further, Eight muttered, “Good work,” and brushed as much of the monster’s remains from herself and Seven as she could. Only when they were uncomfortably close to the drones did the nearest unit spin its head to face Seven and Eight.

Each MoNITOR possessed a single ocular implant: a glowing blue portal into the mind of the machines. Seven wondered if the AdvISOR was watching them through the eyes of the drones, hundreds of them, simultaneously. If so, it again stayed its hand. None of the drones moved, spoke, or attempted to restrain or arrest Seven and Eight as they walked to the entrance.

At the twin doors that marked the entrance to Grand Cross, a golden orb floated down from one of the spires above until it was at eye level with the visitors. Like the humanoid models, the flying MoNITOR possessed its own blue eye. If it had been on the floor Seven might have kicked it away but this machine had a singular purpose.

“Follow,” the flying machine chirped. Sliding gracefully through the air, it ventured towards the narrow opening in the entryway. Disappearing beyond the doors, the aerial drone vanished into the darkness but not before it sounded another chirp.

“Pushy,” Eight remarked.

They followed the drone into the unlit atrium of Grand Cross. The light from the lonely blue eye on the floating MoNITOR was enough to guide their steps and reveal the wreckage therein. Cracked marble pillars held the vaulted ceiling in the air but chunks of the roof’s decorative painting had fallen away. From the scant portions that remained above, Seven tried to assemble the story.

“It chronicles the war between the Builders and the Founders. See there? The Sphere is flying and then begins to fall out of the sky. That last area shows it crashing into the water,” Eight deduced, more quickly than Seven could. With her commentary the images and colors made sense.

Seven had hoped, inwardly, that Grand Cross might have escaped the neglect suffered by the rest of Haven. From the floor’s cracked tiles, the exposed dirt, and the collapsed ceiling he realized that wasn’t the case.

“That seems out of place,” Seven said to Eight when they arrived at the elevator that had been built in the middle of the atrium. Its style reminded Seven of the scaffolding erected around
The Mortal Coil
in the harbor behind Grand Cross.

“It was added after the city’s fall. Long after,” Eight said, running her fingers through the upturned soil around the elevator. The flying MoNITOR whistled its impatience at them from inside the elevator’s metal carriage.

Seven and Eight cautiously followed it aboard. Taking her hand in his, Seven tried to ignore the sensation of panic spreading across his body. The AdvISOR cared little for human comforts given the condition of the atrium, so why was it expending this much effort to keep them alive? Why hadn’t it addressed them directly?

Eight squeezed his hand.

Seven’s knees buckled when the lift lurched downwards, dragging him and Eight into the darkness beneath Haven. His stomach churned, made uneasy by their ongoing journey into Grand Cross, but when the dirt walls around him vanished and exposed an enormous hollow cavern as far as he could see, he felt steadied.

Monumental pillars of dirt, tended to by vast numbers of MoNITOR drones, kept the cavern’s roof from collapsing inwards. The drones had erected support structures along the pillars that enabled them to tend to beams that kept the cavern’s ceiling aloft.

“An underground atrium,” Eight whispered.

“But why?” Seven asked.

Seconds later, their elevator passed into the ground at the bottom of the underground cavern. Cold brown walls surrounded them again, imprisoning them deep within the soil of Haven’s furthest reaches. A sudden reduction in speed alerted Seven to their arrival at their destination, wherever that might be.

“Go,” the MoNITOR beeped at them, indicating the long hallway that wrapped into the darkness. Seven guided Eight out of the elevator and he was saddened that their floating companion would not be following them, even if only for the loss of light. For a while longer the weak blue light from its eye gently lit their path, but when they were far enough away it faded to a speck in the distance at their backs.

“What is the AdvISOR doing?” Eight inquired.

“Playing with us.”

“There are other ways to toy with us.”

“Like what?”

“Like torturing us for information. Like torturing Twenty and making us watch. I’m not the supercomputer that the AdvISOR is, but there are options.”

Seven didn’t answer and pressed deeper into the tunnel. Periodically, he slid his hands along the walls, feeling the bare and cold stone, to make sure they were in the middle of the tunnel.

“What is it?” Eight asked when he stopped abruptly. Seven pushed against the wall, his hands grabbed at the handles. “Seven, what have you found?”

“It’s a door,” he groaned, pushing with all his might to open it. “It’s locked.”

“There’s another one here,” he heard Eight say from ahead on his left. He opened his mouth to object when she said, further ahead and on his right this time, “And there’s another one here. Locked.”

“One of these doors will be open,” he said, finding her in the darkness and taking hold of her hand again.

“Probably at the end of the hallway,” she guessed. “Five hundred years later and this is what the AdvISOR has been up to? Digging out tunnels with locked doors all this way beneath Grand Cross?”

“What was it keeping down here? I don’t see any MoNITORs.”

“Obviously they can get down here. I think this is a private show.”

“How lucky for us.”

They continued on through the dark. Seven wondered how much longer they would be stranded in the tunnel, in this place where the clammy air weighed him down. It reeked of age and malice, hurriedly buried but not entirely forgotten.

Shortly after that the whispers began.

Eight could hear the whispers as well. She started to shiver so he tightened his grip on her hand and pulled her close. When they entered the room at the tunnel’s end, whispers abounded and the interior was as black as the preceding tunnel. Seven could hear the whispers growing stronger, louder, the further that he and Eight proceeded, as if they had stumbled into a room of people embroiled in a hushed argument.

Black boxes of many sizes, though none taller than their shins, were scattered across the room. Stacked in untidy rows and pillars they cast off an unnatural luminescence, as if darkness created a disturbing light, and made the outlines of other objects visible, but not brightened, in the dim abyss.

With the discovery of the boxes the whispers became audibly defined.

“You never cared...”

“You’re a liar...”

“Traitor...”

“Abomination...” the voices hissed in Seven’s ears. Panicking, he stopped walking and Eight shook to a halt next to him. Seven struggled to listen to the mounting accusations from the whispers.

“Deserve to die...”

“Never remember...”

“Crime against nature...”

“Life is sacred...”

Who was speaking? Each voice was different. Where were they? The room was empty. Why were they angry? The clones were not responsible.

Eight managed to pull her mind free of the sounds, even as the whispers became angry accusations. Prompted by the renewed movement, the black boxes vibrated and shook as the visitors passed by them.

“You are not real. You were created by man in man’s image. What you have been told is a lie. You are not real.”

“Clones do not love. Clones do not feel. You are an imitation of life, which is sacred, and you must be destroyed.”

“What do you hear?” Eight demanded, shaking Seven’s arm.

He swallowed hard, sweat gathering along his forehead.

“Terrible things...” he admitted.

Only when Seven felt the most desperate to get away from the black boxes did he see it: a lonesome, feeble light directly ahead. The black boxes did not dare to go any further than than the faintest edge of the luminance’s aura and it was there that he saw a thin silver pole, upon which sat a fist-sized cube. Unlike the others, the blue cube radiated a healthy and welcoming glow. Mist lifted from it and vanished in the air.

Sounds of waves crashing against the beach, of a child’s laughter, of a newborn’s cry, of serenity and joy and life drowned out the whispers. Seven was hypnotized by the cube and felt his grief tumble away from his heart. Grief for the dead of Haven, for the millions of lives unfulfilled and prematurely ended.

“Leave it,” Eight ordered. “I can see the door.”

At the far side of the room, an exit appeared. Its occurrence was a test, a temptation, and Seven conceded to his desire to escape. Offering the cube a remorseful look, Seven continued ahead and was glad to be free of the room with the black boxes. After turning a corner the cube’s light was choked away by the darkness of another endless tunnel.

Blinded by the dark again, Seven took a step that was no different from the thousands before it, only to find that there was no ground waiting for his foot. He tripped and dragged Eight into the breach by accident. His fall was brief but steep and ended only by a sickening crunch that bellowed in his ears.

Seven lay still, his body battered from rolling down the side of whatever cushioned his impact. His face was pressed against the dirt, his short breaths kicking up small clouds of it into his face. If he was quiet enough, maybe he would wake up from this ever-worsening nightmare?

“Seven?” Eight called, plodding along the mound of refuse to reach him. Her voice was enough to reanimate his aching body and he pushed himself upright. They were both alive and, barring a hidden broken bone, they were both uninjured.

“I’m fine. I’m fine,” he answered. “How about you?”

“Look at where we are,” she urged him. Seven saw that their fall had deposited them in an arena strangely similar to the one directly underneath Rose Garden’s entrance. This one was several orders of magnitude larger and definitely occupied. Torches that burned zealously circled the arena and their orange light revealed the nature of the tall mound that had kept Seven and Eight from smashing directly into the floor.

At Seven’s foot lay a chalky, partially shattered human skull. Half buried in the dirt, the skull stuck out awkwardly, loosened from its submersion by Seven’s descent. Across the arena were an incalculable number of skeletons that had been discarded through the myriad of exit apertures in the ceiling of the arena’s domed roof.

“Who do you think these people were?” Seven asked.

“Rebel Clones? Descendants? Does it matter anymore?” she replied.

Stealing one of the torches from the wall, Seven led the way through the only exit on the arena’s floor. Eight stayed at his side but she was distracted by the bone pile, the skulls and rib cages of a thousand decomposed bodies alight with an orange glow.

“I don’t understand what the point of this place is,” Seven remarked loudly. His dread was tempered by the disdain that pumped through his voice. “These rooms, the tunnel…none of this makes sense.”

“Do you remember what Nine said? About how the Rebel Clones showed us the horrors of Grand Cross, including Lore Chambers? I think these tunnels and these rooms are the Lore Chambers.” Eight’s words reached him but he was too concerned with following the winding tunnel away from the arena. The torch became his only weapon against another dangerous fall and their progress was slow.

“Grand Cross was the original cloning center. And even that was in addition to everything else they must have studied. The Lore Chambers must be the rooms where they experimented with humanity and learned about the body and the mind. Maybe this is where they tried to understand it before building it?”

The torch in Seven’s hand made sure there were no further missteps though the floor remained even and whole. Ahead of the travelers, the tunnel ended in a narrow fissure. As they wedged themselves through the breach’s sharpened edges, Seven and Eight emerged into a broad cavern with jaggedly uneven walls.

A few clues suggested the artificiality of the cave or else it might have otherwise passed itself off as a natural formation. Firstly, the smooth floor’s perfected finish was too delicate and precise to have formed naturally. Secondly, and most absurdly, was the presence of a gate composed of thick iron slats that barred their way on the far side of the cavern.

Seven’s torch caused firelight to bounce across the sawtoothed walls and roof, creating shadows that danced around him.