Chapter 43: 43 The First Test, Part One

Four Months After Impact

In the afternoon Angharad helped the doctor re-label things. She took slow care to add the names of things in English in her best handwriting to every bottle, every box. One by one through the whole hospital, until a piercing sound from outside split the world open and she couldn't think well enough to work.

The high-pitched whining noise increased in intensity until it became the only thing in her world.

She realised that the doctor was shoving her shoulder a moment before her hearing returned well enough to hear Dr Yeoh saying, "Go, go."

Angharad shoved the pill boxes in her hands back on a shelf and ran outside.

Where was it from? What was making that sound? It got more shrill, then less. She watched someone run into one of the dorm buildings and another run into the crafts room, as if anyone could escape the noise.

Then there was a sound almost like cracking, and a white noise layered over the top of it, a strange rumbling hum, which spilled forth from the loudspeaker next to her building.

She whirled around, lost in an ocean of sound. Jin ran up to her, trying to sign some of the letters she'd taught him. She was too dizzy for that. He grabbed her shoulders as if she was a malfunctioning technology he was going to shake and, no, she refused to be that.

She tore away, looked up at the sky.

The gate was lit up, humming with violent sparks, shaking like it was fighting itself. She could feel it begin to move in the ground beneath her and nearly stumbled against the rocks sliding against her feet.

The gate stabilised itself. The wormhole spread in a blaze of light inside the high loop.

That wasn't right! The gate was in the small, still space outside the two barriers. Nothing should be out there.

A small craft came through the loop, like a shot out of nowhere, and landed somewhere in an area that was too blurry with barrier distortion to see.

When the sound cut out, the loudest thing was her ragged breath.

She stumbled a few steps in the direction of the crafts room and then she gathered speed and ran. Threw open the door to check for whoever was in there. Somebody hid under one of the tables and started to cry. She ran to the cafeteria instead, and people there were huddled in a corner. One of the robots had tilted over until it had unhooked itself from the power socket, and it lay on the bar where it regularly laid out food, slumped over its own arm, lifeless.

"I'll fix you later," she promised, and ran back out.

A small crowd began to gather by the other barrier, blurry figures on the other side of the divide. In Angharad's dome only she moved toward the edge, trying to see what she could see of the other craft.

"Don't open the doors," she hissed at it, as if anyone inside could hear her. "Stay inside."

She still didn't know if there was breathable air in the space between the two barriers but everything she could see the blurry edges of seemed to be unmoving, as ever.

She didn't know what she was waiting for.

Still nothing from the sky. She turned away and almost bumped straight into Tsuyoshi.

The noise pushing down on them from above was still too loud to hear over. She watched his mouth shape out, "I need to talk to you," and followed as he walked into a quieter doorway, where the noise was slightly dampened.

Every part of her body prickled at the continuing sound. She didn't grab any part of him but the edge of his too-long sleeve. Surely any human contact in that moment would be too much.

"I can't find Sophie," he said, voice urgent, leaning in to whisper in her ear. "I looked everywhere. I literally looked in the women's showers."

"You know, technically they're not actually the women's showers so much as the showers attached to the building that mostly girls stay in."

He clenched his fist and bit off a breath. "You know that's not my point."

"I'll look for her, okay! I will. I don't know how, but—"

"This place has probably done something to her and I don't know what to do, Angharad. I can't stand this. I feel like I'm going to go crazy."

"Wherever she is, I'll get her back."

He looked away. Mumbled, "I know you will." At least, she was pretty sure he did by the shapes he made with his mouth.

*

She checked everywhere twice.

People on her side of the barrier started to gather in groups to stare at the people on the other side. None of them paid attention to Angharad as she looked for Sophie wherever she went. It felt like a hopeless search, a quest without any clues to guide her.

That is, nobody looked at her except Josephine, held in place by Eleanor's arm around her waist. Josephine looked over briefly as Angharad walked behind them. Angharad wasn't sure which one of them looked away first.

Angharad was ready to give up and go back to the hospital again to look there a third time when she saw a new electric barrier opening up between the hospital and crafts room, crackling into shape in front of her. It flashed with unnatural light from within, like it held inside a disco ball rising from the ground or some secret new laser tag place. If only. And then it formed into a square and settled into place.

Angharad shook her head to shake the strange thoughts out.

Everyone else was looking the other way. She would have to explore it on her own.

"Will you save them?" A voice over the PA system, smooth and round like the voice on the latest of Rod Spark's smart phone assistants. "Will you save her?"

Angharad couldn't think about whether anyone looked at her now. She had to be the one to make the choice. She raised a hand as if to touch its dangerous electric edge, even as all the hair on her body stood up and that weird burnt plastic smell washed over her senses. Then it cleared a rectangular shape in its form like it was opening a door.

She stepped in and heard the doorway close behind her.

Real walls formed around her. The arms of machines stretched out high and bent at their joints to put rectangular sheets in place, climbing up and up until they covered all the electricity around her and only the roof was exposed to the crackle above. And then they climbed higher, putting together a ceiling of dark slabs.

It got darker where she stood as the ceiling reached completion. She blinked away the after-images of the electric light and her eyes started to adjust to the lack of too-shiny buzz. She only had enough time to notice a body on the ground before the last slab of ceiling went into place and the room went completely dark.

"What do you want from me?" she asked. She didn't know how her voice managed to be so measured.

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It was a well modulated version of her own voice that spoke back. "Solve a puzzle."

"Sure. I like puzzles."

Was this the goddess Darren had imagined? Whose voice had it used to speak to him?

She wondered if this was like the sphinx, ready to trick her with riddles she wouldn't understand. Angharad had never liked that story. Riddles were hard and annoying. Kind of pointless. If it wasn't her favourite kind of mathematical problem or a philosophical issue that was relevant to robotics she tended to find it confusing.

Instead of riddles, first it was algebra, lighting up in front of her.

"I don't have a pen to write the answers down," she said.

"Your fingers are pens. You'll speak with them."

Angharad tried not to shiver. Hearing her own voice speaking back to her like that was super creepy. She tried to swallow her own fear and write the answers in the air in front of her, hoping that was enough. Hoping her fingers would trace the right symbols in the air and she wouldn't get flustered halfway through and forget what she'd traced already.

Her answers lit up a far wall. Had the machines built some kind of projection equipment?

"These matters are simple. The test was your obedience. Would you step into this room for any human body?"

"U-uh... I guess. I mean, maybe not Neo, but..." But she tried to imagine it, if Neo's life was dependent on her ability to choose this. Even creeps like that deserved to live.

"Would you step into this room for any human-shaped body?"

"Will you plug that guy in the kitchen back in if I say yes?" she asked.

"Why do you treat them as if they live?"

Around her, the room became awash with colour. Holograms dripped down the walls, painted everything with the brilliant colours of an open field.

Angharad's throat felt dry. "U-uh... Because if I don't that's wrong?"

"You seem uncertain."

"I don't know what answer you want. But if it acts like it's alive and has a consciousness I'm going to treat it like it's alive and has a soul, whether it really does or not. Okay? It doesn't have to be human-shaped. People decide that people aren't human enough to be treated like people all the time, and I'm not going to be that kind of person. I refuse."

The images around her changed. A recording. People running across a field. Bodies lying down in the mud. And the shape of Jin raised his arm and shot...

"Would you step into this room for all your companions even if you knew what they'd done?"

The image of the body fell in front of her.

"How did you get such hyper-realistic images? Who took this video?" she asked.

Another body exploded in front of her, bloody pieces flying toward her face. She put her hands to her face to shield herself from nothing. She was dry, still dry but for her sweat, and this was like a bad a dream in high definition, but nothing she should fear.

Nothing to fear, she reminded herself, even as the images changed to Tabitha crying in a ruined building as she beat at something that looked like little more than well-clothed, over-cooked meat. Darren waking screaming in a small space next to charred remains. Zelko sorting through bodies in a wrecked craft, taking a pack of cigarettes from the jacket pocket of a bloated corpse. Josephine—

"Yes!" she yelled. "I would for any of them! Even Neo. I would make this choice every time."

The images paused, stilled on that last image like a taunt. But now she knew where the security cameras in camp were. Was this thing telling her it could show people the way she'd let Josephine kiss her in that hallway any time it liked as some kind of blackmail, or did it think it was funny?

Or, worse, did it think nothing, and only showed this to her as part of its programming? A strange kind of game.

"The girl is yours if you can find her."

The room went dark again. Angharad felt her way along the walls. Even if it was a maze, she just had to close her eyes and listen until she got close to the sound of breathing. She just had to be patient and determined and make her way through.

Finally, the sound of another person's breath grew loud enough that she could make her way to it, fumbling in the dark until she fell next to a body and the humble rise and fall of its chest.

"I found you. I found you, okay?" she said.

The machines started to move again with clattering noises, pulling away first the ceiling so that the space she was in was light enough to see the shape of Sophie, unconscious but alive. And then pulling away the cladding of the walls until it was almost too bright to bear. The ground seemed to move underneath them, lifting them up with a sound that reminded her of her father's factory tours. Then it stilled again, and the rest of the built-up walls fell away.

That voice again, hers but not hers. "You will be tested again."

Angharad moved around so she could put a hand to Sophie's forehead and touch her soft hair.

The electric walls finally fell away. People began to crowd around them, dark blurs.

Someone leaned down to look at Sophie. Angharad pulled her hands away and looked up at the sky. At the barrier, as it shimmered and moved. Something happened to its form. It changed shape, spreading out.

Angharad pushed herself upright and then pushed through the crowd.

Was the barrier really doing what she thought? It seemed to be forming a larger super-structure connecting both domes together.

She stumbled forward and then she was sure. The edges of the barrier she was used to were rising above the ground. Slowly, as if it needed to be slow. And then faster, so she could see all the way through to the people on the other side, close enough to see without the distortion getting in the way.

She could see the shape of the craft that landed in the middle zone with its rounded edges and chipping paint job. A door started to open and she could see the people inside it, healthy and alive.

And then someone in a dark red uniform coat running past distracted her. She turned to watch Freya and Jin run toward each other, like they were in a romantic movie.

Angharad couldn't help but laugh.

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