Drone World by Jim Kochanoff - HTML preview

Chapter 31: Higher

Mr. Stewart handed me a backpack.

“Put your belongings in this. There are enough provisions to last you about a week. Once you get to another city, tell them about the situation here.”

“You’re not coming?” I asked, although I knew the answer.

“No. I worked towards this day for over ten years, Pene. Morall is right in some respects. People will handle the truth in different ways. Crime will increase. But when the drones reanimate, I need to make sure the process is transparent rather than being controlled by someone who thinks he knows our best interests.” He put both hands on my shoulders. “Do you know where to go?”

“I’m headed west. This little piece may have caused Lou his sentence.” I pulled out the concave piece of glass. “I want to see why it has caused so much trouble.”

“Then go. But make sure you come back soon. I’ve tried to give you information on your past. A lot didn’t make sense to me but maybe you’ll come back with some answers.” Mr. Stewart hugged me, turned and then he was gone.

I ran over to Austin, who was working on Lola’s legs. The dog’s metal tongue stuck out, touching the back of my hand. I could see why he loved this dog so much. He looked at me.

“You’re going, aren’t you?” I nodded. “I wish I could go with you.”

“Then come,” I begged.

“I can’t. There is too much for me here to do. People need to know what has been happening. I can’t just leave my family.” He looked into my eyes. “This is your dream. See the world. But make me one promise.”

“Anything.”

“Take this with you.” He handed me a small phone-like gadget. “It will record everything you do and see on your travels.”

“Ahh, I’m trying to get away from being under surveillance.” I was unsure of Austin’s gift. He punched me in the arm.

“You choose what to record. That’s the difference. Consider it a scrapbook of your travels. When you come back, you can show me the world. Deal?”

I kissed him, and no further answer was needed. In our embrace, I was having serious doubts about leaving. Figures — I spend my entire life trying to leave the city and when I finally get the chance, I had to meet him. We opened our eyes and I knew he was conflicted in letting me go.

“Make sure you come back to me!” I left his embrace and immediately began to run. I had no courage to look back to see if he was watching me leave. If I looked into his eyes again, I might change my mind.

Ten minutes later, I was running across the commons of downtown. All transports were offline and sitting idle. I’d have to get around the city the old-fashioned way. There were people standing around everywhere, some poking at the piles of drones, almost waiting for them to become active again. My pace was steady — I wasn’t going to exhaust myself. I was confident that I could escape the city before the drones were reactivated. I rounded a corner and ran straight into a barrel chest of a large man. He reeked of alcohol and sneered down at me.

“Where you going?” He looked me over and smiled. Not a nice smile. “Want to spend some time with me?” As he said it, I knew he wasn’t asking. His hands groped around my waist. I guess Morall was right in some respects. People were becoming less inhibited without the drones around.

“Leave her alone,” an older woman yelled. The man turned and was greeted by the flash of phone camera. He was startled and released me. “I’m sure the police are going to love a picture of this.” She clicked her phone. The man seemed less eager for an audience and walked away, embarrassed either by his actions or by getting caught.

“You okay, dear?” the woman asked and reached for me. I nodded. “People are getting a bit cheeky with those drones down, aren’t they?”

“Good thing you were here.”

“I guess we can still handle ourselves,” she smiled. I grinned back and realized that Morall’s dire prediction might not take place after all.

By the time I had made it across town, the late afternoon sun reflected off the West Gates. Drone bodies littered the area like garbage, and some of the boxes they were carrying lay strewn across the ground. Most human workers were absent; they must have either gone home to check on their families or were busy trying to find the cause of the drone collapse. I dashed through an open scanner. A red light flashed as I entered but no alarm screamed.

“Hey, you can’t go through there.” I turned and saw a heavy-set man wearing a hardhat gesturing. He didn’t look like he could catch me so I didn’t slow down. He took a few steps but gave up in moments. Before I knew it, I had crossed the boundary of the city. My heart thumped, I felt so alive. I had been waiting all of my life for this. Within minutes, the walls of the city faded into the background and no drone was following me. I was free!

I checked the coordinates that the Wildman had given me. Although I couldn’t climb there like he had, by passing through the city boundary walls I would be able to reach my destination. I wasn’t sure what I was going to find but I’d better do it before it got dark. I pulled out the spyglass that Lou had given me, a relic from the past, and looked towards my future. The peak of the west mountain. Something glimmered in the sky, yet it was too light out to be a star. I used that point to focus my journey.

After two hours, I was dirty and sweaty but near my goal. As I reached the peak of the mountain, the clouds rolled slowly to the east, fluffy and fat. The view was amazing and a little bit scary. A huge chasm opened up into a valley below. One false step and I would fall hundreds of feet.

I looked up at my focal point. The glimmering in the sky looked different now. Its edges reflected light but its center was dark, like a hole. As the cloud crossed it, it seemed to skip across the hole, like a rock skimming the surface of the water. A large pine tree grew near the peak of the mountain, one of the few trees on top of the slope. I grabbed the trunk, my pack still on my back. For some reason I did not want to leave it at the bottom of the tree.

I grabbed the branches; they were sappy and I had to grasp carefully not to get a sticky hand. I enjoyed climbing; it forced you to focus on one task. If you started thinking of something else, you could lose your balance. Right now I needed to concentrate. I climbed onto a sturdy branch near the top of the tree and reached skyward towards the raw, sharp hole. Were my eyes playing tricks on me?

I stretched upward and ran the ragged edge along my hand. Its shape looked very familiar. I reached into my backpack and pulled out the glass I had purchased from Lou. It looked like an eye looking back at me. Like Chicken Little, I wondered if the sky was falling. I grasped it and inserted it into the sky. The hole immediately vanished and the illusion was complete. Clouds rolled by without interruption. As I reached up, the sky was cool and glassy to my touch. Even now, with the evidence staring me in my face, my brain couldn’t process it.

My hands touched a glass roof. The clouds ran along my fingers, as if the projection was trying to use my hands as a screen. I supressed the urge to scream. My hands continued to grope the sky. Near the place where the piece had fallen out, my hand touched something hard and round. Maybe this caused the piece to fall out in the first place? I tried to turn it sight unseen and it spun counter-clockwise. A portal opened in mid-air down below, a hole into darkness. It was impossible. I turned and looked at the city miles beneath me. Could anyone see me? Could anyone understand what I was doing? Everything looked so small and unimportant below. I swallowed and climbed down the tree.

As I reached the ground, I stepped towards the edge of the cliff. In order to reach the door I had opened, I had to walk across open air. It might be a projection, but it looked real to my brain. If I stepped forward and was wrong, I would fall to my death. If I were right, I would reach the open door. The opening was a good thirty feet away. I looked behind me and thought about taking a running jump. Instead an idea came to me. I leaned out over the cliff and touched the air between me and the door. The air was solid, like a concrete floor. As hard as I pressed, the air impossibly resisted my touch. With that knowledge, I should have walked across, but the illusion was still too real. Instead, I crawled, looking at the ground below me, and for the first time since my dream, I almost felt as if I could fly. If I spread my arms, I felt I could glide back to the city. But that wasn’t my goal.

I reached the door and spun the wheel mounted on its front. It remained firmly shut. I looked around and thought I could make out a camera lens — was the door about to be electrified? Instead, a loud click reverberated. The door swung open and I stepped inside. The sky was not a sky, but instead, as I entered, it became a narrow hallway. The door closed behind me as I left the only home I had ever known. The hallway in front of me was long and sterile. The bright sky was gone and the interior held little natural light.

I walked forward. A sickly green glow came from the end of the hall. I was drawn to it, and as I got closer, I thought I could hear a voice. I stepped towards the illumination and stepped into a large room with rows of chairs and monitors. A semi-transparent screen looked down onto the city below. If a squinted, I could almost make out a few familiar landmarks. But the city wasn’t what got my interest; a voice filling the room through the overhead speakers became my immediate focus.

“Standard protocols apply. Breach in sphere 39X — resource team ETA — two hours and fifteen minutes. Approach subject with caution.” A steel door closed over the entrance I’d come in through. I wouldn’t be able to return to the city the same way I had come in.

The voice overhead was female and familiar. Her information was confusing. Was she talking about the city? Was she where the drones come from? I was faced with more questions than answers. Then I turned to the right to a bank of video screens.

The screens were in rows of ten by ten and showed scenes from places that both thrilled and scared me. Some of the images I recognized. The dinosaurs. The pirates. The war battle. Do these places actually exist? Numerous other images played like a series of movies, with scenes and characters that my deepest imagination could never create. Someone accessed actual video feeds from other places and sent them to me? My city was only one of many that were being observed. These fantastic places were real!

Then the voice from the speakers spoke from one of the monitors. Her image was clear and showed the top half of her body. I looked into the screen and my mother’s face stared back at me. It was her as she was about fifteen years ago. There was a reason her body was never found. Why hadn’t she tried to communicate with me and Dad? Why hadn’t she aged? She must have escaped to here. Wherever here was.

“The Vectordyne Space Station contains forty-nine individual worlds, each with a unique twist never seen in Earth’s history. Each ‘world’ is programmed with a specific scenario and observed to see how it survives and evolves under the specific rules it has been given. Some residents will not survive the experiment. But the lessons learned are invaluable to our research. The data is sent back to Earth to help govern the planet.” As my mom’s computer image spoke, a huge graphic filled the screen, and it looked like a huge molecule with many domed spheres existing independently of each other. Somewhere in the map, my city — my world existed. Everything I knew was a lie. People never left my city. Anyone who came close to the truth was tricked. Or sentenced.

Suddenly the earlier message on the speakers made sense. My ‘breach’ from the sphere had been detected. My city was in a sphere. That was why the city went black for days, why people were put to sleep after the earthquake. The city was moved —as crazy as it sounded — transported to this place. This space station.

A team was coming. I didn’t know if the team was soldiers, drones or scientists, but they were coming because of me. And I didn’t want to find out what they would do with me. I had to tell others what had happened. What our city actually was. We had no freedom. We were nothing more than a prison sphere. A Drone World.

I had to get out of there. Maybe tell Austin and Mr. Stewart what the city actually was. Return to Earth, if that was possible.

I approached a door and walked through it. It didn’t matter how many of these artificial worlds I had to cross, I would find my mother and a way out of this space station. I would find out why she was here and why she left us. I looked at a schematic on the wall that resembled the graphic on the monitor of the forty-nine worlds.

Which sphere to explore first? I realized how long a journey it was to the front of the space station. My fingers traveled down the map and I realized where my trek would begin.

Let’s. Go. Here.

I walked to the far end of the room and opened the door. The next sphere waited, and I was ready. I had always wanted to explore the world — I just never expected I would see more than one.

I walked forward and the door closed behind me.