Chapter 3

Ghosts of Corporate Headquarters

The sun was seemingly turned down to ‘low’, like the phosphorous overhead lamps of an office. Water yet again became the first sound to ease me into a conscious state (or was it out of?). I grabbed at a wall of sandbags beside me, hand over hand like a baby climbs the stairs, as I helped myself to my feet. I was standing amid the glass and plastic debris of a shadowy ruined street, struggling for recollection once again. Two sets of round red and orange lights stared at me from the shadows of a nearby retail store, like the eyes of robotic frogs playing piggyback.

You crashed the car into a teeny bopper clothing store, nice.

Dark windows hiding bogeymen all around me as I shivered, cold, wet, and naked near the fortified intersection checkpoint, abandoned as if by children suddenly bored with a game. The moonlight gave me ample light to limp across the debris-strewn street back to the shop window I had crashed through with my vehicle. A desire to be protected in the car, away from the shadows and the smells, asserted itself.

Still unsettled by the mannequins who somehow triggered my ‘panic attack’, they were somehow even more disturbing then the prone and decomposing true residents of this place, an inner voice told me not to look at them and I focused only on the vehicle.

The auto half in the shop was still on, but made a crunching and whirring sound as I tried to put it in gear. The illuminated indicator symbols across the dashboard informed me that nearly everything was wrong with the automobile, except the battery. Realizing that there were possibly a planet full of vehicles to choose from, I exited the car and wandered up the street.

Other clothing stores were all about, as I was obviously in some kind of shopping district. In a daze, I nearly slipped and fell at regular intervals, often on the putrid fluids pooled around the uncountable bodies, as I wandered toward another of the large storefronts. A nearby building with a huge familiar face on its front billboard caught my eye. It was a men’s department store called ‘Celebrity’, the glittery title like the rippling water of a tranquil lake. It became my beacon as the shivering became more severe.

The metal gates had been ripped open, clothes scattered in abundant heaps, as if a sale overstock had reproduced asexually, was left unchecked and finally exploded outward into the street. Since most of the clothes outside were wet, I had to step barefooted inside through the glass. I grabbed a coat quickly from a dismembered celebrity replica near the shattered entrance. I knew his face. As I worked his pants off, his detached head, bouncing and rolling out of the store, became a horrible exclamation point on the fact that real human bodies lay about me in every direction.

Stay focused.

By the time I was dressed, in my threads pilfered from one happy mannequin or another, not sure if they even fit me, Jon Coyote began to enter my mind, pushing the surreal details of my senses out by necessity.

As if by trance, I soon found myself in the nearest sturdy vehicle with its doors unlocked, an extra-wide military all-terrain transport, parked right near a tank with an impossibly huge cannon. I looked up at the moon shining down on the dark silent street. It’s like a blackout. I think I used to like blackouts, I thought. This blackout was serene, fully without the panic or criminal opportunity, as if everyone decided to ignore the situation and stay in bed. Looking at my hands to anchor myself, I tried to understand what was happening to me.

Was I Jon Coyote? I wondered if it was even possible to experience a dream so lucid as to essentially be indistinguishable from reality. I was confused as to which one was even the true reality, like some Buddhist parable or an imagined cinema fiction, shifting back and forth to confuse or amuse.

It was unlike what I somehow inherently knew a dream was - a vague replay of sensory events, old and new. I thought of the possibility that the voices in my mind were my own creation.

Am I hiding something from myself? I thought.

My sense of self faded, as if a childhood memory experienced much too long ago, rubbed away by rethought.

Hands blurry, morphing, I looked out the windshield. The environment, as sickening and frightful as it was, was perhaps more grounding then my inner landscape after all.

The dream, as mundane as it seemed to me at the time, was the only vessel of information, the only detail I knew about myself. Was it nothing more than vague feelings, or was it remembrances of feelings? In the moment, my leg was still in pain. My enigma of appearance and identity, skin burnt or stained, and my situation were the same as when I awoke at the river.

I sat in the transport trying to come up with anything else from the foggy recesses of my mind, hoping that my lucid dream sparked some fire of familiarity. I remained there some time until a felt a bitter frustration which gave way to shifting emotions and suddenly a spasmodic loss of control.

Breathing deeply, I attempted to relax and squelch this rebel element within me. Breath and the release of muscle my instinctual guide. With much effort, and fighting another rise of nausea, I avoided another ‘attack’ and regained control. The dim wispy voices in my mind, that I knew were somehow struggling for freedom, temporarily were suppressed out of fear and the dread of loosing total control again to pass away into death, like the very world around me, into a possibly eternal slumber.

I had no reason to doubt the apocalyptic cityscape as real, and assuming that I must have a serious injury, I started the giant military jeep with resolve and went in search for help and answers.

Driving along the street with all the lights engaged, after initially attempting to avoid the dead strewn about, some semblance of respect still intact, I nearly collided into an overturned twenty-eight-wheel truck and took more direct routes, a concentration camp’s sick test course. As I went I noticed a gradual increase in the size of the buildings. Four to ten-story residential blocks giving way to forty and above skyscraping office and luxury buildings.

Observing a break in the obstructions after dozens of streets and intersections, I took the entrance of a curved overpass rising nearly twenty stories into the air above a seaport. Speeding along the empty road, I had to hit hard on the breaks, screeching to a halt before ramming into another sandbagged military checkpoint. Built completely across the highway, its makeshift mobile gate was closed, a huge gun turret rising into the air behind it on a raised pneumatic platform. These ‘martial law’ structures seemed so out of place among the dignified ruins, as if a thoughtless entrepreneur was running tours of a disaster area.

Whatever happened to these (my?) people, I thought, the effects must be far-reaching for this whole region not to have been reclaimed. Were these obviously desperate military measures employed against an enemy? Was the threat the people themselves? Or was it a simple panic in the face of disaster?

I exited the transport and went to the railing to look out over the harbor in the moonlight. The bay looked like swimming-pool after a raucous party, boats of every size floating, shining like beer bottles, thumping or screeching metal heard as they drifted into each other, listing about unchecked.

Turning away from the melancholy sight, I stared out across the dark city, the buildings closest reflecting the bay at me again through their vasiform glass exteriors, as if pursuing me. A valley of mountainous skyscrapers lay beyond, bisected by another raised four-lane expressway, the off-ramp just beyond the checkpoint. I walked over to release the gate and found a group of dead soldiers in full battle armor littering the ground. To the side behind the sandbag wall was a tent, stacked to the top with canned military food of various types. I could imagine these men, firing off their weapons into crowds of civilians, defending only their food in the final chaotic days of the city, ravioli taking precedence over human life.

Strangely I was not hungry, despite not having any memory of ever eating. I found the release for the gate and rolled it open. I moved the bodies aside, the reflection in the circular glass of their chemical protection masks reminding me of swatted wasps. Moving the vehicle through, I loaded as many cans as I could into the vehicle, knowing that at some point in the future food would be needed.

There were electronic devices around the whole area, but none seemed to have power, as if they received them from a central source. There seemed to be no visible way to connect them with the transport’s power. With the exception of the hospital corridor and its sopping charts, I had seen no paper in the streets, no signs or newspapers. The accounts of their last days could be locked forever in the digital code of these inert devices, as reachable as a fossilized jellyfish within a mountain of granite.

Just as I was about to drive off, after staring at those seemingly well protected soldiers, a sudden realization gradually dismissed the reserved framework of my thinking and I climbed the ladder of the gunnery platform. Initially fumbling with the controls, sending the gun erratically in various directions, I gained an understanding of the weapon and prepared to rouse this inanimate town out its sleep with a violent display. Hoping to get the attention of anyone still living, I fired the weapon at will, lighting up the night, a demented dance disc-jockey with the ultimate sound arsenal.

The swiveling platform came alive and I was spinning like a hyperactive child on an amusement park ride. Focusing on a nearby antiquated bridge, of a distinct architectural style then the rest of the structures, I tried to bring it crashing down into the bay in a wild barrage of explosions. The twang of ruptured steel wires could be heard between deck-shattering collapses. Spinning to and fro I obliterated office windows, destroyed vehicles of every size, exploded fuel tanks, sank sea-craft, and sent a barrage of colorful exploding projectiles into the distant and silent unknown.

After it seemed, in my imagination, that the buildings themselves could be cut like grass, the ammunition stopped abruptly and I was left for awhile to tremble with vibratory aftershocks, as if I was still firing happily away. Fires burned near and far, while displaced objects fell with a crash from extreme heights. Even the gurgling cries of sinking euthanized vessels temporarily returned a semblance of life, however distorted and ultimately morose, to this necropolis. Climbing down after surveying the destruction from my insane S. O. S. , I knew I was probably reliving the fantasy of thousands of office workers who toiled in the cubicles above.

I listened for more than two hours, confirmed by the vehicle clock, for any type of response without luck. Imagined whispers and footsteps heard in every piece of settling rubble. Disappointed, I drove the military vehicle onto the curved onramp, deciding to push onward into the center of the silent monoliths.

The elevated road snaked through the high-rise buildings like a canyon river and soon I became hypnotized by the rhythmic flow and the vehicle’s soothing motor. I slowed down and reached into a nearby bag for a carbonated juice I had taken from the soldier’s tent. A putrid, nauseating smell rose from the beverage as I put it to my lips and hurled it out the window. The taste was like bleach and the few drops I had ingested burned my mouth as acid would. Rifling through the bag, I found a clear plastic bottle of water and rinsed my mouth out. Sudden nausea gripped me as I gulped a mouthful of water and I exited the vehicle just in time to disgorge it upon the cold pavement. As I knelt there on the road panting with my heart in my ears, I looked down at my vomit and in the headlights noticed that it had the same greenish hue I remembered from the crumbled hospital.

A moving light in the corner of my peripheral vision diverted my attention away from my sickness and I rose to my feet. High in the darkness, to the left behind the vehicle, there was a shaft of light that seemed to rise above the city, like a bridge connecting one darkness with another. Grabbing a pair of binoculars and setting them to their highest magnification, I could see a series of tubular elevators traversing the exterior surface of a sleek enormous building. Like ripples of sun on a diamond shard, the illuminated car in a gentile glowing white, glided steadily and swiftly as it soared to the top of the sword-like building, its ridges rimmed in the same dull light.

To my nearly paralyzing astonishment, the top three floors, and several interspersed throughout the length of this massive building, were brightly illuminated, as though a cadre of rebellious workers were working straight through judgment day.

Finding an off-ramp ahead and circling around, always keeping the building’s sharp tip in sight like the north star, I set out again. It took much longer then I initially thought to reach the building, this was not because I could not find a direct route through the raised roadway, rather the skyscraper was of a size that I did not expect.

By reading the measurement still remaining on the binoculars, and by the sheer length of time it took me to even close on it, the building must have been over two thousand meters tall. An intricate, and likewise designed, plaza complex surrounded the building like a city unto itself. All the structures jutted out at extreme angles, with sweeping curves like segmented thorns, organic in its own way, yet bred from a type of innovative thought that could conceive high art from space technology. The buildings all seemed to either protect themselves from the sky or stab at it like the aspiring tentacles of some tyrannous robotic vegetation.

The illuminated entrance signs and maps to the complex heralded it as ‘The Illynois’, the largest building ever built. Named strangely after a confederacy of tribal primitives long extinct, it seems to be the only sign of life that remained. I drove toward the skyscraper’s main entrance, wondering briefly if that long vanished clan would bring something like this into existence, even if given a cultural lifespan of millennia, with such a defiance of nature.

As I drove my vehicle through the barriers that marked the entrance of the grand mall toward the building, I could see that the whole area was illuminated with either natural-seeming light supplied by high and dramatic avant-garde lamps or lit from below the stairs and walkways eerily, several of which ‘crunched’ as I drove over them. A functioning fountain caught my eye. Illumination revealing not pristine white grandeur, but varying shades of purplish horror. Water spewed high into the air with the sound of violence, not the sea, the ‘tones’ no doubt discolored by recent noisome events involving unfathomable violence. A man sat upright on the marble rim near the water on the far side.

He was moving. He was alive.

Slamming the brakes, I screeched to a halt down stone stairs and ran without heed to meet him. The fountain, as I limp-ran around, was in a cloud of flies. Corpses littered the water. As I approached, I could see that the man was dressed in a tattered suit, frayed at all the edges and stained, its original color unknown. He turned to face me, his tie still on straight. He chewed on a handful of moldy bread with one hand, a loose collection of impossibly stained and brittle newspapers in the other. The casual, seated posture was that of any businessman who is enjoying the air of noontime lunch in a local park.

Excitedly approaching him, I called out, “Mister, thank …”

I thought of the weapons I had left behind in my rush. A mistake which soberly washed over me, damning my raft-at-sea enthusiasm. When I beheld his state, complete with an utterly displaced smiling countenance, I knew he was as sick as I must have been.

Eyes bloodshot and swollen, he looked to me, a blackened tumor oozing from just above the sharp edge of his once white and starched collar. He spoke through an upbeat voice, yet the sickness reduced it to an outpatient rasp.

“Weather’s something nice today, eh? Aw-some ball playin to be had on a day like this … the skirts … indian summer, baby. ”

In another realm of time, this kind of man would certainly have been the life of the party, the guy who could always cheer you up with some pub antics that usually involved his own humiliation. The sad sight of him did not quite register.

“Wh … what?”

“Hey, the Titans are gunna clinch this damned series - got a feeling. I say, ‘place your bets, my friend, place your bets, ha’. ”

There was an extremely lethal-looking automatic weapon near his feet, pushed up against the back of a corpse, a military bayonet through it. Through his wide smile, several of his teeth were broken. I made no sudden moves.

“Yes … they just may … pull it out. ”

The man released a barrage of coughs. A minute, or what seemed such, went by before he could take a clear breath. “I should really quit smoking this year …”

“Yes … you have to … think of your health, “ I uttered, equal parts disbelief and disappointment.

Standing there frozen for a time, unable to fathom this absurd development, I began to slightly shiver in fear as he read his ‘newspaper’. He looked to the vacant air at his side, as if someone walked past, and said, “Bill, how ya doin’ buddy … beers on Friday … hell-z yeah …” Chuckling, he began to cough again.

I started to slowly back away. He turned to me and said, “Were do I know you from?”

Reminding me that I needed to question him on my appearance, as I did not really know what I looked like, but too fearful to remain calm, I simply blurted out, “You have the time?” All my instincts pushed to return to the relative safety of the transport to think this situation through, and more importantly, arm myself.

His hopelessly shattered watch read, “Oh. Quarter to. ”

“Thanks … see you later – I’m … late. ”

“Yeah, no problem-o. ”

As I rounded the far side of the fountain, my eyes darting constantly back, I nearly walked right into a dead police horse. The ingrained assigned value of ‘nobility’ made the corpse somehow more of a tragedy, oddly it was not rotting as the human bodes strewn about were, as if the natural world wanted nothing to do with this particular ‘human’ catastrophe. I looked around quickly for his rider, who must surely possess a weapon. I knew that I required an appraisal of events, and more importantly my own perception, even if it was from an apparent lunatic. For all I knew we suffered the same delusion, the same illness. Though two wrongs do not, by any stretch, make a right in this case, I needed him. He could have died at any moment, or I for that matter, or he could have possibly wandered away in delusion to a fatal mishap.

The rider was nowhere about and the close examination of the dead was making me reflexively ill. The businessman was still eating his ‘lunch’, apparently uninterested by my scrambling around. Looking back at the horse from another angle, I noticed a shotgun stock sticking out from beneath him. Running around, I wrested it free from its holster beneath and the sheer weight. My hand was on the horse and I noticed that it was warm. Forgetting the gun for a moment, I went to its mouth. Was it dead? It surely was not breathing, nor its massive heart beating. Eyes were open, unblemished and moist.

Breaking my reverie on this odd observation was the sound of a ringing telephone, seeming to shatter the winds of the empty metropolis. The businessman answered.

“Pronto … Yeah, this is Stu. The what? Again now? Oh … oh yeah. Well … ok – but I better get overtime for that. Alright now you kids take care, bye. ”

He put the phone in his pocket and went back to chewing his bread.

I examined the shotgun. My hands searching the well-worn receiver, I clicked the safety of the shotgun back and forth a few times, not knowing which was which. I guess I’ll find out, I thought. Walking back up to him I said, “Hi again – Stu. ”

“Oh, hi there. I was just talking about you. ”

“Me? Is that right? Listen Stu, I am having a bit of a problem. This may sound ‘strange’, but who am I anyway?”

“I don’t know. I found out you’re not a team player, though. ”

“A team player?”

“Look, after lunch we’re going to have a serious meeting, so don’t go far. I’m sorry to say it has to do with your future at this company. ”

“I don’t believe this . . . I can’t play these games. Stu – what do I look like?”

Stu coughed up something dark and spit it on the ground. “I know you are no fool. Look -you’re good at your job. It’s just …”

“No, no – what do I actually look like? Describe my appearance – I can’t see my body. ” I raised my hand. “It’s sort of a blur …”

“Woa, easy now. Are you on ‘the drugs’? Maybe the owners in the building are right about you. Look, I’m sorry to have to be the one to say – but we’re going to be letting you go. It’s nothing personal – there’s just a lot of cutbacks these days. Look, we’ll talk more about it later. ”

“Later? What later?”

“Yeah, after lunch. I never do any work at lunch. My mealtimes are where I …” Stu had another coughing fit. “… draw the line. But when I’m done - I’m going to poke a few holes in you. ” He began coughing again.

Surprisingly, I put the gun right to his head. It seemed to have no weight at all. “Give me your phone - now!”

Stu, one hand still over his mouth as he coughed away, reached into his pocket with the other free hand, as casually as lending me a cigarette, and held it out to me.

I yelled, “Put it on the ground! Back away!” The tones of my voice sounded like the scraping metal of a sudden crash.

He did not try to recover the weapon at his feet, if in fact it was his at all, and backed well away until he felt he could run off, which he did with dramatic clumsiness. Stu’s unbalance of mind only added chaos. I needed answers. I was sick and frightened. The phone did ring, however, and I needed to know if there were others.

The mobile phone opened like a clamshell, with a screen and a keypad which were illuminated. I knew the symbols on the screen and was able to determine that the signal to the phone was strong. Must be the transmitter atop the building, I thought.

There were saved text messages. Going through them, they were nearly all maintenance instructions on one part of the building of another. Someone must have been sending them to him, either that or it was a divergent personality of his own creation. One message saved was not out of the apparent building archives, but a personal letter. While I was reading it, I heard the distant echoes of Stu yelling repeatedly, “You’re fired! You. Are. Fired. Fired!” Thankfully, he was getting farther away.

Stuart,

You have done exceedingly well on the conduit in the mid-level atmospheric regulator. You will be well rewarded. I have the assurances of the other owners that you will be summoned to our chambers soon.

You are on the fast track. Great work.

We are sending you programming manuals for the main interface. Learn them. If communication becomes hampered within the building, or if messages seem unusual in any way – it will be up to you to do the repairs.

Building security is currently stable and commissary systems on level 98 are functioning on auto for your needs. Please do not go below the 43^rd floor. They are not secured.

One

One? What could that mean, I thought. Unwilling to wait for Stu to mount a possible ambush, I felt I had no choice but to explore the possibility that there were others alive in the building, hostile or not.

There were lobbies with banks of elevators stationed all around the building, a massive vertical train station. Not all were lit. I chose the easiest one to enter, a four storey open space, shattered glass in huge piles littered the floor with broken furniture and bodies. Changing into some military clothes acquired from the transport, still unsure if they actually fit. They felt like they did. I’m probably a man, I remember thinking. I could not be sure at that point, as if I was fighting through a layer of preconscious dream. I slung a small bag of food and water on my shoulder.

As I walked into the lobby, I noticed a dull pain rising in my injured leg and a throbbing in my chest. Soothed by a rising optimism in what I would find, though I had no evidence for this feeling, I was easily able to ignore it.

Suspended in the once enclosed space of this particular lobby was an enormous corporate logo. As if defying gravity, it was a globe crisscrossed with circuits, helping hands reaching out from the body of the world in all directions. Written in multihued marble across the floor, visible even beneath the detritus, were the words ‘Silicon Horizons’. Searching the banks of elevators in the lobby, there was one elevator button illuminated, an apparent express to the topmost levels. A speaker somewhere made the digital version of a gong as I pushed the button and the elevator door’s rim became illuminated in that same soft white I remember seeing from the road.

There was a sucking sound and the doors opened, as if decompressing, the whole car seemingly made of white light, shaped like the cylinder of an antiquated vacuum office delivery tube. I pushed the top button without hesitation and the glow dimmed noticeably on the inside. As the elevator rose over the exterior of the building, the full extent of the dead cityscape came into view. The building I was in was seemingly the only structure lit. To the far left, I could see a fire that I had apparently started with the gun near the docks, becoming larger as it burned out of control.

Startled, I turned quickly to the right after hearing what sounded like a child’s voice mumbling, followed by a subdued playful laughter. Looking around the car, it sounded as if it came from all around me. Upon inspection, some kind of speaker on the roof of the elevator seemed to be projecting the sound around me.

As the elevator reached the top, much faster then I would have thought, a new, mature, digital voice within announced, ‘Top floor. Welcome to the office of Briant J. Langley. ’ Cringing in surprise at the volume of the announcement, my heart skipped a beat as the lift came to a halt.

I stepped off into a sweeping white reception area with three-storey high cathedral ceilings. Lit by a bright luminescent floor, walls and ceiling, it was a century old extrapolation of an imagined, aseptic, hyper-future. I felt like I was floating in a cloud, unsure of each new step as if at any moment the floor could loose its solidity. The elevator door closed and through a window I could see it receding below.

The waiting area was devoid of any sound or activity. I called out, “Hello? Hello, is anyone there?”

The same welcoming digital voice answered, ‘Someone will be with you shortly, please have a seat. ’

“Who are you? Is there anyone here?”

‘Mr. Langley is in his office with another appointment. Someone will be with you shortly, please have a seat. ’

“Appointment? Hey, I need help here, I …”

‘Mr. Langley is in his office with another appointment. Someone will be with you shortly, please have a seat. ’

The canned, prerecorded announcements were obviously controlled by some still-active reception computer program. Even though I did not have any memory of ever hearing one before, it started to seem familiar to me and strangely not alarming considering the circumstances.

The speaker seemed to then change tones quickly from the mature and professional, somewhat artificial, monotone voice and another sound came out, like two giggling playing children. The elevator returned, its doors opening with a hiss, startling me yet again.

“Going down?” The child’s voice asked all around me, chuckling.

“No, I … who … ?“

“Going up? Up, up, up! Hehe … ” The two distinct child-like voices seemed to recede in all directions, as if running away.

Confused, and wondering if I was hallucinating, I strode to the only visible office doors in the reception area. They reached all the way to the ceiling, rimmed in a thin, barely visible, line of brass. Like the entrance to heaven, I thought. I grabbed two shining brass handles, shaped liked curved arms, seemingly floating in midair, and pulled at them. There was a hard loud locking sound and another vacuum-like hiss. I pulled at the doors and they would not budge.

A child-like voice returned and said, “Hide … hide and seek … “ And then faded away with more giggling.

I was shaken and frustrated, a rage welled from within me and I screamed into the air. “Open this god-damned door you little, what ever you are! We need to help each other, damn it! Don’t you know what’s going on?”

Laughing again rose from the corners of the room and then the voices said, “Shhhh! Daddy’s sleeping! He-he … hide and seek …”, and again faded.

I yelled again, and sometimes cursed, into the air for many minutes, but the voices never returned. I then looked about for any other access, but was unsuccessful. The reception desk and chair on a far wall were built into the floor. I would have to force the door using a tool or weapon from the military vehicle.

Going to the elevator, I pushed the down button on the wall. When the elevator arrived and the doors opened, the familiar formal voice exclaimed, “Thank you for coming by. Have a great day!” Just as I was about to push the lobby button, the child-like laughter returned in a near whisper, like radio static, and said, “Goin’ down … slow, slow, slow… he-he …”

All of the floors buttons on the panel lit at the same time and I was treated to a long journey of one dark deserted floor after another all the way down. Just as the door closed on the second floor, the green lights in the lift dimmed nearly to darkness. The elevator then made an express journey all the way to the top again. Fatigued and frustrated, I simply had to endure the ride again to the top as no button or control I could push had any effect on the journey, except for one. When I pushed the ‘Emergency Stop’ button a subdued giggling could be heard.

Once I reached the top, I jumped off quickly.

‘Top floor. Welcome to the office of Briant J. Langley. ’

I looked once again for another access or even a staircase, but there was none. The walls were uninterrupted white, with no visible access except the windows. I decided to try the elevator again, but would jump off at the first floor that opened and try to take the staircase. As I entered, I pushed the lobby button again to see if this prankster would do the same thing as before. The speakers played again.

‘Thank you for coming by. Have a great day!’

The elevator started its regular decent, skipping the floors on its way to the lobby. It then passed the lobby entirely, the ‘L’ light on the panel went off and the lift continued into the basement. Stopping on the second sub-level, the doors opened onto a dimly illuminated underground parking garage. Nothing I could do would get a response from the elevator. All the panels seemed dead and the doors remained ajar.

After the lights in the lift went off, I decided there was little I could do, as there was nothing to stand on to get to the elevator roof access, and crept out into the garage. There were dozens of parked cars interspersed throughout, one dim yellow light still functional on the wall to the right side, casting eerie shadows. On the far end was a security guard’s booth and a rising ramp, which I assumed went to the surface above.

I knew that whoever was playing these games wanted me exactly where I was. That notion and my own physical weakness, added to my overall shakiness. I walked cautiously though the center aisle, limping on my throbbing bad leg. As I reached the center of the lot, a red light came on above the security booth.

I froze as I heard the announcement, in the same familiar proper digital voice as before echo through the concrete garage, “Attention please: Proceed with caution. Computer attendant is now parking cars. Attention: Proceed with caution. Computer attendant is now retrieving your car. Thank you. ”

Before I had a chance to realize what this may mean, all of the lights on all of the cars went on. The electric whirring of engines started and I could hear them being thrown into gear. Running the best I could manage back to the elevator, I was getting close when one car on the left side reversed at the same time a right one did. I staggered back just as they both slammed into each other, rear to rear, like a gate closing. I turned around and saw that the driverless cars were coming to life all around me.

On an impulse, I ran toward one of the walls, just narrowly dodging a colorful reversing ultra-compact. Another vehicle, a wide passenger van, then came forward turning with a fury on screeching tires. I hid behind a concrete column in desperation, hoping that it would hold. The van slammed into it, knocking me to the ground. My bag of provisions forgotten on the ground, I rose just in time to avoid being decapitated by the wheel of yet another vehicle reversing at me, this time a sleek convertible sports car. It clipped the side of the column, scraping its side and removing a side mirror. It gently bumped the wall as the breaks kicked in and I saw my opportunity.

Jumping into the convertible just as I heard it being engaged in drive, I desperately searched for some kind of override. The car sped forward and started to spin at high speed. The car was a type with pivoting wheels, allowing it to rotate in place. I was thrown to the side door as centrifugal force pinned me. Feeling myself becoming severely nauseated, as my organs seemed to find new arrangements, my head invited sleep and a escapist drift away. The garage relentlessly spun in a blur all around me with ever increasing speed. The engine roaring was roaring ever louder by the second.

Fighting the feeling of surrender, I reached out and grabbed at, pushed, pulled, or struck any control I could get my hands or feet on. A saw a bright red light on the other side of the panel and kicked at it with my braced leg. There was a crunching sound followed by a generator powering down. The car was now coasting in place, still spinning as in neutral, but slowing down. I managed to get into the driver’s seat, hit the brakes, and the car came to an abrupt stop. I started the engine with the manual key controls and pressed the accelerator, steering the car toward the guard booth. Lowering my head, I rammed through the gate just as other cars were smashing into each other behind me. I took the ramp without turning back, knowing that there was a ghostly demolition derby occurring and could hear, even over the engine, the crashes as the computer controlled autos made a desperate attempt to reach me.

Once on the surface, crashing through another gate, I went quickly around the dark streets and found the military vehicle parked in the shattered lobby. I loaded ammunition and hand explosives into my pockets, an automatic weapon slung over my shoulder. Just as I was satisfied that I had everything I needed, I heard a subdued crashing sound on the quiet street. Several followed in quick succession and I knew that the cars had also made their way above. Obviously the parking computer’s range was more then I would have liked and the autos would soon be around to this side of the building. I was struck by the madness of it all. My desperate search for help, optimism briefly aloft by the notion that someone might still be alive, had turned into a absurd and violent fight for life.

Past the bank of elevators, I found a stairway entrance and opened the door just in time as three cars came screeching around the corner of the street. They rammed the military vehicle one after another as I watched from the dirty window of a stairwell door. I heard them crash through the remaining structures of the lobby as I ascended the first level on my long journey back to the top, my leg throbbing.

Time was lost to me as I climbed one level after another, the atmosphere regulated to a comfortable constant, easily resting or passing out several times on the way. Surprisingly, the water that I drank from my canteen gave me great energy and I kept it in my stomach easily this time. Equally surprising was the fact that I did not encounter any strange occurrences in that stairwell, as I did in other parts of the building. I even found food in an automated commissary half way up, consuming it with relish, seemingly my first meal, eaten in the corner as machines processed food for people who would not come. The dead world dark as space through the windows I leaned on, as if the building was on an intergalactic voyage.

Finally, I reached the end of the staircase. Without a landing as in the other levels, there was a flush door at the top of the steps. The door had no handle, only a lit computer panel. I first thought of hitting at it with my rife, then realized utilizing the element of surprise might be a better strategy. I pulled the pin on a grenade and placed it on the top step, then ran down as best I could. The explosion hurt my ears only, but knocked me off my feet, as the powerful shockwave was reverberated down the stairwell.

I released the safety on my weapon and went through the blasted door to the illuminated white of the reception area beyond, the floor and walls now full of holes and black cracks. The stairway door must have been concealed, flush with the wall. The large room was still partially illuminated, some lights blinking on and off in distress, and the wind from several shattered windows obscured every other sound, like an approaching tornado. I went over to the giant white doors again, now scraped and dented by high velocity shrapnel. Going back to the stairway entrance, I pulled the pin on another grenade and rolled it to the door. The explosion did not take the doors off, but one was knocked and bent back, and I was able to slide through the space.

Beyond the doors was a giant, similarly illuminated, white hallway that led to a circular staircase, built into the side of the wall. I walked up, weapon in hand, rising through a curved break in the ceiling to stand right in the space above.

The scene was otherworldly. The room was a wide open circular room, built-in furniture and small walls of computer screens, most inactive, came up out of the floor. The floor was the same illuminated white, bathing the room in light just as the reception area. Several stories above, the ceiling revealed the stars through a dramatic triangular skylight, several stories even higher still. The skylight was cleverly designed to be nearly invisible, and the stars seemed unreal in their clarity, as if they were being projected from a planetarium apparatus.

Another digitized giggling sound made me turn to the left and I was startled at the sight. At the far end of the giant space, suspended from invisible means, were three giant transparent globes. Two were filled with a glowing blue fluid, they seemed to contain one naked body in each one, except the rightmost one, which was empty and cracked, its fluid lost, a body laying face down beneath it.

As if time had resigned, the bodies in the tanks were frozen in place, their arms and legs in dramatic positions. On the floor in the corner was another body, sitting like a rag-doll haphazardly placed.

Quickly making my way toward them I was struck and knocked to the ground. My nose started to bleed and my face twitched with pain. There was a perfectly clear glass or plasticized barrier separating me from them, extending I assumed all the way to the ceiling, the smudge marks deposited by my face the most visible feature.

As I examined this nearly invisible sealed environment, to the extreme side which went initially unnoticed, were machines seemingly hooked up to vents hanging in midair. There seemed to be no way to enter. Looking at the person in the corner, I was startled at his condition. If this person, and the apparent child face down, were dead, they were the only ones I had seen that were perfectly preserved, as if they just fell asleep when my elevator door opened.

The giggling sound returned, “ We know you … hehe … “

I was reminded that these were the people who may have tried to kill me in the garage. I felt myself loosing energy and knew I need to act. I walked over and I kicked at the largest vent, eventually breaking it as it let out a decompressing hiss. Pushing the machines connected aside, I entered the sterile area and approached the body in the corner. It was a bearded man in a surgical gown, dead eyes staring away to infinity. He was not decomposed and was completely preserved by the vacuum. Looking up at the blue globes, the people contained within were obviously children. I could now see that they were connected to the top of the globe by an intricate series of wires and micro-tubes that connected right into their bodies in various places, especially their heads.

The one on the left was a female, with small nearly prepubescent breasts and a slight, almost emaciated, figure. Her long blond braided hair extended in all directions from her small elfin head like a gorgon. I did not know her, but there was an unmistakable familiarity. My eyes followed the contours of her face, the skin seemingly just as soft as if she was alive. She looked as if she was frozen in a elaborate aerial dance. The next tank contained a male child with blond hair, perhaps ten, his eyes open as if in surprise, and his extremities stretched out as if he doing jumping jacks when he froze.

I looked at a nearby computer screen with what seemed like medical data, three dimensional figures of various body parts were highlighted with data streaming past. One of the displays seemed to indicate the workings of a power source within the building, digital dials read power levels and floors initialized. As I looked back at the vital signs, for some reason I knew that they were slowed, almost to the level of hibernation. Looking up at the children, I could plainly see that they were alive, their eyes moved in an eerie way, as if they were in REM sleep. Were these the children of a powerful executive, I thought, one last desperate act of selfish preservation the crowning achievement of his success?

Examining the bearded man, there were a great number of punctures and bruises on his body, mostly on his face and abdomen. Even though his clothes were ripped in many places, he looked like a scientist, various medical tools in broken pieces around him.

My husband is a doctor, I thought, he would know what this all means. You’re a scientist, think.

I paused for a long time, perplexed by my own thoughts. What made me think of that phrase?

A digital whispering sound rose, voices again seemed to be all around me. A child voice said, “Shhh, he’s sleeping…we made him …he-he …”

Nervous, I walked over and examined the body of the child laying prone in the fluid. Rolling him over, he seemed identical to the other boy in the suspended globe, probably a twin. This notion stuck in my mind for some reason and I began to clean him off. Twin? Identical. We are one. Strange words seemed to dance in my mind and I put him down abruptly.

I tried to walk away but then found myself at his side again. A warm, somehow wet feeling flushed from just below my shoulder. When I looked to it I could see clearly that my skin was blackened, as though burnt, a copper boil plainly visible just above my chest. Silver veins seemed to run from it, throbbing with life. As I touched it, a whisper without words urged me to touch the boy again.

A child’s scream came over speakers in the room again, this time in a warbling robotic tone, static blaring, “Get away from him!”

Unable to help myself from touching him, I ran my fingers through his short blond hair as a overriding recollection began to take hold. I ripped open my shirt and rubbed my chest, startled at the way my skin and nipples felt. I tore at my clothes until they were completely removed and scraped my long nails on my skull. Pain and pleasure blending in a comforting psychotic strobe, images penetrated my mind like a barrage of artillery. An inner fuel ignited that begged my tensing muscles to implode, to draw life in from the air itself.

Gripping the child’s neck, I pulled him toward me. Digging my nails deep into him, I could have pulled him apart. Transfixed by his blue eyes, I attempted to make a direct connection to his soul by focused concentration alone. On some unknown impulse, I took the boy up into my arms, taking a deep inhalation of his hair, his whole scent, tightly hugging him while I rocked him to and fro.

As I embraced the cybernetic child, disconnected wires scraping my face, my reflection in the glass, with the dim black skyline beyond, became distorted. Through welling tears, I could see an army of female children standing there, their blond hair shining like the rising suns of some new and genetically improved world.

Running toward them, I knew I was going home again. Transformed into that beautiful reality, like an ascension into a celestial paradise, I rose above the deceased earth to be in the light of that everlasting peace again. The life of beauty, ultimate belonging, and … power?