J Batt: Onliest

They all went mad. Anger and greed and fear.

And someone had also managed to wipe the system’s memory of the records of those last few months. I don’t know what sent them all into a raging mania. I don’t know what started the “Madness.” There’s no exact moment recorded for when it happened. No luck finding that precise info. But I know they’re all dead, and they’re dead because they killed each other. With knives and sticks and bricks and anything that they could bash into another person’s skull.

Humans.

To Hell with them.

The world hung frozen and silent around her. She yawned, and the soft noise of her breath filled the quiet of her world. The treehouse was draped in the sapphire of nighttime from the false moonlight from above. Across the room, with a deep, rumbling, stuttering snore, Eku slept, curled up and looking more like a housecat than ever before. A few other housecats slept around it, one tabby nuzzled into Eku’s thick coat for warmth.

All were sleeping. All were still. But there was no Blip.

He was never there in the middle of the night. He didn’t sleep. He didn’t power down. He’d come and rest beside her as she dozed off every evening, but she knew that once she fell asleep, he was up and about, onto the tasks at hand. Reviewing repairs, analyzing the environment, checking on plants.

Or that was what he told her he was doing.

Syn narrowed her eyes and stood up. In that quiet hour, her own body felt loud. Perhaps he was somewhere else entirely. Olorun was huge, and she was quite small.

As she stepped out of the main room and descended the stairs, a thought bloomed. Blip had nearly eight to ten hours a day away from her. He could live an entire other life in that time. And she would never know it. What was he doing right now? Perhaps late at night, he would meet up with not just another companion bot, but with many of them. Perhaps there were secret meetings every single evening without her. Perhaps tonight they were holding a funeral for their fallen comrade. Was Blip secretly mourning the loss of a hidden friend?

Syn shook her head as she stepped through the wet, cold grass in her bare feet. The chill bite sent shivers up her spine.

Syn stepped out of the trees, into a small clearing, and the thought echoed again. She muttered, “Who can I trust?”

Did she hear a response in the wind? Did the leaves rustle and say, you’re alone? And again, the tree creaked: all alone, little girl.

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. The air wafting over the river filled her senses. A smell mixed of the spreading moss from the far banks, the racing fish, and the moist spray from the rapids created a sharp tonic. If she had been groggy from sleep, she was now fully awake. Far, far away, behind the rush of the river, she heard the slight buzzes of bots floating across the Disc. Above her, clearing the air, were the jellyfish: massive bots unburdened by gravity floating across the sky, pushing the clouds around. Beyond that, she heard the crunch, crunch lumbering steps of the treemovers—the spider-like giant bots that served as the caretakers of the forest. The entire artificial ecology—an ecology of bots—never stopped their toil. She wondered, did they have some hidden world they built, behind the walls of the Disc, that they escaped to when I’m not looking?

So not everything was asleep. Was Blip with them?

The wind moved down the Disc and whipped the loose fabric of her pants around her. She only wore a thin blanket across her shoulders, and the breeze yanked at it, threatening to rip it from her. The world was painted in blue and black. A bruised world. Perhaps this was the true sight of the world. Perhaps daylight was a mirage, she thought. Perhaps it was only at night that the truth was revealed.

Again, that dark, bruised voice in her skull whispered : all alone.

And a single tear ran down her cheek.

She stared up at the curving Disc towering far away and reaching up above them, its end veiled in the shadow. Blip was somewhere out there, but she did not know where.

She shivered again, but the wind was not blowing.

What else is out there?

The single set of doors were shut tight, and the string of lights parallel to the center slit were black. A fan behind Syn, far behind, whirred up slowly, juttering a few times as it did, cycling air through the vents above, a hollow sound through the empty corridor.

Syn slid an orange paint-covered finger across the wall as the running lights at her feet lit up. She smeared the orange paint in a half-meter long line. “There.”

“Room J1302-97,” Blip said as he floated up to the large doors.

“We’re looking for J1302-99.”

Their hunt had led them to one of the settlements on the side opposite of her tree—this was the side that she had explored only recently in detail. They were near the thirteenth level of the settlements. The entrance path around this level opened up on one side to look out at the Disc and the sweeping jungle that moved off in both directions. The jungle twisted up and disappeared into the clouds above their heads. There were still several corridors, like this, that she had not touched. They spent most of their time in the jungle or by the water or, more and more often, floating through the zero gravity of the needle. Yet, the settlements had to be accounted for. It was still amazing to her that after several years of being awake on Olorun, there were still a few places they hadn’t ventured. The settlements had begun to bore her—they all seemed the same. House after house after shop after office after store. It was an endless repetition of a boring life.

The settlements were a collection of houses stacked several high along the outside edge of the Disc, providing a wall and a border for the world of Olorun. The dense, hill-laden jungle named Aja (Syn’s home) thrived in the center of the ring.

Blip twisted up in the air, peering down the metal corridor lined with doors. “I know. But that’s what’s weird. The rooms stop at 97. There is no 99. This is the last room on the thirteenth level here.”

Syn looked back from where they had walked and counted off the doors, reading the numbers above the access panels. “91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96.” She pointed at the one ahead of them. “97. Okay. Did we hear him wrong?”

“You could’ve. I didn’t. He said J1302-99.”

“Maybe it’s not a room.”

“What else works according to that numbering?”

“It’s not 99. 97 is the only room here. It’s the last one. And we’ve never explored here.”

“Let’s open it up.”

From down the hall, Eku walked—a large shape emerging from the darkened corridor into the blue light of the floorstrips activated by Syns presence.

“Eku!” Syn shouted, running to wrap her arms around the tiger’s neck. She pulled back and looked at her hand and then at the cat’s neck. “Oops! I got some orange paint on you.”

“She’s an orange cat. Won’t make a difference,” Blip said.

Syn dabbed another finger into the small pot of orange paint in her hand and tapped her finger across her forehead leaving nine dots above her eyebrow from left to the right. “There. We both have paint.” She smiled and held up her finger to the tiger. “Look we found somewhere new.” She leaned over and in a hushed, dramatic tone, she breathed out, “And a mystery.”