Steve Tem: Ubo

Wherever anger and irrationality were factors, he imagined males any younger would skew the results. Bad enough they had so many in their twenties—those he tended to avoid. Perhaps it wasn’t fair, but he’d always assumed the residents had been chosen for a reason. As to why they’d chosen him personally he had no idea.

Several roaches—the mammoth, guard variety—milled about in the area beyond the arch, dragging their oversized appendages on the floor, spinning around now and then like dogs chasing their tails. Their mere presence kept the residents from wandering too far.

At the opposite end of the room was a long wide slot of a window at about chest height. Numerous roach heads were visible peering in from the other side. These creatures were of the smaller variety, who walked around upright and wore the lab coats—no more than tattered capes really, of some thin shimmering material. Because these were the ones seen just before each scenario began, they’d been labeled “scientists” or “doctors” by the residents.

Of course there was no way of knowing whether any of these suppositions were true. Falstaff, however, was definite. “Trust me. I’ve been here a long time. The way they stare at us, I think they’ve probably got us all pretty well figured out by now. They’re the ones in charge.”

Daniel had noticed that at certain angles the heads of the roaches shimmered with a flickering striation effect. It occurred to him that they might be wearing some sort of protective suit, without which they would be unable to breathe. It was a constant tug on his attention. It suggested an alien environment. Where exactly was Ubo?

Daniel wandered over to the bank of windows which provided the sole view from the waiting room of “outside.” He did it for the direct sunlight, not because he particularly enjoyed the view. Many of the residents appeared to avoid it after the first few visits.

One of the surprises he’d gotten the first time he’d gazed out these windows was the understanding that they were more than twenty stories up in the air. Each reminder of this fact disoriented him. The facility had always felt like a dim, buried, underground sort of place. To look out a window and see a vista felt somehow contradictory here.

Even if that vista had largely been destroyed. It was obvious that a significant portion of the sprawling structure they were in had collapsed. The ground below them contained shattered walls and support beams several levels deep. An avalanche of dozens of floors of staircase sections had made a convoluted mass of steps that led nowhere. The building that remained looked as if a gigantic bite had been taken out of it and the mouth’s contents spat out below.

The area around the building appeared to have been scraped down to bare earth and gravel. Hundreds of yards beyond were the ruins of more buildings, mostly destroyed, not enough left to speculate as to their original appearance. Beyond that a drift of haze, smoke, and flickering talons of flame. Daniel craned his neck to look up at the sky: more, darker smoke, but sometimes there were reddish clouds near molten in appearance. Many days a misty rain came down, and often a steady fall of fine light gray ash.

There was a commotion behind him. He turned, already accustomed to the sound. Several of the enormous roaches had entered the room, their claws clattering across the floor. With impressive efficiency they separated certain men and herded them back toward the arched entrance, the residents hurrying themselves to avoid any contact with the guards.

The morning round of scenarios had begun. They didn’t take you daily, but it was more frequently than every other day. Still, it seemed random, as the roaches never announced their schedule, or anything else. The roaches didn’t speak.

Daniel saw the huge bug headed his way, and ran to stay ahead of it. He did not exactly dread playing his part in these experiments, even though they were often unpleasant. Invariably they were stimulating, and they allowed him to go beyond himself at least for a time, to escape what his life had become.

High drama, excitement, was everything to the human organism.

If not love, then cruelty. If not goodness, then evil.

SOMETIMES IT HAPPENED this way. Daniel—non corporeal, a mind in a bubble—hung over the figure below. It was as if he had died, and having left his mortal flesh, paused for a final goodbye.

But he had no idea if he believed that was the way it happened. Probably he didn’t—if the mind of man imagined it, at best it could only be a vague grasping after the truth.

And that figure below was not him, and he was not leaving, but arriving. He was simply reluctant to take the final leap into a stranger’s mind which could only mean more anguish and hellish confusion, and yet another delay before he might get back to leading his own life again.

Not that Daniel had any choice. Behind him was the weight of a thousand mad insects, pushing him to complete his mission, to slip into the stranger’s mind and experience the dynamics behind his violence, however poorly Daniel understood it. The assignment was never that clearly articulated but it was apparent that was what was expected. He made no report—there was no need. The roaches watched everything that happened to him.

He could feel insect parts invading his brain, working their way into his motor centers, into the prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia. The insects, the roaches, had a need to know.

Still, he resisted. He’d gone through dozens of these, maybe hundreds—he really had no idea. Hundreds of personal Hells. He floated, and the longer he floated the more he knew, the more he absorbed from the character he was to play. Mid-Sixties, Austin, the University of Texas. Climbing the tower.Daniel watched as the young man climbed the steps steadily, without rest, arms and legs captured by the precise, military rhythm. This young man was in good shape, and admired precision, and loathed the very imprecise thing that was happening inside his head.

Unable to resist any longer, Daniel was sucked inside.

Going into a personality was much like diving into a pool. You immediately sank to the deepest, coldest, scariest part—the part you didn’t like to think about—before returning to the relative safety of the more manageable surface layers. In this case the deepest, scariest part was the almost robotic, emotionless determination.

Daniel began to sweat more profusely, his heart racing, his legs and lower back straining as he pulled the dolly with the heavy footlocker up the stairs. He saw that he was wearing khaki overalls. He had a vague notion to stop, to get out of this body, this life, to go lie down somewhere. It was hot . But everything had already been decided. Two floors so far, he thought. One more to go. He’d supplied himself well. He was satisfied that he’d done everything he needed to do to prepare for a long siege.

He kept staring at the words printed on the footlocker:

L/CPL. CHARLES J. WHITMAN

USMC - 1871634

Marine Bks.

Navy 115, Box 32-A

FPO, NY, N.Y.

Beneath him, at the bottom of the footlocker, two small, thin arms were straining, wobbling, trying to help him by pushing the footlocker up the stairs. A pale face appeared alongside the footlocker as the little boy put his shoulder into the job. Blond hair so light it was almost white, glowing as if electrified. Daniel had a vague vision of a photograph drifting up out of the inky darkness, eventually floating on the surface: the little boy at two or three, playing on the beach, holding on to two rifles taller than he. They were his father’s guns, C. A. Whitman’s. Guns had always been the old man’s thing—he’d taught the boys how to shoot at a young age, but of course Chuck and his brothers had never been good enough. Well, now guns were Chuck’s thing, and he was far better with them than his father ever had been. Later, after it was all over and the bodies had been carried away, his father would say, “Those guns aren’t to blame for anything.”