Velvet Dogma

chapter 29



She was hanging upside down again, only this time she had reason for being there. The basalt walls, the darkness, the barely constrained voices just out of range, the people she knew that were all around her but couldn't see, the breaths of her watchers upon the back of her neck—all of it spoke to a mimicry of her solitary confinement. She'd died and gone to hell, for what else could this underground grotto be except a room made especially for her?

Rebecca remembered the chain wrapped around her legs and checked to see if it was sure there. Sure enough, the ochre links gleamed bloodily. While she'd been away the blood had dripped down her legs like candle wax. She gazed at the floor, the perspective spiking her dizziness so that her gorge rose from her stomach to her chest. A pool of darkened blood had gathered beneath her. A single strand of pearls lay within it, all but a few of the brilliant white gems coated in the ugly slime of her impending death.

What a waste. She'd never owned pearls, but had always admired them. To see them discarded like that made it clear that someone didn't understand their worth.

Again Rebecca watched the wall. Shadows moved in their own world, going about tasks both strange and dire. She could not know, but she understood the movements and postures of those reflected. They were going about a mad business, one in which she wished she could be a part.

She tsked. They should have known better than to start without her. She could have been a great help had they but asked. Instead, they'd relegated her to this hell, her turn to pay back the universe for doing too much, too well, too soon.

Pah!

The question was were the shadows real or were they projections from something behind her. A part of her insisted that they were real. She hung in an upside-down universe to watch these monochrome images unfold their lives. Hers wasn't a just punishment, but hers was fitting for one who'd known more about being alone than most people ever should. Who else would they put here? Who else could handle it? She'd proven her toughness and could take whatever they had in mind.

But what if the shadows weren't real? What if they were a montage of disproportionate events occurring behind her? She remembered a man who could make it look like a hawk flew across the screen in high school by using his hands to form the wings. If you looked at the screen the fantasy held, but one look at his hands and you saw just fingers and thumbs intertwined in such a way as to confuse the human mind.

And if they weren't real, then what was happening?

"Rebecca!"

The static-laced voice shook the room. She glared at the shadows, but they did not pause. Who was it? Who called her? With the greatest effort she turned to her left and saw that there were others in the room with her. Not just others, but a line of other hers, hanging dead and dying down her line of sight all the way to eternity. And as she stared, one of her down the line turned to stare back at her. It was then that she focused on the face. Beneath two impossibly wide eyes was a blank slate. No mouth. No nose. Nothing. It was all wiped clean.

Her heart jumped to her throat. Rebecca tried to scream but nothing came out. Her hands went to her face and she ran her fingers across the smooth surface that had once been lips kissed by Andy. Gone.

"Rebecca!"

The static words came again, as if from an old radio, but how could she answer them? They'd taken her ability to communicate. She had nothing. Like an old television, she couldn't interact. She had one way input, nothing more.

"Rebecca come to us." Many voices had merged, high and low, fast and slow.

Now all the movement on the wall had stopped. All of the man-shapes seemed to be watching her. She ignored the shiver of goose bumps that sailed up her arms and tried to figure out what it meant.

A school lesson planted itself atop the reality with all the pubescent colors, spring smells and afternoon boredom she'd grown to dread as an adolescent. In the seventh grade she'd been forced to take philosophy because of her advanced curriculum. She'd heard about the stiff, padded-elbowed professors, and even seen a few on televisions, but to see one in person was to confront a real stereotype.

The professor slumped over the lectern. His grey beard was flecked with toast crumbs. His nose was red with age spots. The object of his concentration as he spoke rote dictums of Plato and Socrates was the craggy knuckles of his fists that gripped the lectern to keep the palsy still. He wore blue corduroy pants, a white shirt of questionable age and a brown corduroy jacket with honest-to-God elbow patches. A thick set of rimless bifocals balanced on the crest of his patrician nose.

There were times when Mr. Joyce could be as obtuse as the dead white men he quoted, his words an elemental drone that could stop time. On rare occasions, he'd capture her attention and make her eagerly listen—not something easily accomplished with a twelve-year-old girl.

Of all the things that had interested her were the ideas espoused in Book VII of Plato's Republic as they spoke of the allegory of The Cave:

Socrates: And now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened: Behold human beings living in an underground den which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets.

Glaucon: I see.

Socrates: And do you see, I said, men passing along the wall carrying all sorts of vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials, which appear over the wall? Some of them are talking, others silent.

Glaucon: You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners.

Socrates: Like ourselves, I replied, and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave.

Glaucon: True, he said; how could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?

Socrates: And of the objects which are being carried in like manner they would only see the shadows?

Glaucon: Yes, he said.

Socrates: And if they were able to converse with one another, would they not suppose that they were naming what was actually before them? And suppose further that the prison had an echo which came from the other side, would they not be sure to fancy, when one of the passers-by spoke that the voice which they heard came from the passing shadow?

Glaucon: No question, he replied.

And the memory vanished, leaving Rebecca with a basalt wall of waiting shadow figures, the ache of her legs and the almost overwhelming numbness creeping over the surface of her brain. The one place she could not look was behind her. Was she to trust the images on the rock? If she called them real would it make it so?

"Re-becca." The static-laced voice barely registered.

Someone wanted her. Was it her imagination, or the figures on the wall, or was it someone behind her pretending to be something? She had no idea. All she knew was that they wanted her, whoever they were.

For whatever reason, she decided to target the figures on the wall. This was her hell. She could decide what was real or not. She could not speak, she could not walk over to the wall, but she could reach out and touch it.

Given time.

Rebecca threw her arms in front of her, kipped her legs, then threw her arms behind her. After a few spastic moments, she began to swing. Incrementally she got closer to the wall. Back and forth. Back and forth. On one swing she spied the pearls lying half submerged in her expanding pool of blood. She grasped them as she passed.

That's strange. She didn't remember bleeding to death?

But with the pearls gripped in her hand, she kept kipping, harder and harder until her hand came close enough to strike the basalt wall. Only it didn't strike. It pushed through, then on her back swing, instead of reappearing, it remained disappeared, her wrist sliced bloodlessly at the wrist.

She should have freaked out, but instead she somehow knew that this was what was meant to be, so on her back swing she skipped again. This time when she intersected the wall, she disappeared up to her shoulder, and when she swung back that much of her was gone.

A different person would have been afraid, but Rebecca only wanted to follow her body, knowing that it traveled from one reality to another. So as she swung towards the wall with the pearls gripped in her hand, she screamed inside her mind, and as she intersected and passed through to her other shoulder, her scream became a reality.

She'd entered a place where she had a monocular view of the world, everything commuted through a single grainy eye. She allowed her body to pass back and away, leaving her disembodied to watch those who'd been waiting for her. Some sat. Some stood. She recognized Andy right away. A part of her begged to touch him, but another part, a part created by the brick-a-brack of reason, understood that he had become an untouchable ideal. Panchet hovered at his side. Others and more she'd seen before her death stood in a semi-circle, gazing at her with expectation and worry.

"Rebecca, can you hear me?"

It was like listening through a straw, but yes, she could hear.

"Rebecca, if you can hear me, then answer."

Answer? How could she answer? She had no mouth. She tried to turn to look at her body, but there was no turning. There was no body. When she'd moved through the wall, she'd changed realities. Without a mouth, how could she answer?

"Tell her she needs to think the answer and force it towards her mouth."

But I have no mouth.

Rebecca's words came clear through tinny speakers set around the walls, her cadence and tone belonging to no one but her. Everyone stared at her for a moment, then cheered.

She'd thought the words, wishing she could respond to the inane directive, but had never imagined that it would be broadcast through speakers. Maybe this is what Panchet had meant.

Can you hear me?

"Of course we can hear you."

She watched Andy step towards her, pain and joy fighting for space on his handsome face. That could only mean one thing. She'd joked about it to herself, but the reality of it was more harsh than she'd expected.

Does this mean I'm dead?

Andy opened his mouth to speak, but shook his head instead, unable to bring himself to say anything. Panchet didn't have the same inhibition. "You're body is almost dead, Rebecca. They did too much damage to your brain when they took the hippocampi."

Then where am I? What am I? That last she'd meant to keep to herself, but it broadcast as if she'd shouted to the sky.

"We moved your consciousness to a storage unit."

Explain.

"You currently reside in a five by five terabyte nodule connected to the internal communications of Velvet Dogma Earth, which is the name we have for this complex. Although you have access to all cameras in the facility, until you're able to handle basic interaction, we didn't want to inundate you with too much information."

But the information wasn't too much. She felt laconic in her responses only because the level of input seemed so low. She wanted more. She wanted to be connected to the ID.

I need more input.

"We understand. But until you get the hang of living in server reality, you should be offline." Panchet waved to the others around him, shooing them away. "Go on now, get back to your stations. There's still work to be done, especially now that she's back." Turning to Rebecca he added, "Cody Larkins wants to speak with you when you're ready."

Cody. That's right—she'd commanded them to seek out the dead hacker. Something he'd said back at the Ack Ack Underground had made her bring the small server. She'd hoped that she'd been right. The very fact that she was here verified her judgment.

Is Cody okay?

"It took him a while to get used to being dead. He'd uploaded his consciousness four hours before he died, so Andy had to convince him that they had indeed met and that you'd spoken with him about Velvet Dogma."

She remembered giving him the password, the mischievous look in his eye, and then his death. He'd wanted to die. Was it so he could live in the online universe?

You still want the password, don't you?

"Most definitely."

Did you ask Cody for it?

"Yes."

And?

"He said to get it from you."

Cody had no other choice. He hadn't learned the password until four hours after he'd recorded this version of his consciousness.

Andy returned to Panchet's side, his red face sad proof of his tears. She felt sorry for him. If she were dead, he'd be able to move on. Instead, she was in some halfway, living-dead computer consciousness reality where her mind functioned without regard to her body.

"Rebecca, do you feel any pain?" he asked.

No, Andy. I'm okay.

"What does it feel like in there?"

Lonely. Sterile. Confined. The same things she'd felt in solitary confinement.

"I'm sorry I couldn't protect you." He stared at the ground, his hands shoved deep into his pockets. He looked so much like a little boy.

You were overmatched. It wasn't your fault, Andy. This is just the way things turned out.

"Cody's wants to talk to you," Panchet interrupted. "I want to make sure we didn't do anything wrong."

Bring him on.

Suddenly Rebecca felt a presence fill the space beside her.

Looks like you're getting the hang of it, came Cody's voice.

She tried to turn, but once again was reminded that there was no physical reality. She was in a server. He was in a server. Their only inputs were cameras to the outside world.

Cody Larkins? Is that you?

Of course.

Oh, Cody. She felt her heart that wasn't there break a bit. What have we done? We've gone and killed ourselves.

Yet we still live.

If you call this living.

Come to me, Rebecca, and let me show you what I mean.

How can I?

Close your eyes and you'll see.

But I have no eyes.

You have no mouth but you speak.

He was right. She thought about that for a moment. How would she do it, though? She had to somehow see inside the server. She'd used the camera to see Andy, but what would she use inside the server? But Cody spoke to her, guiding her past her doubts and misconceptions, until an entirely new world opened up to her and she stood face to face with him.

You look like hell, girl.