The inside of the Candle Square station was smaller than it looked like it should be from the outside. Most of the triangle structure went to the mechanics of the cooling unit—and, apparently, the large guns—so once Oliver and Minerva made it inside there was little else to do but head down the non-functioning escalators to the first landing.
If they had decided to go all the way down to the subway platform, it would have meant a much longer journey. The first landing had turnstiles, on the other side of which was a much longer escalator system that led to a second landing, and a ramp to the inbound trains. The outbound trains were on an even lower platform requiring additional ramp access.
What struck Ollie as soon as they got down to the landing and he had a chance to catch his breath and get his bearings was that the place looked no different than it had any other time he’d been down there. No bunks with soldiers or high tech military gear, no maps of the city with red X’s indicating alien attack points, no provisions, nothing. Just a normal subway terminal in a normal city.
Also: no people. The city’s emergency preparedness plan for this immediate vicinity included the local citizens taking shelter in the station, because the place was deep enough to offer decent protection in the event of a bombing raid in which standard, non-nuclear bombs were being used. Oliver knew this because everyone knew this, because there was a sign posted at the surface that said more or less exactly this. Yet, the place was empty.
Maybe the city had different plans in the event of an extraterrestrial assault. Or maybe everyone was down on the lower platform. But he thought if that were so—if there were ten thousand people down there—he’d hear them.
Minerva helped Oliver—who wasn’t entirely ready to stand on his own—to the ground in a corner against the wall, about ten feet from something that looked like a pool of pee, which just reinforced how normal this subway station was.
Wilson emerged from the control room door. He was dressed in the same camo outfit as before.
“Is he all right?” he asked.
“He’s a little dizzy is all,” Minerva said. “Big blast, no helmet.”
“I’m fine,” Ollie said.
“Yeah you are. Saved our asses.”
She smiled at him and he smiled back. Ollie thought maybe there was something nice there, in her smile, that he wanted to keep for himself. He didn’t really care that her boyfriend was standing a few feet away. Not after what they’d just been through.
Then again, he was so dizzy he couldn’t stand, so a misinterpretation was possible.
“Hey, where’s everyone else?” he asked Wilson.
“Who do you mean?”
“It’s a rendezvous point. Please tell me you’re not the person we’re here to meet.”
Wilson looked hurt.
“You mean, not just me.”
“Sure, if that makes you feel better.”
“I’m not the only one here,” Wilson said. “There’s another guy, but he’s down below. Little weird, though, I’m not sure we want to hang out with him.”
“You mean down at the trains.”
“That’s what I mean, yes. He seemed to think the only way to get where we’re going is through the tunnels.”
“Reasonable assumption,” Minerva said. “I wouldn’t go back up there without an army behind me.”
“Is it really that awful? I didn’t have a good deal of trouble getting here,” Wilson said. “I just headed on over.”
“No aliens?” Oliver asked. “They’re all over the place, topside.”
“None that I saw.”
Oliver looked around the space they were occupying a little more closely from his unfortunate vantage point on the floor. He realized the soot marks he thought he was looking at were blaster marks.
“I think this place was overrun,” he said. “Must have happened early. What was the problem with the defenses?”
“The what?” Wilson asked.
“The big guns that go bang-bang. The thing you fired.”
“Oh, it was offline. Part of the console was shredded. I had to hotwire a few systems to get it started. Didn’t even know I knew how to do that.”
“There’s a lot of that going around.”
Minerva pulled out the map she’d gotten from Ben, seemingly two or three lifetimes ago. “Do you recognize this part of town?” she asked Wilson.
“Nope. Where’d this come from?”
“Ben. So it’s important. It’s where we should be heading next.”
“That’s going to be a challenge if we don’t know what part of town this is.”
“Hey guys?” Oliver said. “I know at this point this is probably too much to ask for, but could you explain, in a non-crazy-sounding way, what you mean when you say stuff like that?”
“Like what?” Minerva asked.
“Like that the map is important, because it came from Ben, a guy who held us at gunpoint and made us drive around town for no obvious reason. He didn’t even know what the map was for.”
“You want a non-crazy-sounding explanation?” she repeated.
“Preferably.”
“No, I really don’t think we can do that. Can you walk, though? We should get moving. We’ll give you the crazy explanation on the way and you can decide for yourself what to believe.”
Under normal circumstances, the trip to the inbound platform would have required little effort. One had only to get past the gates using whatever token or pass-card was appropriate, then stand on the escalator and wait for it to make it to the bottom, possibly wondering the entire time why it was still called an escalator when it was taking people down and not up.
That’s what tended to go through Oliver’s head more or less every time it was appropriate. On a couple of occasions, he shared this observation aloud, but never found someone who thought it as perplexing and/or clever as he did.
The city appeared to be without power, though, because the turnstiles didn’t work and the escalator wasn’t moving. Ollie wondered if he missed an EMP detonation. That would definitely explain the abandoned cars, but became less likely when he considered that the futuristic soldier gear he and Minerva employed was unaffected. Maybe it was technology that was shielded from electromagnetic pulse attacks.
Or maybe none of this makes sense and I’m losing my mind, he thought. Let’s just put that out there.
They didn’t have to jump the turnstiles, because there was a handicapped entrance that didn’t have a gate. But the escalator problem was insoluble. They were going to have to climb down.
While undeniably better than going up without assistance, down was a little frightening for someone still recovering from what he thought was probably a mild concussion. Dizzy spells and the stairs didn’t go well together.
“So explain,” he said, to whoever felt like answering. It seemed like a great way to fill up the time on what had to be a quarter of a mile downhill.
“I don’t think we can,” Minerva said. “We can tell you what we know.”
“All right, what do you know?”
“We know something’s wrong with this city,” Wilson said.
“You mean other than the alien attack and the helicopters falling from the sky and the fact that all the people seem to have disappeared?”
“Yes, other than that. We started picking up on these things a while ago.”
“Like the dead spaces,” Minnie said. “Times when we were suddenly in a place, and we were supposed to be there, but we didn’t know how we got there. Has that ever happened to you?”
“You almost need to be looking for it,” Wilson added.
“I guess a couple of times, sure,” Ollie said. “But that’s normal.”
Minerva laughed. “Okay.”
“No, it is. The mind isn’t always on, right? We’re on autopilot sometimes. It’s a thing. Happens to long distance drivers a lot.”
“All right, but this is subtly different,” Wilson said. “Imagine waking up in the middle of a conversation and the last thing you remember was being home, and two days had passed.”
“Like an alien abduction or something?” Ollie asked, deliberately invoking the claims of a few of those long-distance drivers who convinced themselves they hadn’t just been half-asleep: time had been stolen from them.
“Well yes, I suppose.”
“Except without the abduction,” Minnie said.
“I mean, we have aliens,” Oliver said. This seemed worth pointing out.
“Yeah but nobody saw them until today.”
“Then just missing time.”
“We think of it as not missing, it just wasn’t ever created,” Wilson said.
“Well that’s cryptic.”
“Oliver, we think the reason for these jumps is that the story that connected the two points was never filled in.”
“I’m not following.”
Minnie, who was leading them down, stopped at the next landing. They were nearly to the bottom.
“Ollie, remember you asked where all the people went?” she said. “And I told you I had a suggestion?”
“But I wasn’t going to like it, yes, I remember.”
“I think they aren’t here because the alien attack was supposed to happen in a nearly abandoned city. Nobody else was written in for this part. Just us.”
Ollie laughed, and waited for the other two to join in. They didn’t.
“But that’s ridiculous,” he said.
“I get it,” Wilson said. “Crowd scenes are incredibly difficult. You never really know how much detail to provide. I can understand not bothering to provide all that background; it just bogs down the action. It’s a good call.”
“But we aren’t talking about a story, Wilson, this is… I can’t believe I even have to say this out loud. This is the real world.”
“Yes, but this real world is missing some important parts.”
“Ollie, look around!” Minerva said. “You know how many people are supposed to be in this city? And we just repelled aliens with technology that doesn’t even exist, I mean, come on.”
“Just because I can’t explain it doesn’t mean your explanation’s correct.”
“A logical fallacy!” Wilson declared. “That’s true!”
He clapped Oliver on the shoulder and started down the stairs again, smiling at Minerva as he went past.
“I told you he wouldn’t believe it,” he said. “He’s too rational. Come on, let’s go find that other guy, I bet he can help.”
There was no other guy waiting for them at the bottom of the stairs, or anywhere along the landing. There also continued to be no other people, and no trains.
Light they had. It came from battery-powered emergency lights along the walls that were just strong enough to create pools of visibility along the darkened platform. It was precisely effective enough to raise concern about what was in the darkness beyond the edge.
Oliver didn’t entirely register how discomfiting the environment was, as he was too busy trying to get a grip on the self-evident nonsense his friends appeared to believe.
The whole thing reminded him, oddly, of Ivor’s story. Ollie’s biggest problem with it—aside from the fact that it was a plot borrowed from The Matrix—was that in order for it to work the characters had to be in a dream and not know they were in a dream.
Oliver had been dreaming his whole life, and not once had he been in one where, at some point, he didn’t recognize that he was in one. Dreams could be emotionally real, but not physically real. Pain, physical exertion, and just basic physics weren’t there, and that was what always pulled him out of the idea that what he was experiencing was reality.
It wasn’t even worth it to question if what he was experiencing was real. The whole it was all a dream premise made for a good twist in a story, but it never really rang true for him, because real dreams just weren’t that substantial. It was a cute plot twist, sure, but not a workable explanation for what he was actually experiencing.
Unfortunately, there weren’t any other good options.
“Did he say where he was going?” Minerva asked, once they’d walked the length of the inbound platform.
“No, just that he was going to push ahead,” Wilson said.
“That’s all?”
“Essentially. There might have been more, but I was occupied with the defense grid at the time.”
“What direction do you suppose ahead is?” she asked.
Wilson just shrugged.
They headed down another flight to the outbound platform. It was even more poorly lit. Minerva took the headlight off her vest and held it up like a flashlight. It improved things only a little. Oliver reached for his own, but discovered it was missing.
More to the point, the entire armored vest was missing. He didn’t remember taking it off, but he must have slipped out of it at the same time he was hurling his cannon pack into the mouth of a roaring alien. That meant the vest was likely spread out over the same vast radius as the insides of that alien. His light was gone, in other words.
“Anybody down here?” Minnie asked.
“Unless he’s playing hide-and-seek, I don’t believe he’s here,” Wilson said.
“I thought I saw something.”
Ollie thought so too. The shadows were surprisingly tricky on this level, and one of them looked almost like a person.
“Let me see,” he said. She handed him the light. He headed toward the ‘person’. It was a cardboard display: one of those human-sized cutouts of a spokeswoman for a monthly wifi package.
“Unless you want to change data plans, this probably isn’t who we’re looking for,” Oliver said.
He redirected the light at the floor in front of her display, because something gleamed in the paving stones when the light caught it. At first he thought it was some kind of moisture, but the ground was dry. There also wasn’t any metal that he could see.
“So what do we do now?” Minerva asked. “Wait for him to come back?”
“Don’t know if he’s coming back,” Wilson said. “And I don’t think we can go back up at this point: nighttime, with only one of those brilliant cannons left, and giant bugs all over the city. We need another way through.”
Ollie knelt down to get a better look. It took some manipulation to get the light pointed exactly right.
“What are you doing?” Wilson asked.
“There’s some writing down here,” Oliver said. “It’s weird.”
“What kind of writing?”
“Just writing. In some phosphorescent paint or something.”
Minnie leaned down to look. She tilted her head three or four times at several angles.
“I can’t see it,” she said.
Oliver put his finger right under the lettering. “Here.”
She squinted.
“Nope, I don’t see it.”
“What do these words that don’t exist say?” Wilson asked.
“That’s a complicated question. Can you see it?”
Wilson peered over Minnie’s shoulder.
“If there are words near your fingers, I don’t see them,” Wilson said.
“So I’m either going nuts—some more—or my eyesight is better than both of yours? Or you’re screwing with me.”
“We aren’t screwing with you,” Minnie said.
“Why is it a complicated question?” Wilson asked.
It was complicated because Ollie knew, as soon as the message came into focus, that this wasn’t written in any language with which he was familiar. The letters were vaguely Arabic, but that was about the best he could do in terms of identification. But even as the rational side of his brain understood this, there was something in the language center that decided it knew what was being conveyed. It was like watching a movie that was subtitled in another language and close-captioned in English at the same time. He could read the words lying underneath the ones he couldn’t translate.
Somehow.
“It just is,” Oliver said. “But I think we should go that way.”
He gestured with the light beam down the length of the tunnel.
“Is that what the message said to do?” Minnie asked.
“More or less.”
The message was an annoying bit of doggerel. It read, to go back for the first time, go in the out. Oliver didn’t get the first part, but the second was clearly saying to take the outbound tunnel inbound. It was useless advice unless the trains weren’t running, which was only one way in which this was absurd—there were many others, including what the message was doing there at all, and why nobody else could see it—but he felt instinctively this was the correct interpretation.
A big arrow would have done the trick just fine, of course. If he ever figured out who put the message there he’d have to tell them this.
“Down the tracks, then?” Minnie asked.
“Assuming the electricity doesn’t return subway service to the city any time soon, it’s probably safe,” Wilson said. “Although I’d stay clear of the third rail. That would be a bad way to learn the electricity’s back. Doesn’t look like there’s much in the way of lighting down there, either.”
Oliver took the initiative to drop down from the platform to the tracks. He’d been taking the subway for much of his life, and for most of that time he’d harbored a secret desire to jump down onto the tracks and walk around. He felt this way even when standing at the edge and noticing soot-colored mice and rats scampering around down there. He doubted he was the only one who had these thoughts.
Standing in the middle of the tracks, he held up the light and verified that it did very little to stave off the looming darkness ahead.
“You’re right, this could stand to be brighter,” he said.
And then it was. The lamp in his hand brightened, until it seemed like he was holding a piece of sunlight.
“Well then,” Wilson said, jumping down next to him. “I guess that will do.”
Minerva jumped down last. Oliver tried handing her back the lamp, since it was hers.
“No, no, you keep that,” she said. “I have a feeling it won’t work as well in my hands.”
Subway tunnels weren’t meant for walking, or at least not for walking on two legs. The area vermin seemed to be okay with it. Oliver wondered if the rats had stories they told each other, and if they did, what those stories had to say about the thunderous monsters that traveled down the tunnels a hundred times a day. Did they have to be taught to hide in the walls every ten minutes to avoid certain death, or was it completely instinctive? Did baby rats learn cautionary tales about the trains? Was the 7:07 C Train their bogeyman?
If the rats had mythologies, surely this day—the day when the trains stopped—would be an important part of the legends.
The larger point was that travel was slow going. The sheer amount of dirt, soot, dust and grease was staggering. They were only halfway to the next stop when Oliver started to consider just turning around, climbing back to the surface, and dealing with the rain and the bugs. It had to be better than the coal lung and the rats.
“How’s it going up here?” Wilson asked, stepping up beside Ollie. Oliver had been in the lead because he was the guy with the big shiny light. The others were content to trail behind and follow in his footsteps as much as possible. This was necessary because the ground was uneven, and nobody wanted to deal with tripping. Every direction looked like a tetanus shot waiting to happen.
“Super. I want a shower.”
“So do I. It’s filthy down here.”
“Yeah. Look, I’ve been thinking about this, and I’ve decided I don’t want to go to Pallas with you guys after all.”
Wilson laughed.
“Oh, it’s much too late for that now.”
“That is where we’re headed, though, isn’t it?” Ollie asked.
“Ultimately, yes. That’s still the plan. But now you understand why we left so early. The commute is challenging.”
This made Oliver laugh, which caused the light to bounce around. It seemed as if the entire tunnel trembled when he did that. Footlights along the left and right side of the tunnel were all that passed for emergency lighting in between the stations. They were only there in the event a disabled car needed to be evacuated, or so Ollie assumed.
“So do you want to tell me what’s really going on?” Oliver asked.
“I don’t have a better explanation, if that’s what you’re looking for.”
“You said you started to notice things a while ago.”
“This is true, yes.”
“And that somehow these things are connected to me, in ways that make zero sense to anyone with a brain and a basic grip on how reality works. How did you get there?”
“We thought it was Wilson, at first,” Minerva said, from behind them.
“That’s true,” Wilson said. “But once that was proven wrong, we decided to create the writers’ underground. Took a while, but here you are.”
Ollie shook his head. “I can’t go down that rabbit hole with you. I didn’t even start writing until a few months ago, how do you imagine I’m… I mean, I existed before then. You did too, didn’t you?”
“Well you didn’t write yourself into existence, Ollie,” Minerva said. “We aren’t saying that.”
“I’m not so sure you didn’t,” Wilson said. “Just to be contrarian about this. Ollie, what’s the name of this city?”
“What? It’s… the name is… It’s the city. What do you mean?”
“You know exactly what I mean. What is the name of the city we live in? Don’t look at me, I don’t know.”
“But that’s crazy.”
“I know it is. Where’d you go to college?”
“I went to community college.”
“So you said. What was the name of it?”
He couldn’t remember. He could picture the buildings, and the classrooms, and a professor he was particularly fond of, but whose name also escaped him.
“This is ridiculous,” he said.
“What’s your full name, Oliver?” Wilson asked.
“That I know. It’s Oliver Naughton.”
“Your full name.”
“Oliver Tennyson Davis Naughton.”
Wilson looked impressed.
“Told you,” Minnie said.
“Told him what?” Ollie asked.
“We had a bet you wouldn’t be able to answer that,” Minnie said. “Because other than Ben, nobody else we met could. Wilson has a last name, but that’s it. I don’t.”
“Well that’s ridiculous,” Oliver said. “Of course you have a last name. It’s…”
Then his mind drew a blank again. He was worried if he guessed, and that guess was right, he would somehow be proving them correct in his effort to prove them wrong: would he be retrieving their surnames from his memory, or creating them on the spot? He wouldn’t know the difference, and maybe they wouldn’t either.
“Okay, but what does any of this prove?” he asked. “I have a name, great.”
“It proves you’re different,” Wilson said.
“It doesn’t prove he created himself too,” Minerva said. “If that’s what you were leaning toward.”
“It doesn’t disprove it either. Plus, look at the consequences. It would mean someone else is involved. Let’s lay out what we’re talking about here.”
They were coming up on another station, and with that came better lighting, from the platform’s emergency lights. Also, it looked like there was another glowing message: something caught in Oliver’s light and glittered back at him.
Wilson continued. “We’re talking about a situation in which an intelligence is actually scripting us, and we think Oliver might be that intelligence, and that’s completely absurd. But now if we don’t allow for the idea that he’s also scripting himself, we’ve got to go up another layer and find out who’s writing for him? Do you see why I don’t want to do that?”
Oliver stopped at the wall opposite the platform. There was definitely another message there, just below an advertisement for a department store. He trained the light on the spot, which was covered in the same dust as the rest of the tunnel. The message came through anyway.
“I think that’s a much more comforting idea, actually,” Minerva said.
“Why?”
“I don’t know; it just is.”
“Why’d we stop?” Wilson asked Oliver. Clearly, he couldn’t see what Oliver could see.
“New message,” Oliver said.
“What does it say?”
It said the good way home is through the home goods and that was nonsense, but Oliver had already stopped puzzling over that and focused on the advertisement above it.
“I don’t know what it means. What stop are we at?”
“Dunston Street, I think,” Minerva said. She was looking at the platform. “It looks kind of familiar, but it’s hard to tell from this angle.”
“Isn’t that the stop with the weird underground entrance?”
“Right, yes, through the basement store,” Wilson said.
In the somewhat distant past, there was a large department store in what had been the center of the shopping area in the center of the city. This part of the city was no longer considered central, but it was still a major shopping plaza, even as the concept of the department store dwindled in significance over time.
The store had been huge: eight levels of public showrooms, with another eight floors above that containing stock and business offices. It was important enough to the downtown area that when the city decided to create the Dunston Street stop, in the Seventies, they put it right next to the giant department store and added an exit ramp that permitted their customers to enter the store at the basement level. In the winter, shoppers could park at the edge of town, hop on the train, and shop for the entire day without taking another breath of unfiltered air.
The appeal of the all-in-one shopping experience waned over the years, and the store eventually went the way of the dodo and the buggy whip. The spot it occupied had since been replaced by a modest, two-story version of essentially the same kind of department store, which put out its overstock on deep discount in the basement. The entrance-via-subway-tunnel was the most interesting aspect of the store, although most shoppers used it as a pass-through to get to the street and perhaps do some shoplifting along the way.
It was a story everybody who’d ever taken the Dunston Street stop was familiar with, because a nicer version of it was on a plaque affixed to the wall next to the store entrance. Briefly, Oliver entertained the notion that he’d literally just come up with that story, rather than that it was always true, but he discarded the idea because it made his head hurt, and was in every other sense simply not helpful. Minnie and Wilson were messing him up with this craziness.
“We should stop here,” Oliver said.
“Is that what the message says?” Minnie asked.
“Not exactly, but we should stop here anyway.”
Getting off the tracks was difficult and disgusting. There were ladders embedded in the platform in a couple of places, but needless to say, they were the kind of ladders that cried out for a pair of gloves, and they didn’t have those. Once that was accomplished, though, it was nice to be standing in a spot where humans were supposed to be. It felt like rejoining the land of the living. Seeing other people around would have probably helped, but one thing at a time.
“Do you think this is where that other guy went?” Minerva asked.
“Maybe, if he can read the same signs I can,” Oliver said. “Or if he’s the one leaving them. That’s assuming he still exists. I could have forgotten to write about him.”
Nobody laughed.
“I’m kidding.”
“We know,” Minnie said.
The way from the landing to the store was a concourse that had an empty popcorn stand, an empty donut stand, and an entrance that led directly to the street. There weren’t any donuts on display, but the popcorn smelled fresh enough.
The door to the store was open. Off-hours, there was a big roll-gate pulled down over the glass doors, and that gate looked like something that could withstand a blast from a bazooka. If it had been closed, Ollie was prepared to ask Minerva to use the pulse cannon on it, because he thought getting inside was important.
He led the way in. The basement shop was a lot of bargain bins full of frequently pawed-over blouses and skirts expertly assembled by children in third-world countries, or so he assumed.
“Why are we here?” Minnie asked.
“Escalator,” he said, pointing the way. She shrugged, and followed.
“Where’s Wilson?” he asked, noting that she was the only one there, suddenly.
“I dunno, I think he’s waiting in the tunnel.”
“Why… never mind, we’ll go back and get him in a minute. Do you have that map Ben gave you?”
“Yeah, yeah, hang on.”
She pulled it out of a side pocket and handed it over. Oliver carried it over to the base of the escalator, which was where the map of the store was located. He put Ben’s map up next to it.
“It’s not a street map,” he said. It matched up to the first floor layout perfectly.
“Look at that,” she said. “So X marks…”
“Home goods,” he read. “Let’s go.”
He headed up the escalator to the main shopping floor, which was significantly larger than the basement level. That was obvious almost immediately; he felt as if he’d been deposited into a warehouse.
Curiously, and unlike the basement, the entrance doors on the ground floor were all locked and chained. He wondered if that meant the employees all escaped through the basement, and just forgot to lock it on the way out.
“All right so, if we head that way…”
He stopped when he realized there was nobody next to him to speak to.
“Minerva?”
He’d gone a few steps from the escalator and turned down the first aisle already. He didn’t remember doing this, but given where his feet were, there wasn’t any other real explanation. But when he backtracked to where he thought the escalator was, he didn’t find it.
“What the hell. Minerva?”
There was a support beam near the front door, and on the beam was a map like the one he’d just been looking at. He looked at it again, and was confused by the revelation that it had no spot for an escalator on it. Ben’s map, still in his hands, also didn’t have a spot for it, but it never did so that wasn’t news.
Still, the escalator has vanished somehow, and both Minnie and Wilson had vanished along with it. To make matters worse, now he was trapped in a locked department store.
Then, on the other side of the sales floor, somewhere in an unseen far corner, a cell phone began to ring.