I CLIMB. I listen to the sound of my heartbeat. I follow the direction of the pulsing light. I haven’t been so absolutely present in such a long time. When I reach the next valve, I have no idea how long I’ve been walking or how high I’ve climbed relative to the place I entered.
I’ve reached my first pod. When I did that with the first team, we’d all been sick—apart from Suh—and were feeling pretty wretched. I feel fine. Even my shoulder has stopped hurting. As I step through the opening, I remember Sung-Soo, but it’s a fleeting fear, part of out there and feeling so distant now as to seem like a memory of a bad dream.
I’m not afraid of him now.
I’ve been here before. Or, at least, a room very similar, filled with the roughly hewn pots and tools. I can’t see any spaces that my thieving would have left, so I decide it’s a different room. It feels more like a museum display, something to be looked at passively on the way to somewhere else. As soon as I think that, a path appears through the center of the room, this time a bold neon purple. I follow it.
It leads me through a succession of rooms and the museum feel of it all intensifies. The pots and tools get more sophisticated with each collection, leaving me with the idea of technological development. Some of the items aren’t familiar to me in the later rooms, but there are universals throughout relating to basic survival needs and then higher needs such as art and written language. If I had access to my files, I’d match some of the latter to the things I saw in the top room. Instead I’m left in ignorance.
Each room is higher, housed in individual pods reached by a short climb up steps revealed by the guide path. No wonder we couldn’t progress before.
By the time I reach the eighth pod I’m feeling relaxed and gently inquisitive. There’s a pleasant scent that reminds me of vanilla. I’m even looking forward to the next rooms, hoping they’ll join up the simple things I understand from the early displays and the massively advanced synthetic biotech I’m walking through and interacting with. But when the valve opens, I step into a room that breaks the pattern.
There are many pedestals, but only a handful are topped by objects. Each one is so very different from the next that there’s no sense of a collection, not like the previous rooms. All the items are small. None of them are familiar in design or function. There’s no path to guide me through the room and I can’t see a way out.
I start to walk around the boundary, but that screeching sound begins again and I stop, returning to the entrance quickly.
I move from one pedestal to the next, trying to fathom a connection between the objects displayed upon them. As I walk the screeching stops, and even though I feel I’m moving toward the right action, I have no idea what to do next.
The only thing each one has in common is being well used. A piece of metal that could be a bracelet has chips in its decoration. A rounded piece of stone on the next pedestal is smooth with a groove in it, perhaps made by frequent use. I get to the end of the filled pedestals and stand in front of the next empty one.
I have a thought that I immediately discard. It returns, like a dog that’s been kicked but still loves its owner.
Perhaps I need to leave something here too.
A soft blue glow spreads up the pedestal and I know it’s what I need to do. But I have nothing that seems right. The rope is hardly worthy of such a place and my clothes are damp and covered with drying mucus.
Then I remember the doll tucked into my waistband. I pull her free. Even though I can’t see my hand, somehow I can see her in the glow from the pedestal. It looks like she’s floating there, buoyed up by some celestial force. The urge to keep hold of her fills every part of me. I look at her little stitched eyes and the arm I knitted for her. I feel my own warmth held in the wool. I know that I have to give her up.
But she’s the last thing I have. All my treasures are gone now. All those beloved pieces of my life are now dumped outside my house and left to the mercy of the elements. I can feel tears running down my cheeks. I know I have to let it all go. I can’t go back there. I have to let her go too. I put her on the pedestal and think of my child in the box at the end of the Parisian church, of my father’s words trampled beneath the feet of our attackers, of my mother’s painting buried under a pile of things I spent years collecting. I release the doll from my fingers, see her rest on the stone and take a step back.
The purple color deepens on the floor until it coalesces into a path again. I see a way out now.