Marco sat over the padded trousers of his astronaut’s suit on blue blades of grass. Oily trees sketched themselves before his gaze, enclosing that stylized meadow—the steady breeze set in motion the fractals, the illusive trunks and branches contrasting strongly with the bleached absence of a sky.
There was something that made him stop worrying about a thing and—most worrisome of all—he wasn’t alarmed by it. An airborne drug that made the landscape more psychedelic. Marco couldn’t fight it, and so happily prodded himself on his bare elbows. The skin over his back felt every bit of the fresh grassy caress. The wind blew his long black hair to one side. Comfortably numb, his eyelids closed.
In his stupor, hot visions of the purple reptilian. He desired her, but opening his eyes Marco found there were no trees, no alien, and no him! He shrunk in a horrible darkness where he couldn’t feel himself breathe. Even though bodiless, he was somehow tossed around, drowning in rushing data.
The operator popped the data bubble, and some flickering distant colors activated Marco. Blurry as they got closer, the moment he punched through them his back sank in a soft mattress. He squeezed his drowsy eyes, but he was awake.
A cotton sheet with a set of woolen blankets covered him, his head resting comfortably on two eiderdown pillows. Through the window at the foot of the bed, lazy clouds painted over a blue sky and nothing more. There was a sweet and penetrating smell of bee’s wax, also smeared over the antique furniture that decorated the bedroom. He tilted his head in checking his surroundings, but rapidly became prey of introspection. He felt clean and well rested. Memories of drifting without a body were recent, though that awakening was somewhat more disquieting.
The sound of shifting blankets as he came to a sit to one side of the bed was loud in the dead silence, and the bare soles of his feet met the polished hardwood flooring.
Naked, he made it to the nearest door and wrapped his palm around its cold brass knob. After spinning it, he found a white and aqua green bathroom with exquisite ceramic, porcelain, and green stone finish—it was only natural for it to be fitted with a whirlpool.
Sunlight filtered in through a sealed window. He reached its ledge and was greatly amazed. That bathroom was terrifyingly high up, half a mile at least. From what he could see, there was no other skyscraper and actually no other buildings to speak of, just green hills to a gulf that stretched inland near an imperceptibly arched horizon.
A calm Marco shook his head in disappointment while walking back to the bedroom. Entering it, he noticed the other two doors—an identical one opposite to the bathroom, and a plainer one by the side of the bed. From his new angle, out of the bedroom window, he could admire the view extending further to the right—a snow-capped mountain much higher than the skyscraper towered over the landscape. A wickedly spiked chain stretched behind it, covering the whole distance to the sea. It was such an extraordinary, fantastic location that Marco feared the Zigs had their hands in it. He only had the word of the alluring representative of the Pranksters to believe the contrary and he didn’t, since he had yet to ascertain if Gianluca and Kalexis were fine.
Marco turned away from the window with displeasure and faced the bed. It was an older styled one with overlapping mattresses and a curvy cast iron headboard. There also was a mahogany wardrobe with drawers on the bottom reaching the ceiling, and on top of a bedside table was a Bakelite dial-phone. The furniture and the three doors could have easily been manufactured in Italy at the end of the eighteenth century, though it was awkward to be staring at that iconic 60s’ rotary phone. He walked up to it only to find no cable was attached.
Someone left a golden key next to the phone. Characters engraved on its ring read the alphanumerical code Z2-0459. Marco tossed it in the air and caught it a few times before putting it back where it belonged. Then, regardless of being nude, he made his way to the door by the bed that he presumed led outside.
To his sides and straight ahead, seamless glass lined the open inside of a massive, hollow truncated cone structure. Marco found himself near the top of it. Because the outer wall of the hallway he just stepped into was transparent, he could see seven or eight larger elliptical floors above him—ending in an open roof with a circumference longer than four football stadiums.
Directly below the blue sky, everything could be seen through, and Marco did not have to count to know there were at least five hundred black doors on his floor only, gradually less on lower floors where the inside of the cone became thinner, equaling larger rooms on the outside. The architect who designed that had access to a construction material both structural and clear—radial bridges connected the four ends of each hallway to a quad lift seated within a staggering main glass pillar. It was possible to see all the way down to the inner garden at the very far bottom. Walking counter clockwise through the transparent elliptical corridor, he lost his gaze in the chasm to his left. It chilled him how every one of the thousands of black doors was shut, the crystal lifts immobile—no other was wandering that gigantic wonder.
Unnerved, Marco decided it was the right time to turn around. Each door in the hallways had its unique code just like that on the key, otherwise being identical. Right then, he didn’t want to find out if they were open or closed and returned to his room. Crossing the threshold his bare feet stepped from the soft carpet of the hallway to polished waxed hardwood boards of the bedroom, and he clicked the door closed behind him. The loneliness of that extravagant place was no excuse for being on display, and that was why he should have inspected the mahogany wardrobe next to the bathroom door. Instead, he went to open the room to his right—where the almost seamless window curved with the skyscraper. He paused before the wide afternoon view outside that essential dining room. A sliding glass door granted access to a small balcony. Moving slowly across the room, Marco ran his fingers over the linear frames of the minimal chairs placed around a rectangular table—he pulled one out and leaned back on it when the phone rang.
He was so startled that he lost his balance—the thin legs of the chair slipped, skipping away from underneath him! Before he knew it, he banged the back of his head against the hardwood floor.
He hardly felt a thing, and sprung up smiling wildly as the phone bells kept chiming—in him the unmistakable sensation of lucid dreaming. His feelings about being there changed rather dramatically. Unlike the waiting bubble he previously been in, that reality was lifelike and its details sharp and consistent. That could have been why he didn’t ignore the ringing phone to do a new heart’s contempt—although he couldn’t understand why, he felt urged to slide the glass door open, jump off the balcony to spread wings and fly away.
On the fourth ring, Marco was shaken out of that inexplicable state of mind. Quite shocked about it, he went back to the bedroom and answered the call. He picked up the receiver and gazed out the window—he no longer felt like he could do what he resisted moments before. The white modular cord flexed as naked he held the phone in his left hand.
“What’s happening to me? Who is this?” he imperatively asked.
“It’s me,” the sweet voice of the purple alien was easy to recognize. “The Elder is here to explain everything, and you’ll have to see him since you answered the phone. Make your way to any of the lifts, and feel free to take any of the vehicles in the garage to go find him.”
Marco felt tricked and lied to. “I’ve been through this before—you told me I was being freed—” he angrily twirled the cord around his finger— “I don’t see my friends, so I won’t take an order as an answer to my question.”
“Your friend Gianluca survived, and Kalexis is fine as well. You are among the first to be in this new world, but as soon as the cryobox grid is wired up, the identities of the thousands of aliens it contains will appear. It’s unprecedented, and I’m excited. It will give you a better chance at repopulating, by getting to know humans in advance—if you like, you can stay for as long as you like.
“There are other humans, Araks, as well as a considerable number of individuals for each of the races the Zigs collected. It was part of their plan to have you repopulate, while objectifying you, of course. Now that the second part is over, I do agree that you still deserve a chance at the first.”
Marco was speechless. The idea of meeting up with other people thrilled him, but the whole concept of repopulating disturbed him. “You must meet the Elder. Considering all of your accomplishments, it should be easy for you to find him.”
“I’m not going anywhere without my friends.”
“But they are here—you will meet them on your way.”
Lying over the antique bed, Marco shook his head. “But what if I don’t want to dream like this?”
“I urge that you train, but you don’t have to. You can fall back into unconscious stasis, but only after you see the Elder. This program will never close for you if you don’t, and I strongly recommend you stay. When you wake up, you may very well find yourself unprepared and on the Zig experimental planet.”
“Even if all you told me is true, I am still being monitored, aren’t I? And I suspect you will monitor us very closely wherever you place us.”
“We respect your privacy, and are here to give you the means to make it on your own.”
Marco grumbled. “You know what? I don’t think you care about us, or you would have woken us up together.”
“I do care about you, Marco,” said she in her sweet voice, but Marco wasn’t budged, and did not reply straight away.
At a first glance, he found the room he was in almost indistinguishable from a real one. Only after falling from the chair in the dining room did he learn how he couldn’t injure himself there. Agreeable feelings were well defined though, such as the texture of the sheets he was lying on.
He held the receiver to his ear, marveling about having proof that everything around him was simulated—he smiled before the clouded light blue sky beyond the foot of the bed.
She remained silent as he let the seconds tick by in wonder. Now he wanted her name, why he felt tugged to the balcony but the line went dead.
When he walked back into the dining room, Marco was wearing a pair of aviator’s, a loose black t-shirt, and a wide pair of jeans. He made his way out into the round, transparent hallway without locking his room behind. Pacing toward the nearest bridge, once again he took in the frightening features of that construction—it was so quiet that he could hear his own steps. He went across the nearest glass bridge, made his way to the central pillar with its four lift tubes.
Bridges beneath him shimmered like the transparent spokes of a futuristic bicycle wheel—all the way to the green garden at the bottom. Marco found it hard to distinguish the glass lift with no cables coming up to his platform, as he nervously waited for it. Being on top and in the middle of that clear structure, with black doors in concentric rings pointed at him, was starting to give him the creeps.
Just like in a bad dream, the transparent lift opened in the most silent of ways. Marco directed his attention to where he expected to find the controls... and almost jumped out when the lift imperatively closed him in.
His stomach experienced the gentle sensation of descent.
Having nothing better to do with himself, he recalled how amplified that sensation was back in the precipitating rescue vehicle.
He adjusted his sunglasses over his average nose, both hands in his pockets touching the golden room key. How much time had gone by, if any? And did it matter? Just like the Eilons avoided his demise by the hands of the Kronians, Marco felt that being saved by the Pranksters was in many ways similar—freedom and privacy were empty words when having to adhere to the conditions dictated by the savior.
The lift ride was long, just like his slow ascent from the caves on Enehea—only back then it was for real. When about to reach the bottom garden with its fountains, hundreds of circular floors towered above him, the blue sky still fully visible through the bridges. As the lift traveled underground for a dozen or so seconds, Marco prepared himself for just about anything... but once the cabin stopped, he was confronted with almost total darkness. The only lights still on were the LEDs on top of the cabin—then neon tubes flickered and lit a huge underground reserve.
Among the cars in rows right outside of the lift were some of the most beautiful Marco had ever laid his eyes upon—they were terrestrial and by Italian, German, and British manufacturers. They were extremely expensive. A Pagani Zonda, a Bugatti Veyron, a yellow McLaren F1, and the Aston Martin One-77 figured among them. These marvels shined like the gold they were worth. Distancing himself in exploration, Marco discovered all imaginable cars and bikes, and not just from Earth. He was amazed by the sheer variety of brand-new vehicles stuffed in there—at least two thousand just on that level! An awe-inducing number of unique lines and specs there for him to choose—the sizes, the types, and the engines varied greatly, but for the most part he would say the vehicles were road legal. In that museum of inventive automotive design time slipped away fast as, distancing himself from familiar shapes, he went past original car after original car like browsing the paintings of an art gallery. Finally something that truly reflected his mood—its GT racing style came straight out of a retro futurist Japanese street-racing manga. For Marco it was as if his dream car had just appeared before his eyes—matte black and riding an inch off the ground.
He approached the racer to try and figure out how to open it, but he couldn’t tell its windshield from the chassis, let alone find the door handle! Only when he finally touched it, testing the smoothness of its paint over the cold metal, did the headlights come on—two smallish ones, on top of the other, set low below the tapered bonnet. The cockpit unsealed with a clack, and Marco pulled the gull-wing door open.
Suddenly a terrible sound bounced on the low ceiling and the curvy lines of the parked vehicles—it was the deep and intimidating growl of a massive V8 engine revving hard before it selected D.
So immersed in that illusion of reality, Marco felt genuine fear as it neared. Its square headlights then reflected on the front ends and the side windows of the lined up vehicles.
An 80s’ red pickup truck turned from the connecting strip of tarmac to the smaller parking one where Marco currently was. In accelerating, hundreds of break horses explosively released through its squealing rear tires.
Standing outside the GT race car, Marco was reassured that no one could or would ever hurt him in there, including whoever was driving that scarily overpowered pickup truck. It kept rocketing toward him and at the very last moment it swerved, leaving Marco aghast as it went crashing right into the car right next to his!
He wished goodbye to his legs and spine—the grill of the truck was hurled at him. Paralyzed by fear and surprise, he had no time to get out of the way. Metal sheet clanged and distorted. The mangled pickup groped the car it hit before its engine kicked the bucket right on top of the havocked GT.
He took a few seconds to realize what happened—it upset him to be twenty yards away from the scene, gaping at the dozen cars the candy apple red truck had taken out. There was no fire or smoke as the driver’s side door was kicked open and fell on the wreck below.
It was Gianluca to laugh his contempt out loud. He only regained a bit of composure when he saw how shocked Marco was in crossing gazes. He was wearing clothes similar to those he loved back on Earth—cargo pants, a wide colorful poncho, and a pair of worn tennis shoes. The only thing missing was his straw hat, but he was wearing his rounded spectacles. With a few jumps he got down and away from the broken vehicles to approach Marco. “Hey, my man, good to see you here,” he said, light-heartedly.
“What the fuck’s wrong with you?” Marco was dead serious.
“Don’t be such a downer—you know as well as I do, this shit isn’t for real.” And Gianluca gestured around in saying so.
“It doesn’t justify you running me over with that pickup truck of yours,” debated Marco, briefly pointing at it. The whole row of unique cars affected by the accident now looked like a modern art sculpture with that mangled ‘89 resting on top of it.
Gianluca didn’t walk all the way up to Marco. He turned around to start walking away holding his hands behind his back. Marco followed him.
“Yes it does,” replied Gianluca, without facing his friend who walked shortly behind him. “When do you ever get the chance of being inside a video game, Marco? You have to take advantage of it.”
“What happened to you, Gianluca?”
Still walking, before replying Gianluca took a deep breath. “I helped the troopers recover the prisoners, did you know? I kicked ass before some serious shit went down.”
They went all the way down to where Gianluca made the turn with his pickup, and stood in the middle of the track. White arrow signs painted on the tarmac showed the way out of the garage.
“Left or right?” Gianluca turned around to face Marco with a casual interrogative expression.
“It sounds like you know more than I do about what’s going on here,” said Marco. “Right after I was teleported, I met this purple reptilian alien—”
“Satkhela?” inquired Gianluca, interrupting him.
“She didn’t introduce herself.”
The two friends paused to converse between aerodynamic cars.
“She’s a purple alien, all right. I thought I was a goner on the Nova, and then I found myself here. Isn’t it something, Marco?” And after he said so he let out a relieved smile.
“They didn’t exactly have our permission...”
“The Pranksters saved us, I helped their troopers save others like us and seen... those capsules with my very own eyes.”
“They may set us free, but I don’t think you fully understand,” said Marco, and this time he walked ahead. He chose to take a right turn with his friend on the follow. He checked out the vehicles he passed to see if any caught his attention—after Gianluca was so kind to destroy the one he fell in love with. “The Pranksters don’t really care about us,” added Marco, “the only thing they care about is for the Zigs to respect their intergalactic regulations. They never bothered for all other atrocities they committed, and won’t stop them from abusing people in this galaxy—just like they didn’t do a thing about the Kronians. Also, what was that all about, running me over with the truck?”
Marco stopped in not hearing his friend reply. When he turned around he found him staring at the rubber tips of his runners.
“It was the Elder to tell me to do this to you, Marco.”
“Why?” replied Marco, perplexed. “And what of Kalexis?”
“I haven’t seen her yet, but she is here. Satkhela told me they woke her up two days ago... somewhere else. I’ve been here three days and should have died at least a dozen times, a dozen,” he said, and then laughed with genuine pleasure. “Can’t get enough of this, I’m seriously considering staying for good.”
Marco resumed walking. “That was a stupid prank you two pulled, then,” he said, trying not to be angry about it. “What else did the Elder tell you to do?”
“We will get to meet other humans. Satkhela told you, right, how we got to repopulate. Too bad they are from the future, so nobody we know. I am more excited about those aliens we’ll get to be with—can you imagine hundreds of different alien races coexisting on one planet? That’s what Satkhela says is going to happen.”
“I’m not too sure about that. Was there any other reason to crash into me other than scaring the shit out of me?” asked Marco, a little skeptical of his friend.
“Right, I didn’t say—something about making you fully conscious of the unreality... part of the message the Elder has for you.”
“And did he have a message for you, too?”
Gianluca looked aside and focused on infinity. “He said I am crucial in saving the human race—” his tone of voice darkened, his eyes glistening— “he told me of how there are no more humans on Earth, how they lied to us and we did go extinct. The same is true for most races taken over by the Kronians.”
Marco grimaced in pain. Gianluca, close to tears, walked up to Marco and placed a hand over his shoulder. In his grave smile Marco could see hope—hope for a second chance as a member of a race wishing to exist again.
“I’m sure we’ll find Kalexis after you see the Elder,” said Gianluca, interpreting the apprehension clearly showing through Marco’s expression. “It’s important you go and see him, it will clear things out.”
“Right,” replied Marco. “I would have already been on my way if it wasn’t for you.”
And in hearing Marco say so, Gianluca went back to his usual self, giving out a dry burst laughter—as if he had chosen to live in the enormous grief of tragedy he knew humans would be doomed for sure.
“All right then,” said Gianluca, pointing at a random vehicle. “Let’s get our ass in that crap box and the hell out of here.”
Marco was at the wheel of a sporty five-door hatchback. He made it out of the underground and onto the access ramp to a five lane super highway cutting through the forested plain, which took directly to the mountains. Marco had to speed for ten minutes before he could see the full shape of the ominous building in his rear view mirrors.
Even if it was all a single window and didn’t have any arches, Marco thought it was somewhat similar to the Coliseum. A resemblance due to its cylindrical shape and inner truncated cone structure, though the building was at least ten times wider and thirty times taller.
After getting in the blue car, Gianluca gave Marco directions to get out and up on the highway and then, for a while, they kept to themselves. Since there weren’t any other cars on the road Marco took possession of the center lane and stepped on it, making the dotted white lines rush faster until he reached a steady high speed. The road was flawless and keeping the brand-new car on it was easy—beyond the guardrails of the elevated highway the tops of trees went blasting past.
Gianluca adjusted his seat so he could lean further back. “I thought that I’d never see this day,” he said.
“What you mean, are you still talking about being in a fucking videogame?”
“Shit man, shit, of course!” exclaimed Gianluca, “Just-just feel it, just look at it,” he said, brushing the plastic dashboard with his fingertips.
Marco was not impressed. He controlled the steering wheel with one hand and rested the other on the gear knob. Bugs squashed on the windshield and he would have to wipe them off soon. He could swear that all the small adjustments he constantly applied to the steering wheel were caused by air turbulence—he had to acknowledge the simulation was flawless, but he refused to give it its due credit.
There was still plenty of sun and of highway to go. He attempted to see beyond appearances to understand Gianluca’s fascination, but all he could see was the tarmac he was busy driving over, the forest expanding on both sides of the carriageway and to the front that jagged chain of mountains outlined behind Great Mountain shortly to the right, impossibly lone. “I wouldn’t want to stay here a moment longer than I have to,” said Marco after contemplating the scenic view.
“I beg to differ. You haven’t seen any of this, yet. Yesterday it brought me back home man, we can go together if you like, back to our home town—everyone’s there, they may not be real but everything was exactly the way I remember it.”
“You said it! It’s not real. I like to play a video game as long as I can switch it off when I want. I don’t like it, it’s like Tetris is playing me.”
Gianluca laughed.
Marco had no problem discussing existence with his friend while keeping to a high speed because of the absolute lack of traffic. “I don’t want to argue with you, but what the Pranksters are doing isn’t right.”
Gianluca looked puzzled, “Cut it bro—what’s wrong with rescuing us and giving us another chance? Or would you have preferred being homies with the Zigs?”
“You still don’t get it, so I’ll try and make it simpler—we’re falling from one pair of hands into another. At least we knew we couldn’t trust the Zigs. Sure, we’re being freed, but this is a strange form of abuse—who knows, we could be dealing with the Zigs and are on the experimental planet.”
“Ah! You don’t know them enough to trust them yet—meeting the Elder should do it, that’s how I see it,” said Gianluca, finally understanding why Marco was hesitant.
“No it won’t,” retorted Marco. “I wish we were free and this isn’t freedom—I bet you any money that Kalexis agrees with me.”
The small but powerful engine of the car purred and vibrations were slight as Marco kept his foot down.
“The Elder is a really nice guy,” said Gianluca after a minute. “I’m sure you’ll be buddies.”
“If he calls himself a Prankster how can he be taken seriously? And what about that purple alien, what did you say her name was?”
“You mean Satkhela?”
“Right,” said Marco, nodding. “Did she try and seduce you, too?”
Since Marco wasn’t hearing a reply he momentarily turned to Gianluca, finding that he opened his mouth in surprise.
“No-no—why? Did she really do that to you, Marco?”
“Oh, yes, she did,” replied Marco. He smiled out of absurdity as he directed his attention back on the road. “She was butt naked when we met.”
Gianluca was astonished. “That’s fucked. She didn’t seem the type, with that brown potato monk sack of hers. Why would she do that?”
Marco slapped the steering wheel hard with the palm of his left hand. “Because I’m the unfortunate star of the Zig show, fuck! She told me she found me attractive, so she must have seen it.”
“Shit man did you—”
“You’re a curious bastard, aren’t you, Gian?”
Gianluca laughed in hearing Marco say that.
“I want to be with Kalexis, not with the first bitch that falls over me because I’m a celebrity.”
Gianluca couldn’t contain laughter, and Marco laughed as well and was almost brought to tears, forcing him to slow the car down.
When Gianluca turned the stereo on there was one and only radio station airing. Excellent record after excellent record with no advertising—right then it was playing When the Levee Breaks something which, though awesome, only added to the dreamlike state of that foreign land.
Seen from above, the straight highway traveled across the plain before rising over gentle hills, at least a hundred miles still dividing the hatchback from the bottom of Great Mountain. Marco couldn’t wait to find out what this Elder was all about and get it over with. Briefly talking with Gianluca only reaffirmed his desire of getting out of there as soon as he could. His wish was that once he was done with formalities he could convince Kalexis to do the same. His reasoning mind wanted to believe that was because of injustice, but deep down truth was he wanted her for himself and, knowing how both he and she were supposed to repopulate their races, was afraid that by staying too long he would lose her to some mighty fearsome Arak suitor.