Craft Arc

The room was blindingly white. It was small and cramped, only a few paces in any direction, with rounded edges and corners. In the centre was a plastic box with buttons and a transparent surface, built into the floor, also with rounded edges. LEDs silently lit everything from sockets in the ceiling. There was a strong antiseptic smell, and the air was bitingly cold, condensing every breath into fog. Traces of ice glittered on the walls and ceiling.

Two girls were bent over the box, pressing buttons frantically. Both wore bleached white hospital gowns and nothing else, other than that one had glasses. The one with glasses was half-Asian, with shoulder-length black hair and unusual green eyes; the one without was pure Caucasian, with pale blue eyes and blonde-brown hair tied in a French braid. They had only been in the room a minute and were already gasping from the cold.

“Any ideas?” asked the one with glasses, her teeth chattering.

“Could we just” she took a shuddering, painful breath “smash the plastic?”

“Bad idea. If you de-ice wrong, they die. I think.”

No-glasses looked through the top of the box again. Inside was a third girl in a gown, this one with auburn hair, with a pink-tinted respirator mask. She was unmoving down to the cellular level and technically dead already, but not permanently so.

“Imma press everything.”

“Don’t press everything!”

Glasses shoed No-glasses away from the console and looked over it again. The buttons were labelled, but the labels were all in Spanish. She didn’t know Spanish.

No-glasses pushed back over and began pressing each button, methodically working her way along the dashboard. Presently, the console beeped, and an LED display lit up.

Continuar?

“Yes, continue,” she said, and hit a promising, big green button.

The console displayed more Spanish and the box hummed and began to heat up.

“Can you please hurry up?” No-glasses said to the machine through gritted teeth, gasping at the cold every five or so syllables. “I am literally freezing my tits off here, and this gown is made of tissue paper.”

Glasses moved over and pulled No-glasses into a hug. No-glasses would normally have been too proud to allow it, but the alternative was to freeze, so she curled her arms around her for her body heat.

“If you tell anyone about this, I will lie,” she said.

“Aw, and my entire life had been leading up to that. Y’know, it’d be warmer to put our hands under the gowns.”

“I want to give you fifty kilos of no, but I only have a ten kilo bag and I don’t want to spill any. Can I fill it up, then you take out all the no and give the bag back to me, and we do this five times in a row?”

“That’s a lot of no.”

“If something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing properly.”

Glasses was too cold to think of any more repartee, so she just pulled No-glasses tight while they waited for their friend to thaw. Presently, the box gave a cheery little alert ping, and the plastic top folded itself inward.

“Hmm?” said the girl inside, her eyelids fluttering open.

No-glasses was on her feet in a flash, reaching down to take Auburn’s hand. “Are you awake?”

Auburn scrunched her eyes. “Um. No?”

“You’re supposed to give someone a few minutes to wake up properly after cold sleep,” Glasses said.

“Too bad,” said No-glasses, and touched the frigid back of her hand to Auburn’s neck.

Auburn shrieked and jumped.

No-glasses just looked at her unapologetically. “Can we please leave?”

The three girls staggered to a thick chunk of white plastic-coated metal like a fridge door, pushed through, and slammed it behind them, then sank to sit against the door. They found themselves in a corridor made partly of stainless steel, partly uncut rocks like a cave floor. It was cylindrical and extremely long, tapering upward in the distance in either direction. Doors of all description led off at irregular intervals; some were in the walls, but others were in the floor, and plenty in the ceiling, accessed by iron ladders freestanding or set into the walls. It was much darker than inside the cold storage room, the only light coming from phosphorescent blue fungi growing all over the walls.

“Where are we?” Auburn asked. There was something creepy about the dark curving corridor, half sterile metal and half packed gravel; they instinctively kept their voices down.

“We’d kind of hoped you could tell us,” said Glasses. “We don’t remember anything about this place. We think the cold sleep causes amnesia; we’re trying to find our other friends, and hopefully somebody will know something if we look hard enough. Do you at least recognise us?”

Auburn stared at her for a while, trying to remember. Her mind felt fuzzy from the cold sleep, even simple concepts and parts of muscle memory eluding her. “You’re … I know you, your name’s on the tip of my tongue … Sue. Sue Wong. And you,” she turned to No-glasses, “you’re Michelle, um, Bright.”

“Nice, Lottie,” Sue said with a grin. “It took us way longer to remember even that. But then, I’m pretty sure that’s because we were woken by a random equipment malfunction and it didn’t thaw us properly.”

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“When we did you, we basically knew exactly how to do it perfectly,” Michelle said. Sue, who was sitting on Charlotte’s other side, tugged at her collar.

“Hey, where’s my brother?” Charlotte suddenly asked, looking around. “I think he was with me when I went to sleep. It’s all really blurry, but he was there.”

“You have a brother?” Michelle asked.

“I think I remember him,” Sue said. “Sort of. Tall, cute, godawful taste in music?”

“I like it,” Charlotte said defensively.

“How cute?” Michelle asked. “And how godawful, for that matter?”

“Eight out of ten for both,” Sue said. “Maybe even a nine.”

“Hey!” Charlotte said, flustered. “Could we please not talk about how cute my brother is?”

“Nine is pretty cute,” Michelle said to Sue. “And musical taste can be taught. So, here’s what I’m thinking. You and I came from the same chamber, so they put two or more in together, and if they’re brother and sister, maybe they were together.”

“So you think we should mess around with it some more?” Sue said. “If he’s there, maybe we can get it to cycle him to the thawing chamber?”

“We should definitely wake him as soon as possible,” Charlotte said firmly. “How do we do it?”

“Go in there and mash buttons until it does the thing,” Michelle said. “Pretend you’re an old person, except you can still do things instead of just locking up. Before we do, though, can we look around a bit for some warmer clothes? They don’t call it cold sleep for nothing.”

“We should probably do that anyway,” Sue said, picking at her gown and glancing over at Michelle’s. “This fabric’s, uh, pretty thin.” Michelle folded her arms.

They stood up and set off toward the nearest door, a Japanese-style slider covered in white paper. Inside was a small ocean of paint of every colour, partially mixed, slowly drying out. Canvas hung from the walls or sunk into the paint. From the doorway, it looked like most were life-size nude portraits. A jumble of open paint cans lay in one corner; it looked as though a heavy impact had knocked over what could once have been an organised stack and dislodged their lids. Easels, brushes, blank canvases, and other painting supplies were scattered around the room.

“This just raises further questions,” Sue said.

Michelle pointed a toe forward, swirled it around a slick of lime green paint, decided there wasn’t anything inside worth getting covered in paint, and pulled it back, wiping it mostly clean on the stainless steel hallway outside.

“Do either of you recognise anyone in the paintings?” Sue asked.

The girls all looked again. The paintings were of every combination of age, sex, and race.

“I don’t,” said Michelle, “and I’d rather regain my memories by literally any method other than staring at naked people.”

“You’ll hit puberty eventually,” Sue said sympathetically.

“You’ll get standards eventually. A guy’s alright to look at if he’s between about fifteen and thirty. That’s maybe a fifth of these, and half are girls anyway. Back me up here, Lottie.”

“I think this room probably doesn’t have any warm clothing,” Charlotte said.

“Oh yeah,” said Sue, “that was what we wanted, wasn’t it.”

They left, sliding the door shut behind.

“Could this be some sort of apocalypse vault?” Michelle said. “Maybe there was a nuclear war on the surface, and everyone was rushed down here and put into cold sleep for until the fallout decayed. But there was an earthquake or something, and now the machinery is failing?”

“I guess it fits,” Sue said, shrugging. “But I still don’t remember anything. Lottie, what do you think?”

Charlotte shut her eyes and breathed deeply. Disjointed snatches of memory came to her. “There was something. I’m not sure it was nuclear war, but some big disaster. We had to bring everyone here to escape, but not everyone could fit, so we … did some clever trick to get around that, I don’t remember what.” She opened her eyes. When she was properly awake, they were naturally wide enough to make the rest of her look small by comparison, brown flecked with irregular spots of orange. “There should still be more people than this. Thousands at least. But it’s so empty.”

“They’re probably all in cold sleep,” Michelle said. “That’d be the trick; you could cut out a lot of life support that way. Let’s keep looking.”

They quietly walked along to the next door. It was hard to make out in the gloom, but when Charlotte ran her hands over it, she realised it was covered in thick foam.

“?” she said.

Michelle felt it with the back of her hand, shrugged, and opened the door.

The corridor was almost tomblike in its silence, but when the door opened, they were met by a blast of noise so loud that it made Charlotte jump and squeak; after a few seconds, it resolved itself into the sound of a club dance song with a bone-shaking bass track. Through the door was a square room. It was divided into large tiles, sixteen by sixteen, all backlit in blinking neon colours; this made it brighter than outside, but still very dark. At the far end was a bar. A man sat at it, his back to them. The girls exchanged glances, tried and failed to talk over the music, and entered.

Sue waved the others on ahead and turned to the side of the room, where a laptop was plugged into a speaker network. With some fiddling, she found the volume control and turned it down until she could hear herself speak. The man turned to look; from the side, they could see that his back was badly curved. Charlotte hesitated a moment, leaving Michelle to take the lead.

“Hi,” she said with her sweetest smile. “I’m so sorry to interrupt you – you weren’t in the middle of anything, were you? – but my friends and I were wondering if you could give us a little help?”

“No,” he said without any hesitation, and he turned back around. Closer to, they could see that he was nursing a glass of what was probably beer.

Michelle’s smile slipped, and she cracked the knuckles of one hand. Charlotte and Sue gave her questioning looks. She rolled her shoulders, hitched her fake smile back into place, and sat beside the hunchbacked man.

“You see, we’ve all got a little bit of memory loss,” she said. “You don’t happen to know where we are, do you?”

“No.”

“No you don’t know, or no you won’t tell us?” Sue asked.

Michelle shot her a look of ‘shut up, don’t ruin this’; Sue replied with ‘ruin what?’; Michelle softened into ‘fair point.’ This all took less than two seconds.

“No, I won’t tell you,” said the man. He took a long drink.

“So you’re being unhelpful on purpose,” Michelle said. “Are you just that desperate for attention, or do you think we’ll leave you alone faster if you don’t get what you want?”

He kept drinking for a few more seconds before setting his glass down. “You’re an idiot child who doesn’t know a thing about what’s going on,” he said.

Michelle bristled, ‘idiot child’ being among the most aggravating phrases in modern English, but Charlotte pressed forward. “Please. We need help. Can’t you at least tell us what this place is called?”

He glanced at her and returned to his drink. In the dark, she couldn’t be absolutely sure, but his expression looked guilty. He knows me. “It’s called The Aquinas.”

“Was that really so hard?” Michelle said. The hunchback ignored her.

“I don’t want to bother you, really,” Charlotte said. “Do you know anyone here who speaks Spanish?” He said nothing. “Or at least where to find some warmer clothes?”

He harrumphed, like she’d asked him to give her a kidney. “Go outside, door on the ceiling with a white circle on it.”

“Thank you!”

“Don’t mention it,” he said, “and don’t come back.”

They turned to leave. He stomped over to the computer to turn the volume up; deafeningly loud dubstep chased them out of the room. Sue clicked the door shut behind, drowning out the music.

“You should have let me go at him longer,” Michelle said. “He would have broken eventually.”

“Eventually is a big word,” Sue said. “Would it have been worth it? He was a pretty big douche.”

“We still have no idea where we are.”

“If there are people around, we’ll find someone nicer sooner or later,” Charlotte said. “Let’s go find those clothes.”