06. ROSE MAZE

Getting “lost in my thoughts” is exactly what happened. After several turns through the maze, I could tell you it changed as we walked. We should have gone in circles many times over, but never ended up in the same spot, my eidetic memory was screaming at me as to how wrong everything was.

Several turns later, I suddenly was sitting in a medical office. The office itself had lines scoured into the floors and walls from decades of scrubbing fluids, while the sterile scent of medical grade cleansers was permeating my nose causing my eyes to tear up.

Something at the edge of my consciousness sang with recognition as I sat in a body that couldn’t have been older than four or five. Two people entered the room, dressed in lab coats. They were faceless - more accurately, their faces were hidden.

“This is subject Juliet Four X-Ray?” One of the two said. A voice modulator was evident.

“Yes. She shows promise.” The other “scientist” said. Another voice modulator evident.

“She is just a child, are these precautions necessary?” Voice One asked.

“All the tests show a fully eidetic memory. If things go wrong and she comes for us later, you will be glad we took these precautions.” Voice Two replied.

“General subject health?”

“Seems to be good in general. Slightly malnourished, but was found with no abnormalities, or anomalies, other than her mind.”

“And you’re sure that she was alone? An orphan?”

“Sure enough.” Voice Two said with a laugh.

“You said ‘Fully eidetic’? How sure are you?”

“I’m sure enough about it to bet my future. This will be a great start for Terra.”

I was jolted back into my body, standing in the middle of a small clearing with eight entrances. Hera was nowhere to be seen. Thinking back, she hadn’t been with me for several steps before I hit the intersection which led me into the decaying medical office.

I checked the paths into the clearing, looking for footprints to give me some idea as to where I had come from. Nothing.

“Guess I have to do this the hard way.” I spun around in the clearing, then started making my decision the only way that made sense. “Innie, Minnie, Miney...”

Once the old nursery rhyme was complete, I started walking down the path I was pointing at.

Several turns later I was back inside the child's body again. I wasn’t alone. Several children were sitting in desks with their hands lying flat on the top in front of them, staring straight ahead.

“713” I heard a voice coming from my mouth answer. A man walked forward next to a child in front of me after picking up my hand off the desk and marking it.

“Give me pi to the 7th power, eighth decimal.” The man, with a voice, modulated close to “Voice One,” was commanding a child in front of me. There were about a dozen of us, which I could see in the room. My head refused to turn to validate the count, but I knew there were only the twelve of us.

“9” the other kid responded

The Voice continued through the room. When one of the children gave an incorrect number, the Voice would simply grab one of the child's hands and mark an “x” on the back of it.

“Ninth root of ‘e.’” The Voice was at my shoulder. “Twentieth digit.”

“Five.” I heard a voice that I remembered from being a child say.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

The Voice grabbed “my” hand and was about to mark it.

“Sir, you said twentieth digit, not twentieth after the decimal. Five is correct under those circumstances. Four would be the answer for after the decimal.”

I heard something that may have been an ear speaker buzz from the Voices direction as he stopped moving for a moment. He then continued to mark “me.” Twice.

He continued to go through all the children again. Even though the voice of the child “me” answered every answer correctly I was marked every single time.

We got to the last question each. This time it wasn’t identifying a particular digit from a basic equation, but providing an answer to an equation.

The Voice arrived at me.

“Sine of the golden ratio over ‘e’ multiplied by the square of pi.”

I started rattling off the digits, only to be cut off.

“3.6267743...”

“Enough.” He let out a deep sigh, which, wasn’t modulated. “You are a disgrace Juliette Four. Everyone else is dismissed.” He waited until all the other children had filed out. “You will wait here until the headmaster comes for you. You will not move other than breathing. You will not speak. Do you understand?”

I felt my body starting to nod before it caught itself. No verbal or physical acknowledgment provided to The Voice.

“Good.” He turned and left the classroom.

It was several hours until the headmaster entered. I immediately recognized him as the person in charge of the orphanage where I was raised.

“Juliet Four, as of today you will no longer be with the X-Ray group. Nod your head if you understand.”

I nodded. No other signs of acknowledgment.

“Good. Seeing as how you are the fourth person selected for the next group you will receive a new designator today. It should be Daniel, but I am sure the program won’t mind me correcting the gender on that. Danielle, stand. We will take you to the lavatory, you will clean yourself up, then you will be coming with me to the new phase of your life.

I was kicked out of that “flashback,” and I was standing at a dead end. I stood there contemplating what I had seen, then I realized that I actually remembered all of that happening. I had just locked it all away. I turned around to backtrack the way that I had come only to see that I wasn’t at a dead end, but I was boxed in entirely by the rose bushes.

“How the fuck?” I walked back and forth from end to end verifying what my eyes were telling me.

“Five paces long. Just over three and a half paces wide. There are seven hundred thirteen blooming roses.” I started measuring and counting everything. It was all the answers I had given during the exam in the memory which I just recovered.

I went over every piece of data that I had answered during my recalled memory, and there was a corresponding data point. I started going through it all again. Every bit was correct and corresponded to an answer I had given. The solution had to be there, in the data. Why else would I have been shown that, now?

I started reviewing all of the answers given by the other children in my vision. There was nothing in what I just saw that was allowing me to get out of here. I started replaying the flashback in my mind again and stopped. That’s the problem. Something in my flashback isn’t there from my original memory. I went back in my mind to that day. I found it almost instantly.

Quickly, I noted that every other child in the room had given incorrect answers, and I found all the wrong answers also portrayed in some way in this “box” I was stuck in. For the solutions that had been given previously which were too large, it was simple enough to remove an item. One too many leaves here, five too many ants there.

The big issue came when I needed to add items. It was impossible to “add” another petal to a rose if I wasn’t the rose bush itself. Ah-ha! I had to count the number of petals on each rose to find what I was looking for. One of the roses had too many petals compared to the rest of them. I plucked the offending petals and then needed to link the petal to the flower that was lacking.

Placing the two together did nothing.

I had no tools or bots with me to be able to stitch the flower together, and nothing in my area was hinting at what to do. With no other option, I sat down and thought about the predicament I was in.

There had to be a solution here, somewhere.

“She’s not ready, yet.” Hera’s voice broke me out of my meditation

“Give her time.” Mab’s reply was reassuring, but I didn’t know what it referred to.

“She’s been here for several minutes already. What is your displacement at?”

“Hera, I won’t tell you all my secrets, but from her perspective out there, she has barely had the time to exhale. You realize she turned the core of the asteroid into a neural AI core, right?”

“You have the core of your rock as your core? I’m impressed. I may have to borrow some of your cycles. The researchers are using so much of my core that it is getting more and more difficult to think. Worst off, is that they are all studying the languages that we already have.” Hera replied. “They aren’t able to prioritize quite like she could.”

It was challenging to keep myself meditating on the problem while listening to two AI discuss their situations.

I studied the petal and the bloom carefully, for an unknown time, and something clicked, right before I passed out. I recall the voice of Mab, faint and fuzzy gloating “I told you, Hera. It was her.”

As consciousness returned I noticed that I no longer held the rosebud or the petal, and where the wall had been in front of me, it was now open.