Chapter 29: Longing for Civilization

Despite the glow of my aura, if it weren't for the sliver of light shining through the small crack at the bottom of the door, I wouldn't have been able to see a thing in the dark closet.

I'd somehow ended up in a small utility room turned broom closet. There was a water heater, a fuse box, and a smattering of cleaning products and tools. Pressing my ear to the door, I felt around for the handle. When I didn't hear any sound coming from the room on the other side, I tried to let myself out. Turning the handle, I heard a click from the door unlocking automatically.

Did they lock me in a closet without realizing the door wouldn't stay locked from the inside? I wondered. Then again, maybe the door wasn't meant to keep me in but to keep curious others out.

Pushing against the door revealed they just had other measures in place. The handle turned, but the door wouldn't open. Then again, the door seemed as cheap as any closet door; I doubted it would be all that hard to bust out.

Still, I hesitated. I didn't know how I ended up in a closet or what that vision was about.

One second, I was walking down the street; the next, I was having a disembodied dream or vision of other people trying to survive the apocalypse. The last time something like that happened, I found myself in an unfamiliar—if comfortable—body talking to a floating eyeball on an impossible ship.

Sori had grabbed my mind and yanked me into unconsciousness to have a conversation. Had it done something similar again to show me the school? If so, was it supposed to be a threat? It'd been dismissive of my concern for Nia and even noted that there were others that could be used to keep me in line. Could the vision be a reminder that Nia wasn't the only child living in this nightmare that could be used as a lever for my bleeding heart?

If so, the eyeball had missed the mark.

Those kids, though rightfully scared, seemed to be in capable hands, the hands of people using their abilities and understanding to take care of their charges. I honestly found it encouraging. Alice was right; as hellish as this place could be, as limited as their memories of each loop were, people were learning, adapting—finding or creating the tools to fight back.

They only had to hold on for 48 more weeks, less, since evacuating children and their caretakers would certainly be a priority. That said, it made me worry all the more about Nia. What had happened to her that Sori was looking for new levers on me? Then again, I needed to be careful not to jump to conclusions. For all I knew, I'd just been taken out by a fast-acting tranq and had a vivid dream.

I'd slept very little since the apocalypse started. It was something that worried Alice and company. Anderson especially had pointed out that using narcotics to have a dreamless sleep wasn't sustainable, that accumulating weeks and months of memories without sleep left people unbalanced. He argued that I was building up memories but not letting my mind really process them.

Unfortunately, there wasn't enough time for me to waste multiple hours sleeping every few loops—or, more likely, failing to sleep. For better or worse, I could get by without sleep for the time being, and so I would.

In any case, I didn't think my vision was a dream. I'd been hit by a tranq before—and drugged another time on top of that—neither time was I unconscious immediately. There had been no sense of dizziness or blacking out before the vision. I'd been mid-thought when it hit, a thought that completed itself as consciousness returned so that it took me a moment to even realize I'd lost time.

Whatever that vision had been, it didn't get me any closer to understanding how I'd ended up in this closet. I doubted it was part of some plan, considering the lock wasn't designed to lock someone in, and the door felt cheap and like it would cave beneath my monstrous strength.

I opened up my Shadow Alcove. I had axes and crowbars in there that would make breaking through the door even easier, but I didn't think that was the right call. Whoever had put me in this closet could have just killed me. Between the make-shift cell and the fact that I was alive at all, I suspected they recognized that I wasn't just some random monster. It was an easy enough realization, considering the fact that I was wearing clothes. With luck, I'd been brought here out of curiosity and concern, but with safety measures in place just in case I wasn't as civilized as my outfit suggested.

Rather than trying to bust my way out, I decided to give my theoretical warden the benefit of the doubt and limited myself to knocking out shave-and-a-haircut on the door. Then I stepped into my Shadow Alcove to give myself a voice and, if they opened the door, a human appearance.

"Hello? Is anyone out there?" I asked.

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Sori had claimed my words were gibberish, but Alice hadn't had any trouble understanding me at all. Either the eye was lying, and it would hardly be the first time, or Alice had been able to understand me for some other reason, maybe because she was part monster, or maybe something else. Either way, there was a chance that anyone listening would be able to understand me. Even if just the tone of my voice and the polite knocking were understood, it would show my captors my ability to reason and use measured responses. If Luke, and Alice, and the rest couldn't be convinced to ignore the Kaiju until we had a stronger position, maybe whoever had decided to secure me rather than kill me would join me as new recruits instead.

As I knocked and called out, I heard the sound of movement from the other side of the door. "Umm, the boss is coming. Please just wait a minute for everyone's safety. Your door is under guard."

The voice sounded vaguely familiar, but I couldn't immediately place it. The speaker was maybe a tenor and didn't have any noticeable accent, so there wasn't much to help me narrow it down.

I considered Luke's patrons. It was possible that I'd been found by people from his bar, people who had vague memories of me but nothing clear enough to be sure I was safe to have around. If that was the case, I hadn't heard this voice often enough to attach a face to it.

"I can wait for a little while," I called back through the door. It was almost strange not to sound like Nia. I'd heard myself using this voice back before Sori captured Nia, but it sounded different in my memory, less flat, with more reverb or something. Then again, maybe I was just looking for signs that the sounds I was making matched the words I was hearing—that my voice was real.

If I was speaking gibberish, I couldn't tell, so I went on. "Unfortunately, people are depending on me, so I won't stay put forever. If you can help speed things along, I'd appreciate it."

I wanted to sound reasonable, but I also wasn't willing to waste hours in this spot. I needed to track down Hands and find out what happened to Nia, as well as how he'd ended up taking over the Filton. It was even possible that Hands had been the one to order me locked up. If something had happened to Nia, he might be expecting me to be a bit unreasonable. Sori had said she'd just run away from him, but I wondered why.

Nia knew that I was using her voice to try to evacuate the city. I didn't think adolescent rebelliousness would be enough to make her abandon that duty. Then again, I was still able to speak, even if just inside my Alcove or with the help of illusory speech bubbles; that was definitely not the case before she'd lent me the use of her voice. It really only raised more questions than it answered, making it all the more important that I find Hands and get to the bottom of the mystery, preferably wasting the least amount of time possible.

"Um—" the voice started uncertainly before being interrupted by another, more confident voice.

"While I can respect that you have obligations, it's yet to be seen whether I respect those obligations. This invasion was completely unprovoked, and I've watched too many good men and women fall to your kind. It's also yet to be determined what your particular nature is. I've seen too many human traitors, collaborators who exchanged their humanity for the strengths of your people. If you're another such traitor, I and my men will make sure you're held to account. You're far more alien than man, however, and I wonder if, instead, you find yourself at odds with your barbarous people, longing for civilization, something that humanity had achieved before your invasion. We may be willing to offer you asylum if you're looking to change teams.

"Uh," I started. This guy's voice wasn't familiar at all. I assumed they were male due to their voice's depth; the machismo with which it oozed only reinforced my guess. He had clearly come to some incorrect assumptions of what was going on. Or, at least, his conclusions were pretty different from mine. Apart from Sori, the most intelligent creatures I'd found were the Gremlins, and they didn't exactly strike me as intergalactic invaders, living in a trash hut as they were.

"My name is—Call me Oberon," I said, hesitating briefly before deciding to stick with 'Oberon.' Whatever I pretended, whatever Sori and Hands claimed, I still felt like Sam. If anything, I felt more like myself, especially when in the Ether and wearing my preferred form. In an ideal world, I might invest the time and energy into better understanding myself and my identity. I'd always believed that a sizable portion of the world's problems were caused by a lack of introspection and self-awareness.

Somehow, that kind of introspection felt like a luxury I could no longer afford.

Still, it didn't seem to matter whether I was actually the same Sam who had put on a tinfoil hat to laugh at the apocalypse or if I just had all his memories. The latter was too vague for me to really intuitively accept. It wasn't like I believed in a soul. If I had Sam's memories and nothing else, I was at least a version of Sam. I just couldn't afford to be Sam. I couldn't follow the heart and conscience of Sam, I needed to look at the bigger picture.

Oberon was a king in folklore, the king of fairies if I remembered correctly. However much I disliked autocracy, there wasn't time for democracy and councils and debate. Sam could be all for distributed power; Oberon had decisions to make, priorities to set, and authority to maintain.

"You might find this hard to believe, but I'm human," I said through the door with feigned, wishful, conviction. Calling myself Oberon rather than Sam undermined my claim a bit, but it wasn't like they hadn't already seen my wolf. They'd know the name was fake, but it was so obviously fake that it wasn't like I was hiding the fact. "I don't know how I ended up a werewolf, but if you open the door, you'll see I'm back to being a regular guy."

I heard the man snort from the other side of the door. "Perhaps you are. Perhaps you'll maintain your innocence and humanity no matter how much we question you. I wonder if you noticed the endoscope poking under the door. That's a tool our construction workers use to see inside walls. It saw you open a doorway into thin air. That door's not human technology. Would you like to try again? Or maybe you'd drop the lies altogether, and we can talk as two reasoning beings. Ah, and in case you think we're unaware of your time-loop technology, we've discovered how to use your crystal devices to secure your initialization to this area. Whether we kill you or leave you locked up for the rest of the day, you'll start tomorrow's loop right there. I have enough men pointing guns at that thin door to take even a monster like you down, so think carefully before you decide to offer more lies."