Past the Pocket

"I'm leaving", Marin clutched her suitcase tightly to stop her hand from shaking. Though the case dragged heavily on her wrist, she had marveled when she was done packing that everything in her life fit inside something she could hold.

"You can't leave, F03165! We have work to do!" Martin howled like her two, simple words had struck him like a blade in the leg.

"My name is Marin. And I can leave whenever I want." She shifted her hold on the case, briefly wondering if she might need to bludgeon him with it. The others would surely jump on her if she attacked him. For the moment, only a few had quit from their normal routines to watch.

"Your name is irrelevant, F03165!" He slapped the nearest wall but without enthusiasm, so he wouldn't have to get someone to repair it later.

Stretching on the balls of her feet, she reiterated, "My name is Marin."

He stalked around in a circle, like a tiger bound in an invisible cage. "I can't even comprehend your thinking. Such insolence has no part in our genome."

"Then perhaps we don't know it as well as we thought", she proposed, with a faint lift of her eyebrow.

Marin scowled and turned away. "No no NOO! There are better explanations. You clearly were affected by stray Hawking radiation in your early development or one of the nurses needs updated software."

Her nursery view, not of a plastic mobile she'd read about in lessons but the haunting curvature of a bound black hole, light from all sides of it whispering to oblivion. Her mother, a machine she named "Zut" for the sound it made as its cold metal arms changed her.

She acknowledged he might be right. She could be broken. She could be a deformity. But she didn't care.

"No matter what, I am leaving here."

Martin spread his arms out. "And going where? There's more in here than there is out there. Out there is a waste. In here, we have much work left to do!"

"For who?"

"Simply because we can!"

She shut her eyes. "I remember, in the lessons, being told the Founder Martin, who made the first Marin, daydreamed about curing cancer for everyone out there. No one has done that."

"You want to cure cancer? Sure. Fine. We can get you another room, we'll give you everything you need. I'm sure plenty of Marins will be interested, probably some Martins too. You can have a team." His tone was still patronizing, still stern and bitter, but he laced it with a softened edge to lure her away, loosen her grip on the case and the idea of leaving.

She clenched her teeth. "I'm done with your rooms."

Marin had burned through eighteen-thousand-and-eighty-seven years, twelve days, seven hours, and fifteen seconds in rooms. Time loop rooms. No one got any older in them, but their minds kept going. She'd practiced the violin until she had to smash it into the walls, only to see it back in the same spot with the next restart. She'd filled a library with books, backed-up every cycle. Once, she even carved an imaginary city of the subterranean Gretlin race out of a single block of stone, with each inhabitant styled after her "brothers and sisters". It got featured in the Main Hall for greatest achievements by a Marin.

Martin hissed. "You get older out there. Nasty old. Your skin becomes like leather. You die."

She'd seen death a few times. Experiments gone wrong in ways they couldn't prevent, or at least told themselves they couldn't. Bad luck. She saw one dead Marin up close. She seemed so normal, like her eyes might flutter open at any moment. No smell, at least not yet. Cool to the touch but not cold. Not like the boogeyman of death she'd heard so much about. More like her roommate Marins she'd shared bunks with through the years when they were really sleepy.

"I'm not afraid of death," she told him. "I'm afraid of death not mattering in whether we existed or not. There are so many of us here. Look at all these wonders..."

The grand library, several hundred levels into the ground and up into the patchy mists of the sky, overflowed with books and storage devices where they didn't have enough shelf space. A Marin in the enclosed plaza sat before a black, grand piano, restyling Liszt's La Campanella on the fly with extra flourishes and none of the Martins or Marins stopped to appreciate it. Water art in the back took advantage of a micro-gravitational anomaly to hover and flex into different animals which hung suspended above the ground. And more and more and more...

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

The Martin threw up his hands. "But then why are you leaving?"

She placed the suitcase in front of her, more like a shield. "Because I need to. There are so many wonders and so much potential here. But there is literally a whole world out there. I have seen and read and imagined about the Earth but I haven't stepped outside my own door to experience it. None of us have."

Gesturing wildly, Martin admonished, "The world is smaller than what's in here! The Founder Martin made it bigger than any of the other Pockets. He took of his own genome because he knew that one man or woman could not COULD NOT alone make an entire universe but, together, WE HAVE!"

They were all taught the story. Out there, on Earth, a new source of power was discovered. It used an exotic form of matter to tease out the inherent energy of space. As a byproduct, small pocket universes, no bigger than 200 cubic meters each, emerged as an exhaust. The area's government decided to give them away freely to anyone who paid "taxes".

It wasn't long before Founder Martin and some others like him discovered how to add mass and space to their pockets, the latter of which the outside universe had plenty of. He used his genetic source to produce zygotes, altering half of them to make the first Marins. So it began and so it continued.

Turning to face the gathered Marins and Martins, he pressed, "And YOU presume that you can do better than the Founder just by yourself, F03165?"

F for Marins, M for Martins. Founder Martin didn't want them to bother with different names, thought it would breed more discontent and disparity than could be controlled.

"I presume nothing", she announced. "Maybe I go because I am defective. Maybe you better let me go, before I pollute the system with my crazy ideas of leaving?"

Stomping, the Martin waved a finger, "You won't be let back in. Once you go, you are gone. You are as good as dead."

Last night he'd called her a "rounding error" and "noise in the system". He promised she would be replaced by two more Marins as soon as she left.

With a deep breath, she accepted, "Then, so be it. I'm ready to go."

His arguments exhausted, the Martin gestured to the hallway, once used for supplies traffic and correspondences, now fallen into disrepair. She didn't look back. The doorway, little more ornate than the entrance to a shed, stood before her.

A gentle hand settled on her shoulder, too soft to be a Martin trying to drag her back. Jumping, she turned around to see another Marin with wide eyes and little, decorative flowers stitched into her standard, blue jumpsuit. "Marin...fellow Marin. Wise Marin. I'm F23492. I just...I was...wondering. Perhaps...I could come too?"

She'd snuck through the crowd and hidden in a small storage room along the hallway. Marin nearly sent her away. She was too young and too curious to go. She would need thousands of years before she exhausted the possibilities of this place. But she was persistent and eager.

Together, they pushed on the door. It shuddered, little bits flaking away on the other side before it finally squeaked open. They'd seen grass before. Small suns lit their skies. But they'd never seen the original sun or felt the wild grasses which grew wherever they wanted. The Founder's house looked fresh and clean, toiled over by robots set there long ago.

The road before them was empty, no one out in their yards, nor anyone driving by, but the air filled with passing birdsong. A melody no Marin had ever heard before.