Yume opens her eyes and stretches her arms out wide. She slept hard. So hard that several bones crack and pop as she sits up in the bed. The mattress she was on had molded to the shape of her body, perfectly cradling her as she slept. The lights are off and there’s no other source of light in here.
She wonders how long she has been out for. In fact, she can’t even recall falling asleep. She leaps out of the bed and slides her hand across the wall to find the switch. She’s not finding anything at all. The room that she’s in is seemingly endless, she’s been searching for the switch for several feet now and hasn’t even found the door.
A soft chime in the corner of the room sounds out.
“Good morning, Yume.” Spoken with a tongue as light as air.
The lights flash on, revealing Yume’s nurse floating above her, menacingly. She screams and falls to the ground. The blinding lights reveal she’s in her dormitory room.
The nurse’s appearance starts to warp and shift. Her body slowly stops producing light and instead reflects it. Yume watches in horror as her body morphs into a towering robot dragging a blade behind it.
Yume screams. “No…No! Not you again!”
All she can hear is the blade scraping against the floor. It moves towards her and appears to grow. Yume sees a knife on her nightstand and grabs it. Just as the GuideBot reaches her side she goes to stab it.
The moment the knife connects to the tube on its underbelly, it falls flaccid. Yume looks at it, trying to figure out what went wrong. She pulls it closer to her face to examine it and it melts down her arm. She’s left to fend the bot off with no weapon.
In a torrential change in pace, the bot grabs her and throws her off the bed. It lifts the blade up into the air, aligning it with her neck.
“Please, God, please just stop.” Yume desperately pleads with the bot. “I just want it to end. I just want it to end!”
A new voice yells from outside the room “Yume?!”
Yume gasps and opens her eyes. She’s thrown back into the room that Junker let her stay in. Her face is drenched in sweat along with an outline around where she slept. It was just a dream. She tries to readjust to reality before Junker barges in.
“Yume!” He yells again.
“Come in! I’m fine, I’m fine! I just had a nightmare.”
“Oh, thank God. It’s been a while since I heard screaming like that. Didn’t know what to expect when I opened the door.”
“There was a GuideBot” She sighs. “I’m sorry… I was afraid.”
“No need for an apology, sweetheart. I know the type. Give it some time and those will pass.” Junker reassures her with a few pats on the top of her head.
Yume habitually looks to the side of the room, trying to trigger a nurse to appear. “Uh, Junker? What time is it?”
“It’s about eight in the morning. You’ve been out for a while!”
“What? I went to bed like an hour or two ago. That’s not that long.”
“Yeah…try adding a couple days to that estimation.”
Yume’s jaw drops. “Wow, uh, that’s…wow. I guess I was pretty tired.”
“You were out. I had to come here a few times to check your pulse!” He giggles. “The body wants what the body wants. Hopefully you’ll be feeling back to normal now.”
“I don’t feel normal. I feel a lot better than that. I can breathe so easily, and my head doesn’t hurt constantly.”
“That’s what everybody says when they get thrown down here. There’s no smog here.”
“I could get used to that.”
“I’d hold off on making assumptions until I show you around town. It’s not all about the air.”
Yume’s eyes light up. “You want to show me around town?”
“Well, I was gonna take Rosie in to see the alchemist, you want to tag along?”
Yume nods excitedly. “Yes!”
Junker motions her to follow him up the stairs. She throws on the cloak and her shoes, noticing that they’ve been cleaned and dried for her. Junker must have washed them while she slept. She thanks him and they head through the kitchen and out the front door.
Rosie is coiled up in front of the house, sleeping. The soft purring of her slumber makes Yume think she must be having a good dream. Junker walks up to her and gently pets the top of her segmented body. Rosie clicks her jaws with an attitude.
“Oh, come on! Don’t give me that now!”
She moves her head away from Junker and wraps her coil tighter, trying to give him the silent treatment.
“She’s upset we didn’t go get food this morning. We’ll have to take her by the swamp on the way if that’s alright.”
“I don’t mind.”
Junker whispers something in Rosie’s ear and she immediately stands up and straightens her body out, ready to go. He laughs and gives her a good scratch on her underside.
“I told her she can eat from her favorite spot! I knew that’d get her excited”
Junker has Yume get up into the saddle and he gets on the segment in front of her. They head away from the house back towards the reservoir that she arrived in. The sun is completely out now and lights up the landscape before her.
Large, sprawling fields of red grass and foliage cover the ground. She looks behind them and can see the skyline of a city quite far away. A makeshift road leads in its direction, connecting several small buildings and houses along the way.
In front of them is the outskirts of a forest. Familiar, dense trees start to fly past them as they progress. The trees on the edge of the forest appear normal and grow straight up, albeit dark red. Moving deeper in the forest, closer to the reservoir, the trees take on a demented form. Huge, round masses protrude from their mangled trunks and branches.
Rosie expertly moves over a maze of roots and fallen logs. There is a path that she is following, but it’s obvious that the environment fights her against it, trying to reclaim the territory.
The cover becomes thick, and the sun barely pierces through pinholes in its canopy. Luckily, Rosie is quite determined to get her reward, so they don’t endure the darkness for long. She rounds one last turn, and they emerge onto the shore of the reservoir.
Before they exit the tree cover, Rosie slows down and gets low to the ground. Her antennae curl inwards as she makes her body as slim and unnoticeable as possible. She gently turns her head, scanning all around the reservoir.
“She likes to eat in private.” Junker whispers. “I don’t blame her, it’s not fun having your dinner stolen. Even less fun becoming something’s dinner.”
Yume gets a bit anxious at this idea. Sure, Rosie is nice, but the thought of other creatures like her roaming around freely sends chills down her spine. There must be other horrors hiding in the shadows here.
Rosie takes them around the shore until it branches off into a sandbar that leads towards the drain. The sandbar is seemingly normal, well, normal compared to the red sand around it. As they move closer to the drain, the horrid smell comes wafting into Yume’s nostrils. It burns and brings back unenjoyable memories. She looks away from the drain, hoping to escape the attack on her nose.
Then she looks down at the sandbar, realizing it’s not made of sand. A white stick pokes out of one section that catches her eye. Interesting, she thinks as she sees more and more of these sticks coming into view. She didn’t put the pieces of her surroundings together until Rosie got close to the drain.
Suddenly, her legs make a disgusting squish with each step. Yume stares hard into the ground beneath Rosie, trying to see what’s shrouded by the shadows of the canopy. The soft glow of the run-off catches just right and for a moment, she can see clearly. It’s comprised of decaying flesh and bones, covered in coagulated run-off. Human flesh and bones. Yume gasps.
“I didn’t really have the heart to tell ya when I found you here.”
“What, that I was delivered to a graveyard?!”
“That’s a bit generous a description, don’t ya think? This is a landfill.”
“These are from people, it’s not garbage!”
“They’re not people anymore darlin’. I wouldn’t come here if I could avoid it. Downright nasty place in all honesty, but Rosie must eat. It’s what she’s used to.”
“Rosie eats…humans?”
“No! Well…not alive ones anyways. Rosie wouldn’t hurt a soul! This is what The Chamber got her hooked on.” Junker sighs. “I can fix her code, but her appetite is a different story.”
Yume crosses her arms. “Well!” She huffs. “I guess they are already dead, but it’s still too hard to accept. These people had stories and dreams, now they’re just chopped up Rosie-food”
Junker pulls back on Rosie’s legs, and she comes to a stop. He gets a serious look on his face and turns back to Yume.
“You and I might hold value in human life, but the folks up there? That’s just a number to them.” He motions to the slog of decay around them. “Sure, it will add a year or two, but what’s one year on top of tens of thousands?”
“Junk, you’re losing me again. What are you going on about now?”
“Ohh…dear, excuse me! I forget you’re fresh meat. Sorry, like I said, it’s been a while since we’ve had a new arrival.”
Junker takes a deep breath in, preparing for another winded explanation. Before he can take his wordy exhale, Rosie’s head darts towards the left side and digs her legs into the ground, coming to an abrupt halt.
Four piercing, bright orange eyes appear on the surface of the pool about ten feet from them. Darting from the murky depths are rows of serrated teeth mounted on a slender, long jaw. The body emerges behind it. A vast, agile amphibian that measures over thirty feet from nose to tail.
Rosie tracks its motion through the air and the moment it touches her body she whips her head upwards, bringing her pincers together in a beautiful display of reaction time and precision. The creature’s massive jaws and eyes fly off its body and zoom over Yume and Junker’s heads. As Rosie proceeds to disembowel her challenger’s corpse, Junker shrugs and continues where he left off.
“Let me ask you something, Yume, if The Chamber truly wants you to ascend, why would they have advertisements plastered everywhere for a streamlined system to off yourself?”
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Yume thinks for a moment and then answers. “Nobody uses those, most people ascend! I’ve seen hundreds of people move up.”
“You sure about that?”
She gets a bit confused and starts to play back graduations in her head. There was never a time that she can remember where she failed alongside another candidate. She was always alone at the end of it, cursing herself for being the only one left behind.
“Yes, I am! I have always been the one left over after every graduation.” She exclaims.
“Your eyes deceive you, love. That’s what you think you’ve seen, sure, but that’s not reality. Ninety-nine percent of all Splinters fail their graduation, and they all have seen what you have seen.”
“I don’t understand…I have physically seen people walk up the stairs.”
“You are seeing a projection, darlin’. Hardly anyone makes it out of The Rung. They built a fallacy around graduation rates and pounded it into your head that hardly anyone fails. Then they show you a render of all your friends and co-candidates entering the pearly gates, leaving you in the dust.”
All the color in Yume’s face fades away. “I…I can’t believe this. Why? Why would they do that?”
“They want to crush you. They want you to call up a GuideBot.”
“Well, if they just want us to die, why don’t they just kill us all in one go?”
“They want you to reproduce. Killing off everyone doesn’t create the longevity they’re after.”
“You really gotta be clearer with these explanations. What do you mean longevity?”
“Every body that they collect adds a year, maybe two to their lives.” He rubs his chin and takes another deep breath. “They harvest organs. We never learned how exactly they made it, but they craft some sort of elixir out of them.”
“…Elixir?”
“Yeah, they drink this stuff and it prolongs their lives. The real interesting part is it compounds, so you can drink as much as you want, and it adds up. Those in the inner circle have consumed countless souls. Damn near immortal at this point.”
“Jesus fucking Christ.”
Yume pushes her hair back and holds her head up as she processes. Everything she had been working towards in The Rung was for nothing. She was, and probably still is, one of many cattle raised for slaughter. A meal to tide over those at the top.
Junker sees drool dripping down Rosie’s mouth and taps her back, allowing her to move forward. The conversation has hit a bit of a lull as Yume sits in a silent whirlwind of thought.
The bit about reproduction seems so odd to her. She was rather isolated in her schooling and didn’t have many friends, not to mention her inability to conceive a child conventionally. The thought had never occurred to her. She wonders how different it must have been for her classmates. She decides to ask Junker about it.
“I just don’t understand who would want to have a child up there. It’s so isolating and cruel.”
“Yume, your situation is a lot different than that of most Splinters. After you went through hormonal therapy, The Chamber no longer targeted you as a viable vessel of reproduction.” A heavy grimace darkens his face. “I hate to say such a thing, but once you did that, they had you marked for death.”
This comment cuts deep into her very being. The Chamber has incredible technology for transitioning one’s gender, but they don’t give you functioning sex organs. She has known that she is unable to produce a child through conventional efforts for years but hearing that she’s been given a death sentence for a misplaced chromosome kills a part of her.
All she has ever been to The Chamber is a sack of flesh. A cow tilling their precious farmland before walking into the slaughterhouse. A quiet rage strikes a match next to the kindling of suffering in her head, begging for the last reason to ignite.
“Well, feel free to tell me what normal Splinters go through.” She says in a bitter tone.
“Yume, I’m sorry, I didn’t make these rules. Besides, you wouldn’t want what they get anyways, I can assure you of that.” He sighs. “They use pheromones.”
“Oh, so they spray perfume on some horny kids. Got it.”
“No, not exactly. They engineer love. That’s what it feels like at least.”
Yume gets a puzzled look on her face. “Junk, why would they allow me to transition if it would deem me unviable?”
Junker sighs. “That I don’t know. I s’pose it’s possible they have a sliver of empathy amongst them.”
Rosie abruptly stops and begins feeling the ground with her long antennae. She starts to poke and prod a large mass in the ground with her legs. Yume turns away to avoid seeing her feast on a corpse. Junker, unbothered, picks up where he left off.
“What they do to the cis-gendered citizens is not much better. Manufactured lust that then becomes sustained love. They pair you with a match; there is no choosing. Doesn’t usually end well, but that isn’t always the case. Hell, me and Astra” Junker trails off in a choked-up voice. “Ah, let’s move on. Point is the shit they do to you up there is cruel.”
Yume raises an eyebrow at the mention of that name but can see Junker’s desire to change the subject. “Maybe you’re right; I’m glad they didn’t do that to me. I doubt anyone would’ve even gone for me anyways. Wasn’t exactly the popular girl.”
Junker smiles. “That’s nothing to be ashamed of, I wasn’t exactly a people person either. There’re more important things than love anyways. Happiness must come first.”
Yume nods in agreement wonders if she is happy. Sure, she may be starting over in a free, new world, but she is far from happy. She used to be happy, at least in the early attempts at climbing out of The Rung. Yume derives her happiness from having a purpose. When she was going through the cycles, she had one clear objective; reunite with her mother. Now, it is all so muddled.
With the information she just received, it seems as though she never had an objective. Whatever nonsense her father did to her node seemed to have fooled them enough, but she was never going to make it. Either because of the pregnancy error, or because she was born with the wrong genitalia.
On top of that, only one percent of the population makes it out of The Rung. Even if she is alive, she’s most likely surrounded by higher ups in The Chamber. These people, as Junker described them, are immortal. It all seems so unobtainable, especially considering her father failed his attempt on them with an entire army of support. Her happiness lays locked behind gilded gates shrouded in uncertainty.
Rosie finishes chewing up her food and swallows. Yume and Junker both move up slightly as the mass of partially digested meat slides through her body.
“Let’s burn off some of those calories, huh, Rosie?”
Rosie chirps excitedly and turns around to head back through the forest. As the sloshing of her feet transitions back to soft thuds, Junker speaks up.
“I hope you’ll like where we’re going a bit more than this.”
“I don’t see how I could like it any less.” Yume laughs.
Rosie pushes through the reservoir bank and enters the dense foliage. She’s full of energy now and makes haste through the trees. Before they know it, they are back to Junker’s house. Rosie passes it and heads towards the path leading beyond.
“Her shop isn’t too far from here, it’s nice being so close. Gets me stocked up on fixer just for living near.” Junker chuckles. “She knows I’m always getting’ myself injured doing stupid shit.”
They go up a small hill and then turn left, down a different path. It leads into a tunnel with an armored gate blocking entry. Junker pushes his face on a glass panel on the edge of the gate. It scans him and lights up green. A soft whisper comes through a speaker.
“Junker, how nice of you to pay me a visit. Please, come in.”
“Always a pleasure, Pat. I have a little surprise for ya.”
The metal siding around the frame of the gate dilates and spray out white mist onto them as the gate itself opens. They move through it and head down a tunnel. At the end of the tunnel, Junker hops off and helps Yume down. He pats Rosie, who at this point is already spinning around to form a coil. She seems to know her place here. She lays down and the two of them proceed through a door.
The inside of the alchemy shop is marvelous. A highly vaulted ceiling in the shape of a dome with long, red curtains draped down the sides. There are glass displays everywhere full of various bottles and trinkets. There’s incense burning and the room smells heavily of sage and lavender.
Off in a corner, in a ridiculously large red chair, sits a woman. She’s fairly old, roughly sixty or seventy years by the look of her. She’s dressed in a red cloak, quite like the one Yume is wearing. Her hands are covered in golden rings with chains connecting them. Her face follows a similar aesthetic, with golden chains linking the piercings on her ears and nostrils together. She takes quick notice that Junker is not alone.
“Oh? Who have we here, Junker?”
“This is Yume! You wouldn’t believe how I found her.”
The woman gets up out of the chair and glides over to Yume, examining her. She lifts back her hood and stares at her face.
Junker continues. “She washed up at the reservoir. Couldn’t believe anything could live through that fall, but here she is!”
The woman cuts Junker’s rant off. “She’s using an altered node.” She makes painfully serious eye contact with Yume. “Do you want to cause another culling?”
Yume frantically babbles at her, not wanting her first impression with the woman to turn sour. “I- um… my dad?”
“Your dad? That’s adorable.” She scoffs. “Maybe you should’ve let her die Junker. We don’t need another troublemaker down here.”
Junker comes to Yume’s defense. “Hypatia, this is Adam’s daughter.”
The woman’s demeanor drastically changes, and she looks happily surprised, albeit a little skeptical. “Yume. That certainly rings a bell. You…you’re his child?”
Yume is flustered and confused. “Yes, that’s me…?”
“Good God! I thought that node looked familiar. Please, Yume, tell me why it is you ended up down here.”
“Node? Um.” Yume tries to ignore that comment. “Well, I didn’t pass my final cycle. I was about to get sent down here but hated the thought of that.”
Hypatia nods.
“So, I called up a GuideBot. It kinda freaked out when it showed up. It wouldn’t kill me.”
“Ha! Those idiots in The Chamber are so easily fooled. Please, continue!”
Yume tries to brush off her strange comment. “It sliced my hand off.” She slides her sleeve back to show her Junker’s prosthetic work.
“That’s…interesting. So where did you go from there?”
“I attacked it. Sliced its cords. It turned off for a while, but eventually it knocked me out and took me to the hospital.”
“What exactly did the bots in there tell you?”
“That I was pregnant.”
“Astonishing. I thought Adam was out of his mind when he came to me about this. That bastard actually went through with it.”
Yume looks to Junker and then back at Hypatia, realizing these comments are becoming unavoidable. “What are you saying?”
“Your father and I designed that node, to keep you alive.”
Under normal circumstances, Yume would have been surprised to hear this. Over the course of the past few days with their unrelenting assault of new information however, this is not too farfetched. She is still quite intrigued by this new detail.
“How did this thing keep me alive?”
Hypatia looks disappointedly towards Yume. “When Adam gave you this, did he tell you what it does?”
“I didn’t even know he gave this to me. I only just found out it was altered. Junker was the one who told me that.”
“Ah, I see. Well, I think that may have been smart, children aren’t the best keepers of secrets. This node, it utilized The Chamber’s database back-door. It adjusted data in real time to give the impression that you were pregnant. Our intention was to keep you stuck in a loop until we could rescue you.”
“How come nobody ever told me? I mean, not even the nurse in my room mentioned me being pregnant.” Yume questions her.
“You can thank your father for that. He figured out exactly when in the pregnancy cycle that they would inform a patient. Our fake numbers would fluctuate within a range that prevented outside intervention.”
“Wow, I honestly did not think my dad was that capable. That’s some real sci-fi shit.”
Hypatia and Junker laugh at that comment.
“It was really quite genius of him, even I was surprised!” Hypatia says between hearty bouts of laughter. “I’m glad it worked for so long.”
“Me too…I mean, I don’t even know when I got this. What year did he put this in my head anyways?”
“It was ’88 when we completed the node. As for when he gave it to you, I don’t have that information.”
Yume starts the mental math in her head. If she was born in 3777, then she figures she must have been around ten or eleven when that got put in. How could she have been blind to her father changing her node? She doesn’t remember him ever tampering with it. His absences outweighed his presence around that time, so there weren’t many opportunities for him to have done this. The only remarkable event around that time was her hormonal treatment.
“You think he could’ve swapped my nodes while I was asleep?”
“There has never been a slumber deep enough to stifle that sort of pain. It’s highly unlikely.”
“I didn’t know it was painful, I thought he just popped it out and put the new one in.”
“Oh, dear. Nodes are woven into our flesh and bone, it’s not quite as simple as you think. The pain is excruciating, life changing. It feels as if you’re pulling each individual nerve ending out of yourself.” She pauses for a moment. “I can’t imagine how Adam exchanged the two covertly.”
“Well, around that time I was in the hospital quite a bit. Nothing out of the ordinary though, I was getting HRT.”
Hypatia gets a puzzled look on her face “In the hospital…for HRT?”
“…yes?” Yume nonchalantly questions. “It made me terribly sick.”
Hypatia looks over to Junker and then back to Yume with her eyebrows raised. “Yume, HRT is harmless. You may get emotional, sure, but it doesn’t make you sick.”
Yume is taken aback by Hypatia’s words. HRT doesn’t make you sick? She begins to question why she was in and out of the hospital for months. Her loss of memory during this time had been chalked up to the treatment. Details that were vastly overlooked are now glaring holes in her recollection.
“So, that’s when he did it? Jesus, it took so long, I was in the hospital for months.”
Hypatia and Junker both wince a bit after hearing that.
Hypatia responds. “Adam wasn’t the most skillful surgeon after all. Replacing the hardware around a birth-given node to allow an exchange is no easy task. It may have taken a long time, but it was completed to perfection.”
“Yeah, that’s true. I am still alive afterall!”
They all share a laugh.
“Junker, I’m going to assume this was the surprise you were talking about?”
“Yep! I figured you’d get a kick out of seeing her alive.”
“I most certainly did. I can’t tell you how happy I am to see it all worked out.”
Yume smiles briefly, before remembering that it hasn’t all worked out. Her father is dead, and her mother is too most likely. She takes her chance with this moment of silence in the room to ask Hypatia about her mother.
“Hypatia?”
“Yes, Yume?”
“Why didn’t my dad give my mom a node?”
“I’m afraid that’s a question I can’t answer.”
Hypatia moves towards a glass case full of shining trinkets. She waves her hand over the top of it and one of the items lifts and slips out of the glass, as if it were liquid. It rises up into her hand and she grabs it. She then gives it to Yume.
“What’s this?”
Yume looks down at the object. It’s a small scepter, about the length of her hand. The handle of it is etched with the phases of the moon. On the tip is a glowing white orb. Just below that is a hole, about the same size and shape as the one on her new hand. Hypatia speaks again.
“This may help you find the answers you’re looking for.” She says, with a slight well of tears forming at the edge of her eyelids.