Sally woke, rose, and started walking toward the stream for her morning ablutions. She took a few steps before she realized she was walking on her own! She took a skip and nearly collapsed. But she was walking!
She finished her business, changed into another outfit, and went over to where the food was piled. Jon had powdered most of the sticks and put the powder into bags. It was more compact and easier to move in this way. Palatable? Well… no. The powder was still bitter. Sally suspected that she would get used to the new diet, in time. She had found that eating a gum seed after the wood helped somewhat. The important thing was that Jon had been correct about the new food; she felt much better.
Jon was still wandering around the room, doing whatever he did. He never seemed to get bored, even when carrying out the same investigations over and over. Sally called for him to come next to her. Once again, it was time for a bit of a talk.
“So, Jon. Do you think we can do a little exploring today? I think I can walk a lot better, and, I have to admit, it’s getting a little boring staying here. Maybe nothing too hard, but at least we can look down one of these hallways a short way. Maybe?”
“I have done an analysis of your mental and physical prowess using six-hundred-thirty-seven points of…” Jon stopped.
...9, 10, 11... Sally had stopped listening and was counting her teeth. Someone had told her it made it look as if she was paying attention. Jon wasn’t fooled. He paused and then simply stated, “Okay. Nothing too strenuous.”
Sally was surprised. When Jon had talked to her yesterday, he had said something about optimizing an interaction emulation model, which Sally thought meant that he was trying to understand her better. Her experience, though, was that people often talked but never really delivered. Maybe he really was changing? This, more than anything else, made her believe that he was some sort of alien.
After hanging a bag of her food and the re-filling IV bag on the chair, Sally pushed it over to the hallway that led to her hospital room. She looked back at Jon, who hadn’t moved.
“Are you coming?” Sally called out.
Jon didn’t answer immediately. Sally had noted that since they’d found the hidden room, it seemed that he took much longer to do anything. Like he was questioning every decision he had to make. Sally was starting to suspect that he had a hard time dealing with anything that wasn’t already in his databanks.
Jon had admitted that even though he knew about the hidden room, he still wouldn’t be able to find it. He’d then added that due to his inability to detect the door, he had massively increased his search methodology to find a way to correct this deficiency. Sally had told him to buck up and deal with it, and Jon had taken her advice as he always did. He ignored it.
After a while, Jon walked over to the hallway, detached his hand and sent it ahead. The two of them followed.
It took much less time than Sally expected to return to the room she had been found in. Nothing had changed. There were still the hospital sounds coming from the speaker outside the room, and the room itself was the same as they’d left it. Sally went over to the window and opened the curtains. Outside the window was just a glowing wall, nothing else. It was all fake. Jon waited by the door. Sally walked past him, back to the hallway.
“Do you have any idea why this pretend hospital room even exists?” she asked.
“I do not have enough information and no particular scenario has a higher probability than any other. It is a persistent thread that this lack of understanding is common when ensnared in the schemes of higher entities. Often these questions are never adequately answered.”
Sally turned and started pushing the chair down the hallway in the direction they hadn’t explored. Jon hurried to get in front of her. His hand exited the room, flew past, and began questing ahead.
After a few more minutes the hallway opened up into another atrium. Jon stopped and Sally followed suit. She assumed he was reviewing whatever the sensor was sending back. Eventually, Jon started walking again. They entered the room, which was very similar to the one they were camped in. Sally sat in the wheelchair while Jon investigated the little rooms at each end. The large open area was in the same overgrown state as much of their room, without the patches of grass or trees which Jon had planted.
When Jon was satisfied that nothing sinister lurked anywhere, Sally went into each room, entreating any gods that were listening to show her their secrets, but nothing happened.
They continued down the next hallway and went through five more atriums with no significant finds. Jon said it should be atria, but Sally thought that sounded stupid.
Sally sang to herself. A-tree-a, A-tree-um, A-tree-dee. She was starting to get bored and tired. Jon had to push her in the chair to the next room.
After another fruitless search, Sally looked at Jon. “Well, this is certainly exciting. Let’s do one more room and then go back. We can talk about what we want to do after I rest a bit.”
Jon had no comment and pushed her into the unexplored hallway. They traveled down it for a few minutes, getting close to where the next atrium should be, when Jon stopped abruptly.
“This is different,” he said, staring down the hall where his sensor had gone. Sally couldn’t see anything special. Jon was silent.
“What?” she asked.
He didn’t say anything, just resumed pushing her forward. She could see that where the hallway ended there was a mound of... something, on the floor. The sensor hovered above it.
As they got closer the mound resolved into a shaggy pile about three feet high. It really looked like long fur. Sally held up her hand to stop.
“Am I going to like what this is?” She asked.
“No.”
Aw crap.
She got up from the chair and inched around the pile. It turned out to be something dead that looked similar to a good-sized bear: four legs with black foot pads and claws, and a very shaggy head that was pulled down onto its chest. The shaggy head was resting on the head of something else. It took a moment for Sally to register what she saw. Tucked into the beast’s chest, as if it was trying to protect it, was an emaciated corpse of a human. The skin was all shriveled, the eyes were closed and sunken, and the teeth were showing in a grimace, but it had the same frizzy black hair Sally had and was wearing something similar to the same hospital gown she had been wearing.
Sally felt suddenly weak and sank to the floor while she stared at the bodies.
After several minutes, she shook her head, dredged up a bit of energy, and stood up. This was difficult to process, but she had known there were going to be more shocks.
“Big breath.” She took that breath, and then another. If you can breathe you can deal. At least that’s what her aunt had told her. Usually, it worked.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
She looked at Jon. “Do your stuff, tell me what is going on here.”
Surprisingly, Jon had waited for her. He looked at her for a moment, then he looked at the bodies.
“This seems to verify some options and narrows my list of what is happening to the two of us. An initial study shows two expired entities, the cause of death: unknown. One of the bodies is very similar to you, and, at this point, I expect that you and she are copies of the same individual. The shaggy creature is a lifeform that has no name that you could say and is a moderately advanced species. The proximity of the two implies that they had a mutual relationship, the nature of which will become clearer as I progress in the investigation. Immediately, I can see that there are modifications to her gown to make it more resilient, and her socks, pants, and shawl are constructed from a cloth woven from fibers of the fur taken from the other entity, which I will call a bear.
“I have noted that the female shows signs of good health at the time of death, and callouses on her feet imply that she had been active for a fairly long duration. I conclude that she had some way to feed herself and was active until her demise.”
Sally thought she was dealing with this situation well, taking in information and processing it without getting too emotional. Maybe it would hit her later. The fact that the human body was completely dried out made it seem less real.
Jon continued. “I do not have enough information to determine exactly what has occurred. I will investigate more thoroughly, although I am sure there will be many unresolved issues. Maybe you can look around and see if there is something we can learn from the scene?”
Sally knew what he was doing. He was trying to distract her. That was good. She wanted to be distracted.
Jon was done with his summary, so he approached the bodies and began a more thorough examination. It was both fascinating and difficult to watch. He started by scanning with a very intense light show, then he moved the bodies apart. Sally was still impressed how he could do this with no sign of effort. The shaggy creature must weigh a significant portion of a ton.
Then, to her disgust, he went around tasting everything. At this point, Sally decided she would follow his suggestion and look around the room to see if there was anything she could find that would contribute to the effort. And not watch him taste... stuff.
The atrium they were in had the long abandoned and overgrown look of the others, but was lacking the smaller rooms on each end. There was just the hallway they had entered and another hallway on the opposite end. Sally slowly walked diagonally across the room, following the ever-present stream. Near the other end of the room, she found the remains of a fire.
Sally had no idea how to start a fire under these conditions, but it appeared that it was possible to burn the overgrowth that each room had. She poked in the ashes and turned up one of the legs of a spider-rabbit. Maybe the shaggy thing could eat these, or maybe they had found a way to prepare them so the other girl... Sally? could eat them.
She looked over at Jon, then quickly turned away; he was in the process of cutting the bodies apart. She really didn’t want to know.
Getting up from the fire, she walked over to the other hallway, and peered down it. It too seemed different from all the other hallways. From what she could see, after a fairly short distance, it ended in a dark room, or something.
She stepped ahead, then jumped as Jon’s sensor-hand flew past. She followed.
As she neared the dark opening, she could make out some details. It was lighted, but much less brightly than the hallway. She cautiously crept down one wall, although tiptoeing along a white glowing wall was not really any form of sneaky.
She reached the end and peered out. Apparently, there was an end to the rooms, because she was now outside. The floor of the hallway kept going straight and became a trail that ran on a wide ledge beside a cliff wall of windows that went up as far as she could see. The trail continued off into the distance, where it appeared to veer left into a gap between the windows. To her right was the massive chasm that she had seen through the windows of the rooms. On the other side of the chasm was nothing except windows, extending out of sight in all directions.
She walked down the trail for a short way, keeping away from the edge of the chasm, since there wasn’t a guardrail and it appeared to be an infinite drop. The windows beside the trail were mirrored and when she tried to peer through all she could see was herself looking back.
Were there other people on the inside making fun of her? Probably not, but maybe? She felt like Jon; she had “no information on this topic”. She snickered and turned back to the trail.
Maybe her other self had come this way? There was no dust on the trail so she couldn’t tell. She wondered if Jon could use his nose to detect smells the way a bloodhound could? She would have to ask.
Sally was starting to get a bit antsy and decided she had gone far enough. Turning around, she headed back just as Jon’s sensor flew past, returning to the hallway. This time she didn’t jump. She hadn’t seen where it had gone, but Jon probably knew more about what was out here than she did.
She walked through the last hallway and across the room. The bodies were now in pieces, spread about the area. Sally had expected they would be all lined up and organized, but that wasn’t the case, everything appeared to be scattered randomly. Even though it wasn’t obvious, she was sure Jon had an underlying plan. And as gruesome as this whole thing was, the lack of blood made the situation less difficult to accept.
Jon was standing at the side of the room, among the remains. Beside him was the girl’s head whose eyes seemed to be watching her. The whole scene seemed unreal. Maybe it was?
In spite of everything, Sally was starting to tire. She walked over to the wheelchair and collapsed, or rather, gracefully descended into it quickly. She was too worn out to laugh at her own joke. As Jon approached, she looked at him.
“I have very good news,” he stated. “It seems that the other you had received an infusion of self-establishing micro-processing fibers that allowed her to digest some of the local fauna, and to drink the water from the stream. These fibers act as a filter for your gut, altering, isolating, and encapsulating the harmful items you cannot use. This processing allows the undesirable materials to pass through your system with no adverse effects.”
He held out his hand, in it was, yep, another blackish powder. “Swallow this.”
She looked at the powder and back to him. “I thought we already had a solution?”
“Yes, but this is better. We will not have to find as much special material if you swallow this, assuming it works as expected.”
She was leery, but he did have a point, so when he passed the powder to her, she swallowed it. It tasted as bad as she had come to expect. She drank from the IV bag to get the grit out of her mouth.
“You know, really, can’t this stuff ever taste good?” she griped.
Then she had a thought. Oh, my god!
“Wait,” Sally burst out. “Uh, where did, I mean, um… where did you get that… I mean… what I just ate?” This was going to be bad.
“I scraped them off the stomach and intestines of the other you.”
Sally blanched.
Her thoughts were tightly focused. Keep it down, don’t puke, it will be worse the second time. You can take it, he’s just trying to help. She fought her gut to a standstill, took a breath and told herself not to kill him, she probably couldn’t, anyway.
Jon looked at her. "You took it better than I predicted.”
After glaring at him to no effect, she took an internal audit and, in spite of her current annoyance, found herself almost completely spent. “Why don’t you tell me what you have found, and then, while you pretend you don’t know, I will tell you what I have found.”
Instead of starting his report, Jon took control of the chair and started pushing her back down the hallway. He didn’t seem to care about the mess he had left behind. He talked while they walked.
“I have no startling information. The female body was a copy of you. The evidence is that she was approximately ten years older than you are, and was in relatively good health at the time she died.
“The other entity is a well-respected species, known for its nurturing ways. It certainly helped the other you survive. One anomaly is that it should have left data files behind after its death, and these are missing.
“With this evidence, it is almost certain that we are caught up in some scheme. What is less certain is whether more than one player is involved.”
“Do you think we are in danger?” Sally asked.
“Yes. If not immediately, then in the long run.”
“Do you think there’s anything we can do? Are we helpless?”
“I do not know. We can keep on investigating and see if we uncover. Nothing I have learned to date mandates an immediate change.”
“Well, then, the big question. Why me? What is special about me? Why are you here, and the bear thing?”
“I have no information to adequately answer those questions. I am confident that you could not survive without help, but why this environment is geared in this manner is not obvious,” he said.
They finished the trek back to their campsite. Sally pushed herself out of the chair, ate one of the seeds, and prepared for sleep.
In bed, she wondered about the life of the other her. She wondered about being a copy. She wondered if Jon knew more than he told her. She wondered about whatever or whoever was watching. She came to no conclusions and dozed off.