The two of them stood looking down on the box of subject 345, Kayla Hederton. Evan’s brow furrowed. “We don’t know much about this world, and we only have so much of the food under the counter. It’s enough for us to survive for a couple months but it would be gone in days if we wake everyone. She still has 53 days left.”
Amelia looked down at her friend, “We could use her help in that glasshouse for edible plants we found at the ground level.”
He grimaced, “But that means more people we have to feed. I say we wake people’s vessels when their count reaches 30. The count seems to match with emptying. As long as the count doesn’t reach zero the vessels should be fine.”
She grabbed his hand and held it tightly, “But what if that is wrong, what if suddenly the boxes stop working as they have and everyone ends up empty. As empty as this giant lonely world we seem to be living in.”
He looked into her eyes and pulled her hands close to his chest, “If anything starts going wrong, the beeping should start by being uneven, right? So if the beeping for any box becomes uneven then we rush and press the awakening button. For now I say we explore more of this building and see if we can learn more about why we are here and why there is no one else here.”
She leaned into him, “But what if the boxes all suddenly go silent and empty like ones before you. I don’t want to live in a lonely empty world.”
He leaned his head against hers ad began reciting:
“From the sand of the ground we grow
The food that sustains life as we know.”
She joined in for the second verse of the well-known harvest rhyme:
“Let the harvest cycles guide our year
Each harvest festival for cheer.”
She stopped and shook her head, “but what does that have to do with us?”
“I remember the harvest rhyme thinking about the crops in the glasshouse. Some of the crops looked ready to harvest soon according to the book, so let’s wait to wake Kayla until the crops are ripe, and if we get within thirty days of her number, we wake her at thirty like my original plan. We can wake William at the same time we’ll have a little more company.” He smiled like this solved all the problems.
“This doesn’t fix the issue of if all the boxes suddenly go silent.” She glared at him.
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“No, you’re right, it doesn’t, but it helps with offsetting the food we’ll need to feed everyone. And we can’t live by what ifs. We are alive in this world, and we have to live by the rules we’ve learned so far. Rule number one is the boxes have a count down and you must be woken before the box goes silent. Rule number two is we have no Source. Rule number three, we need sleep, food, and water.” He stopped and tilted his head as if trying to think of any other rules.
She nodded, “That sounds about right. I would add one more thing, everything is more painful and injuries last longer.” She looked down at the finger she’d sliced on the food cylinder that was still healing.
“Another good reason to trust that these boxes will keep following the rules for now and we just have to slowly release people and teach them about this world,” he looked down at their friend. “We will press the awaken button and have other people join us, just I don’t think we are ready yet.”
“And when will we be ready?” She asked.
He shrugged, “When we find out more about this place. When we have food to share, or when we have to wake people to save them from the emptying.” He smiled at her, “Speaking of learning more, we haven’t searched this level much. We took the stairs down to the ground floor the moment we found them.”
“It would be nice to add to our rules,” she said as the two walked hand in hand to the door. They went out of the small closet room and into a large hallway.
She pulled him toward the door directly to their left, “Let’s just go to the next door. We haven’t gone room by room since the first time we explored this we went straight to the stairs.”
The door led into another room with a counter on one side, but this one had a bookshelf on the other side and a giant white framed shiny thing with writing and diagrams scrawled on it.
She walked toward the wall writing while Evan moved toward the books.
At the top on the board in large capital letters were the words “IMMORTALITY PROJECT”
Below it was multiple graphs. One was titled: “Time on Serum compared to days without DNA decay”. The graph showed a straight line going up out of the corner diagonally. Next to the graph was a note “Being asleep doesn’t change the graph. Seems to be a direct correlation.”
“Amelia, come here!” Evan called to her excitedly. “These are journals. We are in these journals!” He held one up to her. “Look.”
She looked and it showed a picture of a baby. Below the picture was the designation “Subject Number 344” and her name “Name: Amelia Rhineland”. A small description was underneath, “Subject 344 was added to the experiment as the daughter of Subject 189 and Subject 190 who were both also raised in the dream world. Subject 344 will be woken at the 350 year mark if this experiment can continue being run for that long.”
She wasn’t that old, and she’d woken herself. Was this maybe not her? But that was her subject designation and her parents.
Evan gripped her hand. “They called it the dream world. This is the Waking World. They were studying us, but for some reason they abandoned us.”
“And the note we saw?” She asked him.
He shrugged, “I don’t know. Maybe a hurried note before they fled.”
She put her hand over the entry, “Whatever it was, whatever they were using us for, we are free now. This place and this Waking World are ours now.”
He smiled, placed the book loosely on the shelf and wrapped his arms around her resting his head gently against hers, “and we will write new rhymes.”