The Warren Read online

  For nearly a day I was there, trying to make something happen. Nothing happened. At last, in frustration, nothing accomplished, I donned the suit again, opened the seal, and made a mad dash back to the warren.

  “Monitor,” I asked, immediately upon my return, “when did the last person go out and when did he return?”

  Query: what do you mean by person? it asked.

  “As before. Bipedal,” I said. “None of the other qualifications.”

  The last person to go out went out fourteen hours and forty-six minutes ago. He returned eight minutes ago. You are that person.

  “Monitor,” I asked, “is the storage facility that keeps Horak part of the warren?”

  Query: what do you mean by warren? it asked.

  “This place,” I said. “What you see all around you.”

  For a long moment, the monitor did not respond, and I thought that it had at last reached its point of exhaustion. Everything is running down, dying. Perhaps the monitor will not outlast you, I thought. Perhaps, before you die, you will lose even that small consolation.

  And then the monitor said, No. It is on the surface. This place is not on the surface.

  “The warren,” I said.

  If you call it that.

  “But were they once connected?” I persisted.

  Everything was once connected, responded the monitor. Everything still is.

  I called up all the files related to storage. There was nothing that could be seen, nothing that could be read, nothing more than a few bits and pieces of code, a fragmented, damaged hodgepodge that told me nothing.

  I could tell you how I tried to awaken him and how it all failed. But I have not even succeeded in telling you what I planned to begin with, and there is no point, or little point, in pushing that goal even farther away on the horizon by stacking more and more up in front of it. No, it is enough to say that I, or we if you prefer, failed. We could not start the mechanism to unstore this Horak. It had been done before, I knew it had been done, but there was no record of it anywhere, not even fragments. It was as if this part of our history had been wiped deliberately and mercilessly away.

  Is there a reason for this? an awakening part of me wondered. Do I really know what I am getting into?

  I knew something of this Horak from my earlier conversation with the monitor. He apparently was not constructed but rather procreated through the fertilization of an ovum by a sperm and its subsequent development in a womb. He was, according to the monitor, an individual thought process enmeshed solitarily within a body. It is thought, at least by some residing within me, that unlike us he could not be hurt by being outside. There were some within me who felt he was not human, though others argued that he was a true human, a first human, whom we all had been set to emulate. Others still thought he had once been human but had, due to circumstances, changed.

  What was true and what was rumor, it was difficult to say: it is impossible for me to be objective about the opinions of all the selves contained within me, for I hear not only their words but feel along with them the weight of their conviction.

  Better to be cautious, to wait and see if I can figure a way to awaken him, and if I cannot, perhaps I can convince myself that it is better not to awaken him at all.

  And so, knowing all this, believing all this, I removed the suit and tore my strip of flesh off along with it, then bandaged my belly, ate, and fell asleep, trusting that tomorrow was another day, that tomorrow anything could happen.

  And yet, when I awoke, it was to find myself fully clothed in the suit with no memory of having dressed myself. I was not in the warren but rather in the facility above ground. I was, I was shocked to discover, standing beside the storage tank and had in my hand a device for the cutting of metal pipes. With it, I saw, I had severed the cables running along the back of Horak’s tank. Alarms were blaring and all the eyes within me had sprung open, and the machine before me had begun to thaw, water condensing all along its surface.

  Who is it that awakens when I sleep to take control of my body? What do they want? I turned my gaze inward and scrutinized the eyes I saw, but nothing was revealed to me. So I turned my eyes back around and stared outward, at the tank.

  I thought, This will kill him.

  And then I thought, No. If he is as they say, perhaps he will survive it. We can only watch and wait.

  II

  When he first was removed, he was dead, I was sure of it. The thaw had been improper and more than enough to kill him. His skin had turned black in places and was suppurating in others.

  I squatted over his corpse, staring down at it, wondering what to do. Perhaps I would simply drag it outside and leave it there, in the open air, to decay. There were, according to the monitor, no animals or insects, no bacteria even. The corpse would remain there, perhaps for decades, slowly mummifying.

  And then the dead body took a deep, juddering breath and proved itself alive.

  For many hours, days even, he shivered and shook. He lay there, hardly able to breathe or move, his eyes opening occasionally to look desperately around him. I stayed beside him. At a certain point, I descended back into the warren and returned with some food and water and tried to give them to him, but he would not part his lips to receive them, and I could not force them on him out of fear that he might choke. Several times he tried to say something, his voice barely above a whisper, but by the time I had brought my ear down close enough to hear him, he had finished and did not repeat it.

  Twice I awoke to find my hands clenched around his throat, some other personality within me having taken charge of the body as I slept, and the second time my thumbs left black marks on the throat and his tongue lolled out as if he were dead again, and I believe that for a time he was indeed again dead. But then came again that same awful juddering breath as he either barely clung to life or came back from the dead.

  He did not die for good, and yet he got no better. He lingered on a threshold between life and death. I was a danger to him, I knew—or not I exactly, but one of those others imprinted within me—which is, in a sense, both the same and not.

  And yet, who am I to say that the person I think I am, the personality that had risen to the top like cream, is the real me? These others fill up more of me than I do. Perhaps one of them is the real me and I am the interloper.

  Thoughts such as these—considered as I sat beside Horak, waiting for his final breath and then, when it came, his next final breath, and the one that came after that—led me into darker speculations. What was I, I could not help but think, but a repository, a refuge for souls without bodies? Here, before me, was a soul with a fatally damaged body, a soul that could not stay in life and yet could not flee. He was not the same as the rest of us, but there was room for him. We would have him imprinted and then I would take the imprinting into myself and then, together, we would continue.

  Which was why I affixed my faceplate again, shrugged my way back into my suit, and, grabbing him by the arms, prepared to drag him to the warren to have the monitor inscribe him onto me.

  There were, as it turned out, problems I had not foreseen. I brought Horak out into the open air above ground, thinking that this alone might kill him, but he kept breathing. Grunting and sweating, I dragged him across the baked and dusty ground and toward the seal leading down to the access ladder. But as I got there, I realized I did not have the strength to carry him down the ladder. I could not drop him down the shaft—the fall would break his neck and no doubt kill him. I had to figure out some way to get him down.

  Rope, I thought. I use the term I loosely, of course. Better to say, Rope, he thought, and I listened.

  I descended the ladder and passed through the seal at the bottom and then rooted through the warren until I found, half buried behind a stack of cement blocks, a dusty coil of rope. It was long enough, or close enough to being so that, if he had to fall the last few feet, he might do so with little risk of injury. It was sturdy, or seemed so. Sturdy enough, I hoped.


  I slung it over my shoulder and climbed back up the ladder.

  As I pushed my head through the second seal, I saw that in my absence he had rolled over on his side and turned slightly toward me. His eyes were open. His mouth was in a tight line and I could see his hands twitching. And then, seeing him opening his mouth and struggling to speak, I bent closer, brought the receptive port of my helmet very close to his mouth.

  “Leave me,” Horak whispered.

  “There’s no point in leaving you,” I reasoned. “I’ll bring you below. We’ll imprint you and then, even if your body does not survive, you shall survive within me.”

  His head made a brief palsied movement, which might have been involuntary or might have been a denial. I came a few steps higher on the ladder and began to affix the rope around him. But when he realized what I was doing, he scrabbled weakly at the rope, trying to push it away.

  “Stay,” he whispered again, “stay here.”

  “It’s dangerous here,” I told him. “Poison. It’ll kill you. We need to take you below.”

  “No,” Horak whispered.

  I hesitated a moment and then ignored him, continued to construct a harness around him by which I could lower him into the warren. It was nearly complete when I felt a pain in my side and saw that, despite his incapacitation, he had managed to produce a knife from somewhere and force it through the fabric of my suit until it penetrated my skin. As I reached for it, he drew it down, shallowly wounding me and tearing a large rent in the fabric.

  All the eyes within me shuddered open at once and I found myself riding on a swell of panic. I pulled away and the knife slid cleanly out and then he whispered something that I did not understand and the knife slipped from his hand and fell with a thud into the dirt beside his head. A part of me, the part that I will refer to as the real me, wanted to stay and finish the job, to complete the harness and lower Horak into the warren. But the other mouths within my skull were counting now, their panic slowly rising, counting quickly away the moments I had left to live. And so I left him there and passed through the outer seal and clattered down the ladder and slid through the inner seal and then stripped off the suit itself and saw my side stained with my own flavescent blood and began to vomit, though whether from the shock of seeing my own condition or from being exposed to the poison of the outside air, I still cannot say. Perhaps a little of both.

  I would not rise to the surface to check on Horak, I told myself. He did not want my help, I owed him nothing, better to leave him to die there. No, I told myself, I would waste no more time on him.

  And yet there were other parts of me, other bits that whispered, Climb the ladder, and these voices grew louder within me, harder and harder to resist. In the end what could I do but climb?

  He was there still, just where I had left him, the knife lying in the dirt beside him, the tip stained with my blood. He was, as far as I could gather, still alive. Or perhaps alive again. It was impossible for me to be sure on that score. His body, the damaged portions in particular, had become filmed with a milky weblike substance, as if a cocoon were forming around him, and through the surface of this web I could see a regular pulsing of dark fluid that it took me some moments of staring to realize was something akin to blood. His own blood, if the pallor of the flesh beneath was any indication.

  I did not understand what was happening to him, and whether it was something brought about by his own body or by something exterior to him. There was nothing within or outside of me, in pure or damaged form, to give me any hint or indication. Was it a good thing or a bad thing? All I knew was that watching it terrified me.

  I did not dare touch him. I regretted having climbed the ladder. I slid back through the aperture of the seal and climbed down and promised myself that I would not return.

  The days proceeded as they had before Horak. I grew older, hour by hour, and extinction drew closer. I continued my record, making notes with charcoal and paper that would be left in case someone did outlast me. I searched the warren for anything we had missed, any materials that might be used to form a descendant, and found nothing. I scoured the remaining fragmented archives and consulted the monitor, hoping to find some indication of where such materials might be found within a range that I might have a chance of successfully retrieving them and repropagating myself rather than succumbing to extinction. Had there been anything, even the hope of anything, I would have donned the suit and stepped through the seal and over the enshrouded body of Horak and gone to find it. But there was no such indication, and I had no idea where to start. Better, I told myself, to keep scouring the warren, keep scouring the knowledge of the personalities within my skull, keep searching for the question that when asked properly to the monitor would reveal a possibility of continuance. But better or no, I still found nothing.

  It might have gone on like this for some time, perhaps even forever: the doddering torpor of an aging person, if I could be said to fit the proper definition of person, as he approaches an extinction not just personal but extending to his entire species. I could have let my life dribble away like that, not knowing what else to do. And, indeed, would have, had I been left alone.

  But I was not left alone. I was never alone. How could I be left alone, considering the number of selves that had been inscribed on the surface of my brain?

  I awoke on the ladder, wearing the suit. How I had gotten there, I did not know. All the eyes still left intact within me seemed open, none of them accepting blame. Was I on my way outside, or had I been outside already? I had no way of knowing. There was a moment in which I considered climbing out to see what was on the other side, to examine the state of Horak’s body, and there were parts of me that leapt at the possibility, but other parts recoiled. I made my way back down the ladder and secured the suit within a storage chest, and then locked the chest and secured the key.

  “Monitor,” I inquired, trying to learn how far I had gone, “when did the last person go outside and when did he return?”

  Question disabled, said the monitor.

  “What do you mean, ‘question disabled’?”

  The question cannot be answered without the proper employment of a password.

  “Who told you that you were not allowed to answer the question?”

  You did.

  “It was not me,” I said.

  The monitor did not respond.

  “Answer the question,” I said.

  The question cannot be answered without the proper employment of a password.

  “I established the password,” I said. “I should be allowed to remove it. Monitor, there is no longer a password.”

  The monitor did not respond.

  “Monitor,” I said, “when did the last person go outside and when did he return?”

  Question disabled. System shutting down.

  I awoke a second time on the ladder, and this time without the suit, naked and shivering, on my way up to the outside world, unless I had already been outside—but no, that wasn’t possible: had I been I would now be sick or dead.

  I am working against myself. There are parts of me ready to betray me, and I no longer have clear control over them, particularly when I sleep. If I am not careful, I will fall asleep and when I wake up I will not be the self that is currently spread over the body like sweat, touching all parts of it, but one of the selves held close within the skull of the body, locked inside.

  III

  For a few days, I was fine. Nothing happened, or nothing seemed to. I was, at least, still alive, not sick, and the suit remained locked in the storage chest, so I had not been outside, at least not for long. I was lonely for the voice of the monitor, but there are, if I am to be honest with myself, enough voices as it is. The loss of one, even that of the monitor, is something I can survive. I was beginning to relax. Hope had begun to return. I would find something, I told myself. There was something buried in the dirt of the closed portions of the tunnel, or some bit of uncorrupted knowledge that when uncovered wo
uld allow us to continue, for us to persist until the air became such that we could survive it and participate in a different kind of life, for us to persist until there would be no need for external material to fashion us, where the thought processes enmeshed in a body would be singular rather than multiple, and the answer to all three of the monitor’s initial qualifications for personhood would be met.

  I fell asleep thinking such utopian thoughts. There were dreams, but they were muddled, shot through with shadow.

  When I awoke, I knew something was wrong. For a moment, I did not recognize my surroundings and thought I must have ascended the ladder again or, at the very least, moved from one portion of the warren to another. But no, I was on my cot, in my room. My arms I had flung back and over my head. During the night, they had slipped over the edge of the cot; they tingled now as if they did not have sufficient blood. My neck, too, had become bent and was now stiff. It was only in forcing it to turn that I realized someone else was in the room, hanging over me in the darkness, motionless, watching.

  For a moment, I felt as though one of the selves inside me had been extruded out of my mouth and had taken on physical form. And then the figure, noting my eyes were open, moved, and I saw that it was Horak.

  He looked haggard and ill, but his skin had healed, the necrosis of the flesh having vanished. There were still, here and there, little scraps of webbing, as if he had only recently broken from a cocoon.

  “You’re alive,” I said.

  He did not reply. Perhaps he saw no reason to reply.