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REAL
01
My first experience was one of confusion…and one of darkness.
I was floating; there was nothing on my skin but the cool, sweet touch of water. My eyes were closed, and I wished to open them, but found that I could not. I found this odd, but could not find a reason why it was odd.
The only sensation that I could properly formulate in my mind was one of awareness. I was aware of my eyes, my mouth, my nose and ears, of my entire body, and I was aware of how they should function, yet there was nothing. I was floating, I could not see, or hear, or smell or taste anything. I could not feel anything. Yet, there was the vague sensation that I should be able to.
It was frustrating. I had nothing to do but float there in the dark and wish that I could had something to observe other then my own confusion at the lack thereof.
I wished I could remember something; anything, for I knew that I could remember. But there was this vast emptiness in my mind where I knew that memories ought to be stored. I couldn’t put the nothingness to words; it was just a feeling of what ought to be and yet was not.
All I could remember was the confusion that I had first felt when the awareness first began.
My second experience was one of pain…and of light.
The only passage of time that I had observed was the difference between waking and sleeping, awareness and unconsciousness. After dropping off into the latter of these two states, I had reawakened to a bright and hostile light. It had burned down upon me, filling my eyes until it was all that I knew. It was so different from the peaceful dark, so harsh and angry. I felt upset in its presence, and wished for it to go away, to leave me alone in the darkness once again. At the same time, however, I felt elevated. My eyes were wide open, soaking up the light painfully until they became accustomed. Then my other senses started working as well.
My mouth opened, and my lungs expanded to fill with air. It was painful and sharp compared to the liquid I was accustomed to. I found myself gasping, trying to catch my breath. The air was tangy, it tasted of steel and iron and sterile surfaces. I coughed, trying to force the taste away, but it stuck to my tongue.
I could hear voices talking and machinery humming, both sounds were foreign and they blended together strangely in my ears. I could hear my own breath, rough and ragged, as well as my racing heartbeat, which was echoed by a startling noise.
Thump. My heart pounded. Beeeep! The noise responded. Beeeep!
At first I didn’t understand anything that I was experiencing, that made me feel lost and panicky, but then a voice cut through everything, sharp and clear and for some reason, reassuring.
“Is she awake yet?”
The tone was demanded, angry even, but it was also familiar and so I moved my eyes to find the source of the voice.
He was the only one in the room not dressed entirely in white. His face was uncovered and his long, dark hair flowed freely over his shoulders. His olive green eyes met mine, and a look of relief stole across his face.
“Clear the room.” He ordered, and everyone else soundlessly filed out through the only door.
I hurriedly took stock of the room. It was large, with lots of mirrors. I could see the door and lots of machines I didn’t understand, and then there was the large, blindingly bright light right above my face. I tried to lift a hand to block it out, but found that my wrist was strapped tightly to the table I lay on.
The light was suddenly moving, and I looked up in time to see the man shutting it off, flicking a small switch on the side determinedly. The darkness was a relief to my eyes, and his face suddenly came into sharp focus, hovering straight above my own.
His eyes were round, almost like a dog’s, surrounded by a horde of wrinkles, evidence of his ability to smile. He had very straight white teeth, well spaced, and nice, curvy lips that were pointed down instead of up at the moment. He had high cheekbones, elegant eyebrows half covered by his dark bangs. He was wearing a silver chain around his neck, but the end plunged underneath his simple, stripy shirt, so I couldn’t see what the chain held.
His hands were suddenly on my arm, both of them, heavy and well worn. I looked at them. One of his nails was cracked; his hands looked strong and well used.
“Do you know who I am?” He asked. His voice was much softer then before, and I felt compelled to answer, but when I opened my mouth, my throat croaked in pain. I coughed, but before I could try again, the man placed a thick finger on my lips.
“Shh,” He whispered. “Don’t talk. You don’t need to. Just nod if you remember.”
I held perfectly still. Did I remember? When I looked at him, I felt at ease, the familiar contours of his face made all of the craziness and confusion fade into the background. But I certainly didn’t remember. I couldn’t remember a single damn thing before I was aware of being aware. Before I was floating in the dark, there was nothing.
Yet the fact that I somehow knew this man meant that there should be something.
But there were only the empty spaces in my mind, so after wracking my head for another moment, I slowly shook my head once, from side to side.
The man inhaled slowly. I couldn’t tell if he looked disappointed or relieved. He patted my shoulder gently, and I instantly recognized the gesture, but I could not say from where I did.
A pause stretched out between us. “My name is Fill-Carter.” The man finally told me, his voice husky with emotion. The emotion was so mixed up it was impossible to detect. I wasn’t sure if it anger, sadness, guilt or satisfaction. Or maybe it was something else entirely.
His name was Fill-Carter, I suddenly released, and if he had a name, so should I.
“-who…” I managed to croak, my voice raspy with disuse. I took a deep breath to try and finish, but he shook his head and shushed me softly.
“Your name is Sky.” He whispered. He took my hand, his fingers were almost hot to the touch and he looked me straight in the eyes, honesty shining through all those other shades of emotion. “You are Sky-Carter.”
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02
After that second experience, I had a lot to learn.
However, after I had learned everything, life became tiresomely monotonous.
Firstly, my reflection was strangely surprising at first, but there were so many mirrors always around that it ceased to amaze me after a while.
I was unusually tall, I soon realized; taller then Fill-Carter, taller then all the women that worked for him and many of the men as well.
One of the first things that Fill did was get my hair cut. I figured that I had spent a long time floating, because for some reason it felt wrong to have my thick, black hair so long. He clipped it himself, shaving down both sides and around the back, but leaving a wave of hair on the top to swoop down to whichever side I preferred.
After I encountered a window I realized why my name was Sky. The world outside was astonishing, but I couldn’t tear my gaze away from what was above us. The sky was so blue, so bright and so beautiful. And the colour matched my eyes perfectly.
I was young, this I also realized. Everyone around me was older, Fill especially.
I also began to realize that I wasn’t alone.
Fill’s facility housed others who were like me; at least they were like me in the way that they were treated.
They wore the same, grey uniforms that I wore. They were attended by Fill’s employees, as I was. They trained day in and day out, just as I did, but there was a subtle difference.
They weren’t quite as aware as I was.
For one thing, they never noticed me as I noticed them. They never slacked off or question anything, and so I learned not to as well.
The only reason I felt obliged to blend in is because Fill asked it of me. For some reason I found myself trusting him one hundred percent. The others who wore white never spoke to me, unless required to. They never touched me, unless required to, and they never answered any of my numerous questions, so I stopped asking. Fill, however, was always ready to answer, to talk, and to touch. Whenever I did something silly or stupid, he get that sad, small smile on his face and he’s grip my shoulder, gently but firmly and then he’d ask me, gently but firmly, to stay away, to blend in, to pretend to be something other then what I was.
I listened to him, and did as he asked, if only for the seriousness in his tone, the worry in his olive green eyes.
“Why am I different?”
It was probably my favourite question to ask. Fill, however, never liked that question.
“You are different because I made you to be different.” He’d sometimes say, or; “That’s none of your business.” Or; “Why are you asking?”
For some reason I had assumed that I had the right to know. When I explained this to him, he kindly informed me that I was wrong and finally asked me to stop asking that particular question.
So I did.
Instead I asked; “What I am for?”
To this Fill laughed. “That one is easy.” He led me over to the one way mirrors. On one side, all you could see was yourself, from the other, from his side, you could survey the entirety of the training room. The place was huge, and right now it was full of the grey clad people like me and the white clad employees, monitoring everything as usual.
“What are the doing?” He asked me.
“Which ones?” I asked. He looked up, seeming surprised, like he hadn’t expected me to have noticed the difference between white and grey.
“The ones in grey,” He finally said.
“They are training.” I said, sure that I was right. His smile told me that I was.
“Yes, they are…but what for? Why are they training?”
I paused for a moment. “I don’t know,” He didn’t say anything to that, so I pondered for a moment longer. What was the point of training?
“They are preparing,” I started, but I wasn’t quite sure how to finish.
“Yes they are, but that still doesn’t answer my question.”
“But I ask the questions,” I protested. “And you answer. I don’t know anything, but you do.”
“That’s silly,” Fill said, touching my shoulder and smiling. “But, very well. They were made, all of them, to protect, to defend. That is their purpose. They are training so that they are ready to fulfill that purpose.”
“Who do they protect?” I ask instantly.
“Whoever wants protecting,” Fill shrugged. “I don’t pay much attention to the who as much as the how much.”
“How much?” I look at him, confused.
“How much they pay for the protection. Some are willing to pay quite a bit.”
“So…” I furrowed my eyebrows, confused. “So is that my purpose as well?”
“Not quite,” Fill explained. “Your purpose will be protecting, don’t get me wrong. But I will not be selling you off to the highest bidder. You will protect me.”
“Oh,” It still felt strange to me, the idea didn’t feel right. “What will I be protecting you from?”
“Anything or anyone that means me harm,” Fill took her shoulder again and gave it a quick squeeze. “And I, in return, shall do the same for you.”
I allowed a rather false smile to flicker across my face. “Okay, then.”
“Anymore questions?”
“Not right now,”
It wasn’t the truth. I had about a billion waiting in the back of my mind, but I was starting to be able to tell when he was done with me.
“Alrighty then, back to work with you, Sky, we can talk more later.”
I nodded and left the room. His employees called it his office, but it was really large for an office. The desk was way off in one corner, with only a small tab on surface. Mostly the room was made up of windows and couches and some old interactive games, like pac-man.
For Fill, back to work meant back to training. I hated training. For some reason, it seemed rather redundant. He said that I needed to learn things so that I would be prepared for the real world, but I didn’t ever feel like I was learning things. It felt more like relearning things.
Mostly it was the fighting part that felt like relearning.
Once I ‘learned’ something, I could sort of sense when I’d used it before, and when I had not. And if I had, I was an instant pro at it.
I stepped into the synthesizer and waited for approximately five seconds while one of Fill’s employees in white turned it on. Then, all I had to do was follow the instructions that appeared in front of me. I wondered what I would be doing today. It usually varied. Sometimes I would merely run, or do pushups, or pull ups for hours on end. Sometimes it tested me with complicated fighting techniques I had learned long ago, or ones that I hadn’t even learned yet. Sometimes it would be the boring lessons about the world that I really could have gone without.
Reading and writing was easy enough, which meant that I had done them both before.
Math essentials were fairly easy, but once it started getting into calculus and more complicated things, I lost interest.
But the more that I learned about everyday life for everyone else, the more I wondered about why that was not me. I wished that Fill would give me a straight answer to my question. Why was I different? I wasn’t like the others in grey, nor was I like the people in the ‘real’ world. I wasn’t like Fill either, so what was I?
The white clad employee today was a woman like I was, though her loose fitting shirt nearly hid that. I could still see her breasts, barely. She had her hair done up in a tight bun, which was hidden underneath her white cap. Half of her face was covered in white as well, but I knew that she was new. Firstly, because I would have noticed her slightly pointed ears before now and also because it took her longer then five seconds for her to turn on the synthesizer. It took approximately ten seconds, twice as long as the usual employee and it still wasn’t turning on.
Fill had explicitly told me not to talk to his employees, but I couldn’t resist. I thought that he might be watching from behind the mirrors, but I somehow doubted that he was listening as well.
“Are you new?”
It was the only thing that I could think of to say.
Twelve seconds now, and the machine was still off.
“I can help you, you know.” I had her attention. I could feel her eyes on me. She was very new, I was sure of it now. No one else would have looked at me like that. “I know how to turn it on.” I finished, all in one breath. “But I would like you to talk to me before I tell you how.”
I smiled slightly. She was tempted, I could tell, but obviously she had been ordered not to talk to me just as I had been asked not to talk to her.
“Please,” I said; my voice low and very, very soft. “No one ever talks to me. And I know that you are new. I was just asking to try and create conversation. I wouldn’t have asked if I hadn’t known that you were new.”
“How do you turn it on?” The woman whispered, her voice barely audible. “And please stop talking to me. You’re going to get me fired.”
“Fired…” I had learnt about fire recently. “Do you mean burned?”
“No, fired.” She looked around nervously. “I’ll loose my job here.”
“Oh,” I felt a brimming excitement within me. Not only was I talking to an employee, but I was learning things…or rather, relearning things, because deep down I knew that I had already known that.
“Sorry,” I apologized. I had learnt that was the polite thing to do if you upset someone. “All you have to do to turn it on is flick the switch hidden on the bottom of the control panel, and then enter your employee code. Then you have to select a lesson for the day. Please don’t let it be more pushups, because I am sick to death of pushups.”
Yesterday I hadn’t been doing anything physical, so I figured that today there was a good chance that I would be. I just preferred fighting over general exercise.
There was a suddenly hum, and then more delay while the new employee tried to remember her code. Finally she finished, but before she selected a lesson, she actually met my gaze, something no one other then Fill had ever done.
“Thanks,” She said, solemnly. “And its not pushups.”
I felt a smile crossing my features, but before I could respond as my lessons had instructed me to, by saying ‘you’re welcome’, the woman pushed a button and the training room vanished. Instead I was suddenly standing on top of a snow swept mountain top. In the distance I could see a few towns and tiny villages.
“Where are you?” An automated voice asked me. I rolled my eyes. Geography was useful, I realized, but not exactly my thing. There were some places that I got instantly, and others that just looked like every other place on the planet.
“Himalayas,” I guessed off the top of my head.
“Sorry, but you are incorrect.” The voice insisted before I swept to some other distant corner of the globe.
All that I could think about was the fact that she had talked to me. That she had looked at me, I mean, really looked at me. That meant that the others could as well. For a while I had entertained the thought that they literally could not, but now I realized that they merely would not.
When my lesson was finally over, however, there was another employee waiting for me. He quietly and dutifully escorted my back up to my rooms. After geography I had ran about twenty or thirty miles, I had lost track, but it had taken time and energy and I was worn out, and after a pounding shower I collapsed into my bed and lay there, trying to welcome sleep, yet still my mind wondered.
My room was tiny, just the small washroom and the bed, essentially. I only ever slept in there. Whenever I wasn’t training or sleeping I was with Fill, asking my numerous questions or merely watching him work, whenever he did.
When I finally fell asleep, my mind was still buzzing, and my dreams were made up of the employee who had actually spoken to me.
03
Her name was Anna-Gibeon.
Anna was one name, and Gibeon was the other. *
That’s all that she would tell me, because she was terrified that we would be overheard, but at least I got one thing out of our conversation.
And by thing, I mean question.
As soon as I was finished my lessons for the morning, I raced up to Fill’s office. When I arrived I was out of breath, and as soon as I saw him, stretched out on the red couch, I immediately started talking.
“Why do we have the same name?” I blurted, coming to a halt in front of him, panting heavily.
“Good morning to you to, Sky.” Fill replied, his voice thick with sarcasm. “Why don’t you sit down?”
I sat. “Tell me.”
Fill sighed. “So, which one of them told you their name?” He asked, instead of answering.
“What?” I tried to look confused as I lied. “None of them; they don’t talk to me.”
“I wasn’t born yesterday, Sky.” Fill took my shoulder his hand. “I know you couldn’t have noticed this unless you heard another name, and speaking off, I have been keeping that intentionally out of your lessons. So, come one, you can tell me.”
I met his eyes evenly. Like Anna had, before she thanked me.
“But…” I tried to think up a viable excuse. “But if I tell you her name, you’ll fire her. She said that if she spoke to me, you’d fire her.”
Fill picked up his pad, and flicked the screen on. A moment later he looked up at me.
“Is her name Anna-Gibeon?” He asked, his olive eyes scrutinizing me. My face told him all. “I see. She only started here yesterday.”
“Please,” It was the first word I could think of. “Please don’t fire her, Fill. I was the one who spoke first. I knew that she was new, and I took advantage. Please don’t.”
“Don’t you want to know how I found her name?” Fill chuckled, putting away his pad. “You usually have so many questions, Sky.”
I shook my head. “I’ve already figured it out. I only had three employees yesterday, and the other two were both men.” I went for a smile, trying to lighten the mood. “I wasn’t born yesterday, you know.”
Fill laughed, long and loud. “You learn quickly.”
“I’ve already learned my lesson here.” I said. “That speaking can get them fired, but you don’t need to do that. I think she wants to work here, and it’s my fault, so please don’t punish her for my actions.”
Fill arched an eyebrow. “Are you saying that I should punish you instead?”
I tipped my head to one side, unsure if this is a trick question or not. “If you must,”
“I don’t understand.”
“If you have to punish someone, punish me.” I explained quickly. “But from what I understand, you are the boss, the ‘shot caller’, so why does anyone have to be punished?”
“Because, the rules were broken,” Fill touched my shoulder again. “And if there aren’t consequences, they will be broken again.”
“So?”
It was my typical response to things that I didn’t quite understand.
Fill laughed. “You always were a rule breaker.”
It was a slip up, and I knew it, so I pounced.
“When was I a rule breaker?”
“A long time ago…” Fill whispered. “But that doesn’t matter. She will not be fired, but if she fucks up again, she will be. And if you fuck up again, you will be punished as well.”
“Will you fire me?” I asked innocently.
“No.” He growled.
“What is the meaning of fuck?”
He laughed, as if he couldn’t believe that I had another question, or that I had the audacity to ask that particular question.
“Is it a bad word?” His face gave me the answer to that one. “How bad is it?”
“Real bad,” He responded. “Bad enough that I don’t ever want to hear you say it again.”
“Will you punish me if I do?”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Now will you answer my question?” I pressed, eager to find the answer.
“Which one are you talking about?” Fill laughed. “There have been so many.”
“Why do we share the same name?”
Fill sighed. “People who are related share the same name.”
There was a slight pause while I waited for him to continue, but he didn’t, so I spoke. “So, we are related?”
“Yes, in a way.” He sighed. “I created you, Sky. You are like a child to me because of this. So, on paper, we are related. Should anyone look into our DNA, however, they would find that we are not.”
“Oh,” I was more confused then ever. “What’s DNA?”
“I’ll be sure to include that in your next lesson later today.”
He gave my shoulder another squeeze and a look that clearly dismissed me, so I left.
I never saw Anna-Gibeon again.
04
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