Chapter 31 Sem
My cell was just big enough to let me pace a few steps back and forth.
Which was how I’d spent my first night in the underground, along with the entire following day and the day after that.
Staring out through the bars of my cage, I felt the prisoners down here toil.
They made and mended clothes, pumped water up through the pipes, maintained the thermal generators, and managed the feedlots whose odiferous inhabitants I could smell all the way down the tunnel.
Having my empathy back was a double-edged sword.
Being able to use one of my senses again was a relief, providing a laughable sense of normalcy, considering my situation.
But I already missed the mental quiet of life with Elanie.
I missed having to pay more attention, searching every beautiful facial expression for cues about how she felt.
Down here, however, reading vibes was useful.
Nobody would talk to me. No matter how often I shouted, how hard I rattled my metal bars, how much profanity I used—and I was getting pretty creative with it—it was like I didn’t even exist. In fact, the only reaction I’d received since Lars had tossed me in this cell was an amused snort from a Delphinian after I’d called him Captain Crapface.
Despite my unpopularity, I’d pieced together my situation relatively quickly from the thoughts and emotions flowing from my fellow captives.
I was obviously not the first non-bionic to arrive in Thura, but this subterranean shithole was where we all wound up.
Though my sewer mates had come from all corners of the Known Universe, they were united in their resignation to this life of drudgery, each one pretending to be a happy little worker.
But an undercurrent of fear ran through this place like the water through the pipes.
Everyone else might have earned the right to leave their cages, but we were all prisoners here.
I had to give it to Gol. There was a symmetry to this world he’d created. Bionics living off the labor of non-bionics, living freely above while we worked in secret below. It was diabolical.
Speaking of the gigantic asshat…
Heavy footsteps pounded down the hallway leading to my cell, the sound causing every non-bionic within earshot to fall to their knees, their heads touching the dirt in reverence, their emotions going all watery.
I rolled my eyes.
Hauling his ridiculous bulk in front of my cell, his shoulders hunched since the ceilings were too low for him in this cesspit, Gol asked, “What do you think of your new home, Dr. Semson?”
“It’s super,” I replied brightly, wrangling my fury like it was a hydroshark writhing in my arms. “Clean and comfortable. Five stars. Where’s Elanie?” I asked, cutting to the chase. “Does she know I’m down here?”
Scrutinizing the non-bionics still on their knees around him, Gol snarled in disgust. “She is safe in her hut. And she knows only the truth: that you decided you didn’t want to be with her anymore and left Thura of your own accord.
Without saying goodbye.” As he noticed my devastation, his lips twitched. “She’s quite heartbroken.”
“You sick son of a bitch!” With an ineffective grunt, I hurled my shoulder into my cell door. “Let me out!”
Gol’s laughter vibrated through the floor, the bars, my chest. “You are a funny little blue man.”
“Fuck you,” I spat, cradling my throbbing and hopefully not dislocated shoulder. “So what? We’re your slaves down here?”
“Slaves?” Gol’s cold rage was palpable, even without empathy.
“What do you know of slavery, Portisan? No, you are not slaves. You are merely Thura’s labor force.
Paid in food and fair lodging, kept safe from the deadly blizzards of this hostile planet.
I protect you. I give your lives meaning.
I give you purpose. Is that not what the rest of the Known Universe claims to do for us?
” He leaned toward my bars, his voice dropping as a brow arched.
“Tell me, Doctor. Did you ever think of the bionics on your ship as slaves?”
“We don’t keep bionics in cages,” I shot back.
His head tilted, eyes narrowing. “Are you sure about that?”
While I cowered, he rose.
“You see it now, don’t you?” He stared down his nose at me. “You see the truth. I am doing nothing to you that organics haven’t been doing to us for centuries. You are the bionics now.”
As I watched my fellow prisoners rise slowly from the floor, their heads still bowed as they returned to their toiling, all of them fed and clothed and housed but none of them free, I knew that he was right.
Even so, this place? This underground? It wasn’t the answer. And it would not be my home.
Elanie was alone in our hut, probably wondering why I’d left her, wondering what she’d done wrong.
Wondering if I’d ever cared about her at all.
If I’d ever loved her. Despite the anger raising the temperature of my skin until it sizzled, I had to keep my head.
I had to find a way out of here and back to her. That was all that mattered.
“Well.” I kicked at my bars, the clang ricochetting down the long, dark hallway. “If I’m a bionic now, when will you let me out? I can’t be your good little worker if I’m stuck in this cell, now can I?”
“You’ll be released tomorrow. Lars will train you in your duties.” Kicking my bars back, the much louder clang making one of the prisoners jump, Gol warned, “And do yourself a favor, Portisan. Don’t try to escape.”
All the non-bionics within earshot gasped at the word, stale shame wafting from them as they muttered things like “no, Lord Gol” and “we would never.”
I made a massive fart noise. “Did you train them to do that? It’s ridiculous. You’re ridiculous!” I shouted, aiming the word at a nearby Delphinian I was pretty sure was Captain Crapface.
At bionic speed, Gol’s hand shot through the bars of the cell. He grasped my throat and yanked, slamming my head into the bars so hard stars exploded in front of my eyes.
“When I deign to pay a visit to this sickening, repulsive underworld,” he said with a preternatural calm, considering he was a thumb-twitch away from crushing my trachea, “you will bow, you will grovel, and you will obey. If you don’t, there will be consequences.
Our pigs are always hungry, and that is not a good death. ”
He released me, and I slumped to the ground, sucking in air.
“Elanie will do well in Thura. In no time at all, she won’t even remember your name.
” He waved his arm over the still bowed heads around us.
“Just as everyone else here has been forgotten, you will be forgotten. You know, I think it will be good to have a doctor down here.” His smile would have been at home on a snake.
“You organics are so frail and fragile.”
Lars unlocked my cell with his upper hands the following morning, holding a plasma prod in one lower hand and slapping it against the palm of the other. “You gonna be any trouble?” he asked, his bushy brows raised. “This thing packs enough juice to knock you out for a week.”
Recoiling from the bright red beam arcing between the prod’s prongs, I raised my hands. “I’m good. No trouble at all.”
“That’s what I thought.” Lars grunted, slapping his hand with the prod one more time. “Well, come on then. You’ll start on the water pumps. It’s a good job, all things considered. It’s not as nice as the grow rooms, but at least there’s no shit to shovel.”
“Sounds like a dream,” I mumbled as Gol’s warning about the pigs chilled my blood.
Stepping out of my cell, I followed Lars down the tunnel.
With each step, the Gorbie’s frizzy hair brushed against the glowlights overhead, making them swing and cast strange shadows along the walls.
We passed other cells, most of them empty, but some filled with beings in their beds, turned on their sides.
We passed rooms filled with looms and non-bionics stitching clothes together.
A kitchen where a Ulaperian in a white chef’s hat and tinted goggles barked out orders.
A laundry room with a wall of industrial washers and dryers and an old man perched on a stool in front of them, reading a frayed Psychology of the Known Universe magazine that looked even more ancient than he did.
When the man looked up, he squinted bloodshot blue eyes at me, then gave a dismissive head shake before going back to his magazine.
“What’s his deal?” I asked as his disgruntled annoyance reached me all the way out in the hall.
“Oh, that’s just Old Max,” Lars replied.
“He’s been here longer than any of us. From Mercury, I think.
” He made a psh sound. “Mercurians, am I right? Just ignore him. The rest of us do.” Lars spun a finger around his temple.
“His head’s gone sideways. Speaks in riddles. Doesn’t make any kind of sense.”
As we made our way deeper into the underground, taking so many turns I had no idea how I’d find my way back to my cell without help, a sound started to echo off the walls. A low thrumming hum. A power source maybe? But we’d passed the generator station several turns ago.
“What’s that noise?” I asked, ducking under a massive pipe that traveled across the ceiling.
“What noise?” Lars made another turn.
“That humming.” It was definitely getting louder. I stopped, pointing down the tunnel to our left. “There. Don’t you hear it?”
One of Lars’s upper hands scratched his head. “Nah, I don’t hear anything. There’s nothing down that tunnel but some old maintenance closet anyway. Come on, you need to relieve the last shift. We’re already late.”
Narrowing my focus, I tried to commit the remainder of the trek to the water pumps to memory. There was something in that maintenance closet. Something generating power. And I was going to find my way back to it and figure out what it was.
Lars had been right about one thing: pumping water was better than shoveling shit. But barely.
I was not in peak physical shape by any stretch, and after spending mindless, grueling hours pushing and pulling the pump handle, I nearly wept when he came back for me.
My replacement, a four-foot-tall female Gorbie, smacked Lars’s butt with one of her lower hands before settling next to the pump and getting to work.
“That’s Mina,” Lars whispered, grinning proudly. “She’s my girlfriend.”
While I watched Mina use all four hands to work the pump at a speed that put my best efforts to shame, I said, “Congratulations.”
“The pump’s not too bad, right? Mina’s been running it for years.” Lars cracked one set of knuckles, then he grimaced. “You don’t look so good, Doc.”
Clutching at my aching back, I said, “Really? Because I feel amazing. Never better.”
Lars chuckled. “You’re funny. I thought all Portisans were super serious. Carrying the weight of the worlds in their heads and all that.”
I scowled. “You know, Lars, that’s a very narrow assessment of my people—”
“There!” Lars barked a laugh. “Now you sound like a Portisan.”
“Wait? Why are we going this way?” I asked when he started down a tunnel leading away from the maintenance closet I’d wanted to investigate.
“Shortcut,” he said after a thunderous belch. “And this way, you get to see the entire underground.”
“Lucky me,” I muttered, studying the pipe that hugged the ceiling and ran the length of the tunnel. “Is that how the water gets aboveground?”
“Yeah, but don’t get any ideas. We’d be pulling your corpse out of that thing just like everyone else who’s tried to swim out over the years. It’s too long and too narrow. And Gol gets so mad when we try to escape. Doesn’t let us sleep for days. Doesn’t let us eat for a week.”
“Seriously?”
Lars ducked to avoid a flickering glowlight. “It’s why we don’t try anymore. One of us transgresses, we all pay the price. And it’s really not so bad down here, once you get used to it.”
Later that night, lying on my bed and staring at a ceiling that should have been stars, hugging a pillow that should have been Elanie, trying not to move because every muscle in my body protested when I did, I knew that Lars had been wrong. It was really, really bad down here.
Closing my eyes, I started to hum, just a little sound to push back against the crushing silence.
I’d almost given in to my exhaustion when I realized the melody was from Elanie’s favorite song: “Oops, I Kissed Him First” by Macey Valentine.
It was the only moment underground so far when I’d let myself cry.