I wrote this based on a contest here, whose rules I didn’t really bother to follow, after a friend pointed out the contest to me. I wrote until I had nothing left to say, so it doesn’t end so much as stop…it is what it is, though.
—
A voice came out of the darkness. It sounded familiar, in that it had the evenly-paced and modulated tone of an automated announcement at an airport. She opened her eyes slowly, grimacing at the bright white light that evenly lit the small room she found herself in.
The room was square, maybe eight feet to a side, and white all over. The corner she sat in was home to a white bed built into the white wall, and it sat flush with the white floor. She gingerly stood, her feet clad in white shoes that weren’t hers, instinctively smoothing out the white pants and tunic she wore, and looked around. No sink, no mirror, no amenities beyond the white bed and a white door.
The voice rang out again, this time in Japanese. She jumped, and the question took a moment to sink in. The voice sounded layered, like one person speaking several languages at once, and filled the room. She looked around, but failed to spot the speaker the voice must have been emanating from. The voice wanted her name.
She blinked again. She heard a word she didn’t recognize, a Japanese word underneath that, and possibly even English underneath that. She moved to speak and coughed horribly. She cleared her throat as best she could and said her name.
“Thank you. Please wait one moment.” The voice was still layered. Hybrid English and Japanese. She walked to the door and pressed against it. No give. No handle. No indication of how it opened, even.
The moment passed. “Please back away from the door before security measures are enabled. Thank you. Please wait one moment.”
A minute passed.
“Records located and examined. Do you know where you are?”
“Why do you sound like that?” she asked.
“Please be more specific,” the voice replied.
“I hear you, but I hear…lots of you. English, Japanese…something else.”
“Ah,” came the reply. “You are not familiar with our translation socket. I am speaking Japanese. You understand me clearly?”
“You’re speaking English.”
“I’m speaking Japanese, and it is being translated to English on the fly. You may experience a slight delay as the subtext and nuance engines ensure an accurate translation, but the translation socket implanted in the skin just below my chin allows you to speak with me and vice versa.”
She sighed and sat down, her head in her hands. “Why can’t I remember?”
“Excuse me?”
“I can’t remember how I got here. Or what I did.”
“Ah.” A pause. “You arrived on ANA flight number zero-zero-eight, departing from Los Angeles at 1400 and arriving in Haneda at 1600. Passenger 14C. Do you remember your arrival?”
“I don’t remember anything.”
“I’ve been told that that is normal. It will return in time. Your fellow passengers don’t recall your behavior on boarding, but reported that you appeared unsettled upon waking up partially through the trip, that you exhibited a great degree of stress and agitation. Self-Defense Forces on the scene took custody of you, gave you a pacifying treatment, and brought you here.”
“Where is here?”
A pause, and then the voice continued on as if she hadn’t said anything at all. “Why were you flying to Japan?”
“I don’t…no. I had a—a trip planned. A week in Tokyo, a few days in Hokkaido for the penguins, and then on to Fiji.”
“Do you remember boarding?” The voice remained kind, but direct.
“Kind of. LAX is always a mess.”
“Ell-ay-ecks? Clarify, please.”
“Clarify LAX? It’s the biggest airport in the world.”
“Ah, thank you. It isn’t, but your meaning is clear now. What time did you leave?”
“You just said. I left at…what is 1400, two o’clock? That sounds right. And I was due to land in Haneda…did you say I landed at four?”
“That is correct.”
“It’s tomorrow?”
“We’ll get there in due time. Please tell me the exact date you left.”
She did so.
“Do you know today’s date?”
“No.” She paused, and her voice cracked when she asked, “How long have I been here?”
“You have been here for roughly 96 minutes at this point, including transport time from Haneda.”
“Where is here?”
“Do you know today’s date?”
“Where am I?”
A sigh doesn’t need translation, and she winced when she heard the voice lay a deep one on her. “The year is 2037. It is exactly twenty years since you left ell-ay-ecks.”
She blacked out.
—
She awoke again, and suddenly. No grogginess, no fuzz. The lights in the room slowly came up as she opened her eyes. She stayed in the bed, laying on top of the sheets, and looked at the ceiling until a quiet, inoffensive tone sounded and the voice entered the room again.
“Good morning. How do you feel?”
“I feel lost.”
“Those feelings are normal. Do not be concerned. Do you remember our conversation yesterday?”
“You told me I lost twenty years, like I was in a coma or something.”
“No, the years were not lost, and you experienced no coma. There is no known medical cause for your…situation. Researchers are still unsure exactly what causes it.”
“What happened? What is it?”
“Sometimes, people are set adrift in time. Between the end of your era and the dawning of our own, technological advances gave us a certain level of control over reality—physics, gravity, and so forth. Ever since, every now and then, people from your time simply arrive in our time. Sometimes the time difference is just a few years, if they lived close to the breaking point. Occasionally, it’s much longer, as in your case. We suspect that it has to do with the theoretical permanence of the human soul.”
“This can’t be real.”
“No, souls are very real. That was proven to be true years ago. Scientists suspect that the soul may be immortal, and that’s why those that find themselves adrift only suffer temporary side effects from becoming unmoored before adjusting.”
“No. I mean this…all of this. It can’t be real. This is some kind of…”
“Oh no, we make sure that real is very, very clearly defined, to separate it from the surreal and unreal. This is reality, as defined and ratified in the Mayweather Accords. There is no doubt about it.”
—
Days later, and the immediate terror had faded to a dull roar in the back of her head. It’d gone on too long for a prank, and she was treated too well for it to be a punishment. She hadn’t seen hide nor hair of another human since LAX, but the voice was omnipresent, if not genuinely friendly.
“Your voice still echoes, with the languages and all. Is it a glitch?” She’d taken to speaking to the voice to pass the time, and the voice was always willing to answer, even if those answers weren’t entirely forthright.
“Deepest apologies. Those without a translation socket may experience a slight delay before speech is adapted to their tongue. When one translation socket can speak to another, the experience is much, much smoother.”
“Are you real?” she asked.
“Yes, I am.”
“No. Are you a person? Or are you a machine?”
“Small correction: many machines are people. I am a person, but I am not a human being in the sense that you are a human being.”
She stood up and walked to the plain, currently featureless door, folding her hands into fists on the way. She swung a wide hook at the door hard, aiming right at eye-level. Her fist passed through the door like it was smoke, and her momentum swung her around. She lost her balance and began to fall backwards into the door. This time, the door caught her fall. It felt soft but firm, like a waterbed. It absorbed the impact of her fall and bounced her back into the middle of the room, leaving her standing on her own two feet. She gasped, caught her balance, and turned around to face the door. She reached out one hand to touch it again, and found it solid and cold.
“Violence is discouraged. If violence continues, steps will be taken.”
“What am I doing here?”
“Simply put, you do not belong here, but we are a post-cruelty society. In cases like yours, reintroducing you into the modern day has lead to civil unrest, confusion, and panic on all sides. Now, we use a more humane method.”
“This is humane? Keeping me here in a cage? Answering my questions with vague…whatevers?!” She spat on the floor, and sneered when the floor itself bubbled and opened up to absorb her saliva, leaving behind clean tile. “All these stupid magic tricks and fake doors and talk about 2037…and I’m in solitary confinement?”
“Ah,” said the voice, with something like surprise. “You misunderstand. This is merely a holding facility. After your educational period, you’ll be moved to a location dedicated to housing yourself and others. You simply need time to acclimate to the raft of inoculations and treatments we’ve been deploying during your sleep cycles. Within 48 hours, you should be safe and sound and amongst your own once again.”
“During my—”
“More information will be available on an as-needed basis. For now, please do your best to relax and rest. The process goes much more quickly if you minimize the stress you’re under.”