Chapter 11: Compartmental Complications

Calix woke, sitting bolt upright in bed. His heart was racing, his body covered in sweat and no matter how much he tried, he couldn’t get his breath. His hands were clenched, ready to fight, ready to strike out at – who? Who was attacking him? His mind was already calculating his lines of sight, the routes of escape – door in front and to the right was better but he could make a stand at either of the far doors on the right wall, one corner was better than the other – a bathroom with water and possible tools to fight with while the other was just an empty closet. He found himself almost leaping off the bed...

Then stopped. Shuddered. It was a dream, a nightmare, and it was fading. He couldn’t even remember all of the particulars. Something was chasing him, killing his family. Something was after him and no matter how fast he was, it was faster. No matter how strong, it was stronger. He felt blind pain in his neck and he reached up to grab at whatever had ahold of his neck. He couldn’t remember what it was, just that it was.

Only, it wasn’t. He was in bed. Again. Still. There were two women lying, slightly snoring, one on either side of him. As his heart started to slow, he was thankful he hadn’t woken them up. Small miracles.

He’d had nightmares before but never like this. He didn’t subscribe to the belief dreams or nightmares were indicative of the future – maybe the past, but he’d already dealt with that in real life. Still, this had been a bad one. A horrible one.

Even now the feeling of overwhelming dread wouldn’t leave him. He felt like he was missing something, like he was on the edge of a terrible chasm and something was coming to push him over the edge. He looked down, down past the covers, past the bed to the floor but it seemed so far away – and it looked like, with every moment he stared at it, it was getting further away.

Nausea. Disorientation. The room was spinning and he wasn’t sure why. He reached for his compartments and tried pushing the feelings of dread, the physical feelings of nausea and disorientation, into the compartments – and...

They. Just. Wouldn’t. Go.

His heart was beating hard again, slowly gaining strength, slowly ramping up. He could feel the sweat breaking on his brow again, the feeling of dread over-whelming him. He looked left and right, tried to find something to latch onto, some surface or truth to grasp. He couldn’t grasp it, though. In the dull light he’d left on, the gray walls became something else. There was – something there. Something unsettling. Something beyond the gray. He could almost feel it.

The room was whirling away and suddenly it just seemed like those damn gray-but-not-gray walls were starting to close in, like they were moving, getting closer and closer and closer. He moved, jumping off the bed lightly – and he stumbled. Fell. He was on his hands and knees and he felt his stomach tightening, felt it trying to push its contents up and out.

He pushed back. Pushed hard. Concentrated. It was all he could do to keep things down. He crawled. Crawled. Like he had crawled in that destroyed, burning building. His body was broken. He was broken. Suddenly, he could feel the heat again. He could feel the cannery all around him, feel the walls of the cannery falling, crushing him. He couldn’t breathe again, couldn’t find a way to get breath back into his lungs.

The explosions rocked him. He didn’t remember the explosion. Not really. And yet, he could recall it now. He could recall the feeling of immense pressure all over his body. The feeling like a vise, squeezing. Squeezing.

His heart was racing. Squeezing. Too much. It was all too much.

He made the bathroom, door sliding open near soundlessly as he crawled inside. Crawled. Not because he wanted to crawl. Crawled because he had no way of standing. The floor was tilting, and he couldn’t stand.

Cold. Cool. Tiles. The bathroom was cold, cool tiles. He laid his head down, cheek against the tile, trying to soak its cold into his body. He was trying to drive off the heat that had him sweating. He laid on the tiles, trying to get as much of his body against the tiles as he could.

He didn’t know how long he lay there. It could have been a minute. It could have been days. Time no longer held him in its warm embrace.

He fit the nausea into its compartment. The disorientation went quietly. He pushed them down and away. He looked for more to push, more to compartmentalize – but there was nothing else. And yet, there was still something wrong. Something – something was very, very wrong.

“Lights.” His voice was a croak, barely audible. The lights, though, came on. In irony, he closed his eyes. It was enough to know the light would come on. He hadn’t been certain they would.

It took minutes to regain his breath. It took all the concentration he had to stand. The room wasn’t spinning – but only because his force of will wouldn’t allow it to spin. At least, that’s what it felt like. It felt like if he let go at any moment, all would be lost.

He was lost. All of him. This may have been a mistake, coming here. He felt the weight of his decisions anchoring him down and he wasn’t ready for it. He felt like the very air was heavy and thick. Maybe it was why he was having so many problems breathing.

He was – abnormal. The whole fucking situation was abnormal. He didn’t belong here. He wasn’t supposed to be here. He was only a kid. He was only a kid who was way out of his depth, making decisions on too little information, and it was coming back to haunt him. They were coming back; they were going to get him and he wasn’t fast enough and he wasn’t strong enough and he wasn’t...

He wasn’t. Anything. He felt like he was being ripped apart. He felt as if his insides were struggling to become his outsides. He felt lost in a way he never had before. He needed normalcy. He needed something to grasp, some small bit of a normal life for him to hold onto. He might – just might – be all right if he could only find a single, solitary thing to grasp.

“Hermes, I need a place to run,” he started. He’d begin there. He’d begin the reconstruction of his soul with the one normal thing he could control. He’d need his routine, latch onto his routine. It would ground him, anchor him. It would keep him safe while he figured out what the fuck he was doing here.

“I am not the AI you know as Hermes,” a voice replied gently. Calix knew it – but he was concentrating too hard on staying upright and couldn’t spare the cycles to get the name right.

He took a deep breath, trying to ground himself. He could swear he heard some exasperation in the voice, but he wasn’t sure the AIs were supposed to have feelings. He began to consider it, using it as another touchpoint.

I think, therefore I am. I think, therefore I am here. The AIs were sentient so it only stood to reason they would have emotions of some kind. Perhaps it’d even been written into their code – code he’d give anything to see. Well, almost anything.

“I’m the AI for Artemis station.”

“I understand,” Calix replied. Strangely, he did understand. The AI had its own identity. Calix had his own identity. They both were holding onto their individual identities. They were afraid losing it meant losing themselves. It was simple, if you looked at it the right way. “Sorry. You don’t really sound any different so...”

“It is a failing of human hearing you are incapable of recognizing the various different inflections and tonal qualities which differentiate my voice from the one of the AI you refer to as ‘Hermes’,” the AI interrupted. There was definitely a tone of exasperation this time, Calix was sure.