Obama is president elect! Thank goodness. Oh, and James Graham is in Talos.

Word Count: 13,430

It was with a heavy heart that he fell asleep on the couch, in front of the fire, right where Curie had once rested himself. He slept soundly, without dreams, without thought, without motion. The bright November sun shone down upon his face to wake him up in the early hours of the day – he arose abruptly and immediately began shivering; the house was freezing cold, and he’d slept motionless with no blanket. He tried to move his fingers; it was as though they were frozen. Mustering his strength in this half-awakened state, he stood up and stretched, looked around.

Something was missing. The lock. Where was the lock? Panicking, he ran around the room, ducking under his desk and moving the couch so he could check the wall behind it – it was nowhere to be seen. He checked his front door – it was locked, just as it had been the night before. No signs of a break-in. Had he sleepwalked? No, he hadn’t – no footprints on the ground, no imprints in the carpet. No signs that he had ever left the couch. So, where was the lock?

He took his mind to the kitchen and made breakfast. Was the lock in there? No, nothing was in the kitchen but milk and cereal. Until noon he abandoned thought and reason to search for the missing lock, hoping that somehow it would turn up and relieve Graham of the worry that someone may have broken into his house. But nothing else was missing – it was just the broken lock. How someone else would have assembled it was beyond him, so he couldn’t fathom what whoever had stolen it was do with it, or the pieces of it. It wasn’t made of any special metal or anything particularly precious – unless LCD screens had recently become a precious and rare item – so he couldn’t even think of a motive for someone to steal this lock, much less use it for practical purposes.

At noon, he gave up his fruitless search and instead transpired to begin the writing he’d promised Curie that he’d do while his neighbor was away. Graham truly believed that Curie would come back once power returned – and he believed that power would return, too. He hoisted up the typewriter from under his desk, where he’d left it the night before, and placed it on his desk, destroying whatever blank vellum he had left. When he sat down, he felt immediately uncomfortable – it felt as though the desk was for mechanical drafting, not for creative writing. There was in inherent clash of mind states at this desk when the typewriter was present. Thinking for a moment, Graham knew the perfect place to sit and write – Curie’s external writing room.

He decided that he’d have to sneak into the room when whoever was living in that house had gone to sleep, so he waited until nightfall by doing several meaningless tasks, which was more difficult than it sounded without electricity to make those meaningless tasks equally effortless. When it was the appropriate time, he found a large, strong bag and put his Maglite, the typewriter and ink ribbon into the bag, then lugged it as fast as he could across the street to the Curies’ former home.

If there had been any electricity, Graham would have been graced with the presence of beautiful blue automatic lighting – but there was no electricity, so Graham found himself, stumbling in pitch darkness over cement blocks, tree roots, and all manner of obstacles specifically tailored, it seemed, to rip his feet to shred. But at last his eyes adjusted to the darkness, and he found his way to the shed-like abode behind the house.

He hoped the door to the incredibly plain-looking room, and saw through his adjusted vision that its interior was just as plain looking. It was smaller than a prison cell, with enough room to stand and walk forward a few feet before bumping into the elongated wooden desk that filled one-third of the room. There was a lamp, but it didn’t look like it would work, since there was an extension cord running out from its base. He put his bag in front of the desk and reached over to flip the switch that would have turned the light on.

Suddenly, the room was filled with wondrous yellow light. And a loud churning sound.

Graham looked underneath the lavish, intricately carved desk, and found that Curie had placed a power generator underneath it. It looked like he had pumped power into it with his foot while writing in order to keep the light going.

To Graham’s left was the door that led down to the bunker. He had no clue what was down there and had no intentions of finding out; he simply sat down, heaved the typewriter up onto the desk with heavy breath, slipped the new ink ribbon onto it, loaded up some paper and began to write whatever came to his mind. The click of the keys, the twisting loading up the paper, the way each key felt when pressed – it was an engineering marvel, the first typewriter. He was nearly humbled in the presence of such an elegant machine, and tapped each key with great care.

Words began to form, flowing from his hands surprisingly easy and naturally. He instantly understood why someone like Curie would find this experience so enjoyable as a profession. He let go of all his thoughts, and drifted into the dream he hadn’t had the pleasure of having the night before. Then, one key moved out of place. He looked at his work; he’d felt the key move when it shouldn’t have. This typo reflected on the page: This mental renaissance ended with an abrupt coup of the man’s mind by thoughts on other topics he originally intentionally avoided.h

h.

Graham backed away from the typewriter, pumping the generator with his foot and listening to its hum. Was this writer’s block? It couldn’t have been – it was something much, much stranger. Without warning or explanation the typewriter keys began rapidly moving on their own. From his previous sentence it returned two blank lines, then swiftly, in delicate keystrokes,

Hello,
I am your friend.

Graham fell backwards and out of his chair at the sight of this, bruising his head and elbow on the floor. In pain, he picked himself up and wiped some blood off his elbow. The blood left a stain on the light carpet flooring, but Graham’s attention was focused entirely on the typewriter. Was the typewriter his friend? Graham waited for more, but nothing came. Curious, he picked up the chair as well, sat down, and began typing.

“I’d like to be your friend, too,” he wrote. After about a minute, the typewriter responded.

Check your door.

Graham turned around and looked at the entrance of the room, but saw nothing but an ordinary door in an ordinary room – nothing spectacular. The keys clicked of their own accord once more, and Graham couldn’t believe what he saw.

Try the other door.

It wasn’t possible that the typewriter – or whoever was commanding the typewriter from afar, could see what he was doing. Startled, he ripped the paper out of the typewriter and threw it under the desk, then overturned the typewriter in hopes it might break, and finally, in a fit of insanity, began searching the room for hidden cameras.

“Don’t make a fool of me, Curie! Don’t you dare!” Graham shouted to nobody, in hopes that it was his old neighbor spying on him. “Your tricks aren’t going to turn me into an author.”

Graham leaned against the wall and felt his sweat rub against the textured paint, then drifted down to the carpet floor. For a moment he rested before picking himself up, thinking, hoping he’d heard something. After turning around, he faced the door that led to the bunker, only now it was no longer the same door he’d seen moments ago. It was entirely transformed. Outlined in brass and made completely of steel, it was carved with intricate designs that bore resemblance to the designs on the desk. In its center, asphyxiated to and engraved within the door itself, was an object shaped like a six-pronged star. Each of the object’s eighteen circular LCD screens became active and immediately simulated the shuffling of several different colors around in a whirlpool of light.

Curie’s lock.

For a moment all that Graham could do was stare are the swirling colors on the lock. It was inexplicable how the door received its power, or where from, since the generator was not hooked up to the door. Initially, Graham had planned to run a power line from the house to the room and hook it up to the lock from within the door, just as had been done in front of him, but naturally scrapped that plan when Curie decided to move away. There was no connection to any electricity in this room aside from the generator, so not only was it impossible that the lock be in the door in the first place, it was equally as impossible for it to run fully powered.

Bewildered, Graham approached the lock. Having engineered it, he knew precisely how to open it, but not quickly enough for the door. The lights continued to shuffle themselves and, just as Graham’s arm extended to touch one of the LCD screens, the pattern on the lock was solved and the door burst open in a cloud of steam, creaking violently as its heavy structure forced itself upon weak hinges. Upon reaching the wall adjacent, the door slammed into it and left a mighty indent. Not bothering to fear for the integrity of Curie’s lock, but rather scared half to death, Graham looked into the deep darkness beyond the door. Where there should have been steps leading down below ground to a vacant storage area there was a black void, and through that void Graham swore he heard voices talking, whispering – not about him, but about some project that several men had been working on.

Graham breathed heavily.

I just don’t know what we’re going to do with the isotopes, one voice said.

Graham choked.

Perhaps if we tampered with the structure of their nuclei even more, we could increase their instability and increase our chances for—

No! a third voice interjected. Are you mad? Listen, take time off, and don’t speak of this to anyone. Both of you, if you don’t figure out a solution in two weeks, I’ll have your heads and then some!

At this, Graham gagged, and screamed, his hands groping the floor for support, his mind praying that these hidden figures wouldn’t burst out front the darkness and engulf him. He saw the void growing, reaching out of the door and encompassing the room. Graham backed away, but hit the wall, and the blackness came for him. The voices had ceased; Graham was afraid they had heard his gasping, but there was no way for him to know this and, unbeknownst to Graham, no way for the voices to know of this either.

The lamp suddenly shut off; there was no distinguishing the darkness in the room from the darkness emerging out of the steel brass-lined door. As the room faded into complete darkness, so too did Graham’s consciousness fade, until there was nothing left for any of his senses to grope in the room. It was a feeling of complete mental and physical isolation; there was nothing Graham could do at this point to regain control over his body. He felt his mind slip into oblivion, and cursed his body for enabling the darkness so.

* *  *   *    *     *      *       *        *          *          *         *        *       *      *     *    *   *  * *

Blurry but stable, Graham’s vision returned. He was on a bed of leaves somewhere in the middle of a forest, but didn’t recall ever living nearby a forest. Rolling over, he noticed that it was not leaves he rested in, but a bed of ash. He witnessed an entire forest of ash come into view as his vision cleared, and yet even this sight was not enough to wake him – he fell face first into the ash, coughed, and lost consciousness for several hours. When he awoke from this sleep, the ash was gone, and he was face-first on a field of fresh grass. In the distance, a small cabin bellowed smoke. The smoke invited Graham in – even its smell was tantalizing, and the entire visage exuded hospitality.

Graham made an attempt to stand up, but his clothes were covered in ash and soot, and the dust made him cough. In this weakened state, the coughing became violent and he doubled over, dry heaving until the ash content of the air was low enough for him to regain control over his body. He stumbled over to the house several hundred feet away, yet it felt like miles of rocky hiking terrain to his worn legs. He looked under his clothes to see his aching skin covered in bruises in every conceivable location, and thought about the men in the void.

Where was he?

As he drew closer to the cabin, he noticed that it was not made of wood or stone as he’d expected, but entirely of metal; it looked like steel and brass, just like the door that had appeared with Curie’s lock engraved within it back in the writing room. Or was he still in the writing room – was this what Curie had hidden behind the door? Not a storage bunker, but a passageway to some strange green wonderland? The wonderland was not all green, for behind Graham he left tracks of ash, proving that he had not hallucinated the bed of ash that caused him to lose consciousness.

It fell from the sky, and often, he later heard. Ash every few hours from the heavens, coating the land thick, spreading disease and illness all around. The hour next a strong wind would blow all the ash away, supposedly to some other far off land. But it wasn’t their fault. It was never their fault.

Graham knocked on the brass door of the cabin afraid of what he would find behind it, but found a small piece of relief when a young woman, albeit dressed in the strangest clothes, stood behind the door.

“Good day, sir. Oh, my! You look terribly ill, and you’re filthy. Come in, please. Mother!” The woman motioned for Graham to enter. Inside the cabin light flooded in through the windows and ceiling, and he saw the oddly garbed woman rushing around with a wet towel. Everything seemed to be made of metal – the bed, the countertops, the walls, and the fireplace. While Graham expected a quaint little abode like this cabin to be ill equipped for consistent living, the quality and construction of the metal shell that forged the building was comparable to a bomb shelter, and the sheen and purity of the metals would have, in any other circumstance, dictated the extremely wealthy. These folks, however, looked more strange than wealthy.

The woman forced herself upon him with a hot, wet towel, and wiped his face all over.

“That burns!” Graham shouted.

“Oh! Well, excuse me for trying to clean you up, sir,” the lady protested. Her mother came into view, a tall women garbed equally, if not more strangely than her daughter, apologetic for her offspring’s actions.

“Now, now, Vanessa, don’t hurt the man. He is our guests, and we must treat him as we would treat a gentleman.” She smiled at Graham, who looked away, and then at the woman’s daughter.

“Vanessa? What’s your last name?”

“Last name?”

“Yes, your surname.”

“Oh, um…” She was clearly too embarrassed to answer. It seemed like this mother and daughter received relatively few visitors.

“Ah, never mind. I was wondering if you might be related to a friend of mine.” Graham knew she couldn’t be related to Vanessa Curie, but anything was worth a shot to make him feel more comfortable in this inexplicable household. He let Vanessa clean him up, set him up with new clothes – strange clothes like theirs, though he refused to wear certain garments in order to create a look that most closely resembled what he’d already been wearing – and show him around the small cabin.

“Where am I?” Graham asked.

“Where are you? How could you not know?” said Vanessa, looking at Graham strangely.

Graham suddenly realized that if he had been taken somewhere by a malicious group, it would be improper to get this innocent family involved. “Ah, just a traveler passing through. I’ve been hiking for so many days I don’t know where I am anymore!”

“So, you’re one of those people? I thought you left a long time ago, once I had shooed you all with my broomstick!”

“You can’t shoo people with a broomstick, I don’t think,” Graham retorted. Vanessa smiled, and her eyes squinted just the slightest bit.

“It’s a very powerful broomstick,” she said with pride, holding up two hands to show an invisible broomstick. “But still, if you were with a hiking group, how can you not know where you are? Surely you must have known the terrain to be hiking it.”

Graham sighed. “Alright. You’ve made me come clean. I was a hiker, but I wasn’t a very good one, so I, and I apologize if I sound silly, slipped and fell off a cliff. All the other hikers were laughing at me, I hear, and they dragged me up and left me in front of your house for kicks, so I have no idea where I am right now.” Vanessa appeared flabbergasted, as if his words had flown by her ears and ignored them.

“What are you talking about? Ah, no matter, you’re in the Oceanic Confederacy. We’re an outpost of sorts near the edge of Alteria, by the shore, that many countries share and protect. There aren’t many people here besides mother and me, and you don’t look like one of those hikers. You dress oddly. You’re not from around here, are you?”

“It doesn’t seem like it. That’s what worries me. You don’t have a map, do you?”

“Not with me, no, though I think there is a cartographer a few kilometers away, if you’d like to speak with him.”

A cartographer? Graham was sure she must have been joking – were there really cartographers in a day and age ruled by satellite imagery? Then again, he’d been seeing stranger recently, such as raining ash, so it was not beyond him to believe that there really could be a cartographer nearby. When Graham asked her about he’s go find the cartographer, she responded that she really had no knowledge of where he might be, but that her mother might.

The mother walked over on request. “If you’re looking for a cartographer, there’s no doubt in my mind that Marcus is the best man for the job. He lived a few kilometers north from here, just outside of the Confederacy. If you can stand to walk, it shouldn’t take more than several hours to reach him, and you’ll be glad you did. I have not kept a decent, accurate map around this house in ages…” she said, and went off on a tangent mumbling about other things, eventually talking to inanimate objects such as pots and pans around the house.

Then, something caught Graham’s eye – apparently windows were not the only source of light in this cabin. Across from him, on a nightstand against the steel wall, was a glowing orb of light. At first he’d thought it was a light bulb, but it did not share the same structure as a light bulb. He reached out to touch it without knowing the temperature of his surface and let out a quick yelp. By the time he retracted his hand the blisters had already formed.

“I see you like our Lamp Sphere,” said Vanessa. “But please don’t touch it; it’s the only one we have, unfortunately. Wealthier families have lots of them and can even use their homes at night, but we are poor and only have one. The Confederacy does not fund us well here, but we get paid to live here, and that’s always been enough for us.” She stood up and traversed the room, touching the walls with her delicate fingers and leaving audacious marks on their glossy surfaces.

“Vanessa, please! I just shined the walls.”

“Sorry, mother.” Vanessa smiled again.