We’re one-third through November! That means the real plot has to start soon, right? Well, it’s coming – and in full force. Torsten is about to say goodbye to the body he knows and loves, and will become a part of the Cydia fetch experiment Inland is running with the Cydian world government to prepare for an expected collapse of Cydia’s Slate mines.

Word Count: 17,067

Did I dare even go to sleep in my bed that night, only a few feet away from Maiya – whatever she was? I suddenly wasn’t sure what to call her; was she human, or something completely different? Was she an android? Face-up on her pillow, sleeping soundly, she looked like a cadaver about to be dissected. Like she had just died from some disease, and now there were ports on the back of her head.

I couldn’t sleep with that image in my mind, so I left the enclave. Maybe I would find someone else’s home to rest in, or maybe I would sleep on the ground and die. Inhale all the toxic powder, and just die. Out in the tunnels, it was pitch black again. From my glasses I conjured a sphere of light, and began tossing it around, watching the brightness bounce off of the fractured Slate walls. In some sections, I could see my face – I looked exhausted. The relocation had taken more of a toll on me than I’d thought. My body was scuffed and covered with dust, my face greasy, disgusting. My hair, disheveled.

Behind my reflection, I thought I saw somebody else. I turned around to see if I was right. To my surprise, I was. I thought I might have been hallucinating Maiya’s cables, or this man’s face. But standing behind me, as if he’d come to look for me, was The Embassy.

“What are you doing here?” I asked him. “You should go to bed.”

“Oh, I couldn’t do that. Not while you were still looking for me.” He smirked. “Come on, I’ll show you to my new office. It’s nice, I promise – comfortable chairs and everything.”

I agreed to go with him, and we walked silently through the tunnels, never saying a word to one another. I turned the light down from my glasses, so that I couldn’t see his face. Beneath our feet, I could still hear the crunching of the Slate. We created more toxic dust with each footstep out of the chunks of rock that had fallen from the ceiling. Up above, the cracks in the Slate were so numerous that I wouldn’t have been surprised if the entire structure broke and fell upon us at that moment.

Behind me, I heard ruffling. I didn’t know it, but Maiya had woken up and was removing the cables from her neck, annoyed that every morning and every evening she had to deal with the horrible tangling of wires. Charged for the day, she drank some coffee and set out for the nearest light tram.

But I didn’t care about Maiya – all I wanted to do was find Derek. I wanted to know what had happened to everyone in the district, and who all these new people were. But I didn’t say a word to The Embassy. The entire way to his new office, not a word passed between us. I think that made the situation more comfortable than not, and I was appropriately speechless when he pointed at the entrance to his new office.

“No…” I said, whispering. “You couldn’t force me to go in there.”

“Oh, I think I can, if you want to know anything about your squad member.” I couldn’t see him; he must have been behind me, because the cage protecting the light tram in front of me swung open. I felt a pain on my back, and before I knew it I had fallen into the light. The next thing I knew, I was on the ground of a plush carpet. Behind me, The Embassy stepped out of the light tram’s exit and into his office and picked me up by one arm. Out of nowhere Maiya appeared to grab my other arm. I was immediately restrained to the wall nearby, where I got my glimpse of where I was: An Inland skyscraper on the surface. I must have been hundreds of stories high – I could see so far into the distance that the planet curved.

I looked at Maiya. Somehow, I wasn’t surprised, though you wouldn’t have been able to tell by the look on my face.

She didn’t look sorry. She didn’t look like anything. She just stood there, strapping me to the wall, not saying anything, not making any expressions or noises. I couldn’t even hear her breathing. The ports, on the back of her head, they were entirely concealed – it was as if they didn’t exist. Yet I couldn’t bring myself to fight her; I just waited, like a lump. A lump strapped to the wall. I didn’t even fight the braces.

“While Maiya is taking care of you, let me tell you something about behavior in the mines. As soon as you went down below the surface, everyone at Inland was watching you. Every piece of Slate you mined, every meal you ate, every action you took was monitored intensely. Why waste the resources monitoring a normal guy like you? Inland needed to make sure that you weren’t screwing up the delicate social balance in the mines.”

“Social balance, eh? Whatever it is, it’s much more balanced than on the surface,” I said. “I don’t get it, I’m not out to get Inland. I’m just an employee. I’m a miner.”

“You’re getting in our way. You’re lucky that Maiya kept you sidetracked, or else you’d have ruined everything. Didn’t you realize that you were the only person down in the mines who noticed the disappearances? And yet, you would have tried to convince everyone in the mines that your friends were being stolen!” I could see the look on his face: “What a loon,” it said to me. But I couldn’t see what he was getting at, or why it mattered whether or not people knew about Derek’s disappearance.

“I know what you’re thinking. It most certainly matters that you might have told everyone that something suspicious was going on, thereby instigating the first crack in the social structure beneath the surface. As soon as you started doing that, you stepped in the way of countless years of order and peace in the mines. Inland does what it does to preserve peace in the mines.”

“Who are you, really? And why would you do all this to me, go through all this trouble to deal with one citizen who stepped to far?”
“I’m just one of Inland’s pawns. Like you, I just want to keep my job and live my life.”

“Strapping me to a wall doesn’t seem like it would help me live my life.”

“Perhaps, but you wanted to know what happened to Derek, right?”

I panicked; was he going to kill me here? Spill my blood on the floor and dump my body in a garbage incinerator? I saw Maiya turn around and fiddle with something; when she turned back to face me, she was holding a long syringe, tapping out air bubbles. A liquid sloshed around inside, and she began to reach for my outstretched arm.

“Don’t worry, nothing bad is going to happen to you. Although, I suppose that’s a matter of opinion. Maiya, administer the anesthetic so we can get this over with.”

The needle entered my arm, and I began to feel drowsy almost instantly. But something happened before I went to sleep; I saw Maiya approach The Embassy and punch him square in the face. When he didn’t fall over, she did it again. The Embassy covered his face with his hands, so she punched at those. I couldn’t move my body, but my eyes were still open. She took out her Mu Gun and encapsulated The Embassy, tossed him to a corner of the room, and then walked over to me. She grabbed a syringe and began cutting away at my body. At the sight of first blood, I finally fell asleep.

I woke up intermittently, and I only caught a glimpse of what was going on. In one flash, I saw Maiya picking away at my body with the scalpel. In another, I was floating in an area filled with light, not sure where I was. Finally, I saw Cydia’s skyline – for the first time in my life. I was falling from the building, hundreds of stories from the ground. Beneath me were the artificial, grassy plains that formed the archetypal edge of each major city in Cydia. Glass shards followed me in my sprint downward.

I must have remained out for the rest of the day, because when I finally awoke it was dark outside. I stood up and brushed the dirt off of me. Next to where I had fallen, a monstrously tall building stood, towering over the district. Near the very top was a window whose glass had been broken. I looked at my body and saw shards of glass caught in my clothing. When I stepped, glass crunched in the grass beneath my feet. I didn’t even consider how I had survived the fall; all I could think about was how the fresh air on the surface tasted. I felt so unadjusted, it didn’t strike me once that I was alive for a reason, and the reason could have never cross my mind.

I felt my face for my glasses, hoping to initiate a chat with someone in the nearby area who may have witnessed my fall to find out what had happened, but there were no glasses to activate. Without my glasses, I was disconnected from the world. My only solace was to march into the district on foot and approach some people to find out where I was.

I found that out, however, soon enough. Not ten feet from where I’d fallen was a sign that read, “Now leaving District 137.”

If anyone was going to tell me what had happened, they probably weren’t going to do it before shooting me. Not long before my fall, district 137 had been overthrown in a coup. The entire district was radically unstable, and the only way I was comfortable being close to 137 was by being five kilometers below it. This building was an Inland building. In retrospect, it made sense; it seemed like nowadays every city has an Inland building. I tried to walk in the opposite direction of the city, but my limbs didn’t seem to want to move that way – I suppose something inside me wanted to obtain the information I knew I deserved and had been promised.

If what The Embassy said was true, perhaps Derek was in this district. Perhaps he, too, had been dropped aside like rubbish.

Then it hit me: I had just been fired. And I certainly wasn’t in the mines any longer to be found. With Maiya as my roommate, that ensured that nobody would ever know I’d gone missing. Maiya wasn’t about to let anyone know, and my guess was that she had returned to the mines once she’d thrown me out.

Although I wished that was the case, it was not the last I saw of Maiya – or of The Embassy. But for now, I was on my own. With tired limbs I turned toward the city, traveling step by step. Before I knew it, the streets were dirty, noise was abundant, and the air was tough to breathe once more. The stench of the surface filled the air. The stars in the artificial night sky illuminated the Slate on the buildings, making the entire city look as if it were underwater.

A rusty sign next to a working light tram displayed the metro routes for the city. This light tram stopped in several locations; one was a hotel called Cascade Inn. Almost without thought, guided by my fatigue, I stepped into the light tram and rode to Cascade Inn. Before I knew any better, I was in front of a run-down building with twenty or so floors, a downright miniscule size dwarfed even by the purification plants below the surface. Even still, I entered the building and checked myself in, feeling that I would find something in this city that would be of use to me.