It's My Party

Toshi answered. "Irino, Japan. My parents had some friends who had a beach house here. There's a modern city just to the other side of the trees. It's not far."

Holly nodded. "Are we going there?"

"Only if you want to. I'd prefer to hang out here. I have a lot of fond memories of this beach."

There were some beach towels spread out on the sand, near the playing children. Holly went over and sat down and Toshi joined her. Holly reached into a cooler and pulled out a cold soft drink. She cracked it open and took a few gulps, feeling herself relax in spite of her efforts not to. The sand was warm but not hot, the breeze was clean and delightful, and the ocean idyllic. "This is a very nice memory," she admitted to Toshi.

Toshi nodded and lay down, closing her eyes and wriggling her shoulders a bit.

Holly stared at her. "Your shoulders, do they still hurt?"

Toshi sighed deeply. "Almost no. And resting here is helping a lot. I'm very grateful to you Holly."

"Well…" Holly was at a loss for words. Her eyes returned to the children. "Childhood friends of yours? They don't look oriental."

Toshi laughed and shook her head. "Indeed not. They're the self-images of young Mark and Frida. We have shared our images so intimately, I'm able to project them."

"Ah," said Holly, not really understanding. She waited for her jailor to begin her dreadful discussion but Toshi remained silent, resting on the blanket for a while and soaking up the warm summer sun. After a while, Holly got up and went over to the children. She wound up spending half an hour helping them build the sand castle, and Toshi joined them just as the incoming tide began to tear the castle apart. It had been a beautiful castle, complex and designed with loving care, but an enormous wave came that went up almost to Holly's knees. After the swirling water receded there was nothing left.

Holly expected the children to be dismayed, but they laughed and clapped their hands. As Toshi went back to lie on the beach towels, both children asked Holly to take them into the ocean. She tried for a while but the rip current was strong, and after fighting the pull for several large waves she returned the children to the safety of the dry sand. The children then asked Toshi if they could jog down the beach by themselves. Toshi sat up and gave her permission.

Holly sat back down on the towels shaking her head as she watched the children run off. "So that's what Mark and Frida looked liked as kids?"

Toshi nodded. "I've shared so many moments of their childhoods with them. That's exactly what they looked like."

Holly nodded back and watched them go. "They're beautiful children. Is that the point you're trying to make Toshi?"

"Of course. All children are beautiful. I'm not trying to hide anything Holly." Toshi started idly drawing in the sand with her finger.

"I know... And I did promise I'd chat with you. Toshi, remember your side of the promise too. My time here is almost over, isn't it?"

"Yes, almost over. Don't worry. I will keep my promise."

"Thank you." Holly took one more look and the distant children and then asked, "So, what did you want to tell me? You wanted to talk about fear?"

Toshi didn't answer at first. She just kept drawing curved shapes in the sand. Eventually she said, "I had lots of fears when I first suspected I was pregnant. This was before I was rescued. There was one nightmare in particular. I had a child, and he was a boy. He was my child and he was very thin and weak and I was crying and trying to let him suckle but he would not take nourishment from me. My thin starving child was at my breasts and he was dying. And then he opened its eyes. They were Gilberto's eyes, and they mocked me for letting him die. My dying son had Gilberto's eyes and he was mocking me."

Holly grimaced. "Toshi, you promised…"

Toshi started to cry. "Mark! He was so kind! For a while he helped me dream the child to be a girl!"

Holly hissed, "Toshi! You promised this discussion would be more general!"

Toshi gasped and then sighed. "You're right, I did. Okay. What use is fear Holly, in a healthy mind?"

"Huh?"

"What should a healthy mind want from its fear?"

"Uh… Well, I guess fear keeps us out of danger. But it's not a pleasant emotion."

"Are you sure? Don't people crave it sometimes?"

Holly shook her head. "Crave fear? No, I don't think so. What are you thinking of Toshi? Could you give me an example?"

"Sure. Do you like roller coasters?"

Holly blinked in surprise and gave a brief nod. "As a matter of fact, I do, and the faster the better!"

"So a roller coaster that's ultra-safe, slow and with gentle rolls, that would not be interesting, correct?"

"No, of course not." Holly copied Toshi's habit and started to draw idle shapes in the sand. "I guess I see your point. When I want to ride on a roller coaster, I'm seeking danger, or at least the illusion of it. I'm seeking fear."

"Yes, and what do you get out of it? What do you want from your fear?"

"Well, the ride, it's exhilarating, it makes me feel super alive! My senses seemed sharpened. My awareness is at a peak."

"Yes, exactly. And those are good reasons for wanting fear. Now reverse it Holly. What does fear want from you?"

"Huh? Say that again?"

"I was a Drama major. As an actor, one of the tricks I learned was to personify the emotions I was trying to recreate. I needed to get inside the emotions and thoughts of the character I was portraying. I discovered I could think of fear as both an emotion and a thinking entity. On your roller coaster, you want fear to exhilarate you, to be a spice added to your life. You want fear to enrich you during the ride. But what does fear want from you Holly, at the end of the ride?"

Holly shook her head. "I don't understand your question."

Toshi stood up and brushed the sand from her body. "My time is over. I will leave you now. You will be alone on this beach for a few subjective minutes, and then this dream will end. But before I go, I want to tell one thing about my life and my child's life with Mark. A short while ago our dream changed and now our child is a boy again. The dream changed, but with Mark I was ready for it. My son now suckles me in my dream, and he looks at me as he feeds, and he still has Gilberto's eyes." Toshi took a deep breath and shouted, "And thus my victory over Gilberto is complete! Because my son is healthy! And his eyes now look at me in love!"

Holly blinked and turned away, stunned by the intensity of Toshi's emotions. She opened her eyes and looked at the empty sand before her and then slowly spun around. Holly was alone on the beach.

The voice of Toshi came into her mind one last time. "Think Holly! Inside a healthy mind, what does fear want at the end of the ride?"

Holly stumbled along the beach in the direction the children had taken, but her surroundings were no longer noticed. Toshi had laid Holly's fears bare before her. She could flee from them no longer. Geraldo! And Segundo! The fear of having a child that grew up looking like her rapists, the damning shame of hating and rejecting her own child, degrading her own child to be an echo of her rapes, it was all too terrible to face. But Toshi wasn't asking her to confront those emotions, not directly. Or was she?

Holly felt the dream around her starting to become indistinct and she realized she had only moments before she would awaken. Holly wanted more time to think, but the dream was coming to an end. She thought furiously, "So what did Toshi want? Toshi wanted me to see fear from the other perspective, to think of the emotion as a person. Such a strange idea. Monsters from the id, that's what she called it. Fear as a monster. And the monster wants something. And it's a monster from my id."

Holly felt stunned by an epiphany. "And so the monster is me! It's coming from my id! So deep down, the monster wants what I want. During a roller coaster ride I want to be frightened and exhilarated, so the monster wants that too. But what does the monster want when the ride is over? What do I want? Do I want a child like Toshi's, one who looks at me in love? What does fear want at the end of the ride?"

Holly opened her eyes. She was reclining on the autodoc and she could sense the probe again. It was still inside her womb. Next to her on one side stood Toshi, and she was crying and being held in the arms of Mark and Kiyoko.

On Holly's other side stood Emily, with Aggie slightly further away. Emily had a very worried look on her face. "Holly," she whispered. "Your eyes are so full of tears. Can you see me?"

Holly gasped and said in a soft cry, "Yes. Emily, please stop what you're doing. I want to keep my child."

Emily blinked and then spun around and quickly moved to the medical console.

"At the end of the ride," Holly called out after her, "fear wants to be vanquished!"

Chapter 49.

Five days later.

Time: Thursday, February 14, 2019 4:45 AM

Fatima shivered and her eyes blinked open at the end of a very strange dream. She glanced at the clock. It was three hours before sunrise and one hour before she wanted to get up. Was it worth while trying to coax her mind back into an extra hour of sleep? She thought for a moment trying to capture the memory her dream. Fatima had been a teenager again, back home in northern Kuwait before the terrorist attack, before the nuclear bombs. Her home was a hydroponics farm near the Iraqi border, and in real life her family grew tomatoes, onions, and melons commercially and figs for their own use.

But in her dream her family was growing pumpkins, and in a corner of the farm one pumpkin in particular had grown to be monstrously large. Surprisingly no one else in her family seemed to care, and as the dream progressed the pumpkin started talking to Fatima when no one else was around.

Did she really want to go back into that dream? Fatima decided no. Just before she woke up, she had discovered that the pumpkin had been lying to her. So instead she lay there in the silent darkness and thought about her life since the war. It was over four and a half years now. The attacks had occurred during a hellishly hot summer in mid RamaDHann of 1435 A.H. Fatima had just turned eighteen and was looking forward to her first year in college. But who could have foreseen the war? She wound up spending the next year in three different refugee camps before getting the opportunity to immigrate to the United States with her elder brother. Fatima sighed over the memories of coming to the University of Vermont in the fall of 2015. After the dryness of Kuwait and the refugee camps in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, the lush lakeside country around Burlington seemed like paradise.

And who could have foreseen the end of the world? All the nationalism, the religious extremism, the never-ending focus on political factions and tribes, in the end it had all been so pointless. Such a waste, Fatima thought as she sat up in her huge bed. Such a waste of life, such a profound rejection of the gift.

Fatima was in the home complex of Yellow Mall, and today would be her first away-mission as leader of Team-6. Emily had stopped by last night and dropped off one of the three priceless Leophones. Jada in the underground world had the second, and Mark would have the third today. Mark was the leader of Team-3 and he would be making the first attempt to explore the surface area of Blue Mall today with Cassidy, Paige, and Whitney.

"Such a world," Fatima thought with a frown. "We had such an opportunity to have a completely new beginning. What was there to stop us? But as soon as the immediate threat from Black Mall was eliminated, what did we do?" Fatima closed her eyes and dropped into prayer. "All the old prejudices and desires to polarize… Merciful Allah, are we doomed to it? Are we chained for eternity to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork?" Fatima asked this prayer not just as the leader of Team-6, but also as the new leader of a group of twenty-five people now called The Society.

The collapse of their old government had started at their group meeting last Sunday night. Jada, Mandy and Tom had already joined Madison to complete Team 2, and they were in the living chambers next to the underground world. They had just finished their first day of a planned three days of practicing with the kayaks. Everyone else was at the Hilton complex at the terminal store of Green Mall.

Mark was completely blindsided by a storm of protest over Toshi's actions the previous day in the Red Mall hospital area. The majority of the rescued women from Black Mall were complaining that Toshi holding Holly captive in a dream was at least as bad as kidnapping and a gross violation of Holly's rights to her own thoughts.

Over the Leophone bridge, Jada could not sense the emotional intensity that this issue had raised and she started to defend her sister-wife Toshi. In his heart Mark agreed with Jada, and despite his best effort to mediate, he was quickly sucked into the polarization the issue created. As the meeting progressed his worst fears began to be realized. After Toshi's actions and lack of punishment, a number of the women had lost trust in Mark as leader, even to the point of voicing doubts whether Mark and his two augmented wives should remain in their society. At this point Jada as Mark's third wife lost her composure over the bridge and the meeting devolved into a shouting match.

Faster than anyone would have thought possible, their society had walked to the edge of an abyss. Should they split to different societies? How would that work? Who would own which home complexes and the Mall areas below? Mark tried to make a joke that after two days of marriage, he felt as if he were getting entangled in a really nasty divorce. The joke fell flat.

Fatima stepped in with a proposal. She argued that people from unknown parties were dying and it would be both insane and abominably callous to let the issue with Toshi interrupt their rescue activities. Emily and Aggie who up until this point had kept quiet chose this moment to jump in as the leaders of Teams 1 and 4 and strongly affirm Fatima's point.

The group backed away from the abyss. Teams 1 and 4 would continue with their planned second and third days of exploration of the Red and Green Mall surface areas while Team 2 completed their final two days of kayak training. Teams 3 and 6, in charge of Blue and Yellow Mall surface areas, would continue their preparations for their planned exploration on the 14th. But they would also work with Team-0 to find a way to keep their society together.

The original plan was to have Teams 1 and 4 (Red and Green Malls) explore in shifts lasting three days, while Teams 3 and 6 (Blue and Yellow Malls) had one-day exploration shifts during the rest day of the other two teams. The reason for the difference was that Emily and Aggie had janitorial authority in their exploration areas, and everyone was expecting them to be able to search their areas much more quickly and completely.

The three days of exploration showed just how extensive the challenges were. The Great Hexagon covered an area of 1756 square kilometers, resulting in almost 300 square kilometers in each of the six segment areas, and exploration was a tediously slow process. The two search teams were entering vast three-dimensional mazes with convoluted underpass, overpass, and underground connections.

There were often two and sometimes three underground levels to the maze, in addition to the two levels above ground. Visibility was often limited to individual hallways while underground, and numerous times progress could be made only through Emily's or Aggie authority to command access ports to allow their return journey.

The three days of searching yielded many sketches of routes that were then digitized at the home complexes after sunset. Aggie's team had also found and activated an elevator very near the Green Mall home complex, similar to the outside elevator in the apple orchard of Red Mall. And meanwhile Toshi and Holly informally became the heads of the two political factions. The two were determined to find a compromise.

The break came on Wednesday evening about a half hour before their scheduled group meeting. With the span of one minute, the census counter downticked twice, dropping from 010:092 to 010:090. The deaths renewed the group's sense of urgency for their search activities, and also drove home the point of how lonely their new world would be if they didn't find some way to reconcile their differences.

After a surprisingly cordial two hour meeting, they decided to choose for a new leader by secret ballot, and after two rounds of voting Fatima was elected by a large majority. Her term would run until the end of the year, and the new government adopted the U.S. penal code as its rule of law, with the added provision that any forced mind linkage would be considered equivalent to physical assault and rape.

Courts, juries, prisons, rights of the accused, life had been so hectic this past month, no one had appreciated how much of the needed formalism of their life on Earth had disappeared. All twenty-five members pledged allegiance to the new rule of law, and at the end of the meeting the group applauded when Toshi and Holly embraced in genuine affection for each other. Their society had walked to the edge of a cliff, but had rejected the last lethal step.

Fatima sat up in bed and shook the thoughts from her head. Today's mission in the area everyone called Yellow Brick would require her full attention. Their first priority of course was search and rescue. Party #6 had left Earth with a treasure trove of nine men and nine women, but with the census counter currently reading 010:090, at least seven and perhaps all of those men had died. And from Emily's log of the census, a number of the deaths had occurred very soon after Stairway To Heaven had arrived at their home complex on December 21st. What tragedy did they endure?

Their home at Yellow Brick was less than six kilometers from the eastern face of the Great Hexagon, and it was the most isolated of their home bases. It was their only complex where both the lounge and library elevators were inactive. Their theory was that Party #6 explored the first-level and opened the library elevator. Unfortunately they didn't leave any record of the access code it would have displayed, but at the time, how could they possibly realize its significance?

Regardless, the quickest way now to get here was from the Eastern Mountain Sports store at the end of Yellow Brick Road. Yellow Brick's home complex was at spiral mark 59,326, so it was almost a sixteen kilometer bike ride to get here. Fatima was extremely grateful to Lynn and Akiko for getting the communications network up with the library consoles, otherwise their Leophone would be their only way of communicating with the rest of their group.

Fatima had left her bedroom door open, and she sensed a person slipping down the hall towards the bathroom. She didn't see the person directly, but she had trained with her three teammates so closely, somehow she guessed it was Hannah. "A remarkable kid," thought Fatima. "She was still in High School when all this happened." Fatima sighed and got up and decided to join Hannah for an early shower.

Meanwhile, thirty-two kilometers to the south-southwest and more than 1500 meters below ground, Jada's expedition was just taking off from the shore of the northern lake. It was still before 5 AM, but there was already a hint of day to come in the faint grayness of the eastern cylindrical sky, and a bright silver line setting in the west had provided ample light as they hiked down from their new home embedded in the northern wall. One of their most fortunate discoveries three days ago was finding a boat house and dock at the end of the short steep forest path leading down to the lake.