The Windowless Building

"HAY YOU!! THERE'S NO TRESSPASSING HERE!" said the sheriff.

"Well...sorry but I was looking for my friend. That is his car there..."

"You know, you tripped an alarm. What were you DOING up there?"

"Well, I was looking for my friend, his car was here; I thought he was back up there..."

"I don't give a fuck WHERE you or your friend are. You aren't allowed up there! I could arrest you right now if I wanted to. Take your hands out of your pockets for me... Do you have ID?"

Rick nodded.

"Show me."

Rick handed the sheriff his ID.

After a few moments, the cop said, "I see you live around here. Well, I don't care WHERE you live, that is PRIVATE PROPERTY and you aren't allowed to be up there!"

"I'm sorry officer. I just... I wanted to, like, check on my buddy, that is his car right there..." he said.

"Well, look at it this way. If there was anyone else up there that didn't belong, I'd know. In the same way I knew you were up there. They have cameras; they'll trigger an alarm if anyone gets close to the storage tank. If I were you, I'd be heading on home now, okay?"

"Okay, thanks, sheriff. Say, do you know there used to be a cave up there? That's where I thought my friend was."

The sheriff shook his head and said, "That cave was sealed off and closed by the water company; it's an underground storage tank now. They want us to patrol it in case people try to tamper with the water supply. That's why there's security." He explained.

"Oh. I didn't know that. Thanks."

"Go home, Richard. Don't let me catch you over here again."

"Yes sir. Thanks."

TT facility and visitor node...what did that mean, he wondered to himself. Is that, like where the workers can enter the pipeline or something? And now that he thought about it, he seemed to remember seeing other cars parked at this turn-out now and again when he drove by, but he had never really paid much attention before now. Were they all Jackson County Public Works maintenance guys, perhaps? But then what would Paul be doing there, or his parents for that matter (if it had been one of them who had driven their rig there.) Weren't they, like, bigshot bankers or real estate developers, or something? What would they have to do with the water company? The whole thing seemed weird.

Rick drove back to the hardware store, picked up what he needed, then went on home to rest. It would be another grueling shift tomorrow. Sheesh, "I'd rather drop and give me 20" any day, than haul another load of drywall up onto some guy's pickup, he thought bitterly.

9. JASON.

Ah, yes... Spring break in southern Oregon. With no real plans for exciting and memorable spring break adventures in Cancun (couldn't afford it, no passport) or Florida (too far) I figured, why not just kick back at the parents' house for a week or so. Most of my college buddies were in the same boat actually. Campus was pretty dead, the cafeteria and everything else pretty much shut down for the week, so I had just packed up some clothes and driven on down to visit the family.

It was fairly dead around here too. Rick had shipped off to basic training a few weeks ago; I'd talked to him right before he left. He'd always wanted to be an army guy, ever since we were little kids. Now he got to do it for real, though. I half wondered if he was having as much fun getting up at six am every morning with a guy screaming at him, as he thought he would. I saw the Smith brothers once or twice, and it was just the usual hang out and catch up session. Dillan was over in Eugene at U of O, majoring in earth science. The first time we got together, we were cruising around and he was going around rattling off all this useless information about how this or that land feature formed. Not that chemistry was that interesting to most people either, I thought.

One person I did look up was Lilly. Oddly, I had to work up the courage to stop by and knock on her parents door to see her, just with the pretext of just saying hi; I wasn't sure if that would be appropriate or not. I needn't have bothered; she wasn't there. It turned out she had hooked up with some guy over in LaGrande where she went to school, and had decided to spend spring break with his family. So much for that, I thought, dejectedly.

So I spent most of the time just de-compressing. Riding my bike around the hilly back roads, cruising around, sleeping in, and relaxing.

And inevitably, I decided, one day, to walk out the back gate and down the hill.

My mind was wandering, reminiscing about days gone by, the hours we had all spent down here running around. Rick, Dillan, Glen, Danny... and Mauro.

Fuck, I missed that guy. Sure we had grown apart in high school, but when we were all kids...

I came to the Windowless Building. It wasn't my planned destination, ironically. I had planned to just climb the path through the woods to the top of the hill behind it. But of course my route took me right by the front of it.

I walked around it contemplatively, just as I had many times. In the parking lot, I spotted something on the ground, a small square plastic rectangle with someone's picture printed on the front. On impulse, I picked it up. Inside, the machines whirred and hummed, as they always had ever since I was little. I walked over to the small niche where the back door was. Then, for the first time, I noticed a small black box next to the door with a red blinking light.

I thought to myself, I wonder if this is, like, some sort of card reader? Like they have in some of the labs at OSU. On a whim, I reached over and placed the plastic rectangle I had just found next to the small box.

The red blinking light turned green.

My head spinning and my heart racing, I reached towards the door handle and pulled it.

It swung open.

A thousand mysteries would finally be solved. Ever since I was a kid, I had wondered, daydreamed, and fantasized about what might be in here. Well I wasn't a kid anymore, and to be honest, whatever it was probably wasn't going to be that interesting. But at least, finally after all these years, I would know!

I stuck my head in the doorway, then entered the building.

I was in a long wide corridor that bent to the right off in the dim darkness of the place. It was dark, but not pitch dark- I could there was a strange bluish light coming from around the bend in the corridor. On the wall to my immediate right were two propane tanks and what appeared to be a large generator. Pipes and large aluminum vents ran in all directions, ultimately into the nether recesses behind the back wall and presumably to that exhaust vent that was next to the door I had just entered. Further down the passage were a series of motors, and a stack of what looked like metal lockers- these must be the breaker boxes, I thought. Several of the motors were running. I could see a network of cables, of all different sizes, running up into the cable trays bolted on racks near the concrete ceiling.

My heart pounding, I slowly followed the interior passage around to where it bent to the right and deeper into the hillside. Around the bend, it continued back further, at least another 200 feet, deep into what I guessed were the recesses of the hill, before ending at a pair of double doors. The floor here was no longer bare concrete; I could see white tile, like you would see in a hospital.

Geez, I never realized this place would be so big in here. It must have been some work to excavate all this when they built it, I thought. There were fluorescent lights in the ceiling above now, but they were only giving off a very low bluish light.

I was nervous as heck, to be honest. I was pretty sure nobody else was in here, but yet, I was extremely jumpy and on edge. I couldn't figure out why. Yeah I knew I shouldn't be in here, but it was more than that. It occurred to me that whatever this building was, it certainly wasn't just a water treatment plant, as Rick Amherst had always said. There was something really freaky going on in here.

The answer would be behind the double doors. I could see blue lights through the small narrow wire-mesh windows of the doors, much brighter than in this dim corridor. As I approached them, my white t-shirt began to glow blue, like it did whenever I was around a UV lamp. My college buddy Nick Cathaway had a black light in his dorm room, which made all his rock posters glow all kinds of fluorescent colors- as a result this room had become one of our occasional party spots.

So I was thinking about Nick and his dorm room, and the partying we had done there the weekend before after finishing our mid-terms, when I reached the double doors and pushed them open.

The first thing I noticed was the sheer size of the room. It had a vaulted ceiling with pillars everywhere and recessed alcoves at the far back. It must have been twice the size of Gill Coliseum, I thought. Against one wall, row upon row of electronic equipment, rack mounted on rack, stood blinking and flashing. There were several terminals and monitors along this vast bank of computers, and pipes and conduits of all description going into them and then spreading in all directions, like a vast spider web, to all corners of the room.

The noise of motors and fans grew louder. In fact, on the far wall, I could make out a row of large fans and could feel the air current. The bluish purple lights were directly overhead, illuminating everything and yet almost nothing at the same time, bathing this vast chamber in an eerie glow. It made the white tile floor pop out like it did to my tee-shirt, while at the same time, made it hard to clearly see what was far away.

But the main thing that struck me was the tanks. Row upon row of them, stretching in front of me and filling every corner of the room, spaced evenly apart. I could make out a few more of them in some of the alcoves. From where I stood, they looked like large fish tanks, at least seven feet long by three or four feet wide, and maybe at least that deep. Each tank appeared to be wired up to the odd spider-web network of cables. The cables streamed out of the tanks to link up with the rack mounted cable trays along the ceiling, where they fed into the banks of computers.

My heart was racing now. What was in those tanks? I had to know. I had come this far, I wouldn't be satisfied until I peeked into one. It is a decision I regretted for a long time.

In the nearest tank lay a human corpse.

Or at least, that was my first impression. But then I watched, in horrid fascination, as the body's chest rose and fell, as it floated on its back weightless in the tank. This was a living person!

Only, you could hardly call it living, considering the state he was in. The figure was naked and emaciated. Its skeletal arms and legs floated next to a torso that was barely more than a ribcage with skin stretched over it. Tubes and wires poked out of its arms, legs, and stomach. Yet the oddest thing was the head. A clear plastic breathing mask covered his mouth and nose, but around the eyes and strapped around his shaved head was a device that looked like high-tech goggles or binoculars. The head was floating on some kind of plastic cushion. A whole nest of electrodes were taped to the head. And all of them- wires, tubes, and even the cable connected to the goggles, met up in a bundle that rose up to the tray above.

So what the fuck was this place, some kind of hospital then? And where were the doctors?

The figure stirred slightly and beneath the breathing mask, its mouth moved, but no audible words emerged. On a panel at the foot of the tank was a screen with some kind of electronic readout, with bars, lights, and gages of all description that meant nothing to me. And on the side of the tank, as I noticed for the first time, was a name plate: HARTLEY, MICHAEL A. xxx-xx-xxxx, it read, along with a date of birth.

I looked around the room, aghast. There must have been at least sixty, heck maybe as many as seventy or eighty, of these tanks in here, all placed in rows, all with wires, pipes, and tubes running into and out of them.

I slowly walked down the row of tanks. Each one, like the one I had peered into, held a naked, emaciated body floating in it, connected to tubes and pipes that presumably kept it fed; kept it alive. And placed over each shaved head, under the nest of wired electrodes and above the breathing mask, were those strange goggles.

So this was the inner sanctum, then. In my worst imagination, I had not imagined anything this ghastly.

Many of the bodies I saw were less than whole. A lot of them had legs and arms missing, or were hideously misshapen or deformed, either as a result of some prior trauma or a simple case of horrible genetic luck. One tank held a CPL. BRADLEY V. TRAFALIS, with both limbs on the right side of his body mangled and mutilated. His right arm was severed below the elbow. I noticed that someone had placed a golden necklace with a purple medallion around his electronic monitor screen. Across the aisle was a body that had been so badly burned, almost beyond recognition, that it was scarcely recognizable as human. This figure was missing all four of its limbs. MITCHELL, DARSHAUN P., read the name plate.

Here was a female, DE WEERD, KARRIN INGRID, whose body was so atrophied it could have been a novelty Halloween skeleton. I noticed that for some reason, on her monitor in particular, more of the lights were flashing ominously red than on the others.

But everywhere I looked, in each of the tanks, I saw bodies- ghastly, skeletal, broken, maimed, still, and corpselike under the dim ultraviolet lights. Each of them hooked to a web of wires that somehow kept them alive in these horrible fish tanks. Only this was not life. This was living death, I thought. This was an abomination of life.

I was about to run out of there and back to the fresh air and sanity of the warm spring day outside, when, out of sheer fate, or perhaps bad luck, I happened to glance at the name plate of the tank I had found myself standing next to.

I suppressed a scream. It couldn't be. He couldn't be here. How could be like this when he was, was...?

"Not YOU!" I said out loud.

NO...no..no... it can't be...I was AT YOUR FUNERAL, you are in a better place! How can that be YOU, this is...this isn't you, this is BLASPHEMY!! I thought to myself, still suppressing the urge to scream.

I leaned into the tank. His forehead and chest had been crushed, his legs severed below the knee. He looked like a discarded string puppet dangling from a nest of wires, his flesh gone pale white, his body slowly wasting away in the tank. Though, beneath the breathing mask I could still see his face and chin and had to somehow accept that, despite what I so dearly wished, this was what was left of my childhood friend.

"Mauro!" I whispered, choking back tears.

"Mauro? Can you hear me bud? It's Jason! It's me! Jason!"

"Mauro... Can you hear me? No, man, no no... aw fuck... Remember when we used to run around on the hill outside...here? You were..." I couldn't finish. I was choking back tears now.

"It's killing me to see you like this man, it's killing me, dude, you don't even know, you don't even know..."

I reached into the tank. The liquid was warm and viscous, heavier than ordinary water. I stroked his arm gently.

"Get well soon! You're gonna get well, aren't you? They can't just keep you in here, like this, they can't..."

The figure was unresponsive. His lips did not even move. With some of the others, I had thought he had seen their lips move under the mask when I passed by. But not his. And whatever it was his eyes saw behind those goggles, if they saw anything at all, they did not see me.

"Get better, bud. I miss you." I said, one last time.

But yet, I knew in my heart, he would never get better, and he would never leave this room.

10. JULIO

Karri was dying, and they all knew it.

Julio and Karri shared something only a few other people here had, mostly those who had been here the longest. That being, they had always had a complete understanding of the nature of the computer-generated reality in which they all lived in together. They had this knowledge since the very day they popped into this world. It would eventually don on the rest of them, over time, after they had been here a while. Sometimes they would start asking questions, noticing certain things, and when the time was right, either he, Karri, or one of the other long-termers would explain the artificial nature of their world to them.

When he had been brought into the mainframe, there were maybe two dozen minds linked into it, now there were at least three or four times that many. That was not counting the "visitors"- the array of doctors and psychiatrists, and occasional family members, who plugged in to the V.R. system temporarily to interact with them when necessary. Among those who lived their lives in here, however, there was a certain bond, a closeness that people outside never had. People seldom punked each other out or deliberately did harm to each other. It was like they were all brothers and sisters.

Julio was also special in that the digital world that the ThullTech Corporation had created for them was based on the very same neighborhood he had grown up in. Both the mainframe V.R. server, as well as their physical bodies, were stored in an underground bunker that was near the house he had lived in as a kid. He was actually living in a digitally reconstructed model of that same house. This was one thing he shared with at least one of the newer people, specifically Mauro Palmieri. However, Julio wasn't sure whether Mauro had really pieced together the whole truth about their virtual world yet. Mauro was just starting to realize that many of the people he had known and been friends with in the neighborhood simply weren't here with them, and had begun to wonder why.

Amber knew. For one, she had realized that whenever she left the immediate neighborhood, certain roads and streets would be inaccessible, and the street view would never change- day or night. It was like being trapped in one of those online street-view maps, she had said. And she noticed that many of the other people, that is, people who were not THEM, would always say the same things and repeat the same lines every time she interacted with them. Often they even LOOKED the same. So one night, as they lay under the blankets cuddling together, Julio had explained it all to her.

When he had first come here, he had clearly remembered the crash that had sent him vaulting over his bike's handlebars and landing on his back. He had been heavily intoxicated, he should have known better than to get on that motorcycle, let alone go without a helmet, but yet he did- it was either that, or walk the six miles home. He had made a choice.

Karri had no such choice. She had been an athlete, college cheerleader, and gymnast, and had loved running, rock climbing and cycling. Until ALS slowly but inexorably ravaged her body, robbing her of her ability to jump, then to run, then to walk. In the end, it robbed her of her ability to eat, and ultimately, even to speak. So her family had brought her here to be plugged in.

What happened to her was horrible. It was not fair. But here, they could all be whole again. Here, where they could walk, run, jump, play sports, fall in love, even MAKE love, and frolic in a perfect world, for whatever time they had left. Was that really so bad, he asked himself?

Because truthfully, none of them had that much time. Beyond this digital virtual-reality world, their bodies slowly atrophied away inside the locked doors of "The Facility." The doctors had told them it could not go on indefinitely, because eventually the heart muscles would weaken to the point where cardiac death would occur. It typically happened after about six to eight years. Julio realized he had been here almost seven years himself, but that realization did not frighten him.