“Who are you?” He asked.
“My name is Milo Fiori.”
“Why do I know that name?”
“We went to school together.”
“God, yes. I remember. Something happened to you, though. Everyone said you’d been kidnapped.”
Milo shrugged.
“Now you know the truth.”
“You’ve been…like this all this time?”
“I grew up this way. At least, ever since…” He made a pulling motion over his head and made a comical pop with his lips.
“Milo, you’ve got to tell me what’s going on. I have to know everything now.”
“I don’t know everything. What I do know will take time to tell. We should go somewhere.”
“I can’t leave them.”
“Trust me, Robert, it will be easier if we do it my way.”
“Will I be able to come back again? See them?”
“Of course, why not?”
“I don’t know. I just…”
“It’s been hard on you. It’s the same for everyone. Come on.”
Johnson followed Fiori into the night and for a long time they walked the streets of the city. Along the river where houseboats and barges were moored. Around the square in the city centre where Johnson had worked. Through the malls where people could shop all night. Fiori told him how the
world really worked.
“So, it’s people like us on the other ends of the tubes?”
“Just like you and me.”
“And they experience everything we do?”
“Everything. But the difference is, they don’t feel pain so much and they feel pleasure more. They can also experience what it’s like to be an animal or even a rock or tree.”
“Like the mountain?”
“Exactly. That particular tube splits into several hundred others. ‘Being the mountain’ seems to be one of the most popular experiences. After being human.”
“Why would they do all this?”
“Because they’re scared of life.”
Fiori told him how people had become what he termed ‘indistinct’. After generations of using gene technology to phase out certain unwanted traits in their offspring, humans had become unable to resist disease.
“The tube acts as a conduit for vicarious experience—what they call ‘the real reality’. Meanwhile, the receiver lies protected in some kind of safe environment where neither disease nor any other kind of adversity can enter.”
“How do we get to these people?”
“We don’t. They’re inaccessible.”
“Can’t we fly up to them?”
“When did you last see a plane, Robert? Or a helicopter or a fucking hot air balloon?”
It was one of the many truths that landed like punches on Johnson’s already battered consciousness. They walked away from the city and towards the suburbs where they traced their way through neighbourhoods and around the sports fields of schools.
“How do you know all this for certain, Milo?”
“One of them came down here once and made the first disconnect. There has been a line of us ever since. You’re the next one.”
“It’s just you and me out here?”
“’Fraid so.”
“There must be a way out.”
“Every disconnect has looked. None have ever left. If they had, we wouldn’t be here now—the line would have been broken.”
“Why did you pick me?”
“I can’t say exactly. I was told that when the time came, I would know. I knew it had to be you.”
“I don’t know whether to thank you or wring your neck. I was happy, Milo.”
“Really? Didn’t you know better deep down? Didn’t you know you’d never be truly at peace?”
Johnson’s pause was too long. In the end all he said was,
“There has to be a way out.”
“You’d leave all the rest behind? Angelina, your children?”
“I’d come back for them.”
“What if leaving meant there was no coming back? That’s already true, don’t you think?”
Chapter 12
Johnson stayed away from Fiori for the next few days. He didn’t want the job of the disconnect. He didn’t want the responsibility. He wandered into the hills again following the main mountain road. After a while the road became uneven and then broken, huge cracks across its surface. Further along, the earth became visible between the cracks and finally there was no road.
It stopped about forty miles from the outskirts of town. There was no path or track, only a sudden end and beyond it, the blurred undergrowth and trees. Johnson walked on regardless. He became neither tired nor hungry nor thirsty.
He walked far beyond the place where he’d ripped the tube from his skull, past the huge mountain, held in the grip of its own vast conduit. He followed a pass which brought him to the other side of the range and there he found the end of the world, a milky white oblivion that he dared not step into. The earth stopped as the road had, but now there was a drop. He flung a stone over the edge. It slowed in its descent, as if sinking through liquid. He never heard it hit the bottom.
The walk back to the city seemed far longer.
Chapter 13
“If you had designed this place, where would you put the exit?”
“I could never create something like this.”
“Come on, Milo. Think about it.”
“I don’t know.”
“But you would have an exit, right? In case something went wrong.”
“You’ll never find such a thing.”
“What about the one who came from up there? Did he stay here and sacrifice himself? When he’d done what he had to do he went home, I’m sure of it.”
There was a protracted silence between them, Johnson’s passion grating against Fiori’s apparent indifference.
“Don’t you want to get out of here, Milo?”
“I’ve already tried.”
“But why have you stopped trying?”
“It’s not so bad here, really. Life is less complicated than it was with the tube.”
