A voice was whispering loudly somewhere nearby, but I could barely hear it over the constant hum that filled the air. I was lying on my back on the floor. Was I still in my apartment?
“Hello? Can you hear me?”
I opened my eyes and looked around. It was dark, but I could see a little bit. Wherever I was, it wasn’t my apartment; there was metal scaffolding somewhere off in front of me, and I could see a ton of spastic little blinking lights.
“Hello?” It sounded like a woman’s voice.
“I can hear you,” I said.
“Get up. You’re in trouble,” she hissed.
My body was so stiff I could barely move. I rolled over and got up on one elbow, just managing to raise my forehead a few inches off the ground. My body was shaking all over.
“You’ll be all right,” the woman said. My hair trailed on the floor as I lifted my head and let it bob there, looking for her. There was some kind of glass wall or window in front of me. I reached out and touched it, streaking fingerprints. It was hard plastic that looked clear, but there was cardboard taped to the outside so I couldn’t see through.
It started to sink in that I was in a box, a clear plastic box. It was no bigger than my bathroom. I went to brush my hair out of my face and felt some threads there, a whole bunch of them, but when I pulled at one, it tugged at my forehead like it was stuck there.
“Here.”
A fingernail tapped on the plastic nearby and I looked over where a piece of the cardboard was torn. A pair of eyes looked at me through the little gap.
“Where am I?” I asked.
“Look here,” the woman said, and moved her face away from the gap. I crawled across the floor and put my forehead to the wall so I could see through.
Through the hole I could see another plastic box that looked just like the one I was in. They were right next to each other with the cardboard in between them. Sitting in the middle of the floor was a black woman wearing a plain white shirt and pants, and she looked even sicker than I usually did. Her hair had grown into a thicket of kinks that hung around her face, and underneath I saw a bunch of electrodes stuck to her forehead that trailed thin white wires.
Pulling some of the threads out of my hair, I held them up to my face. They were the same thin white wires. My heart was beating faster. Was this another dream? I hoped it was another dream.
“Calm down,” the woman said. “Don’t try to pull off the electrodes; you’ll get shocked if you do.”
“Who are you?” I asked. Skin was flaking off her lips, and her eye sockets were dark and hollow.
“Anna,” she said. “What’s your name?”
“Zoe.”
“Do you know where we are?”
“No, where?” I said, and she looked like she might cry.
“I was asking you.”
I rubbed my eyes and found that my face was all sweaty and my hands were shaking really badly. The side of my neck itched, and as I scratched at it, I remembered the needle poking me there.
“Are you sick?” she asked.
I hated that question. Even in the situation I was in, I hated it. People always looked at me like I was a hobo or a cancer patient or something, always with this look like they were either grossed out by me or felt sorry for me. Asking someone who wasn’t sick if they were sick was such an insult.
“Zoe?”
When I tried to swallow, though, my throat was totally dry and my stomach turned over. Maybe this time I really was.
Either way, I needed time to think. Peeking through the hole in the cardboard, I focused on the woman in the cage next to mine until the lights got bright and the glow appeared around her head. After a second I could see it rippling with deep shades of blue, with small flares of red licking out. The patterns were all of sadness and depression and despair, worse than I’d ever seen before. I meant to push and try to make her feel a little better, when I noticed something else: a thin white band, like a little halo circling her head.
“Hey, my next-door neighbor had one of those,” I said without thinking. It was faint, like the ring of a planet, and when I concentrated on it, I felt a kind of resistance. It pushed me back gently, not allowing me to get any closer and not letting me change the other colors.
The woman wiped her eyes.
“You shouldn’t do that,” she said.
“Do what?” I asked, guilty.
“What you just did. They’re watching.”
“Watching?”
She pointed to the electrodes stuck to her head. My brain was moving in slow motion, but I was starting to understand her.
“Wait, you felt that?” I asked.
“I can do it too, Zoe,” she said. “It’s why I’m here. It’s why we’re all here.”
“Other people can do it?”
She gave me a pitying look then, and it was a look I knew well. “Yes,” she said.
“Then my next-door neighbor could do it too the whole time?” I asked myself out loud. “Why was he—”
“Maybe they were getting ready to contact you,” she said, looking away. “Maybe they just wanted to keep an eye on you.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“Coming in,” a man’s voice said from somewhere nearby. The woman’s eyelids drooped.
“Don’t fight them,” she said.
“Turning on the light,” the voice said, and there was a loud snap that made me jump as a bright light flooded the room from above. Everything went white and hurt my eyes, making my stomach flip.
“When they start,” she said, holding up the thin white electrode wires while still staring into space, “the person on the other end of these wires is going to try to take control of you.”
“What? Why?”
“Because they’re like us,” she said. “Because they can. Because they’re in even deeper trouble than we are, and they need help. They’re desperate.”
“What?”
Heavy footsteps came closer until a shadow fell over me and I saw two men standing in front of my cell.
“Try to remember that,” Anna said.
“You’re awake,” one of them said. I didn’t recognize either of them, but I could tell right away that they were both revivors, just like the woman Nico brought me to see. They were like dead men or robots or something, with no thoughts to read or influence.
“We’re ready to begin,” one said to the other.
“Begin? Begin what?” I asked. What the hell was going on? What was I doing there?
“The new Patient Nine is awake. Has the template been arranged?” the other one said into a walkie-talkie. It let out a pop of static, and another voice came out of it.
“The probes are in place,” it said. “We’re recording.”
“Open the gate,” the one with the radio said.
“Get ready,” Anna muttered from behind the plastic.
“Get ready for wh—”
The words stuck in my mouth, and I found out.
Faye Dasalia—Factory Entrance
