There was a sudden noise.
“Addison!”
He whirled around to an all-too-familiar buzzing. Addison flinched, knowing this time the pain would come. Only it didn’t. After an age, he glanced up to see Five frowning down at him, the mantis drone hovering behind.
“Are you well?” Five asked plainly.
Addison was still too shocked to speak.
“Are you in good physical condition?”
“I’m fine,” he managed. “Considering...”
They regarded each other. The leveller seemed uncertain where to start, but when it became clear he wasn’t going to use the drone, Addison relaxed a little.
“Where are the others?” he asked, straightening up.
“My colleagues are… resting. Preparing for trial.”
There was a stiffness to Five’s movements. He was limping and his face was even greyer than usual. The drone however was fully activated, its blue pincers trained on Addison.
“Walk with me.” Five said, turning away.
Addison glanced at the levelling machinery, shivered, then hurried after.
“I am here to explain your duties,” the leveller continued as they walked back into the institute. “Defendants will be levelled overnight, trials will be held during the day. You will act as interpreter.”
“Help you kill people, you mean?”
The drone flared and Addison immediately regretted the sarcasm.
“Tomorrow there will be two defendants,” Five continued, ignoring the outburst and coming to a halt on a balcony. “Four the day after, then as many as we can handle. At night you are free to do as you wish.”
“So I’m not a prisoner?”
Five stared into the void, eyes gleaming as if he could see something Addison could not.
“We are all prisoners.”
“But I’ve just been wandering around.”
“Planetary collapse is expected within months, perhaps weeks. The institute is sealed, there is no escape. Locking you up would not change that.”
Addison was gripped by that same recklessness.
“Then what’s to stop me just throwing myself off a balcony?”
His heart was pounding, his pulse thundering in his ears. It was clear now this was happening. He wasn’t hallucinating, wasn’t having a breakdown. What doubts hadn’t been zapped out by the drone the vision chair had scoured away. But there was a purity to that realisation, a clarity. It left him two options: do as he was told, or do something drastic. And Addison was feeling increasingly drastic.
“Attempt to harm yourself and you will be stopped,” Five sighed, finally turning to look at him. “The interpreter is embedded in your nervous system and is designed to protect the host. I am told the pain is worse than our paladin’s sting.”
Addison had only been half-serious, but now the option had been taken away he felt cornered.
“What is this thing?” he asked, scratching at the device in his neck.
“An old world marvel. And alas, malfunctioning. Its verbal and non-verbal components allow you to understand my speech and body language. If however I switch it off…”
As Five’s hand swept over Addison’s neck, a startling transformation occurred. Five went from human-looking to a waxwork figure, his face turning slack and expressionless. When he spoke there was a lag between the words and his lips moving, like a badly dubbed television show, and the words sounded strange, like an archaic English dialect.
“This is the truth,” the leveller said, gesturing bizarrely. “Me, as I truly am.”
Addison was appalled. Backing away, he grasped for something to say.
“What are you doing with your hands?” he blurted. “It’s like you’re dancing.”
Five grimaced, and it took Addison a full five seconds to realise he was smiling.
“As I told you,” the leveller replied in his strange accent. “Communication is more than speech. Gestures, movements, body language: these vary across cultures almost as much as vocabulary. You see dancing, but to me you seem almost comically stilted.”
The leveller waved his hand and the old Five returned. “That is how the defendants see us, and us them. This is why you must interpret.”
He turned back to the balcony, visibly tiring now.
“We have a few minutes,” he said. “Do you have questions?”
“This isn’t a trick? I’m not going to get hurt?”
“Why would I hurt you?”
Addison glanced at the hovering drone and Five’s face fell. He waved his hand, and it shot off over the balcony, shrinking to a tiny dot in the upper levels.
“Please,” Five said. “I do not have long.”
Addison grasped for something to say.
“Your names,” he began. “Why numbers?”
“Our designations denote hierarchy.”
“Yeah, but why...?”
“Consider our situation,” Five replied. “The world is dead, resources dwindling. Fighting over what remains kills most of the survivors, so hierarchy restores order. One gets first pick or first decision, then so on and so forth down the ladder.”
“So you’re bottom of the pile?”
Five smiled sadly.
“Once I was Two, One’s right-hand man, but I fell from favour. Hierarchies shift, but after the recent debacle I fear I’ll end my days as the lowest caste.”
Addison let this sink in.
“The debacle,” he said, speaking slowly. “You mean the audition. Me figuring everything out?”
“What else?”
“You really thought I’d fall for that?”
“I had hoped.”
“But it doesn’t make sense!” Addison said. “If you can give me those memories, why not just make me think I was an interpreter? Why go to all that trouble?”
“To spare your suffering.”
“Believe me, I suffered.”
“We all suffer. But replacing all your memories simply would not have worked. False memories are unreliable. They become vague, shadowy, the subject knows they are fake. In fact, I can prove it! Think, what do you remember before the waiting room?”
Examining his thoughts, Addison was surprised to find Five was right. The casting call, his journey to the audition: the memories were oddly dreamlike, flimsy and insubstantial.
“I remember giving blood,” he frowned. “At a clinic.”
Five nodded. “The last memory encoded in your sample would of course have been of it being taken. Once separated from the source, no new memories are retained.”
“So everything after was fake?”
“You were picked for
