The Vessel

5. Effugio

His eyes struggled to take in the sight in front of him, with his mind trailing not far behind. It was all too much to see all at once, too much to process, and he held onto the railing in front of him to keep his balance.

What lay before and below him looked very much like the mile-long strip of a bustling town, yet it was entirely enclosed at the far edges by high, metal walls covered in plants both living and dead. Birds dipped and danced overhead, hunting for insects in the air. Above it all, at least fifty meters up, was a curved ceiling painted the deepest sky blue. A sun seemed to be floating in the distance, just out of reach, lighting the town with its warm rays. A closer look revealed it to be as artificial as the lights outside the Medlabs. An apparatus kept it suspended from the ceiling, moving it almost imperceptibly slow across the fake sky on a floating track system.

As he looked across that place, a sudden pitch of vertigo gripped him, that cold spiral of nausea threatening to throw him over the railing. Below, waiting for him to fall and crack his spine across them, pipes and plants mingled to become bio-mechanical tangles jutting up from the floor and through the walls.

What was this place, and how had he come to be there? What sort of people lived in a walled-in town with a fake sun? He decided to keep moving, to stop drawing attention to himself before someone noticed the look on his face and realized he wasn't one of them.

He walked down a long set of curving, metal steps, staring at the various formations of metal and plastic ahead. Every bit of space seemed to have been utilized in the strange town, an interlocking puzzle of walkways and hanging gardens that grew seamlessly up from the floor. The open-faced structures were like storefronts, yet filled up with people doing anything but buying and selling things. As he watched, a beautiful olive-skinned woman showed a group of children how to hand-knit a sweater. In the next building a small group were gathered around a series of holograms, playing against each other in a game of some kind. In yet a third, three women with delicately tattooed faces sat drinking tea while a young girl played a sad song for them on a transparent violin.

Continuing on, he walked under and through a series of turns and tunnels. The crowd of unfamiliar faces moved ever around him. They were of every age, every gender, some wearing regular clothes and some in uniforms very much like his own, only differing in color. To his right a pair of teenagers walked up a flight of steps to an elevated tram platform before being hummed off into the distance.

It was all too much. His legs felt as if they were going to give out and he would go crashing to the floor. Locked in a daze, he walked until he came to a small park area ringed with green shrubs and white birch trees. He passed a single bench where a couple were seated, stumbling to the large fountain at the center. The water there danced in ways that defied physics, snaking in mid-air and looping back in on itself before falling down and starting all over. It was mesmerizing, though it did nothing to calm his vision.

Strangers moved around him, unknown people in a foreign place. A hundred nationalities making up one people. Through it all a dull sound had been at the back of his mind, and as he paid more attention to it he realized it was the sound of whispering. It was the strangers, it had to be. They were talking about his presence among them, how he didn't belong, how he'd escaped. His pulse quickened, his palms sweating as he waited for their wrath, but when he gathered the courage to look at them, to peer at some of their faces, he realized the whispers weren't coming from the strangers. In fact, the whispers seemed to be coming from no one at all; hushed and hidden voices, intertwined like the dancing water beside him, voices sharing secrets between them, and all saying the same thing, over and over, in multiple languages, in every language, in every tongue, yet none of it decipherable, and they grew and grew in volume until they were all he could hear, so much that he wanted to scream, yet no matter how much he listened he couldn't make out the words they were saying, that whisper-scream tearing his brain apart.