Wake Up With the Kimellians

Part Five

The platform was dark when Roger woke up. The lights had to have been turned off by a timer, because he remembered the platform and the corridor being lit when he arrived. The thought of crossing the pipes in the dark filled his stomach with sick unease, but he steeled himself and made the trip crawling as quickly as possible.

The light panel was where he expected it to be, and the corridor looked identical to the last building he’d been in.

However, he had experienced something of a radical change in his appearance during his sleep. The residual lubricant had colored his skin with a splotchy red rash. There was no itching or irritation, but he felt sure that would come later if he couldn’t figure out how to rinse himself off.

Roger opened the first door he passed on his right, and the rows of beeping consoles drew him inside though he felt an urgent need to leave the building and confirm where he was.

Most of the cable-tethered consoles in the room were mounted to the ceiling from long metal tracks. A few were mounted flush with the walls as well.

Roger couldn’t be quite sure with the strange symbol code the screens displayed data in, but he could understand from the menus and graphs that the screens handled different applications for the building’s operation. Some screens displayed maps or graphs, while others contained only rows of buttons, many of which were blinking and beeping.

Each room thereafter was similar, though every screen appeared to be running a different application. Perhaps because so many of the functions flashed with a menacing red shade, Roger wasn’t inclined to press anything. But he could not speed his progress down the corridor yet.

Every console in every room was on. The consoles ran all kinds of applications, and there were many more consoles available than should have been needed to run the building. Many of the screens displayed a globe with different readouts coming from various locations. All of it was written in the gibberish code of the aliens, which left Roger baffled to their purposes.

In the room closest to the elevators on the left side of the corridor, the consoles all ran the same program. Grids of security screens showed the interiors of each apartment from an angle near the back wall, allowing for a view into the kitchen and the bathrooms.

Roger didn’t stay long in the room, because there was no point in peeping. He doubted he’d find anyone he knew by trying, and watching people sit and stare in abject misery only threatened to upset his own fragile emotional state.

As he left the security room, Roger at last admitted to himself why he was taking his time in returning to the elevators. Part of him was afraid the car wouldn’t come down to the sublevels without an access card of some kind, and he was not looking forward to climbing the ladder up, only to find the elevators blocking him from getting out.

But the elevator came to the floor, and Roger took it up to the sublevel with the clothing vendors. Changing clothes and repacking his remaining supplies, he returned to the first floor lobby.

He looked up at the building custodian, an old man with a thin crown of buzzed white hair and thick eyebrows which spouted wild hairs in every direction.

The old man wore an expression of confusion, as though he couldn’t understand why anyone should be in the elevators at all.

Roger stepped into the lobby, and the old man’s eyes grew wider while he raised his hands in front of himself in a protective gesture.

“Is this Houston?” Roger asked.

The custodian blinked at Roger until he repeated himself.

Then the old man lowered his hands slowly before he shook his head. “This used to be Austin, but now it’s 8218. Houston doesn’t exist anymore.” The custodian got to his feet, the shocked look on his face fading to be replaced with concern. “Are you all right? Your face—”