Mindless

Chapter Six - 022

 We were so close. We got to the door of the closet, and 046 grabbed the handle, and then I fell and instead of saving himself, he came back for me, and he picked me up gently and carried me to the closet, but there were no helmets. And then he put me down, just as gently, and he fell. And then we just sat there. And he told me something I will never forget.

"This whole time... I missed out on my life... and now... it's finally starting. it's starting... 022... we won't be the last..."

And then he was gone and the last word on his lips was my identification. And then I was gone, too.

I realize I'm not lying on a comfortable surface all of three seconds later. I sit up, and my brain feels like it's about to break apart into a million pieces. Which is completely irrational, but still.

Where am I? I wonder. I look around and at first startle at the sight of an electric field keeping me out of the other half of this room-- not that it's much more interesting than this half. I slowly relax as I realize that this room isn't set up like a cell, and the electric field is blue, not red.

Something on the wall, a small thing that resembles a tangi screen. I beeps at me. I look around the room, scanning for a way to turn it off. No such luck.

The door that I hadn't known existed up until now slides out of the wall, and girl walks in. She doesn't wear the clothing of anyone ranked, which makes me think I'm not going to be terminated and am very much going to be terminated at the same time.

Her long black hair is down, though. Which would not be allowed. Her big brown eyes are filled with something foreign to me. She catches a glimpse of my wide open eyes and nearly jumps up high enough to hit her head on the ceiling. I laugh.

"You're awake!" She exclaims. I pause, as if considering this. "Yeah, I guess so."

She laughs, a strange sounding squeak. "I'm going to have to get Enzo in here..."

"Enzo? What's an Enzo?"

She laughs for real this time. I decide this person isn't going to harm me, at least not right now. "Not a what. A who. Enzo is a human."

"Why's he called Enzo?"

"Because that's his name," she says. "I know you probably don't know what that is, which makes me sad, but you'll find out soon enough." Something flickers across her face, turning her mouth into a tight frown. "Hopefully."

Nothing she says makes any sense. Hopefully? Name? Sad?

"I'll go get him." She says. I try, standing up and then end up falling back down. "The aftereffects of the poison are rough," she says, as if it was an afterthought. "Try not to move too much."

She leaves the room, the door sliding back into the wall, and I wait. It reminds me of the last time I was in a room like this. Waiting.

Finally another person comes in. 'Enzo,' as I guess him to be, is a boy about my age with a scrawny build and messy black hair that goes away over the length ordinances for male hair at moonBase 001. He has a strange piece of plastic on his face, kind of square shaped and black with glass covering both of his eyes.

"So." He says. He doesn't even say hi. "Your ship crashed here when?"

"Crashed?"

"Ah, ok. You were poisoned when?"

"How should I know?"

He sighs and pushes the strange piece of plastic further up the bridge of his nose, closer to his eyes. "I'm not going to get anywhere, am I."

"You're not moving."

I know my responses are kind of indirect and annoying, but I can't stop.

"You came from a moonBase." Not a question, but I answer anyway. "Yes," I say.

"Why?"

"I was scheduled for termination." He winces. "Why?" He asks again, in a softer voice. I have no doubts that, despite his size, this Enzo person can be lethal. I just don't think he wants to be, not unless he has to.

"I saw a pair of silver eyes in my air vent in the middle of sleeping hours, and they belonged to a girl who told me there were people with brains like mine, and so I helped her find them by getting them to stand up at lunch, or try to. And she found one. And then instead of letting me get terminated, she brought him and came to save me. And we ran."

"And how does she know how to pilot a ship?"

"I don't know."

He looks at me, then closes his eyes for almost five minutes. He finally opens them again and says, "Your story checks out. But I don't know about that 'friend' of yours."

My story checks out? I have a friend? What do these words mean?

After he leaves, I just sit, waiting. And my brain worked at double the pace it normally would, trying to figure out what is going on.

This new world is so... different.