Sorry for the delay getting this next section out. Life is full of distractions at the moment. But here we are! Diedrich (or is it Ted?) has some realizations about his strange state of mind and the reality he is experiencing, but decides he must go about functioning, or attempting to, in the world he now finds himself in.
New to the story? Read part 1 here.
Chapter 2 – Ted
“Ted. My name is Ted.”
He was staring at his ID, with the German name he didn’t recognize and a face that felt uncomfortably familiar, yet somehow, disturbingly not his own. Inside, he felt that the person on that small piece of plastic wasn’t real…couldn’t be real. He wasn’t German.
“I’m American,” he said aloud. “But this can’t be a dream, can it?”
He put the ID down on a glass table and let his eyes take in his spartan apartment, as if for the first time. The lights were off, save for the painfully white LED panel in the bathroom, but the interior was a flood of clear details from the incessant light pollution groping through the large windows and glass door to the balcony. The buildings outside, stretching to the empty sky, flashed a dozen colors while innumerable offices and apartments flickered to life and death when all the natural world, if there was such a thing in this strange mockery of Berlin, should be sleeping. A flag of Black, White, and Red flew proudly above one building, shaped like a ziggurat of obsidian glass, and Ted (or Diedrich) wondered at it.
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The apartment was small and would have been cozy but for the coldness of its contents. A large, flat TV occupied most of one wall, and the far end of the room was filled with a black table littered with papers that overflowed onto a few unremarkable chairs. Only the couch on which he now sat seemed a thing of human reality, with its worn no-color textile pattern over beaten cushions. Through a door, he could see a bedroom and a messy bed covered in white linens. A computer sat dead next to it.
Ted withdrew his phone from his pocket. It would not open, for his hand was shaking.
“My damn nerves.”
With an effort, he held the thing with two hands, and it unlocked in a familiar way, but the screen that greeted him was as alien as before. He flipped and scrolled around, wondering whether there might be some clues hidden within the digital maze, but then suddenly tossed the thing on the coffee table.
“I can’t take this.”
With shaking legs, he stood up. He realized his breathing was shallow and quick. Steadying himself on the blank, white wall, he worked his way slowly into the bathroom and its sterile white glow. That room felt human in the worst way, like a ransacked hospital room. The pieces of life that lived there covered all the surface of the counter. He ignored the cacophonous collage of hygiene items and swung open the medicine cabinet.
Ted resisted the urge to throw all the bottles on the floor and begin downing pills. Methodically, he began removing each bottle and attempting to read the labels. Most of them had Diedrich printed on them, but they were for odd, old things. Eye drops. A half-finished course of penicillin. Some opioid he didn’t recognize. At last, he found what he was looking for.
“Alprazolam.” Xanax. The word shot into his mind and pounded his frontal cortex like a haymaker.
He opened the bottle and downed one of the pills dry, then put the bottle in his pocket. It would take some time for its effects to be felt, but the act of taking the medicine seemed to calm him down immediately. With a deep breath, he looked in the cabinet again and found that the next bottle, half full, contained Fluoxetine. It wasn’t his usual antidepressant, which was Zoloft, but it, like the Xanax, reassured him. He didn’t know when the last time he had taken it was because of his hazy memory, but the impulse to medicate was strong. He opened that bottle up and popped one, then sighed.
With a heavy body, he navigated his way back to the couch, the small piece of humanity raging against the technological terrors of the city, and collapsed. His eyes strayed to a remote control on the coffee table, but it was too much. He lay back and looked out the window at the city, and a waving, misplaced flag above the black citadel. For a few minutes, he strained his mind, trying desperately to remember the reality of who he was, apart from this strange nightmare. He had a name and a few scattered memories of a different time and place.
Was it the year 2000? It couldn’t be. That was in the past, and yet here he was in Berlin, and there was no mistaking that Adolf Hitler was alive and in charge.
Clinging to the roughly textured cushions, his vision began to blur. The infinity of the wicked city, locked outside the gates of clear glass, faded.
***
The hallway was dim; only every other light fixture seemed to be working. The shadows and dead zones gave the otherwise banal passage an ominous and even disturbing look.
“Still have the jitters?”
Ted turned to see a woman’s face. She was tall, standing at the level of his eyes, and she had an intense look everywhere except for her red lips, which were smirking very subtly.
“I guess.”
“I might be following close behind, so don’t worry too much.”
“I know how important it is, but…” He felt his chest, which felt tight.
“Just think of the mission. Focus on it above all else. Don’t forget.”
“I won’t.”
“Come on, then..”
The woman stepped forward, and Ted followed, striding down the white-walled tunnel and hearing only the sound of his shoes above the rush of his own blood in his ears. Blue-painted steel doors lighted the hallway, but all were shut. He could not say how long he walked; time felt immaterial. In a short time, he found himself standing before a set of metallic double doors. The woman proceeded him through, and on the other side, he saw a wide hall like a hangar or empty arena stretching out into uncertain darkness where the high overhead lights failed. The room was filled with equipment that towered high overhead, covered in myriad lights and screens.
A dozen men in coveralls patrolled the area, checking various terminals and switches. A tall man in a suit approached out of the darkness, his slick black hair reflecting the too-white light like it was made of chrome.
“You’re just in time, Theodore. Right this way.”
Ted shared a look with the woman, then followed the man in the suit around a corner and to a strange door made of shiny steel with a thick glass porthole in it.
“You can leave your clothes on the table.”
Nervously, Ted disrobed, realizing only then that all he wore was a simple set of scrubs and a pair of black sneakers. Naked, he walked to the door under the gaze of the man in the suit. It opened of its own accord, and Ted stepped into a pristine white room, spherical inside and without any feature on its smooth, continuous wall save small disks of metal circling at regular intervals. Two strangers entered, and Ted found his hands and feet being bound into restraints he hadn’t noticed before.
“Remember the mission, Ted. This is critical. There aren’t many left who can make the journey.” The man in the suit stared at him with intense eyes. “Remember what you must do.”
“I will,” Ted found himself saying, though he could not at that moment recall what his mission precisely was.
“There is no other option. You must.”
The door closed, and through the porthole he spied the stark face of the woman next to the man in the suit.
***
Diedrich (or was it Ted?) woke with a start, the image of the machine and the strange rooms flowing across his open eyes like water, neither present nor ignorable. He tried to cling to the dream, to understand the images, but he realized quickly that his phone was ringing.
He found it next to the couch and picked it up.
“Diedrich?” came a deep voice. “Where are you?”
“I’m…I’m at home.”
“What? You’re not caught in traffic?”
“No, I fell asleep on the couch and… Who is this?”
“It’s Henry. Your supervisor? You sound like hell. Maybe I did wake you up. Work started half an hour ago. Get your ass here and I’ll let you work late instead of docking you.”
“Right,” said Diedrich. “I’ll… call a cab, I guess.”
“Normally, I’d say it’s your money, but there may not be a train running. Just get here.”
“What’s the address?”
“Oh boy, you’re rich. You been taking those meds again?”
Diedrich remained silent.
“It’s fine. Just get here. I have a boss, too, you know.”
The hiss of the phone line died away.
*
The office was liminally familiar.
The office was alien—not merely strange or novel, but otherworldly. Diedrich thought it might be reminiscent of some piece of science fiction, like a movie that didn’t yet exist, which he could only fleetingly remember.
The walls were white but not pristine. Flecks of grey dust clung to angles here and there, giving the bleached space some dimension. He passed through the long hallways and square doors guided by instinct more than memory. His feet seemed to know the way, though his mind understood nothing. At last, he arrived before the penultimate door and crossed the black steel threshold into something more comfortable, but somehow just as inhuman. The soft furniture and warm tones of the walls felt like plastic decorations in a fish bowl, or set pieces for a television show, meant to convey an aesthetic but have no real purpose.
Deidrich paused in the antechamber, or waiting room, before the entrance to the workspace proper. How often did anyone sit here? Perhaps the occasional worker waiting for an interview, but the place was devoid of life, save for a receptionist, a beautiful blonde woman, whose attention was totally devoted to a pair of flat computer monitors.
He walked forward, and she looked up, flashed him a row of white teeth between crimson lips, then the door beside her opened automatically.
“What held you up?” she said.
“Uh…Power outage,” said Diedrich. “Clock stopped working. You know?”
She narrowed her eyes, and Diedrich realized his blunder, but there was nothing else for it. He pushed through the door into the beyond, a labyrinth of impermanent walls six feet tall that stopped well short of the white ceiling. Fluorescent lights glowed everywhere, illuminating everything seemingly from every angle, but at least here, the grey carpet and brown fabric of the walls gave the place some sense of grounding.
Diedrich paused as he realized he did not know where to go. His feet had deserted him at the start of a maze whose destination he could not understand.
“Finally.”
Diedrich turned to see a middle-aged man in a stiff grey suit striding toward him. “You filled out the status reports yesterday, didn’t you? We’ll need to stop by your office and retrieve them. The captain will be here soon, and he could have an impact on whether we will still receive funding.”
“For what now?”
The man shook his head and chuckled. He stepped off into a row of the flimsy walls, and Diedrich followed. After a few turns, he paused. Diedrich poked his head into the little cubicle, filled with neatly stacked papers and a computer station.
“Just a minute. What project were you talking about?”
“Servellience bots. Did you think I meant a fishing captain? I mean the Schutzstaffel.”
Diedrich understood the word. His mind swam out of time for a moment, but there was a panic in his belly that brought him back to reality. He flopped into his chair and rifled through a stack of papers.
“Is this it?”
The man snatched the papers. “Yes, of course. What are you on today?”
“I…I’m just a bit hungover.”
“Don’t mention anything like that.” The man checked a glowing watch on his wrist. “Conference room three at ten O’clock. You have time to grab yourself some coffee. Or something stronger if you need it.”
“Henry?”
“Yes?”
Diedrich nodded. “I’m sorry for being late.”
“Don’t mention that either.” Henry (Diedrich supposed) smiled and disappeared into the evergrey artificial landscape. The muffled sounds of keyboards and indiscipherable voices crept into the silence, and Diedrich turned to look at his computer.
Chapter 3 – The Mission