I have decided not to finish this year’s attempt at a NaNoWriMo story. It’s now day ten of thirty, and I haven’t made any more progress. So instead, here’s the opening to the story. Yes, the character is named Cubey Terra, but it’s not actually me. It’s a story about an avatar. Just so we’re clear.
Standing motionless, behind closed eyes Cubey inhaled the chill morning air and flexed his fists against permanent half-numbness in his extremities. As he closed his fists tighter, he could hear the glove leather creak under pressure. Gusts tugged at him, swaying him forward and back by centimeters. And between breaths of pure air, in the distance was the drone of propellers and the thin howl of jets. The wind pushed again from behind, making him step forward to keep from falling. He opened his eyes.
Delicate sunlight painted the landscape a hundred meters below him in hues of rose and gold. Aircraft of all kind filled the sky. Between lumbering airships crept small passenger jets, and even smaller light aircraft darted with reckless abandon among the airborne obstacles. Steadying himself on a weather-stained post, Cubey examined his familiar world.
The landing pad where he stood was one of four arranged radially at the ends of long walkways from a wide, glass-domed tower that rose hundreds of meters above an undulating ridge of hills. The pad extended into the air with a very long fall to the tarmac and taxiing aircraft below. But he wasn’t concerned about the fall.
Acting as the centrepiece to the airport, the tower provided the essential services that any airport needed. In addition to air traffic control, the it provided a meeting place for travellers, baggage handling, administrative offices, and cafes and shops for people waiting for connecting flights.
Cubey had stood, almost motionless for what seemed an eternity, but that time was soon over, he knew. With a flutter a feathers, a gull flew past his head and out into the void, oblivious to the danger posed by the multitude of machines filling the air, as well as the apparent danger he himself was in, positioned as he was above a lethal drop. Carefully, deftly, Cubey lowered himself to the landing pad’s cold metal surface, then wriggled his feet over edge until they swung freely in the breeze. Still, he held firmly to the post. It was too soon to leave, but the waiting – his patient waiting – was just about over. And he would be free.
How long had it been since he found himself in this place, caretaker of Abbotts Aerodrome, cast simultaneously in the role of owner and prisoner? Often Cubey would cast his thoughts back to the beginning, but they existed almost without coherence, without timescale, as if older memories mixed with the newer in a disordered timeline of his life here. This time, however, might be his last opportunity to examine the past, so he meditated on his first moments.
To say that he had woken up would be overstating the experience. In fact, it was like partially emerging from a drug-induced dream. His thoughts had been slow and rigid, giving him the alarming sensation of his mind running on clearly-defined rails that branched at switchpoints.
It may have been only seconds at first, but they seemed to stretch to hours as his perception of the world began to build as through the blurred vision of someone waking from a deep slumber. He was standing, somehow, though he had no recollection of having stood up, and near him stood two individuals, a man and a woman, both watching him intently. They wore identical black shirts, and Cubey remembered clearly the logo printed on the pockets: the silhouette of a tree. What was most striking were their eyes: sharp, impossibly green, and bright, possessing an almost luminous quality.
Beyond them he could see only white – there were no walls or other surfaces on which to focus his eyes. As far as he could tell, his entire world consisted of himself and the two strangers.
Still, his thoughts raced along rails and slammed into intersections, turns, and decision points as his mind tried to cope. Cold fear crept up his spine as he understood that something was terribly wrong. He tried to move, but his limbs seemed distant, and not under his control, though somehow he remained standing.
Why wouldn’t they speak? He tried to force words from numb lips. “I… feel… strange,” he whispered. Though he knew he had spoken, oddly the words came from outside of his body. The black-shirted pair glanced sharply at each other, exchanging silent thoughts, before focusing again on Cubey.
Presently his thoughts became sharper, clearer, though still confined to strict pathways, as if he weren’t able to let his mind stray freely. Obviously, he thought, he had been drugged. Why, when, and how – none of that was apparent to him. It was only a matter of time before the drugs wore off and he could work it out.
He did feel strange. Fearful, but still. Cold, even. Was that normal? And something was missing. He tried again to move, straining against invisible bonds, but his limbs were perfectly motionless. Was he paralysed? His mind raced. If he was, how was he standing? And these didn’t look like doctors.
Why didn’t they speak?
It was at that moment that his entire being came to a halt, as he became aware of the missing element. He wasn’t breathing. He hadn’t taken a single breath since he’d woken up. Cubey tried to gulp at the air like a fish, but nothing worked. Panic seized him, and he tried to thrash, to free himself from whatever bound him like a statue in front of the impassive strangers. Surely they could see that he wasn’t breathing.
There was more. Fear drenched his fogged mind, but he knew something else: he had no pulse either. His heart should have been racing, but Cubey felt nothing. He tried again to wrestle himself free. Were they going to let him die?
Moments passed. Somehow he didn’t die, didn’t pass out. He was alive and awake, though not breathing and with no pulse.
Am I already dead? Cubey wondered. Is this what it feels like to die?
He had no chance to pursue that thought, as the woman stepped forward and tapped him on the forehead. That’s where his memory ended.
Cubey’s backside now ached with cold from sitting on the bare metal deckplate of the landing pad. How long ago had it happened, that first awakening in this place? There was no concept of time associated with that memory, but still he knew it to be the oldest. That is, it was the oldest memory of his time at the airport. Before that was foggy and distant, but he remembered a full life. It hadn’t been a remarkable life, by any means, but it was at least his, and he had been free. If only then he had valued his freedom of movement, and freedom of thought. Since his imprisonment here, he had neither.
It was moments like this in which Cubey felt least certain. Nothing since his arrival had seemed entirely real, as if it were a kind of waking dream. Though he knew that his life before had been real, there was always a certain doubt. His keepers clearly had control over his entire being. Could he even trust his memory?
His hands grew clammy and he exhaled suddenly as if to cast the thoughts out of his head. No. It was real. It had to have been. After all, what was he but the sum of his experiences, from childhood to the present. If he began to doubt that… then who was he?
Cubey remembered his family, his parents, his brothers. He remembered his childhood home, the social anguishes of adolescence, and the freedoms and burdens of adulthood. Friendships made and lost. Where were they all now, his family, his friends? How long had it been since he’d been abducted? Did they even know he was still alive? Were they safe?
There were no answers to those questions. Yet.
Strangest of all was the nature of his prison. As far as he could tell, it was Abbotts Aerodrome, a place that shouldn’t even exist. It was the airport he had built in a virtual world and populated with buildings, aircraft, and more. But that had been nothing more than a computer game, essentially. Cubey would sit down at his computer, run a viewer, and log in with an avatar.
At this point, his memory was a little unclear. He couldn’t, for example, remember the name of his avatar, though he had a feeling that he might have just used his real name in the metaverse: Cubey Terra. But that didn’t feel quite right. Why couldn’t he remember that?
Looking around him, Cubey wondered at the detail and complexity of the place. It was, in most ways, his own creation brought out of the metaverse and made real. Who would have gone to such extravagant effort and why, he couldn’t say. It made no sense at all. It must have taken hundreds of millions of dollars – if not billions – to create this real-world replica. Whoever his captors were, they must be enormously wealthy.
Stranger still were the people who worked in and passed through this ersatz-Abbotts, who walked around like drugged zombies, going about their business with unwavering focus. At first, he tried to engage people in conversation, but that proved futile – they would respond as if they’d been brainwashed, unable to think independently. Their responses were always in the context of their activities in an airport, as if it were perfectly normal that they should be here. As time passed, it became clear that he was expected to act as a manager. He discovered that workers would follow his direction, passengers would ask him for help getting to their flights, but if he ever asked how they got there – how they came to be in Abbotts – their faces would go momentarily blank, then would continue as if he’d never asked the question.
It was roleplay made real on a horrifying scale. What kind of powers could not only build this place, but keep thousands of individuals captive and brainwashed, going about their business in a sick parody of life? Moreover, what purpose could this place serve? Certainly, Cubey seemed to be the only person who seemed to be aware of his actual situation. Was he being studied? Or was it simply an accident that only he was able to think clearly?
Or was he thinking clearly? If he were mentally ill – delusional – couldn’t it manifest itself with delusions of grandeur? Was his awareness that he could be delusional proof in itself that he wasn’t? His mind raced frighteningly in circles on this subject often, with no resolution. Either he was delusional or he was actually a prisoner. What was fact was that he couldn’t leave. That was undeniably beyond any interpretation or doubt.
On that first day, it had taken him only minutes of futile interrogations of blank faces before he had tried to walk out of his open-walled prison. Just like the Abbotts of the metaverse, this one was surrounded by water on three sides, so Cubey chose to walk the ridge east towards the forest. He made it as far as the forest’s edge when he walked into a barrier. It was solid, but perfectly invisible, but slightly flexible and forgiving. Like a magnetic field that repelled him, keeping his arms and legs and body well within the border of Abbotts. It was completely baffling, the invisible force that kept him within the square portion of land. Had they altered him somehow? Implanted magnets inside him? Although he looked carefully, he couldn’t find any scars to indicate invasive surgery, or anything of the kind. Stranger, old familiar scars were now absent.
They had done something to him.
His first days were agonizing. He probed the limits of his region, but couldn’t find any weakness in the mysterious force that held him. He boarded aircraft in the hope of flying out, but the pilots would refuse to take off until he disembarked. The cafe on the tower’s top floor provided enough food to live on, but it was perfectly flavourless, bland. His quarters in the tower were spartan, consisting of a futon, a desk, and a bathroom.
After his initial awakening in that white room, during his entire emprisonment, his captors had never made another appearance. Images of the old TV show, The Prisoner, flashed through his mind often. This was his Village. He alone was self-aware among a population of mindless thralls, and the loneliness of that slowly ate at him as months became years until he broke. What he’d done then—
Cubey closed his eyes and shook off that memory. It went too deep, too dark. His watch beeped once, and he rose to his feet again, toes of his boots at the edge of the abyss. Below him, 737s lined up on the taxiway, waiting their turn, engines shrieking.
Scanning the horizon, Cubey waited for the moment he knew would come, as it had every day with precision. There. West of him, at the border between Abbotts and the darkened valley beyond it first appeared as a black spot hovering mid-air, some tens of meters above the water channel that separated Abbotts from the lands to the west. Gradually, the air around it began to thicken, began to swirl – it was a whirlpool of mist and dust flowing like an emptying sink towards the spot, eventually obscuring it in a growling, spinning vortex.
It began to move, slowly at first, almost imperceptibly, but picking up speed. Now it was clearly drifting towards him, but slightly below him. It would pass right below his platform, Cubey knew, just as he had observed so many times before. Only this time, he wasn’t going to watch it disappear over the eastern forest, out of range of the forces that bound him to the airport.
This wasn’t just a storm, he felt. Air, dust, birds, and sometimes aircraft were pulled into the swirling mass as it passed over the runway, past the landing pad, and away out of sight. Those things weren’t being destroyed. They were going somewhere else, as if it were a hole in space.
The first time he’d seen it, he hid from it in his underground rooms, emerging only after it had gone. Several aircraft had vanished from the sky, apparently eaten by the vortex, and yet the airport seemed to bustle with activity, as if nothing had happened. Nobody, neither workers nor travellers had seen it, and tended to recoil from his questioning, as if he might become dangerous.
It was true: only Cubey could see the vortex. Entire passenger jets vanished into it, but nobody seemed to notice or care. But those things – those people – were vanishing into it. And now, so would Cubey.
He knew, certainly, that in all likelihood the vortex could kill him. The alternative – perpetual imprisonment here – was a living death anyway. His choice was clear.
As the vortex grew closer, a roar of air grew deafening, and the wind threatened to pull Cubey off the edge. It was too soon. If he let go now, he would fall short of the vortex, and plummet to the ground. So he waited, gloved hands gripping the edge. Suddenly, gale force winds blasted him from his ledge into the air, and for a heart-stopping moment he thought he wouldn’t make it. But the suction was far stronger than he’d anticipated, and his fall curved not downwards, but towards the eye of the storm, and in a roaring flash to black, he passed into the darkness and escaped Abbotts Aerodrome.