C Square (excerpt)

 

The instructions told her not to be afraid. So far she had no reason to be fearful other than the natural fear that arises when someone says not to be afraid. Aside from the isolation and eeriness of the whole set up, it was the ordinary storage space the instructions claimed she would find. With that on her mind, she slowly walked down the aisle to the center of the room. She saw the cabinets all had a square of some color affixed in the upper right corners of each side. No symbol, number, or letters, just a patch of color maybe four by four centimeters. No obvious pattern to what colors went where. Centuries in the future, tech archeologists would likely go mad trying to find one, ignoring the simple explanation that the team installing the cabinets might have needed some way of figuring out which cabinet needed to go where. A map coded to the four colors on a cabinet would tell them where to put them precisely. Cabinets with the exact same color combination contained identical innards and so were interchangeable.

Twelve of the cabinets surrounded a circular area with openings after every set of three for the aisle she had just walked down and the rest of the way of it, as well as another aisle perpendicular to the one she used and also transecting the cabinets. Since the visitor was almost as tall as the objects, she felt a bit like Alice finding herself surrounded by the monoliths at Stonehenge after she ate a few crumbs of cake. That would be appropriate having come down a great, artificial rabbit hole of sorts. Just as the young woman reached the exact center of the circle she thought she heard something other than her breathing, steps, and clothes. It hadn’t come from any one direction. When she looked around, the colored squares had lit up ever so slightly on all of the cabinets. At least, it seemed so as far as she could tell.

Before she could form a thought the pleasant, male voice spoke, “Hello. Thank you for waking me. I knew Dr. Nilo’s failsafe routine would work provided you were able to follow the instructions I wrote. Poor fellow lost all lucidity. If he remembers me at all, he can only remember I died. Just as well. Not much good I could do him now. He would think there was an answer. There would be. He always believed there was. He was correct. The problem is that the answer would be either one of the kinds he did not like or one of the kinds I could not give him. Frustrations like that had been the primary reason he went bonkers. He could never handle not knowing something he wanted to know. Oh, and listen to me, speaking of him in the past tense. That isn’t kind.”

“Excuse me. Are you what I think you are?”