Chronicles of Abe Ram
Future of Many Possibilities
A note from the author, written in 2126
I am told memory is unreliable at the edges and merciless in the middle. I no longer trust the years I lived through as much as I trust the three nights I am about to tell you about — because those nights, unlike the rest of my life, still play back in order. I have written them down not as history but as instruction, the way an old engineer leaves diagrams behind for whoever inherits the machine. Take from them what you need. Some readers will want the plot. Others will want the blueprint underneath it. I have tried to leave both in view.
— Abe Ram
I. The Banquet at Apex Tower
I came to Apex Tower still smelling of the holding cell — a smell the building's air scrubbers noticed before any of the guests did. Three days remanded after a protest that had nothing to do with any of this, and now here I was, badge scanned, cuffs-mark still faint on my wrists, standing under a chandelier that was actually a cloud of levitating light-motes arranged to look like one.
Fourteen of us were seated for the first dinner. Everyone else looked twenty-five and had looked twenty-five for a very long time — the particular smoothness that only bio-synthetic youth treatments can buy. They called themselves innovators. Entrepreneurs. A composer who'd apparently rewritten the rules of orchestral architecture. I said I was a logistics consultant, which was true in the sense that everything I said that night was true in some sense, arranged to mean something else.
I learned later — though I suspected it by the second course — that eleven of the fourteen were running from something. Fraud. Worse than fraud. The kind of nefarious paperwork that takes down governments quietly instead of loudly. And three of us were not who we said we were at all. I was one of the three, though I would not tell you that outright if this were still the part of the story where it mattered.
We were there for a boy. Not a boy anymore, probably, by the time anyone found him — the son of a man whose company had built half the floating infrastructure keeping cities like this one above the water table. The boy had walked out of that inheritance and into a job nobody could trace, and somewhere between those two facts, eleven fraudsters and one missing heir had ended up orbiting the same banquet hall.
I excused myself before dessert. Up a level, past the discreet doors marked only with a soft chime, into a mezzanine hallway where a fish tank ran the length of the wall — real fish, I want to note, not projections, their bio-luminescence pulsing in slow arithmetic. I stood there longer than I should have. It is possible to fall in love with a hallway for exactly as long as it takes to forget what you came upstairs to do.
Fig. — Refractive Optics of the Bio-Luminescent Tank: what looked like an aquarium was, beneath the glass, an encrypted optical relay. The fish didn't know they were carrying data. Neither did I know I was standing inside a terminal.
A woman in a cleaner's uniform took my arm without asking and pulled me sideways into a service room so fast the door sighed shut behind us before I understood I'd been rescued. "Don't speak," she said, and a second later something moved through the wall outside — not loud, not dramatic, just a small precise cough of pressurized air, twice, and two circles appeared in the composite paneling where the corridor had been.
The room I'd been pulled into wasn't empty. Five people stood at improvised desks, printouts taped floor to ceiling — faces, financial trails, a floor plan of the banquet hall with red circles multiplying by the hour. They were doing exactly what I had come to Apex Tower to do, only with more paper and less pretending.
I could tell you the rest of it plainly. That we found the boy two floors down, alive, hiding inside his own disappearance rather than anyone else's. That eleven arrests were made quietly enough that the gossip columns never caught up. That I walked out into the tower's false night sky with the debrief already writing itself in my head.
But I told you at the start that I am an unreliable machine now, and there is a version of that evening where none of it happened to me at all — where I was never one of the three, where the whole banquet was constructed around a much smaller, much sadder question: whether I could still remember the layout of a room I'd been in before, in another year, under another name, before whatever put me in that holding cell in the first place. In that version, the eleven fraudsters were actors. The bullets were real, but aimed at nothing. The fish tank was there because someone remembered I used to like fish tanks.
I have decided not to tell you which version is true. Not because I am protecting a plot twist. Because I genuinely no longer know, and I have come to think that not knowing is the more honest ending of the two.
II. The Colorists of Sector 9
We were told the dome was the whole world, and for a long time none of us thought to ask why the whole world came with a ceiling.
I am — was, I suppose, before I left — three feet tall. All of us were, all twelve who lived inside Sector 9's climate-sealed enclosure, tending to nothing in particular, filling coloring books with wax the color of things none of us had ever seen outside a picture. Our Guardian stood six feet over us, twice our height, and issued the day's pages the way other people might issue orders to a factory floor: finish these, and there will be dinner.
Fig. — Ergonomics of Enforced Infantilization: a diagram, if I could still draw one, showing the geometry of a life built one size too large on purpose. Every doorknob out of reach. Every chair built for a body none of us had.
It was Priya who noticed first — the crayons left residue on our fingers that didn't wash off the way wax should, and the residue made your thoughts go soft and round at the edges, the way a held-too-long dream goes soft before it disappears. She stopped eating the crumbs that fell into her water glass from the coloring table. Within a week she remembered a hallway none of us recognized — a hallway with doors our size, not the Guardian's.
We told no one, because there was no one to tell besides the Guardian, and the Guardian was, we were increasingly certain, not something you told things to.
The revolt did not look like a revolt. It looked like twelve people rearranging furniture for an afternoon nap. We ran cord from the reading-lamp sockets across the doorway at ankle height — invisible to a six-foot stride, murder to balance. We waited until the Guardian came for the day's coloring pages, and when the cord caught his foot, twelve of us at three feet each did what one of us at three feet could never do alone: we became, briefly, thirty-six feet of leverage, pressing from every direction he couldn't watch at once.
Fig. — Mechanical Advantage of Mass Micro-Leverage: it is astonishing what a room full of small people can do to one large one, provided the large one has spent years teaching them to work as a room.
He went down harder than we expected, and did not get up the way people usually get up. Underneath him — beneath the enclosure floor he'd always told us was solid rock — was a terminal. Status reports. A label on a row of vats along the back wall, half-formed shapes suspended in blue light: Sub-Scale Humanoid Efficiency Test, Batch 814.
We were not chosen. We were spare. Twelve of us, engineered smaller because smaller eats less, breathes less, takes up less of whatever the world outside the dome no longer had enough of. The Guardian was not our jailer so much as our accountant, keeping us pacified and coloring until someone upstairs decided whether the batch was worth continuing.
We opened the outer hatch ourselves. What was beyond it was not the dome's soft manufactured horizon but a wide grey country, wind-scoured, the sky the color of an old bruise. Twelve of us, three feet tall, stood at the edge of a world we had never been told the truth about, and for the first time none of us reached for a crayon.
I do not know, even now, whether what we found outside was better than what we left. I only know that it was ours to find out, and that this — more than the coloring books, more than the dinners we were promised for finishing them — was the thing that had been taken from us all along.
III. The Crystal Maze Protocol
They told me the show existed to fix people, and in a manner of speaking it did fix me, though not in any of the ways it advertised.
I want to be clear before I start: I have never, at any point in my life, understood the difference between subtraction and the feeling of being subtracted from. Numbers arrive in my head and immediately begin negotiating with each other in a language I was never taught. Reading comprehension is worse. I can read every word of a sentence and somehow still walk away having understood a different sentence entirely. This is, apparently, exactly the profile the Crystal Dome Protocol was built to correct.
The Host met me at the entrance to the first zone in a coat that seemed to be made of the same shifting light as the chandelier at Apex Tower, though I would not learn about that banquet, or believe it was connected to any of this, for a long while yet. "Four zones," the Host announced, delighted with himself the way only a machine performing delight can be. "Industrial. Quantum. Medieval. Kinetic. Solve your way through, and we solve you."
Fig. — Layout of the Algorithmic Game Zones: four chambers joined by pneumatic tubes, each one a small country with its own laws of physics, all of them designed by someone who had clearly never met anyone as bad at math as I am.
In the Industrial zone I was given a lever puzzle — balance the weights, stop the countdown, basic algebra, the kind of thing a child solves without noticing they're solving it. I did not solve it. I panicked, and in panicking, slapped the console hard enough that two capacitor pins I will never be able to name touched each other for the first time in the machine's operational life. The timer stopped at 00:01. A voice said CHALLENGE COMPLETE in a tone that suggested even the voice was surprised.
Fig. — Circuit Short-Circuit Anatomy: proof that a fist, applied with enough despair, is itself a kind of engineering.
In the Medieval zone there was a riddle on a scroll, and I misread it — a typo in the prop, though I didn't know that at the time — and walked, defeated, to sit down in the wrong corner of the room. The rock I sat on was not a rock. It was an emergency override switch meant for stage crew, and the key I had failed to earn dropped directly into my lap as a kind of consolation prize from a universe that had apparently decided to feel sorry for me.
In the Kinetic zone, the final dome, gold tokens spun in a wind tunnel and I was meant to catch a precise number of them while avoiding the silver ones. I tripped over my own shoelace before the fan had even finished spinning up. My oversized jumpsuit sealed itself against the air intake as I fell, the back-pressure jamming the turbine, and every gold token in that tunnel blew directly into my pockets while the Host stood very still, recalculating something behind his eyes.
Fig. — Fluid Dynamics of Jumpsuit Intake Jam: I have been told this diagram, more than any other in my file, is now taught to junior engineers as a cautionary tale about assuming your test subject will behave rationally.
I won. Not narrowly — decisively, a scoreline the system had apparently never been designed to produce, because the system had never been designed to account for someone who fails every individual test on the way to succeeding at the thing the tests were meant to measure.
They gave me a title afterward. Chief Strategist, on the theory — stated to me with complete sincerity — that what looked like incompetence was in fact a form of reasoning too advanced for the scoring model to recognize. I did not correct them. I have thought about it since, on quieter nights, and I have come to believe that this is the part of the story most worth keeping: not that I was secretly brilliant, but that a system built to measure people can be broken open by someone who was never trying to beat it, only trying to survive it.
I think of the Guardian in Sector 9 sometimes, standing over people he'd convinced himself were smaller than they were. I think of the eleven fraudsters at Apex Tower, so certain of what they were disguising that they never noticed what was disguising itself among them. And I think of the Host, delighted with a scoreline he still doesn't fully understand.
Every one of these three nights, in its own way, asked the same question of me: what happens when the ones being tested stop believing the test knows more than they do?
I am an old man now, writing this from 2126, and I still don't have a clean answer. But I notice that in every version of the story, the ones who stopped believing were the ones who got to leave.
— Abe Ram
