06-02-2018, 10:55 PM
‘Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage.’
“Father…!”
She called, but no one answered.
One dream was ending. Life-giving water flowed into her lungs through the tributary of her throat, and she gasped for breath as her pale, thin fingers wrapped around the dog lever. She twisted, and with an expulsion of air that sounded too similar to her own pants, the door sprung open. Dimming sunlight spilled into Eleanor Lamb’s field of vision, and she slammed her hands on the ledge above and pulled herself up.
She heaved, expelling some of the ocean water from her lungs; so much the thought crossed her mind that she may be dead, after all. She shut her eyes tightly, letting the oxygen circulating through her lungs before trying to face the world she’d just been born into.
No amount of preparation could prepare her for the barren, alabaster plain that stretched out before her when she finally opened her eyes again.
For eighteen long years, Eleanor Lamb pictured what freedom looked like. The concept populated her daydreams and haunted her nightmares, and she meticulously altered her images of it until it transformed into something… perfect. She imagined wide open, grassy fields, with grazing animals plodding through the dirt. She imagined spectacular, sprawling cityscapes, with skyscrapers reaching higher than she could fathom. She imagined hundreds of thousands of people, with lives she would never understand and secrets she would never know. When she thought of freedom, she imagined a lot of things. But not this.
In all her daydreams, nightmares, and imaginings, freedom took many shapes. Through many iterations, though, one characteristic stood steadfast: freedom was full. Whether in blades of grass, or metal buildings, or people, something existed, and lots of it.
This emptiness disconcerted her.
She’d climbed out of the escape pod and into a void. Her mother no longer accompanied her; Subject Delta’s crumpled form had disappeared. Before her, instead of hordes of people milling about their daily lives, nothing dared to move—nothing existed that could, save for the millions of oxygen molecules floating aimlessly through the blankness. Instead of grassy fields, a perpetual whiteness oozed everywhere she looked. Instead of skyscrapers erupting nonsensically from the ground, a single marble fountain stood, looking just a little lonely.
This is not the world you know. Memories flooded into her brain, suddenly. A little, glowing white boy sat before her in them, a snickering grin on his face. He launched into a monologue filled with lots of words she didn’t understand, showing her images that just now crept out from the recesses of her memory. The… Omniverse? She had no point of reference for a word like that, but as far as she could tell, it belonged to the seemingly endless expanse around her. The Omniverse; that was the world.
This was not the world the girl had meant to enter, surely. Not by a long shot. While she escaped the claws of captivity, Eleanor intended to find a world she heard of in stories and read about in books. She had not meant to find a world that was totally… new.
Was she dead?
She touched a hand to her cheek. It felt real. No—she wasn’t dead. Quite the opposite. She felt so alive. So awake. So new. For the first time in her life.
And who was she to complain about that? She was… free.
“Father…!”
She called, but no one answered.
One dream was ending. Life-giving water flowed into her lungs through the tributary of her throat, and she gasped for breath as her pale, thin fingers wrapped around the dog lever. She twisted, and with an expulsion of air that sounded too similar to her own pants, the door sprung open. Dimming sunlight spilled into Eleanor Lamb’s field of vision, and she slammed her hands on the ledge above and pulled herself up.
She heaved, expelling some of the ocean water from her lungs; so much the thought crossed her mind that she may be dead, after all. She shut her eyes tightly, letting the oxygen circulating through her lungs before trying to face the world she’d just been born into.
No amount of preparation could prepare her for the barren, alabaster plain that stretched out before her when she finally opened her eyes again.
For eighteen long years, Eleanor Lamb pictured what freedom looked like. The concept populated her daydreams and haunted her nightmares, and she meticulously altered her images of it until it transformed into something… perfect. She imagined wide open, grassy fields, with grazing animals plodding through the dirt. She imagined spectacular, sprawling cityscapes, with skyscrapers reaching higher than she could fathom. She imagined hundreds of thousands of people, with lives she would never understand and secrets she would never know. When she thought of freedom, she imagined a lot of things. But not this.
In all her daydreams, nightmares, and imaginings, freedom took many shapes. Through many iterations, though, one characteristic stood steadfast: freedom was full. Whether in blades of grass, or metal buildings, or people, something existed, and lots of it.
This emptiness disconcerted her.
She’d climbed out of the escape pod and into a void. Her mother no longer accompanied her; Subject Delta’s crumpled form had disappeared. Before her, instead of hordes of people milling about their daily lives, nothing dared to move—nothing existed that could, save for the millions of oxygen molecules floating aimlessly through the blankness. Instead of grassy fields, a perpetual whiteness oozed everywhere she looked. Instead of skyscrapers erupting nonsensically from the ground, a single marble fountain stood, looking just a little lonely.
This is not the world you know. Memories flooded into her brain, suddenly. A little, glowing white boy sat before her in them, a snickering grin on his face. He launched into a monologue filled with lots of words she didn’t understand, showing her images that just now crept out from the recesses of her memory. The… Omniverse? She had no point of reference for a word like that, but as far as she could tell, it belonged to the seemingly endless expanse around her. The Omniverse; that was the world.
This was not the world the girl had meant to enter, surely. Not by a long shot. While she escaped the claws of captivity, Eleanor intended to find a world she heard of in stories and read about in books. She had not meant to find a world that was totally… new.
Was she dead?
She touched a hand to her cheek. It felt real. No—she wasn’t dead. Quite the opposite. She felt so alive. So awake. So new. For the first time in her life.
And who was she to complain about that? She was… free.