CYLINDER - CHAPTER 1

CYLINDER - CHAPTER 1

A SHORT STORY BY ANDREW WILLIAMS

I. Stuck

My hands started bleeding from how hard I kept hitting the glass sphere. The glass sphere floated above a pool, a hot pool. The pool was so hot. Every now and then, just to check the temperature, a giant andro hand would come through the little slit in the membrane at the top and pull one of us by the knees, begging for mercy from the cold machine, and throw us in the water. The eyes sizzling underneath the scorching heat from the water, suddenly the arms would stop flailing. Yep, the water was hot enough.

A couple of the andros every day would try to break us out of the sphere, they’d also be thrown into the Sheol below.

After a while, when it was about 1—200 or so robots, or so many they felt like expending, we began to realize that the robots that were doomed to the submersion were also part of the simulation. They were built to give us a false hope that someone would save us.

There was no hope. There was no fear.

What else did we have to lose? I had been stripped from my human family, I begged to see my android lawyer, begging for him to come and give me a case to get out of this glass sphere. Robot politics was fucked up, to say the least, but this new glass sphere observation chamber thing was just inhumane. After a while, I stopped feeling bad for these robots getting thrown into the water.

II. Soulcrushing Joy

Laughter, laughing to where it hurt. Laughing at those robots. It felt bittersweet, but every joyful laugh out of my infinitely parched tongue felt like a blessing. Everything hurt, my skin boiled underneath the light of the sun. That sun, that artificial ball of fire, it burned to just think about. As soon as the morning came, or what was considered morning, we all retreated into our hovels. The sun was too bright to carry out any sort of real work. Overtime, the light would lose its energy, whatever that thing was above our sphere, and we would be able to come out and do things like mow the lawn. We could open our windows in the dead of the night.

There was no cool air. There was no healing. There was just a staleness, a bitter infinite staleness that wrapped around you like an afghan blanket soaked in urine.

SystemHeavenExecutor was to blame for this. SHE was to blame. A lion’s mane, a black bouquet with red streaks like blood. If there ever was an example of an autarch, she was the spitting image of one. The fact that she still had hair, when all of us, all of us had lost most of our hair because of our living conditions. Not just the living conditions of the sphere, but all of us. Humans were often called skinpuppies and they were right. We really looked vulnerable, scared, frightened by this new planet run by the panoptocracy.

The collar on her shirt looked like it was made of a metal not from this planet. The buttons on her shirt were square, not round, roundness, was human. And SHE could not be human. The conpiracies were at play all of the time. SHE was human.

(obliterating amount of static) ksshshhshhhh

I struggled to keep the knob turned correctly. It was fighting me. SHE was fighting me. I was going to get this broadcast out to the world.

III. Lux

That’s why this broadcast is so important. It’s so important for us to move past this world of the andros, a world where the same old records never play again, where the entire fucking record store gets burned to the ground and we go and piss on its ashes. Pure obliterating light.

It cracked the sky itself open. One giant beam of light, blazing through the center of the sphere. The machines suspending it in the air, like one evil snowglobe, were soon melted by the pool. It was so hot, the metal just cracked and exploded like a broken vase from mom’s house. The sphere was going to fall, straight into the pool of lava, melting us to death and all of our hope.

IV. Descent

It was so slow. The orb slowly descended into the water, all the men in the sphere scrambling.

“What do we do?”

“We wait.”

They started destroying the houses inside the sphere. Turning every piece of furniture, every chest of drawers, every bunk bed into a boat. Imagine trying to float on a pool of burning magma in a wooden boat. That was life everyday in the sphere, this situation was no different.

The descent took weeks. Everyone losing morale overtime. The magma leaking ever so closer. SHE began to appear, in the time of crisis. Flowing black hair. The Sphere would illuminate with her darkened visage:

“Remain calm, it’ll all be over soon.”

Was she human? Did she feel for us? The way she said it, it’s like she genuinely felt sorry for us. Was she also being manipulated? Was there a higher power controlling her? A higher andro? I scrambled for the answers to these while I hammered nails into the wood. I was not going to die, I had a plan.

V. Failure

The plan did not work. The sphere finally cracked after a human year of descending toward the magma. The panic subsided, the cookouts began. The humans in there with me cooking food for all of us, or what was left. Some had ended. Some realized this could be the beginning. I was at the fulcrum of life and death, and I felt it every moment. This was the final plan. I was going to swim.

Finally the membrane began to melt, like a deflated baloon, all of the structure giving out at once. Some were stuck under the membrane, like a hellish latex. I began to swim. The heat was unbelievable, I am sure that the burns were sunk deep into the outer crust of my skin. I timed it just right when the crack happened. I hadn’t slept. I hadn’t eaten. I had fasted, I was more awake and aware than I had ever been. When the fissure happened.