66 - Over and Over Again Boy

She landed, sprawled, with Tizzy spinning flattened out, bouncing up and then floating down again to the floor, weirdly slowly. Well, not really floating just drifting down gently as if she were a feather. It felt odd and her stomach flipped  and she was suddenly nauseated and her head spun.   

This is code.  I control it! But she couldn’t.  Everything around her was blank and featureless.  There seemed to be dents in the smooth walls all around her and when she managed to clamber to her feet. Her walk was a tiny shuffle, struggling to keep from bouncing up and having to throw her hands up to stop her head from hitting the ceiling.  As she approach one of the divots, it opened like a door.

She swallowed and swallowed, struggling to keep her gorge down, and managed to stand still, staring around at this... metal space.  Everything was metal.  There were pipes, it looked like, but not ceramic ones.  Everything seemed... seamless.

There was an all-pervasive hum, as if the place were alive somehow and it smelled... odd.  Flat, acrid, sharp as if the air were full of cold. A box on legs, had a box on top of it and a light began to flicker from the other side of it.  Cautiously, she edged over and peered around the edge to see what was causing the flicker.  A fire? A pulsing light of some kind?

It looked like a painting, but one that moved.  It was the man she’d seen. The man on the moon.  He wore no veil, like one of her own people, but he wore a strange hat upon his head, tall and round and black, with a brim dipping down at an angle, and had cloth wound tight up under his chin.  The image removed the hat, as if she were in front of it and addressed the air over her shoulder, since she hadn’t moved to the front of the boxes.

She didn’t understand a single word he said.  The image froze.  Then repeated its actions.  Tizrav ran out, jumped on top of the boxes, hung down to sniff the top of the image’s head.  *Not real. Over and over and over again boy not real.* She slid jumped from the top of the box, floating over to Hara’s shoulder, landing with a light thump. She’d drawn back so she couldn’t see the repeating image.  It unsettled her.

“What language is he speaking?” She said to the ferret.

A click.  A gabble of noise from the box as if a dozen languages were trying to emerge all at once.  Another click.   

“Hello. Is this human-language analogue, ### workers, ###akstan## Rom#####? Indo-### subculture?”  The image responded, she could see it move toward her motion as she peeked around to look again.  Now its eyes were focused on her.

She wasn’t sure what he was asking.  “I’m speaking my own language.  Are you human?  Are you trapped in there... in that box?  Are you a machine?”