Chapter 22 – The High Tower
It was the next morning, and Vincent was at the window. He stared through the thick glass at the neighboring tower. It, too, was a dashing, pure white, and circular. All the towers in the retirement sector of Hux were. He assumed the insides of the other towers were the same as his, also, sectioned off and isolated, completely solitary but for the Newsight nurses that stopped in as monitors. He had not left the tower, not even left his own small portion of it since he had first arrived. Retirement, they called it. It always seemed to Vincent like a funny word to describe his current state. He had done no real work, and yet he was treated like an irreplaceable asset. The windows were too thick to throw oneself through. The dinnerware was not sharp enough to cut oneself with. The sheets were not long enough to enable a sturdy knot to be tied in them. The food was pumped into one’s body intravenously if one refused to eat it the normal way. And biting one’s tongue or bludgeoning oneself against the wall was impossible to do to completion without being halted by the nurses. None of it ever worked. Couldn’t work. Vincent had been deprived of the escape of death. He had been afforded no activity outside of mere existence save for the newsims. For quite a long time – he prided himself on the length of it – he had abstained from the simulations altogether. He had begun by passing his days in silent compliance. That had gone on for as long as he could manage. He had no way of knowing how long exactly that was, of course. His Lenses no longer told time and his manual count of days had long since been abandoned. He had been given no point of reference, no news of the outside world, nothing of the Newsight Seclusion, of the other cities, not even of Hux itself. He was stranded in time and place. His only semblance of an escape was the newsims, and those were as much an anchor as they were a raft. After a time, though, he had used them just the same.
Vincent did not know what had befallen Jessica: whether she had perished in the attack, been taken away, or continued on with the Order as Goodwin had said. Any of the three would have been the same to Vincent. The results were equivalent. He understood now why Simon had lain so still as they dragged him from holding. Resistance was resignation. It was what Goodwin had taught him. The one thing he knew for certain. To resist Newsight, you were in the Order. To be in the Order, you were part of Newsight. To flee from the bombing, you fled from the Order and into the cities. The cities were protected by Newsight, so in fleeing from the Order, you fled to Newsight, who was the Order. It made his brain hurt trying to keep it all straight.
Sighing, Vincent turned from the window and walked the short distance back to his room. That was his space: the hall with his window, the room with his bed, and the bathroom with his shower and sink (the nurses always came long before the water reached a level into which one might lower one’s face). He walked past the bathroom and went to his bed. With his eyes trained on the ceiling, he could have dozed easily off into a restless, dream-filled sleep. In the days when he did not engage his simulations, that had been his only option. He had felt like a captive then, riddled with thoughts of his parents, of Jessica, of Simon. When he had finally made the decision to give up, to allow himself to escape with newsim, however, he had begun to feel less like a captive. The walls, of course, were just as claustrophobic, and the windows just as impenetrable, but the experience was far different. He had stopped being a captive, and begun being a guest.
“Vincent?”
His head nurse had poked her head through the door. Vincent nurtured a stronger hatred for her than any of the other nurses. She was always the first one to shut off the running water in the sink, or staunch the bleeding of his tongue. But of course, she was quite closely endeared to Vincent, as well. He was fond of her just as equally as he was abhorrent. She always delivered the newsims.
“I have more access cards for you,” she said, stepping deeper into the room. “You should return to your treatment. I don’t know how many times I need to tell you: there’s no need to exit the simulation. You will be taken care of.” She set a bowl of access cards on the table next to his bed. He smiled at her. He also felt a lurking desire to reach for her throat.
When the nurse had left, Vincent reached over to the bowl and withdrew a card. Nearly shaking with excitement, he let his eyes slide out of focus, and he scanned the code. The usual, sweet-sounding voice rang out inside him. He oftentimes found himself wondering if the woman whose voice played in his head was an actual woman. He would like very much to share a simulation with her. Although, her voice was also the one he heard when ramming his forehead into the wall above his bed, and the one that never quite seemed to be all the way silenced.
Vincent’s usual newsim began to load. He had been living inside the same one ever since coming to the retirement tower. He had grown up in the small brown house with his mother and father and grandfather. He had met a girl with a short black ponytail who sat next to him at school. They had gotten their own small house. Nothing in it had been painted white.
The eye on the loading screen came to a stop as it finished its final rotation, and the pitch black began to fade. Vincent began the newsim where he had left off the night before. He was pulling his coat off the hook in the closet. He was walking into a hospital room. He was holding the hand of the woman in the bed. He was listening to the thumping in his chest, to the woman screaming, to the doctor talking in a soothing tone. He was staggering backward and sitting in the chair at the foot of the bed. He was reaching out for a bundle of brown blankets. He was staring down at the tiny wet face of a baby girl, at her button nose, at her clear, unobstructed eyes.
In that moment, the two camps in Vincent’s mind, the irreconcilable passions directly at war with one another, the resolutions both for and against the creators of the Lenses, were joined. There was no force needed to keep them intertwined. They were inseparable, had been inseparable all along. He felt foolish now for having denied himself the peace of their union all this time, foolish for staving off the clarity with which he now saw.
“Vincent?”
He was pulled from the newsim. The nurse had returned. She was beaming from ear to ear.
“Your treatment is complete,” she said. “Would you like me to call you a transport?”
Vincent stood from his bed, in a daze. He felt the thumping in his chest, the slight stiffness in his aged joints, the warmth of the child he had just been holding…
“Vincent.” The woman prompted him again. “Would you like a transport?”
Vincent didn’t respond. Instead, he sat back down on his bed and selected a second access card. Smiling, the nurse left him. Vincent didn’t follow. There was no transport that could take him to the hospital he had just left. Only the slips of glass over his eyes could do that. It’s why he prized them, why he trusted them. Sure, they had distorted and stolen his sight and his sound and his thought. But they had given it all back. They had given him everything. Now in his resentment, there was obligation. In his desire to rip the things from his eyes, there was an insatiable lust to disappear behind them. The reconciliation was his. He loved his Lenses.
Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed the story. If you did, I have good news: there’s a whole world left to be explored. I have two more books in the works: the story of how John infiltrated the Newsight HQ, and the Newsight origin story. You can check out sample chapters of each at masonengel.com/next.
Thanks again!
-Mason
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mason Engel is a 22 year old science-fiction writer from Columbus, Indiana. Though he graduated from Purdue University with a degree in mathematics, Mason is obsessed with the power of words and the stories they tell. No matter what he writes, the end product always seems to tie into one of two themes: the omnipresence of technology, or our perception of reality. It sounds philosophical, and at its core, it is. On the page though, in the prose of the plot itself, for Mason, philosophy takes backseat to story. In every novel he writes, his first and foremost goal is to entertain YOU, to provide yo
u an escape from the real world and, when you're ready, some inspiration to return to it.
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