Azarias shook his head. “No, that can’t be possible. If that were the case, how could we justify exploring? Nobody would accept that. If the requirement were cutting off friends socially, that would be one thing, but their own friends would be dying just so they could explore? It would make it all pointless.”
I bit my lip. “I think the clue lies in something you said earlier, though. It probably doesn’t have to be two explorers who are friends. That’s what we’ve been planning for all this time, right? Think about it: what did you expect the clue to mean? It said we were going to lose a friendship. Doesn’t something ominous like that being told to us in a place like this cave, with a creepy spider hanging over our heads, imply a little bit of death might be involved?”
Azarias said, “Listen, the thought did cross my mind, but I refused to allow it to become a suspicion. If we had to do something like that, wouldn’t it be better to do nothing at all?”
“What other choice do we have, exactly? If we don’t do it, the spider will freak out, and everyone will die anyway. What matters most are the lives of the majority. It’s not like half of the current population has to go exploring; it’s only a small group. That means only a relatively low amount would have to die. Listen, I don’t want this either, and I think we should look for a way around it, but we can’t let it leave our minds as an option. If we wait around and do nothing for too long, or try to protest, who knows what the spider will do?”
Azarias replied, “Let’s say we went along with that insane proposal and we threw someone off the cliff—no, if it’s one for one, that would be at least four people dying to account for a group of Explorers. What happens if you throw those people off the edge and it doesn’t do anything? What would you do if you were wrong, and the tram doesn’t start?”
“As I’ve already said, I don’t think we have many other choices. Azarias, I can tell just from your eyes that you have something you’re determined to do. How strong would an obstacle have to be to block your determination? Would it be a person’s finger? What about their hand? What about a limb? Is the whole body the limit? What about two?”
His expression turned strange. “You don’t sound like yourself…”
I knew he was right. The words coming out of my mouth were incredibly cold, but I couldn’t stop saying them. I couldn’t stop following my train of thought. I had latched onto a dark truth, and I felt the need to prove I was right, no matter how dark it was. Fully grasping the moral weight of the situation and feeling bad about my own words would surely come later, but at the moment, I had a desire to prove my logic was correct.
I said, “The boxes part is certain, but there may be more to the process that I don’t know about. Was anything discovered in any of the other doors while I was gone?”
Azarias said, “You were gone for quite a while, so yes, we did take the opportunity to examine other doors. Someone else had a discovery similar to yours, although the contents are far more vague. He’s still behind that door right now; I’ll bring you to him so we can talk. Don’t bring up what you just told me right away; just get his side of things. His name is Fince; he hasn’t said much until I gave him a shot at the door, so you might not remember him.”
We left the cave and went back to the half-constructed Institute. Azarias headed right to the door of Hymylä, grabbed the plastic door handle, and twisted it. My nasal cavity was instantly attacked by a wave of foul smells: rot, mold, acidic chemicals, as bad as anything I could imagine. I covered my nose, my eyes burning as I peeked inside. There was a giant mound of trash, and it looked exactly as disgusting as it smelled. On top of the mound, there was a man wearing a bright red HAZMAT suit.
I called down to him: “Where’d you get the suit? It looks pretty cool.”
He unzipped the head, revealing a beaked nose and patches of rotten hair. “We found it by those decontamination chambers. I’m temporarily repurposing it; I didn’t want to go down here without protection. That would be simply too much, although I do think trash is really interesting. None of the others were willing to do this, so maybe this role will be my win by default. I mean, don’t you think it’s unfair to the garbage pile? When you look at a pile of trash, your brain reduces it to nothing. You see it as one worthless unit, but in reality, it’s made of countless pieces which all tell their own story.”
“One man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” agreed Azarias.
“In that case, who was the man?” I asked.
They looked at me in confusion. I clarified, “I mean, how did all this trash get here? We didn’t create this; that’s for sure.”
Azarias shook his head. “Who knows? We’re from Earth, so maybe the trash is too. And here I was thinking it was a special privilege to get transmigrated to another world. Looks like you don’t even have to be sentient.”
I called out to Fince. “What exactly are you looking for down there? There’s supposed to be a goal to each of these trials, so did you figure it out?”
“The pile of trash is damn big, so maybe getting to the bottom is the objective, but there’s more going on with this area. You’ll see that right about now…” He jumped onto the wall and began climbing up right as a rumbling sound filled the air. I looked inside the chute and saw the walls starting to move and compress the trash pile. Aleksi dropped back down onto the trash and smiled up at us. “Happens once every 20 minutes or so.”
I wasn’t sure I agreed with him about trash having its own way of being beautiful. It really just looked like trash to me, even though this was my first time seeing trash. Furthermore, I had a sense of disgust for whoever created it. I didn’t have any possessions, but I imagined that if I owned something, it would feel like a part of myself. If I were throwing it away, that would also be throwing away a part of myself. This pile seemed careless; all those parts of people mushed together. Where were those people who had left the dead parts of themselves behind? I forced myself to look away from the pile.
I asked Azarias, “I still don’t understand about some of these rooms being real and some being imaginary. You said the hospital room was special in that it was halfway imaginary. That seems like a strange answer to me, an answer that’s bending around something else to stop a contradiction. Wouldn’t we see some signal—like the fabric of reality bending—if something abstract, like an imaginary room, clashed against something we can fully interact with from a different location? On what grounds did you think the hospital room wasn’t real in the first place? Considering the way we can interact with it, it must be entirely anchored to reality. The only one who’s apparently gone into a true ‘idea’ is Athalia.”
Azarias’s eyes brightened. “You might be right. I’ll tell you why I thought it was imaginary: It was because of something that was repeated to me by other people. It was always, ‘The hospital isn’t real. The hospital isn’t real.’ Other than that, there was the constantly repeated mantra of the 6-5 rule, that six were bound to reality and five were not. When I realized the contradiction in the form of the hospital room directly connecting to our world, therefore indicating a representation of reality, I created my own explanation in the form of a third category that likely doesn’t exist. In this world, the hospital might be real. But that would go against sense if it’s connected to the roles…”
“This 6-5 rule you speak of brings up more questions than it answers. There’s still the problem of physical space. If all 11 doors led to truly imaginary spaces, I could maybe accept that they would overlap, but if there are 6 real places behind the door, how could they all be bound to reality by one entrance?”
Azarias nodded. “Good thinking. My best guess is it partially functions as a portal or a teleporter, perhaps to other dimensions entirely, or perhaps to other locations in the cave. I suppose you’d expect a teleporter to have some drastic sign it’s working, like a flash of light or electricity, but this door makes it as seamless as stepping through.”
“Doesn’t that mean there’s a chance we could get out of here using those doors? I don’t know if it’s possible for that mountain I saw to be inside a cave.”
“There’s no way it’s going to be that easy. If this door appeared at the same time as that scary hourglass, the two objects are probably in cahoots. That hourglass wants us to climb the mountain, and I doubt it’ll hand us an easy way out before that happens. My instinct says they aren’t ways out at all because they’re primarily meant to be trials of selection, but maybe they could function as exits after we summit.”
I turned back to Fince. “I heard you had figured something out. Could you tell me what it is?”
He grabbed an onion and held it up high. “When I jumped down here, the smell of onion was the first thing that I recognized. It made me hungry, so I took a bite out of it.”
Azarias looked away in disgust. “Enza, he’s not joking. Putting the disgusting nature of eating trash aside, it seems we found somebody who actually likes eating food in this place. It goes along with having only one person who drinks water. Maybe there’s a strange plant inside of Fince’s body, too.”
I wondered how Fince was able to survive until now if he didn’t get food until the door arrived. I didn’t know exactly how long humans could go without eating, but surely this would have been too long.
He continued with his explanation, “After I took a bite out of the onion, my eyes started welling up with tears. Then I felt a sudden jolt in my arm. Without my intention, my arm was reaching up for my forehead, and I couldn’t figure out why until the motion was already completed. It went like this.” He drew his fingernail across his forehead. His fingernails were especially long, longer than any that I had seen on anyone else here. When he pulled his finger away, there was a little bit of blood. He wiped the blood on his hand, then used the onion to force himself to cry and dropped the tears onto his palm. He mixed it up and rubbed it onto his eyelids. I was baffled at what he was doing.
Fince said, “Doing that feels incredibly instinctual, like I’ve done it countless times. However, when I complete that action, it doesn’t feel like the end of the process. It gives me a strong urge to throw something heavy, although I’m not sure what I want to throw. Enza, what are your thoughts?”
I looked at Fince for a long moment, then at Azarias. “That’s the missing piece. The boxes will fall, and this is what sets it in motion. This is the contract.”
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