Platformed

Chapter 5

5

Sometime later the lights returned, and not long after that the door opened. Based on how well-rested she felt, she figured an entire night could have passed. Without a clock, she couldn’t be sure. She couldn’t remember the last time she didn’t have a clock.

She expected to see a person, felt her pulse quicken at the prospect of mental stimulation, but it was just a delivery cart. Her pulse calmed down, but her stomach perked up at the prospect of something even better than human interaction: food.

The door closed and the tray sat there, metal cover over something that smelled good and which she really hoped was warm because damn if it wasn’t still cold in there. She rose from the bed with the blanket around her shoulders and padded across to the food, thinking that breakfast was usually the only meal she ate without shoes on, but they hadn’t given her any shoes, so this was going to be all meals now.

She sat at the plain table on a minimalist metal stool so high her feet didn’t touch the ground, and stared at the metal cover, building up to the big reveal.

In a room this empty, food could transform everything. It would be foolish to rush into it.

She ran her fingers over the curves of the cover—brushed steel, so smooth she could barely feel the ridges. So perfect. Someone’s career involved designing this thing. Imagine that being your life.

The smell barely escaped, but she thought there was coffee and maybe maple syrup and she hoped there were pancakes. They hadn’t given her dinner the night before so she could really appreciate a good breakfast, the kind she used to have as a kid on Saturday mornings, that made you feel a little unwell in the best possible way and left you full until evening.

She’d waited long enough, she decided. With no way to meter out the seconds she had no idea how long it had been except long enough.

She was not disappointed.

Coffee, black and opaque in a white ceramic mug, with little cups of cream and soy milk and oat milk and who needed so many options? She poured a little of each into the coffee, watched them whirl through the darkness.

Two pancakes with butter and syrup that tasted real, none of that corn syrup crap, plus apple sauce with chunks of actual apples and yogurt that was maybe the slightest bit vanilla but mostly just tart and delicious.

She was very hungry, it turned out.

Zach loved pancakes. She hoped he had the same meal she did.

Though the thought made her feel more than a bit ridiculous, she thought it nonetheless: just this meal made coming here worth it.

But soon enough the food was gone, and she was left with sticky syrup fingers and dirty dishes and unknown hours laid out before her.

Feeling that delicious post-carb discomfort she had longed for, the tray back by the door, the blanket around her shoulders, she took to walking in slow circles, her footsteps tracing close to the wall and around the bed, weaving in and out of the center of the room.

Left a few laps, then right a few laps.

Like a caged animal.

She stopped, considering the implications, not wanting to be like that poor, sad tiger at the zoo who loped around with its tongue hanging out. But understanding how it must feel.

And after less than a day, too.

She resumed pacing. It didn’t hurt her to admit that it felt good to move, even if it was in steady circles. It was pleasant to hear her bare feet on the concrete, the blanket trailing behind her like the cape of a king surveying a lonely kingdom.

When cooped up, animals sometimes hurt themselves to fight the feeling of nothing. Wasn’t that why depressed kids cut their arms, too? She’d never been sure, but that sounded right. Pain was better than nothing.

It would be very easy to stub her toe.

She decided she hadn’t reached that point yet.

There must be a reason for all of this, she thought, because it cost them something. The bed was comfortable and the food delicious and the light as precisely engineered as the edges of a new laptop. Modern and clean and healthy. The room was not cheap.

The point, she decided, had to be control. Not controlling her, though that also, but controlling a trial. They were testing things. They needed to reset her standards, make people the same in some way, level them. Feed them the same great food and keep them in comfortable and bland rooms for days. Days? Days.

She’d forgotten that the woman had said days.

Okay, so maybe it was quarantine, then. That also made sense. The people in here were in a controlled setting. There’s that word again. They would not want to introduce illness if they did not have to, and of course they didn’t have to, because they could keep anyone new locked up like this.

Quarantine was only fourteen days back during the pandemic. Before that, historically, it used to be forty days. This had better not last forty days.

But that had been, what, Europe and the Black Plague? She tried to remember a high school history class that she had most likely slept through or else blocked from her memory. That wasn’t how things worked now, with germ theory and antibiotics and genome sequencing.

She wondered if Emily had arrived yet. Maybe Emily wasn’t far away at all, just behind a series of locked doors, eating the same meals as Sara and thinking the same flat, traumatized thoughts. She hated the idea of her little sister alone out in the burnt landscape in her cheap car. Other people said they looked alike, but Sara had always thought Emily just looked vulnerable.

The delivery bot returned and retrieved her dishes. She waved to it.

Was it sequencing her microbiome right now? Probably, she hoped. Maybe then it would declare her fit to join the actual Community soon.

She laughed at herself then. As if the delivery bot was the one keeping her there, not people somewhere watching or herself signing away her freedom without even reading the terms of service.