Chapter 7 – Hold

Isaac's first word uttered as a girl was an echoing swear, which made Marley quickly cover her ears in surprise. Seth hurried over to help Isaac away from the wall. Panting, Isaac took a breath and asked, “Mirror?”

Seth clutched Isaac’s arm and offered, “Maybe you should sit down first…”

Shaking her head and brushing her hair back, Isaac answered, “I want to see what that Sim….jerkenface…did.” She gave a glance to Marley and was clearly holding back another swear for her benefit. Marley reached for Isaac’s hand.

With a sigh, Seth picked up the mirror. It didn’t seem damaged by reflecting whatever came out of the periscope. She turned it towards Isaac slowly, letting the base rest on the floor. She frowned as Isaac stepped forward slowly to look.

Immediately, Seth noticed something odd. Isaac was pulling at her clothes and tugging the bottom further down her thighs in embarrassment, but she didn’t pay much attention to her breasts or face. She was focused mostly on her clothes. With a groan, Isaac noted, “This outfit. I can’t believe that jerk put me in it. I mean imagining it is one thing but this hemline…geez.”

She tucked her hair behind her and puffed a soft breath as she remarked towards Seth, “Oh well, it could’ve been worse. I could’ve been turned into a boy like you were turned into a girl. Heh…” She gave a quick smile which faded as she noticed the stunned expressions on Marley and Seth’s faces. Glancing back and forth, she asked, “What? What’s wrong?”

A name tag was evident on Isaac’s left breast. Seth reflected to herself, It seemed like it wasn’t there before or it just said Isaac. Another slip of reality, another edit. Another thing to fear from Sim. Instead of “Isaac”, the name tag read “Marisa”.

Seth read it aloud, “Marisa.” Isaac’s eyes widened and she gave a nod, asking, “Yeah? What is it?”

Clenching her jaw, Seth took a breath and asked, “Are you sure your name is Marisa?”

Marisa staggered back with her mouth open. She grimaced and brushed back her hair again as she said, “Well, like we were talking about, how can we know anything for sure? And plus what we know now.” She gestured to where Sim had been standing.

Marley cupped her mouth and Seth pursed her lips. Marisa noticed and teased at her hair a little. “I mean I love your determination and everything. And you have a point. We need to establish a baseline like ‘I’m an anime-and-D&D-loving girl named Marisa’. And whatever works for you guys. I’m tossing away that 'Hatch' bit myself.”

She noticed the stillness in the room and awkwardly added, “Or whatever’s cool…”

Seth relaxed enough to take a breath as she proposed, “And what about if one of us has been radically-altered and the others remember us differently? Do the others have an obligation to say?”

Brushing her outfit slightly, Marisa nodded and said, “We need to keep track of memories and changes. But Sim or anyone else could still easily switch up everyone’s memory or make them think they did or something in-between....basically the most paranoid imaginings. I know what you think though and I’m not gonna argue it. That’s how this whole thing started.”

Marley asked, “You remember the argument?”

Marisa uttered an immediate, “Of course. And sorry. I hated seeing Marley sad. It’s just…we can’t trust a baseline but you’re right that we each need one.”

Seth gave only a half-grimace. No matter how she looked at it, it only seemed detrimental to point out that Marisa was obviously Isaac not too long ago. Still, speaking out, she gave the reminder, “I only say this because I called you out on not saying what you should’ve, and you called me out on secrets. But, for the two of us, you weren’t Marisa before Sim showed up. You were a man named Isaac.”

Straightening in place, Marisa’s eyes widened and she wore a quick, sour expression of her own before stating, “That’s not impossible...but can we trust what you think any more than what I feel?” She quivered and Seth lamented that she’d taken away even what Marisa considered her baseline. And Seth had to admit that the trick could’ve been played on the two of them instead of Isaac or Marisa.

That being could’ve just led them to a wrong thought or a false past. The same could’ve been said of Seth and her own past. Every moment was a possible fraud. Perhaps none of it was true. But she made her choice and stood by it in front of Sim. It didn’t matter it was false any more than if it were true. It was part of the personal firmament she’d decided upon.

Softly, she told Marisa, “We can’t trust it. We have our memories, but you have yours. Do you really, firmly, and absolutely believe that you are Marisa?”

Marisa gave a quick snort as she muttered, “I certainly haven’t known anything else. I’m hoping all my annoying memories of growing up with skin problems and social fears aren’t a ruse too. It would suck to have all that stress in my head be bull.”

A quiet moment passed before Marisa switched discussions and remarked, “I really wish we’d found some decent food. I’m vaguely, annoyingly hungry. Some chocolate would be great.”

Marley gave quiet words of careful agreement, “I l-like chocolate.” Her eyes darted down, and Marisa smiled as she brushed at her hair. The swoop of Marley’s hair, which looked cool on the fake version of her who liked to blow things up, had drifted over her eye on that side of her face. Brushing revealed Marley’s slim, faint gaze. She glanced away.

While Marley and Marisa headed off to search the other room, Seth decided to wedge the mirror through the doorway just in case it decided to close again and turn her into something else. With what Sim was able to do, she knew it was just a psychological reassurance, but it was something. She told the mirror, firmly and with an outstretched finger, “Stay…”

Before she went looking for food, she crouched over the spot where the periscope had been. It was different from the rest of the floor, like it was scorched. Soot, as though from some massive, billowing machine, had been embedded in the floor. She picked at it with a finger, but it didn’t move. Standing there, she glanced around and expected, “Another flashback, Sim?” But none came as she answered, “Ah, only when they’re not useful, huh?”

Suddenly, a bit of the floor tumbled down and sharply clanged. The section was rectangular and left a dark hole in the ground. Seth explained, as the others called to her from the next room, “I’m fine! Something just fell.”

Carefully, Seth approached the opening, tapping her feet on the ground as she looked for hollow spots. She resolved, “Seems solid around it…”

Leaning over, she glanced down the hole. The top piece of the floor lay to one side. Below that, she could see a wheel and a round hatch like something off a submarine. She raised an eyebrow and quipped, “A...literal hatch? Really?”

Before long, she’d relayed the news to the others and they were all crouched over the opening. Marisa remarked, with a piece of chocolate in her hand, “If anything says ‘trap’…this is it.” She passed the chocolate to Seth who ripped off a bit and let it melt in her mouth. Marley nibbled on a sliver. As Marisa explained, there was an assorted box of food with chocolate on top in the other room, just sitting on the floor.

Seth noted, “Actually…randomly finding food, chocolate especially, says ‘trap’.” Marley stopped eating and looked down. Seth amended, “…It’s probably okay though…just suspicious.”

Marisa shrugged and noted, “Well, we have to eat eventually”

Seth answered, “We do? Considering some of the stuff we’ve seen, I don’t know if we’re in any real place with real rules.” Seth looked down at her chocolate. It remained where it was. It didn’t vanish into the ether.

She added, “I have this vague recollection of an old movie about a computer simulation of reality. That’s all I have and I have to be suspicious why it’s even there if Sim is all-powerful and controlling...but it’s there.”

Marisa puffed a breath and offered, “You know where I stand on what we can assume. I dunno about simulations. I mean that thing called him or herself ‘Sim’. So. wouldn’t that be like waggling it in our faces?”

Seth responded, “And you don’t think that being was the sort to gloat?”

Marisa gave a shrug. “There’s that but we could keep going in circles about it. Wanna try opening this hatch thing?” She gestured downwards.

Sighing, Seth tried to find a spot close to the hatch but kept her feet underneath her in case she needed to suddenly run away. She mentioned to the others, “I’m bolting if this thing becomes a pit into nothingness.” They all got up on their heels.

Bending over, Seth put her hands around both ends of the wheel and firmly turned it. It creaked at first, spinning slowly until it became loose and the hatch dropped down. At the same moment, the room above and around them split and dropped into oblivion in two clear, clean halves. It fell with a *WHOOSH*…dipping into the gray nothingness, like hardened fog, which now surrounded them. A floor space with the darkened opening at the center now was all they had to stand on, floating seemingly on nothing.

Drooping her shoulders, Marisa sighed and lamented, “I wish I’d taken that cache of food with me.” It was like everything else in the world had been erased.

Standing and leaning over to confirm the floor was now like a solid floating carpet in the air, Seth tried not to peer over the edge too much and speculated, “A nasty joke by Sim?”

Marisa replied, “More like…now we have no choice but to go down into an impossible hole and see what’s at the bottom.”

Seth stretched a foot out over the edge of the remaining floor as she suggested, “We do have an alternative choice. I just don’t like it.” None of them elected to jump.

Not that any of their choices had been ideal. She returned to the open hatch. The space inside looked like an access point on a submarine, as least as far as faint memories told her. She said this aloud and the others confirmed, “Yeah, it kinda looks like that.” Of course, none of them knew how they knew that.

Feeling around in the unhelpful grayness, Seth finally picked up a convenient little flashlight. It was a flat rectangle she could hold in her palm. Depressing its side cast a slight but steady light down the opening to reveal a space where the hatch they opened had settled out of the way but also a tight, metallic-gray shaft with a narrow ladder bolted to one side. Trying to use the light to see the bottom didn’t help as the light was too frail to reach it, if there was one. Seth dropped the last bit of her chocolate down the hole but didn’t hear anything when or if it landed. And she wasn’t going to drop the light. The mirror was long gone with the rest of the room. Gritting her teeth, she told the others, “We’ll just have to try it and hope it has a bottom.”

They went one at a time with Seth aiming the light at the nearest rung for whoever needed it. It was crammed and intimidating. The sky above, like static from a broken television signal, didn’t help. Eventually Marisa, in the lead, yelled, “We have floor!” She helped the others down. Seth panned her light, but it still didn’t tell her there was floor until she was just a few steps away from it.

The room at the bottom immediately lit up like someone had flipped a switch. The new space was much like the others, but with only a single couch set in the middle of the room and a single chest of drawers. No sink or restroom this time. And, aside from the opening back up through the shaft and the modest ceiling, there was one more thing.

Filling the majority of the room and looming in front of them was a seven-foot-tall obsidian box cube sitting on the floor. Ivory words etched on all sides of its surface said, “NEVER OPEN THE BOX.”

Seth slumped her shoulders and muttered, “Well, jolly jerkenface….”