Awake

Chapter Thirty-Four - The Foundations of Everything

"You know, this place doesn't make any sense," Carmen remarked.

They had been walking all day through an endless maze of corridors and workshops and great manufacturing plants, all of which blurred meaninglessly in Carmen's mind into a great sea of metal and pipes and words of explanation that only confused her further. Now, they lay behind a great gurgling machine, hidden in a shadowy corner, Nigs and Carmen bedded down in sleeping bags and Kevin propped up against the wall, ready to take the first night watch.

"What, the upstairs?" Kevin frowned at her.

"No, Subterra," Carmen hesitated. "Well, yes, the upstairs too. I don't understand what they're trying to achieve here. Everything is designed as though they wanted it to fail."

"Is it?" Nigs trudged on beside her. "It seems to work quite well to me."

"That's what I don't understand," Carmen chewed the inside of her lower lip. "It should all fail and yet it doesn't. I mean, think about how this place works. It feels like a mistake. The security is appalling. The decisions they've made – about the upstairs, about the youth corps – they don't make any sense! It's like a guideline of what not to do and yet it seems to work..."

"What exactly is your problem with it?" Kevin looked genuinely perplexed. "It's worked for a hundred years."

"And that is my problem with it," Carmen nodded. "It's worked longer than you think it has. It must have. Otherwise more people would know about how the world outside worked, before all this."

"People do forget things, you know," Nigs argued. "And if they were told not to talk about it, to cut it all away completely..."

"Then there's the youth corps," Carmen was on a roll now. "All children are taken away from their families and put in a separate place to be indoctrinated to the society."

"That makes sense to me," Nigs shrugged. "In fact, it's a perfect plan."

"It would be," Carmen agreed. "If anyone actually did any indoctrinating. But they don't! We pretty much run ourselves! Don't you remember? Jonathan is in charge. He can do more or less what he likes! Young members are trained be older members. The high command scarcely gets involved. In fact, the only time we've seen them was after Miriam set off that bomb!"

"I saw the results of that," Kevin recalled. "It was very cleverly done."

"But that's not the point," Nigs was staring at Carmen as though his eyes had suddenly opened. "It really doesn't make sense. If they want us to be unfailingly loyal to them, why aren't they getting involved in our lives? Why are they just separating us from the rest of society and then leaving us alone?"

"The same with the upstairs," Carmen nodded frantically. "You've got all these servants that you're making work themselves to the bone and you're telling them it's because they're worthless and defective...and yet you leave them to their own devices, let them build families for themselves, let them prepare their own food and talk and joke together. You even let them read. Is that a sensible plan? How could anyone think that was a sensible plan?"