Theodore & The 7 Layers of Space, Book 1: Brick & Bird

Chapter 33: Down

"Maybe this isn't happening," he heard his own alien voice whisper at the lifeless robot. "Maybe none of this ever happened. I'm probably someone else, somewhere else. Faraway and asleep. Safe and sound. I have a Mom and a Dad, and I definitely don't need to find a Brick to save seven stupid Layers...What kind of a metaphor is this one, my friend?" he giggled, and then started crying, and then nodded off again.

He awoke to the pain, which was bad, but not as bad as the tightening in his chest. It was as if someone were holding his very heart and squeezing the blood from it, somewhere between panic and despair. He thought of Terrycloth Green and Isobel and he couldn't take it. He was giving up.

"No no no!" he jerked his body upward in an effort to get himself moving and yelled out again as he knocked his side and his hand, his head swimming, pain receptors blaring from all directions. He didn't let himself pass out this time, but paused and let the pain wash over him as he laid back down and then tried to flex his hand. He quickly realized that even the smallest movement was unbearable. He rested his hand on his belly, and even that small action caused still more pain. He gritted his teeth and felt hopelessness wash over him and cover him like a leaden blanket.

He took a breath and his aching hand rose with his belly. He turned his head and looked up at a slice of sky that showed the Grid, and he spoke to it, "I'm stuck here. No one is coming to rescue me. The Buddy Bot is not coming back to life," he stated, expecting nothing in return.

In silence and biting back a scream, he tried to hoist himself up using his functioning arm and hand, and he fell on his face, eating dirt and sending another wave of pain through his arm and body from the impact. After the third time, the pain had become something close to normal, a fact he felt dimly disturbed by. Suddenly he'd hoisted himself up on his two feet, and part of him couldn't understand how he'd done it. This new perspective felt radical.

He stood, swaying unsteadily, covered in dirt and sweat and blood on the sandy floor of the Lumpstone Valley. In a fog, he slowly, agonizingly fell twice more as he proceeded to once again gather up the spare parts that made up his broken friend, no idea what he was doing or why. Unable to carry them with his useless arm, he set about the slow and painful task of tying his pack and tatters of clothes to one of his feet and dragging the robot behind him in a kind of a makeshift raggedy sled, blindly unwilling to leave the broken robot behind. The valley was narrow and long, it's rock walls to his left and right climbed upward in a nearly sheer face leaving only one direction for him and his broken friend to go.

A dim sense of survival kept him moving, and he went forward with no sense of where he was headed. He'd occasionally stop entirely, like a deflated balloon, and start slow-motion collapsing at his knees. Again and again he'd snap himself awake and push forward.

And so he set about navigating the floor of the Valley, every step a new lesson in pain, with no end in sight. He weaved forward making very little progress and nearly collapsing again. "I gotta keep moving. I can't fall down. Can't fall down," he muttered.

And then he fell down. Hard.

He woke again with a flash of non-specific pain and exhaustion. He'd landed with his cheek to the cold sand, and more dirt had crept into his mouth and eye. He moaned into the night, and a fierce beast responded in kind.

"I am going to die here, Buddy Bot."

He coughed hard, keenly aware of how thirsty he was. He regained control of his body and rasped, "I'll take your silence as...as..." he struggled, "as an affirmation. That this is a good and unlikely metaphor...for true friendship." He turned his head to look at the lifeless robot he'd been dragging behind himself, and was suddenly overwhelmed with grief and rage.