The Confined

16. Ego

2302. 04. 20

Yes, I followed her. Of course I had to follow her, she was a girl. She might have been in serious danger thinking on the terms where she was running nervously without even looking up. I should be there to help her if she needed it. That was my excuse for following her. I actually wanted to know what she was up to.

I told Finn that I would be right back and dashed down the stairs. When I got out of the front door, I saw her shadow disappear right behind the corner a few blocks away. I ran to keep up with her, but kept my distance so that she wouldn’t notice anyone was following her. I didn’t want to become a stalker.

She ran and I followed until we made it to a huge house. I could definitely say that this was the biggest house in the world partly because it was the biggest one I had ever seen, and partly because ‘NOMINATED BIGGEST HOUSE IN THE WORLD’ was written on a big rock outside of the house gate.

When I saw this house, it made me feel like I wasn’t part of Violet’s life after all. Violet had a whole different life right under the surface of being a Confined. She had been an RL for all her life, compared to being a Confined for less than ten days. I probably hadn’t become much to her over ten days, but she had surely become a big part of me. I felt empty without her.

I was hiding behind the gate pillars when Violet ran to hug a middle-aged couple. The bald man was wearing an orange golf t-shirt and tan pants with white golf gloves, as if he had just come off a golf course. His house probably did have a golf course. The woman had brilliant red hair that was curly and way that came down to her back. When I saw their faces that was when I knew something was definitely wrong. The bald man was sneering while he was hugging her. It didn’t look like he was happy. It looked like he had something smelly going on in his mind. Chills crawled up my spine. When I looked at the woman, she didn’t look as bad as the man, but still she had an eerie aura masked underneath her beautiful face. They both weren’t happy that Violet was there. And they weren’t thinking of helping her at all.

Violet sat down and let out a scream when the chairs shot down the hall. I myself yelped too, in surprise. Now I had no way of finding where she could have gone. I had to break in. This was a new challenge for me, because I had never broken into a house before, not even a bunker. And I had certainly not thought about breaking into the world’s largest house. It would take hours to find her.

The man and woman had turned down all of the house’s security systems as Violet came in. It was because it may attract the police because of the robot’s alarm signals for warned people. It shouldn’t have been so hard to break in through the gate. I had my pen and my brain. How hard could it be?
It was hard.

So I just ended up climbing over the high fence. I almost broke my back doing it.

Limping, moaning, and trying to run at the same time, I watched the lights in the house turn on and off like a tide rolling from the left to the right. Idiots. I thought.

I knew where she was. Now the question was, how to get to her.

✡

The way was hazardous. Nobody could stay here for a day without dying. It was probably much worse than the desert out there. At least there weren’t flying knives in the desert.

I found an open window and took a careful step into the quiet hallway. The lights were all out and I had to squint to look closely at my surroundings. The house had a type of enormousness that made me want to go into a mouse hole. It felt like eyes were going to burst open from the ceiling and bore through me any moment now. The ceiling was so high that the big chandeliers all looked tiny. The hallway was so wide that I could probably do a cartwheel horizontally.

There wasn’t anything strange or life-threatening until I found a chair sitting in front of me. On the right was a control panel that had about three dozen buttons. If I could work the control panel and make it take me to the place I need to go, that would save much more time rather than carefully walking through the huge house. I touched the panel and it buzzed into life, the buttons started to light up and it began beeping like some techno song. There weren’t any directions on how to move the thing, but I figured it out soon enough. Two-hundred buttons were lined into ten straight rows, symbolizing each floor with twenty bedrooms. The green lever clearly meant that the chair was going to move to that place.

I crouched down to see if the buttons were able to read fingerprints. They were. They only reacted to the man or woman’s fingerprints, and if anyone else pressed a button, the chair might take them straight to… who knows where?

Something kept tugging at my memory as if there was a flaw to this machine. I looked everywhere for clues, but when I saw the white velvet rug on the floor, I remembered. The man was wearing golf gloves. The gloves would have made the fingerprint reader unable to read the fingerprints, and that meant that the fingerprints were only recognized when an actual finger pressed it. I immediately ripped some cloth off of the rug and wrapped my finger with it to press the button slightly. Thankfully, nothing seemed to click or change, so I pulled the lever.

The chair shot down into the dark hallway and I actually thought that this wasn’t going to be too easy.

✡

Someone threw a knife at me while I was riding the chair rollercoaster.

I had been hit by a lot of things during my life, but I had never felt the sensation of a dagger hurtling through the black air and cutting through my arm viciously. I winced and gripped my arm, but tried to keep quiet because if I cried out, Violet might get in serious trouble. Blood trickled down my arm and the pain wouldn’t stop. It was like a million red ants swarming over my arm and invading my skin, cell by cell.

Soon, the chair came to a stop, and I suppressed the pain inside me to open the door. I realized I was panting hard, and I probably looked extremely worn out and tired as the door opened and I saw Violet. I wanted to show her how strong I was to have come all this way into the house to find her. I didn’t have anything to help her but a pen. So I pointed it directly at the bald guy’s head.

“Violet! We have to get out of here! Now!” I shouted to her.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” The man roared.

“Take one more move and you’ll get a clean hole in your head.” I threatened. I was actually good at this because it made him freeze.

“A laser beam?” he asked slowly.

“A very good one, too.” I smiled.

“Where’d you get it?” the bald man asked without moving.

“Probably one of your robots,” I replied.

“Impressive.” The man lifted his eyebrow. He actually seemed impressed with me. The greatest inventor of robots and machines was impressed by me, a child from the Confined.

I beamed and pointed the laser a little more confidently at him. “Come on, Violet. We have to go.” I waved my hand for her to follow me. For a second, she hesitated. I almost thought that she wasn’t going to come to me. She might have gotten a better deal. She didn’t have much chance with only me on her side. I wasn’t much to her.

Just when I thought she was going to go to the bald man and his wife, she walked backwards towards me and took my hand. Even though it was a dangerous situation, I could feel my heart thumping loudly in my chest. I couldn’t even feel my arm aching anymore.

The bald man sneered. “You’ll regret this. I’ll be watching you even at the time you try to break your parents out. And then, I probably won’t have a laser pointed at my head,” he said to her, but Violet wasn’t confused anymore. She’d chosen the Confined over the RL once and for all, and this was her final choice.

We walked out.

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A/N:

Hello, my loves!
Thank you for following along to this story line.

I'm just glad that some people still read it when I haven't updated for such a long time:)
Vote comment and share with your dystopian-lover friends!

Thanks.

-Angelina