Where The Birds Are

The first time Harrison hears a bird call, he wants to silence it immediately. It isn’t the bright chirps he had always imagined hearing, this was more of a screech than a song. Though perhaps it was fitting, as this wasn’t how he imagined his first moments outside the Dome either. He had pictured something beautiful, finally stepping outside the facility he’d been born into and seeing a blue sky, feeling sunlight on his skin, as doves or robins or any type of bird swooped ahead, riding a sweet breeze over golden fields. No more bulky headsets strapped over his eyes and into his thoughts. No more actuator controlling, or bio programming, or the endless endless demands of his neurons for the Orgo-Corps calculations and machines. If he heard birds, it would mean he was free.

But the world was cruel, and he should have learned by now to expect that something as kind as a birdsong would only bring him torment.

The shrieking bird call makes his hand jump again, sending a flash of sweat down his neck and through his ribs. It wasn’t an alarm, he knew that. No, he and his little sister were outside, in a decaying barn that would be torn down for agricultural space during the next cycle. But his body couldn’t keep up with the new environment, thinking he was still strapped into the computation line, listening for the sound of the engineers approaching as his mind burned with numbers and commands. Unwillingly, a shudder ran through him.

Harrison pulls away from the open panel on the side of Hazel’s headset. Poised like a scalpel in his hand, he presses the piece of scrap metal hard into his fingers to try and stop trembling. It made little difference, and he was sure Hazel could hear his uneasy breaths. She sat on the ground in front of him, hunching slightly with the weight of a massive headset on her small head. It hums with a low frequency, thick visor keeping her from seeing the rotting wood and overgrowth in the barn. Blindly, she swirls her fingers through the dirt floor, tensely waiting for him to take the machine off her head.

“Harri, do you see the bird?”

“No, no I can’t see it.”

Through the open panel of the headset, wires pulse with her fast heartbeat. The nausea that had patiently been waiting in Harrison’s stomach surges as he stares at the organic interface that makes wet-computation possible. It was like strung up blood vessels attached to a mother board, sour smelling and warm. Circuitry and flesh crammed together under smooth paneling and all of it running on the action potential of a human’s neuron membrane. But none of this was as important as the one mechanical lock, nestled underneath it all, holding his sister’s head hostage.

“The birds are probably hiding like we are.” He says, watching the speed of the throbbing wires slow a fraction of a second. Calm, she needs calm, especially from him right now. He squeezes her tiny hand, her frail fingers giving a tiny squeeze back.

Wiping his hands on his pants, Harrison waits, twitching again as the bird squawks out. Four seconds, another cry, two seconds, another one. And then 20 blessed seconds of silence. If there’s a pattern to anything, Harrison is usually the one to find it. A bird has no need to follow a predictable model, could sing and crow as randomly as it desires. Lucky creature. But this might be the closest he could get. It would be a risk, but he couldn’t stop now, not after this whole day was one big anomaly in probability. Not when he could show his sister real sunlight, even if it was only the dimmer orange light from their flaring sun.

The bird repeats its calls, four seconds of pause, and then three. It would have to do. Holding his breath, Harrison slides the scrap metal down the inside casing, past the soft wiring, where he could scratch the inner side of the frame.

“That’s probably good,” Hazel said, “Then there will be lots of—” But she never finishes her sentence as a sharp spasm cuts off Hazel’s voice. It’s too sudden, and Harrison sees blood on his hand, the fleshy wiring torn from her sudden jerk. A terrifying whine emits from the headset, high pitched and loud. Hazel starts muttering, stilting and panting nonsense as input is electrically pumped into her skull as someone in the Dome presses buttons and seizes control of her thoughts.

Out of time, Harrison digs the metal and scrapes at the side where the lock is. Blood pools inside the headset as Hazel continues to shake.

With a hiss and a clunk, something gives, and the blaring stops. Hazel sags on the ground. The brief relief he felt vanishes and a new panic sets in as he scrambles to take everything off. The visor goes first, and Harrison could have wept at seeing her closed sunken eyes, looking like a pale corpse. As gently as he could with fighting back tears, he pulls apart the headpiece, separating it into two, and pulls out the sharp needles buried in her temples. It’s sickening, watching how the short needles leave a triangle of three dots in her skin that prick up with blood, but he swallows down the bile. Pulling her into his lap he finds her pulse. Slow but staying strong. Strong enough for consciousness. Unless the headset had damaged — No, she would wake up soon. Any second now.

A thin drop of blood sliding down from her nose into the dirt.

“Hazel!” Harrison whispers, fighting the urge to shake her awake. The bird had stopped its crowing at some point, and the silence he had wanted moments ago chokes him as seconds stretch into minutes. A sourness spreads into the back of this throat and up until the base of his skull feels tight. In the back of his mind Harrison knows they should be moving now. Whatever task or processing she was forced to do would have sent a signal back to the main system. And the educators and engineers in the Dome, even the Warden, would all know she had escaped. It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out Harrison was gone too. They should be sprinting to the perimeter now, running for their lives. She just had to wake up.

He almost misses it through his blurring vision, but he sees Hazel squinting, blinking hard as though to flush out the pain. Her eyes land on Harrison, and she smiles.

“You did it.” She mumbles, holding up her arms for a celebratory hug. The pressure in his head releases as he laughs out a sob, relief condensing into something painful behind his sternum. He scoops her up, hiding his face in her shoulder, hot tears overflowing down his cheeks and into her shirt. There’s dirt pressing into his face now from where she writhed in the ground, and he's never been so grateful to feel dirty.

“You scared me bug.” He sniffs, ugly and wet, feeling the shaved side of her head press against his own.

“Too tight.” She whines.

He gives her one last big squeeze, crushing an annoyed grunt out of her. Standing, shaking his head, wiping his eyes that feel too sensitive now, he pulls her up with him.

Harrison peeks outside the barn, taking a moment to check that nothing had approached their makeshift hideout. If he took a little longer than he thought necessary just to take a few extra deep breaths, Hazel didn’t seem to notice. He squeezes her hand again, and she takes a step closer, crowding his knees. The dark grain fields stretch out before them, running all the way to the white wall that blocked the horizon. This wall would become another Dome soon. Not quite the open golden meadow from his fantasies. The machine behemoths sitting idle in the distance weren’t part of his dream either. Harrison could only see two. The usual gangle of limbs and sensors were curled in on themselves at rest, making them look more like slouching boulders than the modifiable machines piloted by at least 50 unwilling minds.

Harrison takes a step forward, but feels his shirt being pulled by Hazel’s hand. He looks down to see a serious little frown on her face as she watches the unmoving behemoths in the distance.

“The big ones. Don’t like working on those.” She mumbles, biting her lip as if it was something she shouldn't say. Something she wasn’t allowed to say. “They hurt my head.”

“Mine too. But we won’t have to soon.” Harrison says, not minding the small lie. He’d never operated a behemoth before, being pulled from the younger kids' more mindless activities to be stuck on the more complex operations with the adults. But she didn’t need to know that. It all fried their brains in the same way. Orgo-Corp just figured his aptitude for numbers meant there was more to squeeze out of him. Harrison tugs her out of the barn with him, crunching the grain stalks under his bare feet as he leads them towards the wall. A part of him wanted to crawl in the tall grass, and stay as hidden as possible. But he pulled Hazel along, trying to keep an eye on every direction in the open field. If anyone had found out they were missing, they would still have to find out which way they went. He didn’t want to still be here when that happened.

“I don’t think the engineers wanted me on the big ones anyway. Said I wasn’t useful.” Hazel huffs, taking two steps for each one of Harrison’s fast strides. “I was a good arm…I think. But they always got mad when my nose was bloody. Said I caused delays.”

Mad. What a simple word for sizing up whether or not someone was fit to throw out like garbage. Dried blood still clung to the outside of her nostril even now. He’d seen friends strapped into the line up, people stronger than him lying inclined on rows of angled slabs, only to see someone new in their place when his visor came up. Swapped out under the sound of an alarm. Hazel could have disappeared without him even knowing until they all headed back to the dorms deep beneath the Dome.

“Harri, is it my fault we’re leaving?” she asked, voice small and apologetic. The question made him stumble, turning so fast to look at her the grain twisted into sharp points that scraped his feet.

“No, No we’re leaving because we can. Because everyone telling us what to do was lying, and there is more outside.” She looked at him with big wet eyes, showing confusion. “You remember the lessons, that nothing grows outside of the Dome—”

“—and you’re safe and secure inside at home?” she finishes. Harrison nods. “It was a big ole lie.” Hazel screws up her face again deep in thought, letting Harrison pull her forward, keeping them moving. As she ponders, he looks behind them. The white Dome gleamed, foreboding and pristine. He could see no drones in the air and hear no sirens.

“But if outside is safe, why are we the only ones getting out?”

“Getting out is only for the toughest.” Harrison lies again, tousling the curls on top of her head. “For the best. Just for me and my little bug in the code.” This makes Hazel smile, something small and timid. Oh, how long it’s been since he’s seen her really smile.

“Can Lilia get out? And George?”

And didn’t that hurt. “...George isn’t there anymore bug.” Harrison says gently.

Hazel’s eyes brighten. “Is he outside too? With the nice people you found from the secret messages? The resource avengers?”

“Resource scavengers.” He corrects. As if that was the important thing to focus on. Not that the old man who led her section was dead. Removed. How would she take that?

Should he wait? Give her another small lie and tell her the truth when they were safe? Hope was a foolish gift to give. Harrison thought he was past hope by now. That flighty feeling that was supposed to land in your heart did nothing but make devastation that much worse. He should stay realistic, practical. That’s how he got both of them out. Not on hope, but on his own.

The message he’d intercepted was not what pulled his sister into an air vent or guided her up to the surface. It was him. Not the miracle of a gap in flare activity that made a radio message possible, not the high traffic of data processing and demands that drowned out his interception of that message. No, hope hadn’t done any of it. If he wanted to depend on hope, he’d waste it on hoping the sun stopped blasting the earth with so much plasma. Really cross his fingers about it so the world could run on real electricity again and not the wet-computers made of his friends and his sister.

But…they are closing in on the wall. The white monolithic structure sprawls before them, and Harrison sees the gate, clear glass towering over them, just a few minutes of jogging away. Even here he can see the warm dark earth on the other side, and faint blue hills where the horizon met the grey sky. Harrison couldn’t press down this knot in his chest, he didn’t have enough practice with optimism. It feels dangerous in a new way, an excitement bubbling up in his stomach that feels too much like he’s about to puke.

Hoping seemed inevitable at that point. He shouldn’t have trusted it.

The gate is unfinished. Harrison knows this, knows the delays that his sister created with her poor operation of the behemoth means he can tamper with it, and get it open. He was on the team that designed this soon-to-be dome after all. Hazel bounces on her feet, hands fisted in the hem of her dirty shirt and twisting it while Harrison pries a panel off the wall with the scrap metal. Inside is just circuitry and empty space, like the headset without the squishy parts. Sticking his head inside, Harrison looks for the sensor, planning to trick it into opening the door.

“Will there be water?” Hazel asks, her usually timid voice much louder.

“Of course. They said so in the message, remember? They’ll be near a lake south of here.”

“And hot food?”

“I should think so bug.”

“And meals more than once a day?”

“Are you just coming with me for the food?” He leans out of the hole to grin back at her.

Hazel giggles, a real warm sound, bright like the bird songs in his mind, with a smile that reaches her eyes. Harrison smiles back, feeling clumsy, raw, like a head wound that makes you dizzy. It didn’t matter though, his roiling nerves and tense stomach. It could be over soon. He was allowed this spec of hope at last, right?

“Harri! Harri, something's coming!” Hazel’s cry shatters through his thoughts. Hitting his head on the inside wall, Harrison scrambles to pull himself out of the hole to see. Far too close and getting closer were two large dogs, reflecting the orange sunlight off their metal bodies, leaving a trail of trampled grain behind them. For a brief helpless second, he feels heavy, as though his blood sank to his toes like it too had given up on supporting him. But Hazel grabs his shirt in her small hands, pinching at the skin beneath.

Harrison throws himself back to the panel, trusty scrap metal in his hand. He’s already scraped off the shielding of the pins. Now, blood racing far too fast in his veins, he slides the metal over the exposed pins, bridging together enough charge to ground or short the input to the door, and flip the logic state from closed to open. Hazel yanks on Harrison’s shirt, trying to pull him out of the wall as she wails that the dogs were getting closer.

A spark and flash of light, and the acrid smell of something singed, and Harrison hears the door humming. A voice, not his sister's, shouts “Get them!”

His hand finds Hazel’s, and he pushes, pressing her between the slowly opening doors.

Pain shoots up his knee and side, and it takes a second for him to realize a wet-dog had his leg in its jaws, teeth piercing through thin fabric and flesh. He hits the ground, sliding back as he hears a terrible grinding sound. And then a heavy slam.

He looks up. The doors are shut, and Hazel is on the other side. Safe. Alone. Staring at him and turning a blotchy pink.

The Handler’s boots, their soles covered in Harrison's blood, step into view.

“Did you really think we wouldn’t drag back one of our best.”

Harrison doesn’t acknowledge him, maybe he doesn’t even hear him. Just keeps looking at Hazel, the clear door showing her wide eyes, face crumpling in horror as she watches from the safety of the other side of the gate. He points south. Smiling wide for his sister. She falls to her knees.

“Open the gate.” The Handler demands. The other Wet-Dog growls with a sound like a drill.

“No.” Harrison says.

He feels calm. It could be the blood loss, but maybe it was because Hazel was getting smaller. He could still see how she was holding herself, arms wrapped tight and constantly looking back. But heading south. Heading towards food and people and rest.

Above him, a black bird crows like an alarm. Was it the same one from before? Harrison watches as it soars up and over the wall, drifting out of view.

That’s where Hazel was now, with the birds, outside and free.