Hollow World Read online

  Ellis had never spoken to a crowd before, except the two times at Warren’s weddings where he gave the best man’s toast. All he did then was make fun of his friend, which Warren made easy. This was a whole new world. “What do you want me to say?”

  “Whatever you like,” Rex told him.

  “But I don’t—”

  “It doesn’t matter. Everyone will be thrilled just to hear your voice.”

  “Remember, Ellis Rogers”—Pol gave him a wink—“the administrator of the ISP just said it doesn’t matter what you say.”

  Ellis was trying to figure out what Pol meant as Rex escorted him up a set of steps. As soon as he ascended the stage and faced the crowd, the chamber fell silent. Not even a cough. Did these people ever get colds anymore?

  “Ah—hello,” Ellis said. He was startled as his voice boomed, amplified somehow. He looked around, bewildered.

  At the sound of his voice, the audience roared. Ellis shifted his weight, feeling awkward. He didn’t know what to say, how to stand, what to do with his hands, or where to look. He tried to remember what his English teacher once told him about speaking in front of a crowd. Just imagine your audience is naked. He nearly laughed, but managed to restrain himself to a big smile. The crowd saw it and cheered again.

  When at last they quieted, he said, “I guess I’d like to thank everyone for saving my life. I feel great, by the way. You did a good job.”

  Again the crowd cheered, and Ellis waited for them to calm down.

  “I, ah—I really don’t know what else to say.”

  “What do you think of Hollow World?” someone shouted.

  “It’s very nice. Very clean.”

  “What’s your favorite holo?”

  Ellis shrugged. “I’ve never tried one. Still getting used to the showers and voxes.”

  This brought a round of laughter and more applause.

  “Are those your real clothes?”

  “Yes. I probably should get some new ones. I’ve been wearing these for over two thousand years now.”

  More laughter. More applause.

  Ellis looked down and saw Pol with Dex alongside, looking up at him with anticipation, but he wasn’t sure why.

  “Do you have a home here yet?”

  “Actually, I think I will be living on the surface. It’s more familiar. That is, if that’s allowed.”

  Shouts of encouragement rang.

  “Do you think you’ll be lonely without a woman?” It was Pol. He was staring pointedly and gesturing with his five-fingered hand for him to say something, as if the two shared a secret, only Ellis had no idea what that secret was.

  Ellis hesitated, and the pause gave the crowd a chance to quiet down. “Ah…” Ellis thought about the question. He thought about Peggy. He thought about Pax. “Yes,” he said. “I hadn’t counted on that when I traveled through time. Almost everything I knew is gone. To you maybe I’m special because I’m one of a kind, but I’m also the last of my kind. And one is the loneliest number, isn’t it?”

  He didn’t expect anyone to remember the Harry Nilsson/Three Dog Night song, but that was one of the perks of being ancient. He could plagiarize with impunity. Everything old was new again. Feeling awkward and just wanting to get away, he came off the stage to an ovation and the crowd reaching out to touch his ankles as he climbed down the steps.

  “Beautifully done,” Pol shouted in his ear. “I’ll do wonders with that. Our tour will begin tomorrow, so you need to get some sleep. Dex and I will be back in the morning. Now unless you need anything—” Pol pulled out a Port-a-Call.

  “Pol?” Ellis said. “Have you seen Pax?”

  “No. Should I have?”

  “I don’t know.” Ellis took a step closer, lowering his voice. “Have you heard anything?”

  “About Pax? No, and as you’re aware, Pax isn’t an easy person to keep tabs on anymore.”

  He nodded. “Could you contact Vin at least? I’d like to let them know what happened to me, okay?”

  “Right away. See you tomorrow.”

  Pol formed a portal and stepped through. Ellis couldn’t see if it was to the Council office or Firestone Farm.

  Perhaps he should go to Pax’s home. If he had his own Port-a-Call he would. He considered asking Rex, but Wat had been right. He was feeling run-down and tired, like he was fighting a cold. Maybe in the morning before they left, he could get Pol to swing by Pax’s place. It wasn’t like it was out of their way.

  “Rex?” He turned to the ISP administrator. “Has anyone tried to see me since news got out that I was here?”

  “Everyone,” Rex said. “Absolutely everyone.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  QUALITY TIME

  Ellis had tried several times to contact Pax but failed. By all accounts Pax had disappeared. As part of his agreement to go on tour, Ellis insisted Pol do everything possible to locate Pax, including daily messages to Pax’s home, where even Vin had no clue where the arbitrator had gone. Ellis was struck by the irony that by cutting out Pax’s chip, he was the architect of his own misery. This sense of guilt plagued him as Ellis finally submitted to the grand tour.

  Pol had been relentless with the schedule. Each day Ellis traveled to some new corner of the world or another planet altogether. There weren’t nearly as many inhabitants in Hollow World as Ellis had expected. Just over 123 million, the majority of mankind having died during the Great Tempest. They all resided inside a honeycombed earth, scattered across the fifty-two tectonic plates, but with portals they could travel anywhere in an instant.

  Mars looked nothing like Ellis had expected. After spending most of his youth dreaming of being the first person to walk on its surface, the ease of the trip removed that mystique. For the most part it was no different from Hollow World except for the ubiquitous Mars logo placed everywhere. This was because the vast majority of the Martian resort destination was below the surface. The little bit of the planet he was able to see from the viewing domes looked like Nevada under a hazy pink sky.

  He did get to see the Mars rovers. They were still out there, preserved as part of Odyssey Historic Park. The rovers were the Red Planet’s second-biggest tourist attraction after Olympus Mons, the largest Martian volcano and the tallest mountain on any planet in the solar system. The one highlight of Mars was that Ellis got to see robots. He’d wondered where they were. Buck Rogers and The Jetsons had promised flying cars, jet packs, and robot maids. Once again Ellis was disappointed. Previously used to safely explore the landscape of the planet, they’d become a novelty for tourists. Robots were remote-controlled machines sent out to transmit 3-D visuals and fetch rocks as souvenirs. Mars had become like Niagara Falls, a cheesy tourist trap. And like vacationers to a Mexican resort, where tourists preferred the sand-free hotel pools to the ocean, most Mars visitors preferred walking around the virtual holo than suiting up to experience the real thing. Ellis did indeed don the suit and join the mechanical delivery bots, but after a lifetime of waiting, the experience was anticlimactic.

  New planets had been discovered, like Trinity, which was outside the galaxy, but no colonies had been established. The East Indian Tea Company didn’t exist anymore. Everyone had plenty of room, and nothing beyond novelty remained to drive humanity to the frontier.

  While travel everywhere was instantaneous, the outings were taxing. He felt good. He was, in fact, incredibly fit for a fifty-eight-year-old man who’d just died and had his organs replaced. His energy wasn’t perfect, but he figured that was more a result of thirty years of reduced exercise than the surgery. What drained him were the crowds. Everywhere they went, hundreds of people waited. As far as the public was concerned, Ellis was bigger than Olympus Mons. Unlike the gathering in the ISP’s Grand Cathedral, these were filled with people wearing clothes and sporting tattoos. By the time they were visiting Challenger Deep, the lowest point on Planet Earth, Ellis began to see his first imitators.

  “Pattern designers are working ’round the clock to create El
lis Rogers wear,” Pol explained, seeing Ellis staring back at a gawker who wore an identical flannel shirt and jeans.

  Pol had enormous amounts of energy, finding time to report to Warren each night even after a long day of appearances. Apparently it was important to keep the technology-deficient farm informed on Ellis’s global impact.

  That day, he and Pol had stood under the illuminated dome of Challenger Deep, and looked up at a dead, dark world of empty water. They were too deep for fish. Ellis had preferred the city of Atlantis, an artificial coral reef surrounding a thousand-story-tall see-through city, also known as The Aquarium. The Deep was just scary. The knowledge of all that water above left Ellis haunted by the thought of a crack in the glass.

  “It’s wonderful. The whole world is going Ellis Rogers crazy,” Pol said. “People are sharing your speeches. Ellis Rogers masks are big, and a hyper-realistic interactive holo featuring an interview with you is the most popular in the world for the second straight day.”

  “I’m surprised people aren’t having plastic surgery done,” Ellis said.

  “Plastic surgery?” Pol asked.

  Ellis gestured at his face. “You know, it’s where doctors alter your features surgically. With all this desire for individuality, I’d think more people would have done it.”

  “There are limits to self-expression,” Pol said. “People want to be individuals—not different.”

  “How’s that?” Ellis spotted another Ellis Rogers wannabe entering the sea-dome, this one with the same JanSport pack slung over one shoulder.

  “Putting on clothes, even applying a tattoo, just adds a layer of identity. It doesn’t fundamentally change a person. People don’t want to be something different—they aren’t dogs longing to be cats or even horses wanting to be zebras, although they might paint on stripes to look different. You’re fascinating to all of us. Not only because of your divergence from the norm, but your complete acceptance of it. You honestly don’t mind being separate, being alone in your singularity. This courage is what so many of us admire when we see you. We’d like to think we’d be just as comfortable standing out, being a real individual, but actually doing it—that’s a bravery beyond most of us.”

  The backpacker offered Ellis a shy smile. He smiled back, embarrassed for staring. Ellis casually looked up at the dome where the illuminated ocean was filled with vents and motes. While what he saw was real, it looked more artificial than anything he’d seen in Hollow World.

  “You see, there’s a comfort in belonging to a whole. Humans are social animals,” Pol explained. “But people don’t live together in groups like in your day. Once it became possible to survive separately, those traditional groups like families and tribes dissolved. In Hollow World they maintain a sense of community by being the same—exactly the same. They live any way they like, keep what hours they choose, follow such pursuits as they find interesting, while believing they’re always part of a greater whole. They don’t really want to be different so much as noticed—recognized.” Pol held up his maimed hand. “Those of us at the farm are different. Permanent alteration will be part of our future. And you’re a big part of that future.”

  “What sort of future is that exactly?”

  “I suppose that will be up to us, now, won’t it?”

  Ellis’s growing popularity was putting pressure on the ISP, and Pol had him make speeches at most of the places they visited. He got better at speaking, although most of what he said at each stop was identical. He talked about how different the world was now, thanked the ISP for saving his life, and expressed his appreciation to all of Hollow World for their warm welcome. Pol had him follow this with a plea for help in convincing the ISP to release the original female pattern so he didn’t have to be so isolated. Pol insisted he repeat the one is the loneliest number line from the first speech. When Ellis admitted it came from a song, Pol dug it out of the Wegener Archives and blared the recording before and after each speech, making it the Ellis Rogers theme. Occasionally he heard people singing it, usually the ones in the flannel shirts. At his speeches, the crowd, hundreds of identical voices, would sing the song together.

  In addition to tourist attractions, Pol took him to a sporting event and an art exhibit, but Ellis found the historic sites and museums to be the most interesting. He was delighted by the chance to visit Egypt’s pyramids—which looked a little worse for wear but were still hanging in there. He also had the chance to walk through the South African Museum of Prejudice and Segregation, the ruins of New York, and the Forbidden City of China. The most interesting by far, however, were the famed Museum of War and Museum of Religion, both located in the historic city of Jerusalem.

  Pol arranged for Ellis to have special access to the vaults in the Museum of War, where he got to see the stockpiles of weapons—those items they didn’t have room for on the official floor display—weapons still considered dangerous. They had preserved everything from Greek bronze-era swords, to British ship cannons, to American thermonuclear bombs. What shocked Ellis the most was that the themes of the two neighboring museums were similar: the tragic mistakes of humanity. While Ellis believed in God, he recognized the contributions in terror and bloodshed such beliefs had generated over the long history of mankind. One exhibit redefined the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse as greed, pride, fear, and religion—the leading causes of war.

  While riding on a moving walkway through a tunnel, various scenes from history were played out on either side by lifelike, but fully digital, constructs. A narrator said, “The errors in judgment were unfortunate but necessary roads taken on the long journey from the barbarity of the past to the enlightened peace of today.”

  Behind him, Ellis heard someone explain how at one time roads were physical things rather than mere metaphors.

  The crowds were significantly smaller in Jerusalem—the museums were less popular than the Mars simulators or see-through Atlantis—but Ellis was captivated as he walked the timeline of humanity’s religious history from prehistoric burial mounds containing personal items that suggested a belief in an afterlife, to the last active church in El Grullo, Mexico—eventually destroyed by the Great Tempest. Ellis entered holos where he could stand in churches, temples, and mosques and listen to sermons about the growing apathy toward God or experience virtual battlefields so realistic that he jumped out to avoid being sick. The Three Miracles and the ISP were responsible for the final eradication of war, but religion had disappeared much sooner, and the cause was far less definitive. Organized belief wasn’t outlawed. There had been no discovery refuting the faithful’s claims, no great atheistic crusade. Religion, it seemed, had just been forgotten.

  Each night Ellis returned to Wegener with Pol, to a room as spartan as the home of Geo-24. Ellis didn’t care; he just wanted a place to be alone. The grueling schedule kept him joined with Pol like a newlywed couple on their honeymoon, and Ellis was growing weary of both Pol and the tour. He’d recovered from his surgery, but told Pol he was still suffering from fatigue just to get a break.

  He spilled the contents of his backpack on the bed and sat like a kid on Halloween night, looking through his haul. The flashlight, his compass, water purifier, first-aid kit, matches, rain gear—still in the bag with the Target store label. This was all he had left. Spotting a bag of peanut M&M’S, he tore it open and popped a red one in his mouth, savoring the taste of the twenty-first century like never before.

  In the last few days, Ellis had seen marvels. He’d traveled to the depths of the ocean and outside the solar system such that he could spit in the eye of the meager accomplishments of the Mercury Seven. He’d gained what he’d come for—a cure, a new lease on life. Looking at the cheap assortment of sporting-goods-store junk, Ellis could only think about what he’d lost. He longed for a good cheeseburger, a normal toilet, and the sound of traffic or his computer booting. Even the things he used to hate he missed: endless commercials, driving in traffic, the sound of his cellphone, even the vicious fighting between Re
publicans and Democrats. What movies had he missed? What achievements? What disasters?

  He popped another candy in his mouth, closed his eyes, and saw himself helping Isley with his math homework. Then he was shopping with Peggy for a television, then just raking leaves on a Sunday afternoon. Memories—perfection in an airtight glass—frozen in untarnished beauty.

  He spotted the glint of gold under the raincoat—Peggy’s rings. He reached into his pocket. Ellis still carried his wallet and phone, though he didn’t know why. He just couldn’t bring himself to discard anything. He flipped past his license to the photos of Peggy and Isley. Fuzzy, pocket-scarred—he should have brought more pictures. Why didn’t he bring pictures?

  He missed Peggy.

  He pressed the power button on his phone. Lights came on. He checked his messages. Peggy’s call was still in his voicemail. He pressed play.

  “El? Oh goddammit, El, pick up! Please pick up.” Her voice still quivered, still frightened. “I need to talk to you. I need to know what you’re thinking…I’m sorry, okay? Seriously, I am, and that was years ago. I don’t even know why I kept the letters. Just stupid is what it was. I’d honestly forgotten about them.

  “I know I should have told you. Jesus, I wish you’d just pick up. Listen, are you still at Brady’s? I’m driving over. I’ll be there in twenty minutes. We can talk then, okay? Please don’t be mad. It wasn’t Warren’s fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, really. It just happened, and I know we should have told you, but…well…If you get this before I get there, don’t go anywhere or do anything crazy, okay?”

  Ellis was crying when he pressed the return call button.

  He listened.

  Silence.

  Her name was Sol.

  She wasn’t really a female, but Ellis thought she was close enough. The voice and mannerisms were there, even though Sol had been born years after the sexes were being phased out. Sol was a first-generation standard pattern and had no number designation after her name because Sol was the oldest living human in existence—or had been until Ellis challenged her for the title.