The corridor continued on straight for a very long time. The luminium coating the ceiling and both walls provided dim light, though it had peeled off in places, and a thin layer of dust upon the floor rose in small clouds around Siddhārtha’s feet as he walked. The dust was finer and lighter than volcanic ash, and the clouds that rose from it thinner than a northern sea fog.
“No one has passed this way for over a thousand years,” Siddhārtha muttered to himself. He approached one of the doors along the side of the corridor and pressed gently on it. It opened without a sound. What luminium remained on the walls of the room beyond lit the space with a lonely light. A storage shelf built into one wall was half open, and a mountain of dust spilled out of it, covering whatever contents it had once held. Along the far wall, he saw three chairs fashioned of metal tubing, the rust making the metal look like fossilized bone. A single pilot lamp on the back wall cast a small circle of orange light that made the abandoned room seem unreal, like a place from a dream.
Siddhārtha turned and was about to leave when he sensed a presence behind him. He looked around to see a large gray creature emerging from one of the walls. It had a large head, sturdy limbs, and thick scales like tree bark covering a cylindrical torso. Siddhārtha retreated to the entrance as the creature’s hind legs emerged, followed by a long serpentine tail. The end of the tail was pointed, and it lashed violently against the walls and the floor. Moving as quickly as he could, Siddh ārtha slid out into the corridor and shut the door behind him. A moment before the door slid completely closed, he spotted another of the strange creatures emerging from one of the walls.
Siddhārtha leaned against the door, catching his breath. Then, stepping quietly, he walked farther down the corridor and pressed on the next door. The room behind this one was exactly the same construction as the previous room, and likewise abandoned. Instead of chairs, this room had a single bed that seemed to have been made of some kind of reinforced glass. It was remarkably transparent once he blew the dust off of it. Siddhārtha sat down on the bed, suddenly feeling very weary. Emotions rose inside him, tugging at the corners of his memory, binding together snippets of something that had been familiar to him once, yet now felt very distant. He could feel his subconscious trying to piece together the self he had been from the parts of the self he was now. Threads of memory slowly wound together in his mind, creating a picture. But when he tried to look at it, opening his mind’s eye wide, he felt it recede into the distance, his memories like strangers standing on the opposite shore of a wide river. He could see them with his eyes, but never know or touch them.
He looked up to see a vast blue sea stretching out before him. The sun cast vibrant rays across the water. As he watched, amazed, the surface of the sea split in two, and a single enormous fish swam out of the depths. In the blink of an eye, the fish transformed into two spacecraft, their photonic engines displacing the water beneath into the shape of an inverted umbrella.
Siddhārtha assumed, without explicitly thinking it, that this was some kind of dream, or perhaps a phantasm. He tried to shake it out of his head when he realized that what he was seeing was no phantasm at all, but an actual scene existing in reality. With a start, he leapt back out into the corridor in a single bound, his inertia causing him to trip and roll across the floor in an ungainly ball. He stood, but found he lacked the courage to look back into the room behind him. He ran.
The corridor seemed as endless as it was empty. Siddhārtha could sense no people anywhere along its length, nor did he detect any presence in any of the rooms to either side. Only one of the rooms he found with its door half open. He peeked in to see strange forms rising underneath the dim illumination, rising and falling in the center of the room, spewing flame and smoke.
“What is this place?” Siddhārtha wondered out loud. “Are these the A-Class Citizens?”
He reflected back on what he had seen thus far in the rooms along the corridor—scaled monsters, creatures of fire and smoke, photonic spacecraft—and did not think that any of these could be what one called “citizens.”
He was contemplating returning and speaking to the Leader once again, when at last he came to the place where the corridor ended in a wide, hard panel made of a light green metallic substance. Glowing letters across the panel read A-CLASS CITIZEN AREA.
The panel slid into one wall at the slightest touch, revealing darkness ahead through which long rows of lamps along the floor and ceiling lit and faded, making it look as though the lights were jumping up and down in time to an unheard rhythm.
Siddhārtha lit the light projector fastened to the end of the leather cord wrapped around his waist. It cast an intense white circle of light, revealing an enormous complex structure ahead of him. The structure looked like some kind of shelving system for storing files or physical media, save for the vast number of pipes that ran horizontally and vertically in front of the metal panels providing access to each compartment in the system. Most of the pipes seemed to contain wiring of one kind or another, while others were clearly designed to carry liquids as they were fitted with automatic adjustment knobs at regular intervals. High above, a hoisting mechanism like a giant, flattened crab slid quietly along a silvery rail near the ceiling.
“Are you the otherworlder who seeks an audience with an A-Class Citizen?” came a strangely undulating voice from the direction of the crab.
“Yes. I would know the truth behind the rebellion outside these walls.”
“Very well,” the voice continued after several seconds of silence. “I will bring one out to you. You may ask it any questions you like.”
Two arms extended from the sides of the crab. One of them shot downward, pausing in front of one of the many small panels where it split into four manipulators that deftly opened the container. From inside, one of the manipulators withdrew a thin, silvery dish. Another arm picked a single square tab of metal off of the dish, which it brought back up to the crab and slid into a slot in its side.
Some sort of identification card? Siddhārtha mused, wondering at the high level of security here.
He looked up at the metal crab hanging high over his head to see a green light flicker on just as a bubble emerged from the crab’s underbelly and ran along one of the vertical pipes, descending toward Siddhārtha like a translucent gondola.
A single human shape was crouched inside the gondola. Siddhārtha narrowed his eyes to scrutinize the crab and found it far too compact and flat for a person to fit inside. The gondola landed on the floor directly in front of Siddhārtha. Its canopy opened to either side, and the man inside stood and stepped out. For clothing he wore a simple piece of cloth, hardly more than a bed sheet, and silvery circlets on his wrists. His eyes seemed strangely far apart and filled with suspicion as they looked at Siddhārtha. His thin lips parted halfway, exhaling a surprisingly warm breath.
Siddhārtha observed the man closely. Though he stood only a meter tall, the man’s eyes, nose, and ears were fully formed. Those expressionless features, like something molded out of clay, his round head, and slender arms were elegant in their shape.
“Are you an A-Class Citizen?”
The man looked up at Siddhārtha, his face a mask, leaving Siddhārtha with the nagging feeling that there was something lacking in the man’s expression.
Something is very amiss here, Siddhārtha thought, trying in vain to discern exactly what it was about the man standing in front of him that bothered him so much. “Tell me,” he said at last, “what is different between you and those who are in revolt in the streets outside?”
The man stood, listening intently to Siddhārtha’s words before he spoke. “They are B-Class,” he spat. “Robots, nothing more.”
“Roh-bots?” Siddhārtha echoed. The word was unfamiliar to him.
“Yes,” the man replied impatiently, “that’s how they are different from us. They’re robots.” He seemed to have already grown disinterested in the topic of conversation.
“And what are robots?”
The man looked around uneasily and said nothing. The light Siddhārtha’s projector cast on the man’s expressionless face contrasted starkly with the gloom of the stacked compartments behind him.