Chapter 13: Relaxed
Start reading from the beginning…
“A watch? Am I supposed to watch it then?” Adam looked down at the new item on his wrist, a gift from Audrey.
She kept smiling, “No, that’s just what people call it. It tells you what time it is. My father told me that you don’t understand time measurement, and on my way to see you, I saw it in a shop window next door.”
Adam stared at it, watching the watch, waiting for it to tell him the time. The number in the outer ring changed again. “Why does it do that? Change numbers I mean, what is it doing?”
“That is the minute changing,” she answered. “Time is divided up into segments so that we can measure it. One second is approximately how long it takes for your heart to beat twice when you are relaxed. There are sixty of those seconds in one minute. The number you saw changing was one minute ending and a new one beginning.”
“How does it know how to measure my heart?” Adam thought this seemed kind of strange.
Audrey was patient. “It doesn’t actually measure your heartbeat. A second is just how long it takes for most people’s heart to beat twice.”
“Oh. Well how long is a day, because that’s what I have heard the most about?”
“A day is about 24 hours here on Mars, very close to what it is on Earth. A day is how long it takes for the world a person is on to rotate once, and humans have evolved to have one sleeping period and one waking period during the course of one day on Earth. Some worlds have longer days than others, which can make keeping track of them very tricky. Your watch determines where you are and changes the time accordingly.” Audrey sat down in the chair that had recently been cleared of gifts and started looking down at the pile of things Adam had put there for identification.
“This is confusing. Maybe I’ll just have to get used to it,” Adam said. He figured that if he could start calling a sleeping and waking cycle a day, and see how his watch divides those up, maybe he’d be able to figure out what the other numbers meant on his own. “Who is your father?”
“Excuse me?” Audrey said, as if she hadn’t heard him.
“You said your father told you I could not measure time. Who is that?”
“Admiral Chan is my father.”
“Why do you call him your father? What does that mean?” Adam had so many questions, and he felt like Audrey could tell him anything he needed to know. Since arriving here, she was the only person who seemed even remotely interested in helping him do or understand anything.
“Can I ask you a question first, Adam? How is it that you are mentally mature in some ways, but do not understand some things that humans consider basic common knowledge, like time and ancestry?”
Adam though about it a moment and said, “I guess things that humans consider commonplace were not taught to us by the Protectors. They had no watches to tell time with, and I guess they didn’t think we needed to know about it either.”
Audrey looked at him curiously, but she didn’t ask any other questions right then. Instead she explained, “A father is a male who cares for a child all the time, and a mother is a female who does the same. Usually, these people are the creators of the child, but not always. When I was a baby, I had a mother and a father who both died, and later Admiral Chan became my father and cared for me while I grew up.”
Adam’s forehead wrinkled in confusion. “People create other people? That sounds difficult.”
Audrey cut him off before he asked for an explanation on that process though. “Yes, it’s very complex, probably too much information for right now. Do you have any other questions about humans?”
“Yes, many. I could ask questions until it is time to sleep, and wake up thinking of more.” Adam smiled at himself. “Thank you for answering. It is all I have wanted since arriving here.”
Adam continued asking questions for a few hours, and became very comfortable with Audrey. Occasionally she asked him questions that pertained to the topic, and he answered her as best as he could. They discussed human history, common customs among humans, and other things that Adam didn’t have the first idea about. Audrey responded periodically with questions about the Protectors, the complex he had spent his life in, and how he managed to escape. Food was brought in for both of them, and they ate together, but continued talking. Eventually, Audrey yawned, which Adam knew meant she was becoming tired.
“Adam, thank you for talking to me,” she said at last. “I think you are the most interesting person I have ever met.”
In reply, Adam told her, “I think I am happy for the first time since coming here. You have made me feel comfortable; most other humans here have not.”
She smiled at him, and he smiled back. “I’m going to come back tomorrow, and I want to ask you some more questions about your life, and your experiences. Would that bother you?”
“I think I’d like it more if I could leave this place, and I could go to you instead. I have been trapped in one place or another for my entire life. It would be better if I had some of the same freedoms everyone else here seems to have.”
Audrey contemplated on this a moment. Finally she stood up and went to the door, calling the person outside at the desk into the cell. It was a man this time. “Adam needs a chip implanted, so we can leave together tomorrow. I know it was being withheld at Admiral Chan’s request, but I think I can change his mind. It just doesn’t seem fair to keep him locked up here. He’s not dangerous, and he’s not in any danger in this colony either.”
The man nodded his head, they walked back over to the desk and he picked up some sort of communication device, handing it to Audrey. Adam couldn’t see what she was doing with it, or hear what was being said, since he followed only as far as the door. She handed the device to the guard-person, who also spoke into it for a few moments also. When he set it back on the desk, he nodded again at Audrey.
She walked back into the room where Adam waited, and Audrey told him, “My father wants me to escort you to the birthing center, to have you chipped. Would you like to come with me?”
“Will it hurt?” he asked.
“No. They do it to every newborn human to identify them,” Audrey explained. “A doctor inserts a very tiny device under the skin behind your ear. It allows machines with recognition software to recognize you to better serve you, and gives security clearance to the people in charge. More than anything else, it allows authorities to immediately recognize who you are, even if they have never met you before. Since you haven’t been chipped yet, we would not be able to find you if you ever became lost, and that’s why you have not been allowed to leave.”
“Under my skin? Will I bleed?”
“No. Every human has one too. You can hardly even feel it once it’s in, because your skin grows around it.” She could obviously tell he was not comfortable with this at all. In an apparent effort to ease his worries, she asked, “Would you like to feel mine? You can if you really focus on it.”
Adam considered it a moment, and then agreed. Audrey reached out for his hands, and he provided them. She closed all of his fingers but the index of each hand, and slowly brought them up to either side of her face. She seemed to blush a little as his hands relaxed against her cheeks, and Adam started to feel warm suddenly. He was afraid that Audrey would feel the heat radiating from him, but then realized that her face was warmer than his hands.
“Right behind my earlobes, there are dents where my head ends and my jaw begins.” Adam could feel the spots she was talking about as she spoke, because her moving jaw seemed to guide his hands right to it. She told him, “If you press just a little… don’t worry, you won’t hurt me… you will feel that there is a little bump on one side that is not there on the other.”
Adam felt the small bump she was talking about. He closed his eyes for a moment, concentrating on it with his fingertip, but gently. Audrey’s sweet smell, which Adam had first noticed when she had arrived, overtook his concentration suddenly, and he pulled his hands back to himself, opening his eyes. “Thank you,” he told her. I am not afraid anymore.
Audrey reached out and took him by the hand, smiling at him, and led him out of the cell. Adam followed, scarcely able to believe that she was continuing to touch him like this, like family. He had seen some of the other kids holding hands like this when he was young, but nobody except Egypt had ever held his hand in hers like this, and that was only for a brief moment before she left to begin the distraction that allowed his escape.
The two walked together out of the cellblock and into the hall beyond. Audrey used some sort of colorful wall panel to display a map of the complex they were in. She explained how to do this to him, so he could find his way around once he was chipped, and then asked the panel to provide a guide to them. The panel drew a path through the map in purple, and then Audrey pointed to a small light near the floor that became purple just ahead of them. She explained that the machine sensed her chip, and changed a light to purple ahead of her on the real path she needed to go. As they approached the light, still hand-in-hand, it became white again and another light further down the hall became purple. The two of them followed the path laid out before them in this manner until they reached a door that was lit purple on both sides for them. The lights flashed twice, and returned to normal, signaling that she had reached the destination she had requested, Audrey told him.
She opened the door, and Adam followed her inside. He sat at a table, and Audrey discussed the situation with the person who Adam guessed was “The Doctor”, although he didn’t know what that meant. The man washed his hands, put some clear stretchy coverings over his hands, and then produced a small pointed device. Adam turned his head as requested, and after wiping the spot on his skin, the doctor poked the device into the spot behind his ear, causing Adam to wince as if he had been pinched.
“There you are Adam. That chip contains almost no information, just what we know about you so far,” the doctor told him.
“How much do you know?” Adam asked.
“Well, when you were unconscious, shortly after you arrived, we did some tests to try and get some basic idea about you. Your DNA has not been completely sequenced yet, but we were able to determine that you are approximately sixteen Earth-years old. We will attempt to find some records of possible family members once the sequencing is complete, but since we don’t know where you came from for sure, I don’t expect to find very much.” The doctor smiled at him, nodded at Audrey, and then walked away, back to his work elsewhere.
“You are sixteen then. I would have thought you were a little younger than that,” Audrey said.
“Why? How old should I be?”
“I’m eighteen, nearly nineteen, but most people think I’m older.” Audrey smiled. “We are close to the same age.”
Adam looked down at his feet. “That sounds like it should mean something, but I don’t know about ages.”
“Teenagers are no longer children, but not quite adults. Younger people look up to us, but older people treat us as if we need help with things we don’t actually need help with. Except Admiral Chan, of course; he thinks children are just small adults.” Audrey smiled and Adam smiled back, then they both yawned. She took him by the hand, but continued to face him. “Goodnight, Adam. I trust you will be able to find your way back to your room.”
“Yes. Goodnight Audrey, whatever that means.”
