Previously
And so they drove me out a few hundred miles to a facility where the steel actually dropped away at places to admit sight to a terrible swamp below. A doctor had checked me to see why I was coughing up blood but hadn't determined the cause and decided that "if you're not dead yet you're not going to die so get used to it". Needless, the white clothes I wore were stained at the ends of the sleeves where I most often coughed.
A woman named Barbara met me at the front door of the facility and the three police who had driven me to the facility turned away and walked back to their truck. I listened to their vehicle drive off before walking to the front door.
Barbara looked down at me (she was probably a foot taller than I was) and said, "You exposed the engine."
I nodded.
"Very well. If all goes well, this should be over soon. You might be over too, but that isn't the point of my speech is it. Follow me."
I nodded again.
Into the front doors and through a spartan grey-steel hallway, with no paintings or mirrors. We made a few lefts and rights through the corridors, our feet making a four-time tap-tap-tap-tap as we continued. I got used to it's regularity and chided myself when I fell out of step. When Barbara fell out of step it was just an accident, though.
We ended up walking out onto a thin steel catwalk that led to a center chair, with nothing around it. The entire room, I witnessed, was one large sphere. The walls of the sphere were covered in white, glazed, ceramic tile. A few cracks were present, but they did not betray if anything lie underneath the thin covering.
She led me to the chair and sat me down. There were no fastenings, or anything to keep me there. She simply instructed me to "be still" and left. I watched her leave, eventually exiting through the door which we'd entered through. I was stuck in the white room, and I soon realized that the only source of light came from the chair and the catwalk itself. There were floodlights all around it that pointed to different parts of the sphere.
And as soon as I became comfortable a voice shouted out from the walls, "Jack Carentan. Fifteen years old. Exposed my inner workings to a class of thirty seven students and one teacher. Most did not see, only Jack Carentan. I now address you, Jack Carentan. What did you see?"
"I saw... I don't remember. Snakes? What were they?"
"They were tubes and wires. You saw tubes and wires."
"Yes, I did. But they looked and moved like snakes. I could see heads and tails."
"The tubes and wires are autonomous, they are thinkers. They carry data."
"But why not be built like a computer?" I asked, my imagination soaring.
"You are curious for a fifteen year old. And you are not afraid of me. Why is that so?"
"Because," I said. He stood from his chair and took of his shirt. He then took off his skin. The spiders, mice, ants, and beetles underneath swarmed around his skeleton. "I have always wondered why I wasn't."
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