How can this possibly work, though? he thinks, doubt creeping back in. How can this possibly be real?
Because how did people have babies, huh? He turns around the room, the coffins stretched out before him like an army of the dead. And how did everyone stay healthy? How did they even get fed? He and Regine and Tomasz were maybe not prime athletes, but they were still functional human beings who could walk and lift things. He’d been weak for a bunch of days, sure, but his legs could still hold him up after years of lying down.
No, he thinks. No, this can’t be.
He wanted something, he realizes now. Wanted an answer other than the ones he’d been given. Wanted to find out this whole world had some purpose, some particular purpose. For him.
He doesn’t want the explanation to be the obvious one.
He sticks his fingers on the seal of the coffin, trying to find purchase. He can just about slide his fingernails – untrimmed since he woke, but yeah, how about that, how did everyone’s fingernails not grow? – into the seam. It doesn’t budge much, but he presses hard and lifts up.
The lid rises half an inch, an inch –
Before slipping from his grip and shutting again, pinching his fingertips painfully. He shakes his fingers out and tries again. And once more.
“Come on,” he grunts. “Come on!”
The lid opens so suddenly and so high, Seth loses his balance and falls hard to the floor, knocking his elbow on the concrete. He unleashes a long, loud shout of the worst curse words he knows, holding his elbow close to his chest until the pain ebbs.
“Shit,” he says, more quietly. More mildly, too.
Still breathing hard, he looks up to the now-open casket. He’s below the edge of it and can’t see inside, but already the underside of the lid looks like the one from his house, with tubes and strips of metallic tape, though this one has pulses of light moving along the length of it.
He drags himself to his knees, unbending himself slowly up and up, the pain in his elbow still throbbing, as the bed of the coffin comes into view.
He’s surprised. He shouldn’t be, he knows it, but he’s surprised at what he sees.
Because, of course, there’s a person lying inside.
A man.
A living, breathing man.
The man’s body is wrapped like Seth’s was when he woke, bandages around legs, torso, and chest. His gen**als are exposed, and Seth can now see why. There are tubes connected to the man’s penis and another running down between his thighs, held there by medical adhesive tape. Seth remembers the marks on his own body. Marks where tubes must have gone into him exactly the same way. Taking away his waste, just like Regine and Tomasz had guessed.
Almost every other inch of the man is covered, down to his fingertips and almost his entire face. Seth doesn’t remember those bandages, but he does remember that horrible vague period after he died. That sense of disoriented panic. It had been a different kind of frightening, almost worse than the death itself, but whatever his mind had been doing, his body had been tearing bandages away from his hands and face, as he crawled out of the coffin and found his way downstairs. He wonders now how he made it without breaking his neck, how he knew where to go when he was so blind.
Instinct, he supposes. A memory he didn’t even know he possessed.
The only thing not covered on the man’s face is his mouth, which has a guard fitted between his teeth with a tube attached to the end of it, supplying food or oxygen or water, Seth guesses, but who could say for sure? Who could say for sure about anything? Did the metallic tape on the bandages provide the programming for the sleeping world? Did they stimulate the muscles so they wouldn’t atrophy? Did the tubes for waste also do the work of reproduction somehow?
Who knew? Who had the answers?
The man gives no sign at all of knowing that anything’s different, that someone is standing over him. His only movements are the slow rise and fall of his chest as he breathes. The top of the man’s head isn’t covered, and his hair is as brutally short as Seth’s. The man’s neck is uncovered as well, and Seth finds himself reaching for it, touching the skin there, lightly, gently, just to see if it’s real.
He’s surprised somehow to find that it’s warm, the warm, blood-filled skin of a living person. He’s even more surprised to find the man has stubble. Low and barely there, but still. How did that not grow into a beard? Did someone shave him? Were there drugs that stunted hair growth? How the hell did all of this work?
“And who are you?” Seth whispers. “Did I know you?”
Because all these people were from the same town, this town, wasn’t that the idea? All the people from the houses out there in the neighborhood moved to a single spot. So this man could have been a next door neighbor or a friend of his parents or –
“But I moved away, didn’t I?” Seth says. “Or in the imagined world, we did. And who knows where you imagined you went.”
He stares down at the man, uncomfortable at his sheer vulnerability. He looks like a patient lying there. Someone recovering from an indescribably terrible accident. Kept asleep because being awake was too painful and the recovery too long –
And then a notion takes Seth. A crazy one, an impossible one.
He resists it, crossing his arms, still looking down on the man.
But the notion returns.
Because he’s roughly Seth’s size, isn’t he? Pretty close in height and about the same weight, too. The same width across the shoulders and chest, the same skinny legs of a runner, the same color body hair.
“No,” Seth tells himself. “Don’t be stupid.”
But the idea won’t leave. The more he looks at the shape of the man through the tightly wound bandages, at the few stretches of skin and body that aren’t covered, the more he thinks –
“No,” he says again.
But he’s moving his hand back to the man’s face, back to the bandages there. He gently takes the edge of one and tries to peel it away. It doesn’t give. He follows it along, trying to find a seam to start the unwinding, turning the man’s head to look for it.
“This is crazy,” he mumbles to himself. “How would that make any sense at all?”
But he still needs to see. Needs to know for sure –
Because what if –
What if it is him?
What kind of answer would that be?
“Shit,” he’s saying, his anxiety rising, his heart beating faster. “Oh, shit.”
He finds the bandage end near the man’s left ear and starts peeling it back, working hard to get a start, then peeling more and more of it away. The bandage unwraps a layer across the man’s face, and Seth lifts the man’s head out of its cushion to unwind it around the back –