the timboucher experience

Barry Townsend turned left at what might appear to others as only a completely random hallway, one of half a million identical utility corridors which criss-crossed underneath his great city. Constructed out of the rotting husks of buildings from eleven major US cities, the empty lanes served as the invisible back-bone to Townsend’s immense floating urbanate, Mr. Blue Sky.

In the interests of securacy, the route through the byzantine web of access tunnels was known only to Barry Townsend, and the use of augmentation technology of any kind was expressly forbidden within its endless walls and corridors.

Barry took another left, three rights, walked fifty paces, turned around one hundred eighty degrees and opened a door on his left, which opened out onto another hallway. Barry stepped through without hesitation.

As part of his election by the inhabitants of Mr. Blue Sky to the office of mayor, the AI that controls the city had locked Barry within these tunnels for a hundred and twenty hours without food or water, and with a diminishing supply of oxygen. Barry’s task was to learn the secret of the tunnels or die.

The many-ringed urbanate had been without an acting mayor for some seventeen years. Elections were only allowed by Mr. Blue Sky every three and a third years, and of the five candidates who had been elected consecutively prior to Barry Townsend, none had evidently found the secret to traversing the tunnels. All but one had died during the ordeal and the fifth came back so insane that he had to be forcibly ejected from the urbanate as his tenuously low link to consensciousness put the securacy of all the inhabitants at great risk.

Barry still wondered what it was that had set him apart from the others. No records existed of their descent into the tunnels. And upon successfully unlocking the secret during his own initiation, Mr. Blue Sky had somehow sucked out and destroyed Barry’s memories of what first happened down there. And yet the seed of that knowledge had buried itself deeply enough into Barry’s mind during the experience that the controlling intelligence of the urbanate believed it to be safe.

Barry wasn’t so sure, but he had to admit that if anyone tried to torture him or otherwise steal the information from him, he simply couldn’t give it. He didn’t know it. He just walked into the tunnels (always from a different access point), turned left here, turned right there and before he knew it arrived at his destination. He couldn’t explain it and stopped trying to do so to himself or to anyone else.

Barry took one final left turn down a relatively short hallway and stopped outside a blue door at the end of it. He swept his hair over to one side, adjusted his coat and shirt, tried to smell his own breath – just in case – and knocked on the door. It slid open.

“Good evening, Miss DeMolay.”

• REPERMANENT [Sci-Fi Novel] - Sample Chapters [Index]
• REPERMANENT [Sci-Fi Novel] Introduction
• REPERMANENT [Sci-Fi Novel] 06
• REPERMANENT [Sci-Fi Novel] 07
• REPERMANENT [Sci-Fi Novel] 08