The dim halls of the bunker grew dimmer still in the aftermath of X’s outburst of violence directed at Hoichi; the clown continuously used insults whenever addressing the other man, but often the words regressed as grumbles or whispers and Hoichi kept his distance when X entered a room—if X noticed this difference in behavior, he never commented on it. Nothing though, not even X’s surveillance, stopped Hoichi from enjoying himself when he was alone—the clown continued listening to music and dancing at his leisure.

  His wound wrapping did little good—within the day after the scalpel had pierced his hand, his skin was sealed and the only thing which remained of the event was a pair of thin scars; one on the back of his hand and one upon his palm. They were hardly visible even when searching for them.

  Telekinesis was what X told him it was, and so swaths of the clown’s free time were spent menacing inanimate objects with his fingers stuck stiffly out in front of himself while he grunted.

  He took himself, on the morning of the day after which his sister fended off a horde of mutants, to the level one kitchen and began to try his psychic abilities on the bench-tables there; none moved and a vein on his forehead protruded as he grunted. It was a hopeless endeavor, and he marched back and forth then tried again and again, until finally he shrugged and moved to the long, dustless cabinetry.

  Sitting there was a bag of cold microwave popcorn, swollen from its cooking. He’d not been the one to produce it, but he peeled the bag open and sniffed its contents then popped a few pieces into his mouth, chewing loudly while smacking his lips together.

  “Eh,” said the clown. He shook his head and protruded his tongue and blew air to imitate flatulence. He tossed the bag of popcorn back onto the counter where it slid, haphazardly spilling its guts. “Idiot,” he said to the floor, and he went back to the bench-table he'd concentrated on before.

  “Stabbing me like a mother,” he swung his arms at his sides while keeping his fists tightly pinched. He stared at the bench-table and twisted his face into a fierce ugly expression of pure contempt. His nostrils flared and the table lifted free from the floor by several inches.

  Hoichi grinned and the table returned to whence it came; its metal feet were muffled by the rug beneath it. The object sat askew, but otherwise unhurt.

  The clown nodded and posed his hands like exaggerated claws and twisted his face again. This time, the table came so abruptly from its position and launched into the ceiling so hard that it echoed and Hoichi jumped at the noise, recoiling from where he stood. The table clattered hard against the floor with one of its feet bent outward from its fall, so the thing leaned too much for any sitting comfort.

  Stuffing his hands into the pockets of the shorts provided to him, he whistled and jumped again upon noticing X standing in the doorway to the kitchen; the strange man was framed there stiffly like a box.

  “You understand then?” asked X.

  Hoichi blinked a few more times and shifted on his bare feet, “Yeah.”

  “Do you understand that you can do almost anything, then? You could, in theory, remove someone’s heart from their chest. You could, in theory, manifest something from nothing. You can bend reality. Moving things is fine—that’s why you’ve hands, after all—but you can bring food to the hungry or water to the thirsty or even dominate the world. There is a limit, however,” X seemed to nod, “It’s your adrenal glands. That’s the limiter of your power. Push to hard, and you go into total renal failure.” He seemed to nod again. “You’ll kill yourself with it. Someday, you will. They all do.”

  “Do you know what this is? Where did it come from?” asked the clown.

  X’s face didn’t change; nor did his posture. “You are an experiment gone awry. You are a thing which should not exist, and yet somehow does.”

  “Why do you know this?”

  “A colleague of mine worked on this exact thing. But who needs powers like that in a world of limitless power.” Silence filled the conversation while the pair of them stared at one another. Finally, X guffawed dryly, and continued, “That makes no sense to you. What you need to know is that if you use that power of yours, you will assuredly die. It might take days or years depending on how much you exhaust it, but there is a limit, and you must be mindful of it.”

  “Where did it come from?” repeated the clown.

  “You’d need to ask Jonathan Wright that question.”

  “Who the fuck is that?”

  “He was a captain of industry. One of them. A friend of mine before I was forced to recede from the world above.”

  “How? How does it happen?”

  “It functions much like an airborne virus, from what I understand.”

  “What?” shouted the clown.

  X waved a hand. “It was released into the general populace over two centuries ago.”

  “So, everyone can do this? That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I never said that. Some ancestors of yours likely took it in and survived. Even among those that can do what you do, it remains dormant in most. Every living organism on earth is likely to have some strain of it in them. If you’re asking specifics, I have a cursory knowledge of anatomy and medicine, but robotics is my strong suit. Wright was the geneticist.”

  “This guy’s dead though? Over two-hundred years?” The clown rocked on the heels of his feet and examined the ceiling and held his lips apart as he stared out from himself with his brow furrowed. “That doesn’t make any sense. Why would he do that?” The clown froze and shuddered and squinted at X who remained in the threshold, “You said he was a friend. Are you dead? A robot? Is that what’s wrong with you?”

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  “There is nothing wrong with me, Hoichi. I am not dead.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-seven.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “No shit. This body is twenty-seven years old. This facility’s power—I say with some pride—has never gone down, so I can say with certainty that the clocks I have are spot on.”

  “What are you?”

  “You should meet Eliza,” said X.

  The clown frowned.

  ***

  The strange man took the clown through avenues of the facility he’d yet seen, and in their walk, the pair remained quiet; several times throughout, the clown began to open his mouth as though to speak, but only a huff of air exited. The clown examined the other man with a newfound curiosity that was evident on his face. The stilted way in which X’s heels clicked along the floor, the stiff movements of his arms when he walked, and the sturdiness and assuredness he carried himself with.

  When the clown did speak again, he simply said, “Fuckface is a bot.”

  X did not respond and instead continued leading the other man down hallways which spilled into catwalk pathways which overlooked empty and dark atrium-like interiors, and when they came an elevator, X displayed his arm as though to insist that the clown go first. Hoichi hesitantly followed the offer and stepped into the closet sized room, sagging his shoulders while remaining in the leftward back corner while X stood in the center without looking at the clown.

  Upon the elevator doors gliding shut with them inside, X clicked his remote and their platform shifted downward through the earth; Hoichi was left in the windowless tube with the robot, and he pushed his shoulder blades against the rear wall, staring at the floor. There was no sound, no shift of pulley systems nor any electrical hum.

  “How far?” asked Hoichi.

  X forced a noise like a sigh and pivoted how he stood to look on the clown fully with his unblinking gaze, “Hoichi, this is the way to Eliza—I told you. You, not so long ago, seemed intrigued to meet her and now you finally will.”

  “Alright. But how far down are we going?”

  “Are you again stuck on your theory of this being hell? Well, I’m no Virgil and you certainly aren’t Dante. Relax. Are you still afraid because of what I did?” X put his left hand out, keeping his palm face-up, flat—he brought his right fist down onto the palm, as if to imitate his previous act of violence. “I won’t hurt you anymore. As long as you don’t intend me any harm. Or Eliza. Relax, Hoichi. I’ll apologize, if you’d like.”

  “Whatever,” said the clown, putting his fists in his pocket, “Whe—

  The elevator doors slid open, and X stepped out onto the landing, motioning for the clown to follow.

  This new place was a hall the same as the rest, though seemingly even further polished than the parts of the facility Hoichi had yet seen.

  X led Hoichi rightward down the hall and there were more rooms and broad breaks in the walls on either side which gave way to amenities: showers and kitchens and libraries with paper books and even places decorated—though sparingly—with framed nondescript landscape photography. Moving beyond these, the pair traversed the desolate halls, the robot X with a steady pace, and Hoichi with a hesitant gait behind—the clown continuously wrung his hands together, fidgeted with the hair around his ears, kept his expression permanently pulled into a weird grimace.

  “Yo, roboto, you said before that this place was built a long time ago, and that it’s a place for,” the clown puffed out his chest and put on a mock baritone, “Captains of industry,” his shoulders returned whence they’d come as did his voice—into a slouch, “But what does that even mean? Who were these captains of industry—wait! How long have you been down here alone?”

  To the continuous prattle of the clown’s prodding, X did not answer but merely glanced over his shoulder as if to shoot a nonexistent expression to the other man.

  “You’re a fuckin’ awful conversationalist,” muttered the clown. Once again, he fell into a silent walking trance behind X.

  It wasn’t until they’d walked in this fashion, down myriad halls and through other strange places—more decadent dining halls with chandeliers, open rotundas with plastic foliage jutting from metal pots—some hanging from walls and some lining where the floors ended—and the rush of a fabricated waterfall, that either of them spoke again. At the rushing water, produced from a horizontal rectangular hole in the high wall, Hoichi froze and moved there in the large circular great room, and he went to the place of the basin and put a knee there and stared into the clear liquid and reached out with his hand to brush the surface of the rippling water with his outstretched fingertips. “This?” asked the clown, “How?”

  “The bunker needed certain human touches,” said X, “Or did you mean to ask where the water is coming from?”

  The clown pushed off from the metal basin and shook his wet hand dry while standing to look at X, “You know how many people up there would kill for a place like this?”

  “It comes from the facility’s reserves. I don’t require much water, so I’ve never needed the ground pumps. Quite the waste, honestly.”

  “Who was this for?” The clown turned again to ogle the waterfall.

  “I would ask you to refrain from repeating questions, if you can, Hoichi.”

  “No, goddammit!” said the clown, “What is all this? There’s a whole world underground and you want me to just accept that?”

  X shrugged, “It will exist whether you accept it or not. Let’s go.” He turned to leave.

  Hoichi followed with a more robustness to his step. He continued with his inquiries as they went, regardless of whether he received any real answer—X seldom verbalized an answer.

  Finally, after roaming like ants through a maze, they came to a narrowed hall with a single door at its end and the pair of men went there and X lifted his remote one last time from his pocket to slide open their way. Beyond the was a room equivalent to Hoichi’s in size. Garbage cluttered the floor so that the surface beneath could hardly be discerned and the walls were all scrawled with marker etchings from someone’s mad pen; many of the marks on the walls were strange, longed faces with profane words scrawled alongside them. Several phallic doodles stood out among the jumbled mess of black-ink art there.

  X stepped within and Hoichi followed, stepping over wild mountains of discarded popcorn packages, either swollen or half emptied—the puffs and kernels crunched beneath their feet. The ceiling too, was not untouched by the mad penman’s art, and Hoichi stood there in the small room alongside X, staring directly up at it. With the incredibly lowlight which entered the place from the doorway, much of the art disappeared at its edges in shadow.

  The clown, after thoroughly tracing the mess, spoke, “Holy shit, did Eliza do all this?”

  “It’s not as tidy as the rest of the bunker, I admit,” said X. He moved to the center of the room and bent and pawed the piled popcorn mess from where it had avalanched onto a device bolted to the floor there. The device was a circular ridged platform only large enough for a person to stand on, and after X had pushed much of the debris away, he said, “Eliza’s right here.”

  Hoichi craned over to examine the device and saw a pair of women’s underwear taped there to the device. “What’s that now?” asked the clown.

  X clicked a button on the side of the device and a shrill hiss entered the room before ceasing and suddenly, a naked woman appeared from nothingness in front of him. She stood erect, directly atop the platform. If not for the slightest, dreamy waver of her image and the light she produced, she could have passed for flesh; she was a hologram.

  Her visage locked onto Hoichi and she started immediately, “You need to kill him! His name is Edgar Muse, and yo—

  The hologram disappeared; X had touched the button on the side of the platform again and then whispered, “You lied to me. You said you’d—” X stopped abruptly from speaking aloud and hunkered to snatch the pair of underwear from where it was taped; he fondled it in his hand then tucked it away into his pocket before placing his expressionless eyes on Hoichi. “I’ll take you back.”