White Christopher

The outside world was unknown to her, but she could see a glimpse of it through the window in His room. And that glimpse confused her quite a bit. For there was a small garden of various fruits, falling from a trio of trees, and clusters there on the circular patch of grass of peaches, apples and pears. Beyond that: numbers and stars, infinitely so, and she could not tell which came first. Her better judgement assumed that the vast array of shimmering celestial spheres were far beyond the fields of raining digits, but the instinctual voice of her subconscious kept nagging at her that the numbers were even deeper back than the stars. Anyhow, it didn’t really matter, because she was White Christopher, just another captive soul to the White Christopher who ran the Ore from on high, and she had never been allowed access to any of the inclinators in all her sixteen long years of life.

The Ore was a giant four-sided pyramid (hence the four inclinators in the corners of each level), and the sixteen year-old White Christopher resided on the 931st level, a mere 273 floors down from the Pinnacle, which rested atop the Peak of the Ore, on the 1204th floor. But our young White Christopher knew none of this; she knew very little of anything, for she had spent her sixteen years in complete solitude. She had her large corner suite all to herself, and the four halls outside her room as well. In the halls she would run by hundreds of rooms before ending up back at her own, and she had passed countless days knocking on the doors, screaming for someone to come out— anyone. But there was never a response. Never a sign of any life in that place save herself and the lights that would sometimes go on and off twenty or so levels either below or above her.

It was in her sixteenth year that White Christopher finally did learn for certain that she was not entirely alone in that tall peaked structure, for a visitor came thumping down on her floor from above. It was a boy, older than our resident of the 931st level but not by much.

“Who are you?” asked White Christopher of the 931st with a trembling voice (she had learned the English tongue from the television in her suite which was always on— incapable of being shut off or controlled in any manner). She had waited for this moment all her life, to see someone real in this world besides just herself in the mirror.

“I’m White Christopher,” responded the boy White Christopher.

“I’m White Christopher too,” smiled our resident of the 931st. “How did you get here?”

White Christopher of the 1135th explained how he had begun leaping down from his home level about a week ago, managing to make about 30 heart-stopping jumps in a day, descending one level at a time. His hope had been to find just one other living being, much the same as W.C. of the 931st. In all his bold jumps, he had come across no one, until now. Sure, there had been suites lit up with the noises of inhabitants inside, but whenever he had knocked and bid them to open up their doors, the lights went off and all reverted to a wary silence.

“You’re the first person in this place who’s come out to meet me,” admitted W.C. 1135.

“Is it hard to make the jump?” asked W.C. 931, peering down over the ledge at the black abyss below.

“Very hard,” nodded W.C. 1135 regretfully, “Very hard.”

“Well it can’t be that hard, you’ve done it 200 times.”

“But I’ve seen others on floors above and below fall to their deaths. It’s not a very practical thing, jumping down the levels of a pyramid. Because the level below is never straight down. You’ve got to hang off your own level, and then propel your whole at an angle so you don’t miss the next level. Because if you do, there’s no recovering. You find yourself farther and farther from the halls, and then you’re just falling down the middle of the pyramid, with no hope of a light drop. One false move and it’s all over.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad,” shrugged W.C. 931, who at that moment would’ve preferred an end to existence over staying another minute on her floor which she had explored to its full capacity after an agonizing sixteen years of loneliness.

W.C. 1135 asked why she wasn’t happy to finally be face to face with another person after so many years; she replied that was thrilled at his sudden appearance, but so much more thrilled at the prospect of descending levels to find out what lay at the base of their pyramid.

They argued for something like a day as to their next course of action, and in the interim gave each other new names, since they had both been told by their television sets that both their respective names were White Christopher. W.C. 1135 decided on Muhendis, and W.C. 931 went with Joan.

Their new names being settled, Muhendis and Joan began leaping to their dooms, one level at a time, and it was no meager feat. For Joan, it took all her physicality, coupled with absolute concentration and the desire to live. Very many times she found herself slipping off the ledge before she could fling herself towards the next level down, or landing on the ledge down and nearly toppling backwards to a painful demise. After a few too many of these close calls, Joan decided that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to find an open suite and settle down with this Muhendis fellow. He certainly liked her enough, anyway.

After six months of jumping, they still found themselves high at the 456th level, and nothing regarding their situation had changed. They had learned nothing, they had met no one new, they still had no way of breaking into the glass-sheltered inclinators which rode up the side of the pyramid from its base to the Pinnacle of White Christopher, and they were quite tired. So they decided to take a break.

Their break came there on the 456th, because when they landed, they were greeted by a jolly old fellow called— would you believe it— White Christopher. White Christopher 456 had lived in his charming suite for something like 300 years, so he said, and upon hearing this, Muhendis took it upon himself to throw W.C. 456 off the ledge after gaining access to his room.

“He’s had plenty of time in this place,” sighed Muhendis, fresh off his murder, coming back into the room to find Joan filling up the hot tub. “I’m sure we were doing him a favor.”

“I don’t know,” reflected Joan, taking a sip of wine and dipping down into the water. “He seemed happy enough.”

“Well that’s the thing,” smiled Muhendis, joining Joan in the tub. “He was happy; we weren’t. We’ve been risking our lives every day for months, leaping down this damn pyramid, spending the night in hallways. He’s been comfortable here for 300 years. I see what I did as an act of balancing.”

“Maybe so, maybe so,” muttered Joan, falling asleep in newfound serenity.

Their serenity did not last— not even a single night— for within the hour, that suite on the 456th was invaded authorities in sleek metallic uniforms. The next thing Joan and Muhendis knew, they were exactly where they had wanted to be: at the base of their pyramid. Except the ground level was nothing to be especially fond of.

They looked around, surprised to be sure. In all their lives they had never guessed that they had been living above all this, all these…. shelves. They looked around and saw shelves. Rows and rows of high shelves, with near-blinding lights, and cans and jars and boxes of food as far as the eye could see.

They were in a grocery store, and this store of food stretched from one end of the pyramid’s base to the other, and all along the four walls.

For all their lives, Joan and Muhendis had wondered where all the people had been. They were all here.

There was hardly a spare inch to be found in that place. Men and women stood shoulder to shoulder, shoving their way through aisles. Some of the younger ones took care in examining the products they sought, while most of the older ones moved in a mechanical fashion, with blank looks on their faces, as though their souls had vacated their bodies long ago, to find what little peace they could in fabricated realms.

Orientation came swiftly. Tied together at the wrists, Joan and Muhendis were sentenced to a century-long shift of sending food up the shafts, to what few people resided up on the high levels. After their century was up, they were then free to work for wages, and at the present wage, they would then be able to purchase their old units on the 931st and 1135th floors after an additional century of labor.

The man in charge of their orientation was White Christopher, and he refused to call Joan or Muhendis anything but White Christopher, and White Christopher.

“What is the point of any of this?” asked Joan rather bluntly, with a plethora of follow-up questions.

“I am not permitted to answer any of your questions,” answered the White Christopher in charge of orientation. “But this is a Grocery Store of Answers. On the night shift, after you have shopped your food for the day, you are free to shop for yourselves. There are questions printed on every product. And you may use your daily wages to purchase those products, and find the answers within.”

And so years passed by, with Joan and Muhendis spending their nights shopping for answers, rather than sleeping (for they had no beds anymore anyway).

The vast majority of the questions and answers they found were utterly pointless. They would buy a can of beans with the question “What is nine minus five?” and find the answer inside to read “The product of nine minus five.”

Or they would purchase a box of cookies with the question “Why is your ass huge?” and find the answer inside to be “Better luck next time, chump.”

In some aisles they would indeed have better luck. The specialty cheeses revealed themselves to be far more profound.

“What is this place?” asked a block of Peruvian Pepper Jack. And inside, it answered: “Fallen short of its original intent.”

Joan began drinking soda, as the aisle seemed geared towards her. Every week or so she began to hit a lucky bottle, with questions like “Where did I come from?” and “Why was I born alone?”

From these bottles of soda, she learned that her parents— both conveniently named White Christopher— had spent their entire lives working at the base of the pyramid, so that they could live out the final days of their lives in the peace and serenity of a suite on the 931st. They died before Joan reached one year of age, but the suites were inheritable, and so Joan had remained.

This sudden realization made Joan feel absolutely abysmal. There she had been, in a comfortable room enjoying the fruits of her parent’s long long labors, and she had cast it all aside to go back to the same miserable fate they had endured for the sake of getting her out of that position. But she did not dwell on that thought for long. She turned instead to rage and fury, looking about and seeing thousands of people toiling in everlasting damnation, while thousands of empty homes of luxurious comfort stood above them over their shoulders. Did all these infinite shoppers know what vacancies abounded over their heads? And that they would spend their entire existences walking the same aisles just for a chance at a year or two in the quiet upper havens? Even more upsetting was the thought, then, of others like her, born into a world without love or guidance, knowing nothing but peace yet ever wondering what lay beyond, until it drove them to the point of harshly falling from the heavens to a highly disappointing earth.

While Joan lay submerged in these dark thoughts, Muhendis gave her a nudge. He pointed to the produce section, where a raw onion sat with a rather tempting question: “Is it possible to turn the pyramid upside down?”

Joan and Muhendis bit into the onion, and found the answer to be just as tantalizing: “I suppose it could be. Check back with future onions for further instruction.”