quinto formaggi: a tale of parallel worlds, some serial killings, and five different kinds of cheese
...because ZQ's characters really, really need to meet.
If you don't know much about them, don't worry; neither do I, and I'm writing this thing. :|
All Chapters
(REVISED 1 OCTOBER 2010)
--
The eleventh dimension. The final frontier.
Kenselton Hotel floats in an isolated bubble of hyperspace, hanging from nothing, supported by nothing, surrounded by an all-encompassing vacuum. Ten blocks at its inception, an additional central block, and more in the process of construction.
There are no windows anywhere. No entrances, no exits, its interior an unbroken shell of concrete.
Inside, the internal time hits 0730 hours and the transworld teleportation machines hum automatically back to life.
Kenselton Hotel needs to be populated.
It is Day 3 of its operation.
The shawls of coloured light rose and faded in the air, revealing the figure on the ground as their bright, chiming notes gave way to faint music from unseen speakers.
Adam Kaufman opened his eyes.
Soft light infused his field of vision in a steady glow of warmth. He blinked, still half in the dream he'd woken from, his mind struggling to place where he was.
The first thing he saw was his arm before him, resting against a polished wood floor, and that seemed strange to his half-asleep mind convinced that he had previously fallen asleep in bed and should not, now, be lying on a floor.
There was a plastic tag around his wrist. Adam gazed sleepily at it, trying to figure out what it was doing there. He rolled over and tugged at it with his other hand, turning it around in examination. It had a barcode, said 704270/003/KAU, was made of seamless plastic, and refused to come off.
...He was not in his home and he had been tagged. Suddenly more awake, Adam scrambled to his feet.
He was in a tiny room, just long enough to lie in, high enough to stand in, the walls smooth and cool to the touch. And there was a door with a note on it.
BLK-J/ENG/2
Welcome to Block J of Kenselton Hotel. We are pleased to inform you that you are part of an epic experiment involving the transportation of fictional characters like you into our world, henceforward known as the real world. In time, your services may be solicited by members of our paying public to indulge their whim of choice, which may include but not be limited to murder, sex, housekeeping and cannibalism.
There is no possibility of escape, but for your entertainment we have provided several red herrings that might make it seem otherwise. These are mainly to confuse and discourage you in the unlikely event that we have overlooked a genuine means of getting out of here.
The populating period will be a week or less, depending on when you came to join us. In this time and for some time after, your residence will be here in Block J, on the floor that our receptionist will allocate you based on your unique identification number. Have a pleasant stay.
P.S. Please do not tear this message off the door and throw it at our receptionist. >:(. We have had to replace it twice, and our receptionist knows kung fu.
Adam rubbed a hand across his eyes and blinked. Nothing changed.
He looked at his wrist tag. He looked at the door. He looked at his wrist tag. He pushed the door open, and it slid aside from under his palm.
Beyond lay a small lobby. In the lobby was a desk counter, and behind the counter sat the receptionist who knew kung fu.
Not looking up, she pushed a sheet of paper out between the counter and the unbreakable glass that separated her from everyone else. "This is a map," she said. "Mealtimes are stated here. You will be staying on the seventeenth floor."
Adam stared. There was something off about her movement and speech. "Are you a robot?" he asked.
She looked up. "Seventeenth floor," she replied with a stern look.
"Okay. What's going on here? Seriously?"
"Seventeenth floor."
Adam looked back at the cubicle from which he'd emerged, one of three in the room. He pointed at it. "How did I get there?"
"Seventeenth floor, or I'll call the guards."
"You can't just kidnap me from bed and-"
The receptionist hit a red button. "Code 1," she said into a small microphone. "704270 on J-64. Please assist. Set phasers to stun-"
Adam backed off, palms raised in surrender. "Seventeenth floor. Got it."
The receptionist hit the cancellation button. She tapped on the counter where the paper was. Adam picked it up and looked at it. It was a map. Mealtimes were stated there. The map had vague place descriptions, like 'bar'.
"You can read it on the seventeenth floor," the receptionist said smoothly.
Adam looked up. "There's something wrong with you, you know that?" he asked.
The receptionist gazed coolly at him.
The lift arrived on the seventeenth floor. Adam went through the stairwell and through a door to the hallway. There were rows of doors to his left and right, most closed, several slightly ajar and opening into darkness. Adam paused at one of the doors and pushed it open.
Light from the corridor cast his silhouette in the doorway as he stood gazing into the darkness of the deserted room. Two bunk beds on one wall, a desk and chair adjacent to them, all of it waiting in the silence for some future occupant. Adam had the sudden fear of having to live here, forever, sucked into its grey waiting depths to be lost in the shadows of template furniture.
This room, the one after... he had the feeling they were identical. This was a hotel of sorts, after all. Identical rooms; it was a pity there were no identical people to fill them in some mechanised fantasy of perfect order. Everything neat, running to function, minds acting as one-
Adam closed the door and turned his gaze ahead. The doorway to the end room stood ajar.
More significantly, its light was on, but in the absence of any sounds of life he did not know if it meant people. Someone, anyone, to help him explain away this mess, to tell him what was going on and why he was here and how it had all been some mistake and he could go home right now back to his bed and his home, ready to leave for yet another day of work at the Counter Terrorist Unit.
He paused before the door and listened; and while he thought he heard nothing at first, he soon became aware of the sound of steady breathing. Slow, as in sleep, barely discernible if not for the silence of the hallway.
Adam nudged the door further open and slipped in, closing it softly behind him.
This room was much larger than the others. There were no beds, no desk nor chair, but a kitchenette to his left and shelves of books and stuff to his right. Before him, facing the television set, was the back of a couch with legs hanging off one end.
This did not seem like a place for answers, Adam thought as he slowly moved around the couch, or a place for locating whoever was responsible for him being here. Such people waited smugly in high-backed chairs behind their desks, decked out in rich clothing and condescending smiles to bestow on the lowly folk who dared speak to them-
Adam paused by the side of the couch, a chill running down his spine. There was something uneasily familiar about the two people asleep on it.
Two people, oblivious to his entrance, oblivious to his approach; oblivious as he bent lower on shaky knees to get a closer look at their faces and confirm, with a wild, sick feeling, that both of them looked almost exactly like him.
Identical rooms for identical people.
Adam sank down onto the carpet, his breath caught in his throat, unable to take his eyes off the imperfect doppelgangers.
They weren't him, that much he was fairly certain of; one was slightly older, the other younger, just a few years out of his teens, both of them clad in the kind of clothes he'd never be caught dead in. But otherwise...
Adam shut his eyes and took several deep breaths. He had to get out of here. He opened his eyes and stood up.
His gaze was drawn back to the two on the couch, sleeping peacefully in each other's company - perhaps a little too close, but his mind refused to go there - and he tried to push aside the sudden mysterious yearning to stay there, with them, and belong-
No, he told himself. Get out of here. Get out.
He backed off towards the door, gaze still locked on the couch, and that was when he tripped over the remote control and yelled as he hit the ground.
The younger of the two others jolted awake and sat up. He found the source of the disturbance, and looked quizzically at Adam.
"...Hi," he said, voice wary.
Adam threw the offending remote control aside and looked up; and a jolt of weird shot through his mind as their eyes met.
He opened his mouth to say something. Nothing came out. He closed his mouth and went on staring.
"Why are you staring at me like that?" the kid said, suddenly defensive. "IS IT BECAUSE I'M BISEXUAL?"
Adam blinked, tension broken. "What?"
The other turned to shake his companion awake. "SAS!"
"Ungh."
"SASAN!"
"what."
He hit him.
"Ow!" Sasan got up. "Don't-"
"There's a new guy here and he's staring at us."
Adam got to his feet and stepped back. "Forget I'm here," he said quickly. "I'm going to go, okay? Just-"
He forced himself to look away and head towards the door with slow, heavy steps, aware that the others' eyes were on him-
"Where are you going?" Sasan asked, and Adam recoiled at the sound of his voice, different and wrong when outside his own head, and he could not bring himself to speak a reply and contribute to a one-voiced conversation.
Sasan got off the couch and came up to him and Adam knew he was there but dared not look and then he was in front of him in curious concern and Adam just wanted to look away, look away, trying to suppress the panic rising in him-
"There's no way out," Sasan said. "Other people have been through the place. There have been escape parties and numerous attempts to break out through the walls, and if any of it had succeeded we would have heard of it by n-"
"Stay away from me!," Adam said in a forceful burst, channelling fear into angry frustration because that he could deal with, that he could handle.
"Hey, I'm just trying to help. There's no use in running around out there looking for escape because there are thousands of people in this place and if none of them have gotten anywhere... Are you even listening?"
The shock of contact ran through him as Sasan placed his hand over Adam's on the doorknob and tried to push it off.
Adam snapped his hand back, raising his head to look at Sasan with a fear he tried and failed desperately to disguise; angry that he was scared, because there was no immediate danger at hand, angry that Sasan had dared to touch him, still reeling from the feel of his own fingers against his own, and he knew Sasan saw him flinch as he looked at him.
"I... know this is weird," Sasan said. "You'll get used to it eventually, but it might take a while. What's your name?"
"..."
"I'm Sasan. That's Smudge. He's bisexual."
"Yeah, and you're gay," Smudge retorted.
"Smudge!"
"You told him I'm bisexual."
Sasan sighed. "Smudge, you tell everyone you meet."
"...Oh. Yeah."
Sasan turned back at Adam, trying to look as though that exchange never happened, and wondered if it was just his imagination or if Adam had taken several steps back.
"So that's us," Sasan said. "What about you?"
Adam struggled again to meet Sasan's gaze, angrily forcing himself to do so because to give in to fear would be cowardice; struggled to make sense of the sight of his own eyes looking back at him, eyes the same and yet somehow different, controlled by a foreign mind. Sasan was a stranger he knew nothing about. Like Smudge, he moved differently, he talked differently, no more similar to him than any hypothetical person grabbed off the street, and this knowledge fought against the instinctual feeling of kinship that arose as Adam looked at them-
"Adam," he finally said.
"There can't be no way out," he added.
"I would tell you to go and see for yourself, but the escape parties tend to have a lot of people who don't seem completely human and can do really freaky things and for some reason a few of them keep trying to kill us."
"Why?"
"I have no idea."
"It helps if you say 'I'm not Sylar' and run," Smudge advised.
Sasan shrugged. "That helps, but I still got hit with a spanner."
"Who's Sylar?" Adam asked.
Sasan bent down to pick up the remote control and return it to the table. "I don't know," he said. "But I don't think we ever want to find out."
*
CHAPTER TWO >>
If you don't know much about them, don't worry; neither do I, and I'm writing this thing. :|
All Chapters
(REVISED 1 OCTOBER 2010)
--
The eleventh dimension. The final frontier.
Kenselton Hotel floats in an isolated bubble of hyperspace, hanging from nothing, supported by nothing, surrounded by an all-encompassing vacuum. Ten blocks at its inception, an additional central block, and more in the process of construction.
There are no windows anywhere. No entrances, no exits, its interior an unbroken shell of concrete.
Inside, the internal time hits 0730 hours and the transworld teleportation machines hum automatically back to life.
Kenselton Hotel needs to be populated.
It is Day 3 of its operation.
The shawls of coloured light rose and faded in the air, revealing the figure on the ground as their bright, chiming notes gave way to faint music from unseen speakers.
Adam Kaufman opened his eyes.
Soft light infused his field of vision in a steady glow of warmth. He blinked, still half in the dream he'd woken from, his mind struggling to place where he was.
The first thing he saw was his arm before him, resting against a polished wood floor, and that seemed strange to his half-asleep mind convinced that he had previously fallen asleep in bed and should not, now, be lying on a floor.
There was a plastic tag around his wrist. Adam gazed sleepily at it, trying to figure out what it was doing there. He rolled over and tugged at it with his other hand, turning it around in examination. It had a barcode, said 704270/003/KAU, was made of seamless plastic, and refused to come off.
...He was not in his home and he had been tagged. Suddenly more awake, Adam scrambled to his feet.
He was in a tiny room, just long enough to lie in, high enough to stand in, the walls smooth and cool to the touch. And there was a door with a note on it.
BLK-J/ENG/2
Welcome to Block J of Kenselton Hotel. We are pleased to inform you that you are part of an epic experiment involving the transportation of fictional characters like you into our world, henceforward known as the real world. In time, your services may be solicited by members of our paying public to indulge their whim of choice, which may include but not be limited to murder, sex, housekeeping and cannibalism.
There is no possibility of escape, but for your entertainment we have provided several red herrings that might make it seem otherwise. These are mainly to confuse and discourage you in the unlikely event that we have overlooked a genuine means of getting out of here.
The populating period will be a week or less, depending on when you came to join us. In this time and for some time after, your residence will be here in Block J, on the floor that our receptionist will allocate you based on your unique identification number. Have a pleasant stay.
P.S. Please do not tear this message off the door and throw it at our receptionist. >:(. We have had to replace it twice, and our receptionist knows kung fu.
Adam rubbed a hand across his eyes and blinked. Nothing changed.
He looked at his wrist tag. He looked at the door. He looked at his wrist tag. He pushed the door open, and it slid aside from under his palm.
Beyond lay a small lobby. In the lobby was a desk counter, and behind the counter sat the receptionist who knew kung fu.
Not looking up, she pushed a sheet of paper out between the counter and the unbreakable glass that separated her from everyone else. "This is a map," she said. "Mealtimes are stated here. You will be staying on the seventeenth floor."
Adam stared. There was something off about her movement and speech. "Are you a robot?" he asked.
She looked up. "Seventeenth floor," she replied with a stern look.
"Okay. What's going on here? Seriously?"
"Seventeenth floor."
Adam looked back at the cubicle from which he'd emerged, one of three in the room. He pointed at it. "How did I get there?"
"Seventeenth floor, or I'll call the guards."
"You can't just kidnap me from bed and-"
The receptionist hit a red button. "Code 1," she said into a small microphone. "704270 on J-64. Please assist. Set phasers to stun-"
Adam backed off, palms raised in surrender. "Seventeenth floor. Got it."
The receptionist hit the cancellation button. She tapped on the counter where the paper was. Adam picked it up and looked at it. It was a map. Mealtimes were stated there. The map had vague place descriptions, like 'bar'.
"You can read it on the seventeenth floor," the receptionist said smoothly.
Adam looked up. "There's something wrong with you, you know that?" he asked.
The receptionist gazed coolly at him.
The lift arrived on the seventeenth floor. Adam went through the stairwell and through a door to the hallway. There were rows of doors to his left and right, most closed, several slightly ajar and opening into darkness. Adam paused at one of the doors and pushed it open.
Light from the corridor cast his silhouette in the doorway as he stood gazing into the darkness of the deserted room. Two bunk beds on one wall, a desk and chair adjacent to them, all of it waiting in the silence for some future occupant. Adam had the sudden fear of having to live here, forever, sucked into its grey waiting depths to be lost in the shadows of template furniture.
This room, the one after... he had the feeling they were identical. This was a hotel of sorts, after all. Identical rooms; it was a pity there were no identical people to fill them in some mechanised fantasy of perfect order. Everything neat, running to function, minds acting as one-
Adam closed the door and turned his gaze ahead. The doorway to the end room stood ajar.
More significantly, its light was on, but in the absence of any sounds of life he did not know if it meant people. Someone, anyone, to help him explain away this mess, to tell him what was going on and why he was here and how it had all been some mistake and he could go home right now back to his bed and his home, ready to leave for yet another day of work at the Counter Terrorist Unit.
He paused before the door and listened; and while he thought he heard nothing at first, he soon became aware of the sound of steady breathing. Slow, as in sleep, barely discernible if not for the silence of the hallway.
Adam nudged the door further open and slipped in, closing it softly behind him.
This room was much larger than the others. There were no beds, no desk nor chair, but a kitchenette to his left and shelves of books and stuff to his right. Before him, facing the television set, was the back of a couch with legs hanging off one end.
This did not seem like a place for answers, Adam thought as he slowly moved around the couch, or a place for locating whoever was responsible for him being here. Such people waited smugly in high-backed chairs behind their desks, decked out in rich clothing and condescending smiles to bestow on the lowly folk who dared speak to them-
Adam paused by the side of the couch, a chill running down his spine. There was something uneasily familiar about the two people asleep on it.
Two people, oblivious to his entrance, oblivious to his approach; oblivious as he bent lower on shaky knees to get a closer look at their faces and confirm, with a wild, sick feeling, that both of them looked almost exactly like him.
Identical rooms for identical people.
Adam sank down onto the carpet, his breath caught in his throat, unable to take his eyes off the imperfect doppelgangers.
They weren't him, that much he was fairly certain of; one was slightly older, the other younger, just a few years out of his teens, both of them clad in the kind of clothes he'd never be caught dead in. But otherwise...
Adam shut his eyes and took several deep breaths. He had to get out of here. He opened his eyes and stood up.
His gaze was drawn back to the two on the couch, sleeping peacefully in each other's company - perhaps a little too close, but his mind refused to go there - and he tried to push aside the sudden mysterious yearning to stay there, with them, and belong-
No, he told himself. Get out of here. Get out.
He backed off towards the door, gaze still locked on the couch, and that was when he tripped over the remote control and yelled as he hit the ground.
The younger of the two others jolted awake and sat up. He found the source of the disturbance, and looked quizzically at Adam.
"...Hi," he said, voice wary.
Adam threw the offending remote control aside and looked up; and a jolt of weird shot through his mind as their eyes met.
He opened his mouth to say something. Nothing came out. He closed his mouth and went on staring.
"Why are you staring at me like that?" the kid said, suddenly defensive. "IS IT BECAUSE I'M BISEXUAL?"
Adam blinked, tension broken. "What?"
The other turned to shake his companion awake. "SAS!"
"Ungh."
"SASAN!"
"what."
He hit him.
"Ow!" Sasan got up. "Don't-"
"There's a new guy here and he's staring at us."
Adam got to his feet and stepped back. "Forget I'm here," he said quickly. "I'm going to go, okay? Just-"
He forced himself to look away and head towards the door with slow, heavy steps, aware that the others' eyes were on him-
"Where are you going?" Sasan asked, and Adam recoiled at the sound of his voice, different and wrong when outside his own head, and he could not bring himself to speak a reply and contribute to a one-voiced conversation.
Sasan got off the couch and came up to him and Adam knew he was there but dared not look and then he was in front of him in curious concern and Adam just wanted to look away, look away, trying to suppress the panic rising in him-
"There's no way out," Sasan said. "Other people have been through the place. There have been escape parties and numerous attempts to break out through the walls, and if any of it had succeeded we would have heard of it by n-"
"Stay away from me!," Adam said in a forceful burst, channelling fear into angry frustration because that he could deal with, that he could handle.
"Hey, I'm just trying to help. There's no use in running around out there looking for escape because there are thousands of people in this place and if none of them have gotten anywhere... Are you even listening?"
The shock of contact ran through him as Sasan placed his hand over Adam's on the doorknob and tried to push it off.
Adam snapped his hand back, raising his head to look at Sasan with a fear he tried and failed desperately to disguise; angry that he was scared, because there was no immediate danger at hand, angry that Sasan had dared to touch him, still reeling from the feel of his own fingers against his own, and he knew Sasan saw him flinch as he looked at him.
"I... know this is weird," Sasan said. "You'll get used to it eventually, but it might take a while. What's your name?"
"..."
"I'm Sasan. That's Smudge. He's bisexual."
"Yeah, and you're gay," Smudge retorted.
"Smudge!"
"You told him I'm bisexual."
Sasan sighed. "Smudge, you tell everyone you meet."
"...Oh. Yeah."
Sasan turned back at Adam, trying to look as though that exchange never happened, and wondered if it was just his imagination or if Adam had taken several steps back.
"So that's us," Sasan said. "What about you?"
Adam struggled again to meet Sasan's gaze, angrily forcing himself to do so because to give in to fear would be cowardice; struggled to make sense of the sight of his own eyes looking back at him, eyes the same and yet somehow different, controlled by a foreign mind. Sasan was a stranger he knew nothing about. Like Smudge, he moved differently, he talked differently, no more similar to him than any hypothetical person grabbed off the street, and this knowledge fought against the instinctual feeling of kinship that arose as Adam looked at them-
"Adam," he finally said.
"There can't be no way out," he added.
"I would tell you to go and see for yourself, but the escape parties tend to have a lot of people who don't seem completely human and can do really freaky things and for some reason a few of them keep trying to kill us."
"Why?"
"I have no idea."
"It helps if you say 'I'm not Sylar' and run," Smudge advised.
Sasan shrugged. "That helps, but I still got hit with a spanner."
"Who's Sylar?" Adam asked.
Sasan bent down to pick up the remote control and return it to the table. "I don't know," he said. "But I don't think we ever want to find out."
*
CHAPTER TWO >>