Graymere

I exited the vessel and made my way down the hallway, marveling at how narrow it was. I saw some construction underway and remembered that Mortimer was remodeled in 1865, the year Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was published. Another book I wouldn’t be able to read yet.

I stopped by one of the little shops on my way to the tubes. I looked on the shelves to see what books I could read. There was a collection of Shakespeare plays, most of which I had read multiple times. My fingers brushed past Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre, not quite in the mood for all that drama. I lingered on A Christmas Carol for a moment before finally selecting Frankenstein. I took my selection to the cashier and typed in my employee code O431. It was the closest I thing I had to a real name, a real identity. That was one of the reasons my mission was so important.

I had a life before Mortimer, nearly a decade of memories, and I need to know what it was like. What was my name? What were my parents like? Why did they give their daughter up to be trained by an agency? Were they trying to help me or did they just not love me?

The whole point of wiping my mind was to clear space to learn more of the things they wanted me to know, to control what I knew and what I didn’t know, to make sure that I was loyal only to them. Only once I had succeeded in a certain number of missions would my memories be returned. I wasn’t sure exactly how many, but I suspected that this first mission was the most important.

My task was simple, supposedly. I needed to investigate the strange occurrences surrounding Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. There seemed to be more patients than there should be, and their crimes were most unusual. There was talk of supernatural monsters and dark magic. I needed to find out what was going on and what key events started this alternate timeline. Fixing it was the job of someone higher up than me, someone with intact memories.

I bought and drank some tea as I waited for the crowds by the tubes to dwindle. Everyone had to go in one by one. This was one of the problems that caused the remodeling.

When I finally made it to the tubes, I paused to touch the glass. It looked like a giant hamster tube leading up through the ceiling and farther upwards until I could no longer see it.

“We don’t have all day,” a gruff voice from behind me said. The fingers closed around the coin in my pocket as I glanced around at Ernest Traubel—a gray-haired old man who owned three different golf courses on Mars—and stepped inside the opening to the capsule. A curved piece of the capsule slid around, acting as a door closing. Then I was pulled towards the surface of Earth by the pneumatic tube. I tried not to scream as I gained speed. This was the first time I had been in one of these that I could remember, but I suspected that someone made the journey more comfortable in the future.

My capsule began to slow and eventually came to a stop at the top of the tube in a warehouse. The door opened and I quickly stepped out, not wanting the capsule to fall back down to get Ernest with me still inside. My eyes adjusted to the light and I scanned my surroundings. There were maybe seven other tubes in the room I was in, each delivering disoriented passengers one by one. Arrows pointed us to dressing rooms to get clothing appropriate for this time period. I groaned, dreading being dressed in all those frilly layers with too much lacing and barely enough room to breathe. Maybe I could pretend to be a man. That would come with its own difficulties, though, and I wanted my mission to succeed. I took a deep breath and stepped into the room to see what horrors await me.