The Annihilation of Foreverland

just brought the whole island down? No sense, Danny Boy. It makes no sense.”
    They leaned against the wall like they were told. They looked through the window at the Investors, still motionless. Some of them were breathing. Occasionally, they’d twitch like the tracker was still hitting them with a low dose of voltage to keep them out. Danny didn’t feel so sad about Mr. Jones, not after putting it all together. Maybe he did care about Danny, maybe he did want the best for him while he was here. It didn’t matter. In the end, the old bastard brought him here to steal his body.
    And that could not be forgotten.
    Zin was hunched over Sid, looking closely at his open eyes. Danny walked around the bed toward the back wall.
    “Where you going?” he asked.
    “I’m not waiting around to get zapped.” Danny put his hand on the doorknob.
    “Hell, if you’re going to do that, let’s just get out of here.”
    “And go where? We can’t outrun this.” Danny smacked the back of his neck. “Let’s see what else these old bastards are up to.”
    Zin thought for a second. He was right behind Danny.

    The room was fairly dark, lit only by a few backlights beaming up the wall near some of the desks and the faint glow of tiny lights flashing on computers and various machines.
    The room was dominated by a large stainless steel table in the center with a big lamp hanging from the ceiling. A number of shelves and steel carts held more computers or medical equipment.
    “Think they did surgery in here?” Zin asked.
    “I don’t know.”
    It didn’t look like surgery. There was just the one table and too many computers. If anything, it was an autopsy room.
    There were nine doors on the wall to the right arranged in three stacks of three. Like a tic-tac-toe board. The doors were only three feet by three feet. Danny had seen doors like that on TV. They were used to store bodies. Pull the handle and the bed would slide out just like a filing cabinet with a plastic bag and a body inside.
    He touched the handle on the one in the center. Did they deep freeze a new candidate until they were ready to suck out his memory and scramble his mind with random ones? It would be so claustrophobic inside. And what if they woke up?
    He yanked the handle. An empty slab rolled out with a cloud of frosty air. It was a freezer. They were storing bodies in sub-zero temperatures. Nobody would survive that. Did they just hold the old men in these things after they crossed over into the candidate’s body?
    He had his hand on another handle—
    “Danny Boy.”
    Danny jumped. Zin scared the hell out of him.
    “Come here.” He had his hands around a small window on the other wall. “You need to see this.”
    Zin stepped aside to let Danny have a look. The window was on a heavy-duty door. There was a slab inside but it wasn’t like the freezers on the opposite wall.
    “Watch this.” Zin punched a button next to the door.
    The interior lit up with blue flames. The room flickered with an eerie glow.
    “A crematorium,” Danny said. “They burn bodies in there.”
    “You thinking what I am?”
    Danny nodded.
    Once the Investor crossed over, their body was empty. They had no use for it. So they cremated it. That’s why the Chimney smoked whenever someone graduated. It was the Investor’s body they were destroying.
    “Boys.”
    They jumped back. The crematorium’s blue light illuminated the Director standing in the doorway. His eyes flickered with strangeness. Danny and Zin backed up.
    “I need to show you something.” He turned around and left.
    Danny and Zin waited for him to come back. After a minute or two, they found him across the hall in the network room. He offered the chair in front of a large monitor to Danny. They moved slowly, suspiciously. The Director stood several feet away from them, but distance didn’t matter. Not with the controller in his pocket.
    Danny sat down. The Director told him to tell them what he saw on the monitor.
    It took Danny a few minutes to understand what he was seeing. H e was abl e to interpret the information and it became apparent who was standing next to him. The Director was inside the Looping Program, even though his body was standing next to him — “It’s me, Danny Boy.” The Director held out his arms, displaying his new body. Tears brimmed on his eyes. “I made it out.”
    Zin was a little shocked to watch Danny hug the Director.

70
    Harold Ballard’s mother was a beautiful woman.