• Plocha Zjeveni
    Alek Bock
    Date Started: 5/19/08
    Date Finished:
    Regular Period C- “Mystery Writers Workshop”
    DISCLAIMER: NONE OF MY STORIES ARE FAN FICTIONS. DO NOT ASSUME SUCH. THEY ARE ALL ORIGINAL WORKS.

    For trusted eyes only


    Classified file no. 436628

    Codename “surface”
    “The worst thing in this world besides Anarchy, is government.”
    ~Henry Ward Beecher
    Part One: The Deadly Riddle

    Steven stood still; The static message from nowhere in particular still rang in his ears. It was the most painful, spine-freezing noise he’s heard in his life. Izzy said nothing, she just stared into the distance and tried to pretend such a noise never entered her field of hearing; Lyle and Ami just ignored it, they were still in shock from everything else.
    “DO YOU COPY?” The noise rose again; it wasn’t even a voice, just a horrid static blast that had no apparent source.
    Steven rose slowly to his feet, checking in every direction, trying to find any place where someone--- or something--- may be watching.
    Isabel continued to kneel; she was fascinated by the water below her. It went down so far, she couldn’t see the bottom, and she wanted to numb the nervousness and paranoia, by just staring down into the blue abyss, safely dry from the water by an eight-foot-thick, clear, unknown substance.
    And then, the noise stopped; there was no more static ringing, no more shouting… It all returned to normal--- or however normal the current situation could be.
    “Is it… gone?” Isabel lifted her head, her hair slightly covering her face.
    “I hope so.” Lyle looked at one of the neon buildings before him and sighed.
    “…I don’t think we’re getting much done sitting here. I don’t think that this was all that they meant for us to do…” Ami mumbled without looking at any of them.
    “These buildings… They’re so high up, why would they build these if they knew it was going to just be four people?---”
    “Because maybe they put more files in ‘em.” Lyle stared up to the top of the rightmost building. “Just look at what they left last time.”
    “But where do we begin?” Izzy gawked at every single window of every single neon building; it was so much to take in.
    “Let’s start right at this one,” Steven pointed to the small one nearest him, “take the small things first and work your way up.”

    Neon high-rise
    The front hall had a mahogany floor; colors shifting from colorful murky blue neon to dark brown wood, it hurt their eyes from such drastic transitions. Book shelves reached the ceiling, there were chairs, desks, stairs that reached higher up into other floors of the building… Steven and Ami’s parents mapped out everything… This must have taken decades to plan and piece together…
    The question on Steven’s mind was how did they predict the end of the world?
    “Whoa. Look at all these books…” Ami stared at the tall bookshelf to the left.
    The cover of the nearest book had numbers carved into it forcefully.

    21.334.128.63

    “What’s this?!” Ami took the book from the shelf and everyone behind her just stared with curiosity. She flipped the cover page, and in a thick red ink, almost bloodlike, there was this:

    “Wh6 5s 16hn ga3t+ where was he b6rn+ And, h6w d5d h5s 35fe s*ar2 the *h536s*6*h5ca3 change 6f that 06t6r 6f the w6r3d he v6wed t6 ‘st6* 5n 5ts trac2s+’.”

    “It’s just numbers and letters…. Some sort of crazy code…” Steven tried to think of what the code could be but nothing came to mind. Maybe it was a serial number for something, or maybe it was just gibberish that meant nothing at all.
    Ami, intrigued to find out more, and flipped the pages on and on. The questions she had thickened in her brain like a stack of mental bricks, blocking her path through the doorway of truth; it was like a mental Cask of Amontillado played out in her head.
    With every page, she read the information to herself. The shade of red on one page surely had to be blood; it was dry and a horrifying shade of brown. Over and over, one phrase was repeated as if a madman’s last words were cast on this one single final sheet of paper:
    “Plocha Zjeveni… Plocha Zjeveni…Plocha Zjeveni…Plocha Zjeveni…Plocha Zjeveni…Plocha Zjeveni…”
    It was written so many times that the last time it was scribbled on the page, it ran off it… Not enough room.
    She dropped the book and fell back, a sudden piercing pain shocked her skull.
    “Ah!” She yelped as she tumbled to the ground and cried from the pain.
    “Ami! What happened!?” Lyle ran to her and looked her in the eyes; they had a dead stare in them… She didn’t cry any more, she just quickly twitched and then looked back at Lyle, smiling.
    “Oh thank God… She’s alright.” He helped her back to her feet and then hugged her, relief looming over him like a shadow.
    “What the hell is in this book?!” Izzy picked it up and continued reading where Ami left off. She couldn’t help herself, she had to know what was in these thick pages. She flipped one after another, reading…

    “Death by words, nevermore,
    It’s now time to settle the score.
    We’ve all sinned, we’ve all done wrong.
    And now it’s time…
    Time to end it all…
    It’s that time, the time where we halve;
    Split in two
    Two dead
    Two remain
    The Perfect Equation.

    ~PLOCHA ZJEVENI
    “
    Izzy’s eyes widened as she read more and more of the mysterious book.
    “I think we should leave this place… This library’s got too much for us to handle here.”
    “No, we’re going to find answers. We have to figure out this once and for all.” Steven had a determined look of anger on his face; that one look, Izzy would never forget.
    “I think Ami needs to take a break. I’m gonna go find a chair.” Lyle walked Ami to the nearest seat and set her down easily. She held her head and squinted.
    “It’s gonna be okay,” Lyle smiled, “what happened?”
    “I don’t know. After I read the third page I sort of had a quick headache and fell.”
    “What did the third page say?”
    “I don’t know, some random phrase….” She didn’t feel like talking, all she wanted to do was take a breather and stay away from that damned book.
    “Lyle…? You might wanna come look at this.” Steve stared back at him, his face turned paper white…
    When Lyle ran up to see what happened, he couldn’t see the words written, they were so small that he had to literally put his face into the book.

    VIZCORP EXPERIMENTAL DATA SHEET
    Test Subject#_____ Experiment name ______ Outcome_____ Description____
    #436628 Surface Failure Subject bled internally
    Data:
    Subject 436628 had a stable heartbeat minutes after the injection of the vaccine. However, in the passing days, its health began to worsen. Three weeks after the injection, the subject lost a limb and began convulsing.

    #2133412863 Underwater Success Test group lived
    Data:
    In the aquatic bio dome, all four subjects lived. All 150,000 tons of edibles remained intact, and the subjects showed no signs of sickness or any type of bodily dysfunction.

    _____________________________________________________________

    “Is this some kind of sick hoax?” Lyle closed the book and threw it across the room. “I don’t want to see any more! No more, I can’t take this.” He panicked, and began shaking. His hands wouldn’t stay still, and he continued to fidget as he stared at the three of them with a look of horror. “There’s something going on that’s far bigger than us…”
    The static noises returned, but this time they emerged from the bookshelf.
    “ALL THE ANSWERS AWAIT.”
    “Ah!” The four of them were slowly being driven insane in this aquarium; at first, it seemed like this place would be a safe haven to start a new world….

    …But they all realized at the same time….

    ….They were just experiments….

    “Show yourself, dammit!” Steven shouted furiously. He looked around suspiciously, there was no possible way there could be any noise coming from anywhere in the library.
    The neon lights in the room became increasingly brighter.
    “EVERYTHING WILL SURFACE.” The static voice taunted once more.
    “Did you hear me?! Come out from hiding!” He violently tossed a chair at the wall and it broke into little wooden pieces. He started to breathe heavy… He wanted to leave this place immediately. Steven put his head in his hands and began to cry from frustration. This escape from the wiped out world just tossed him into another cruel one.
    The lights flickered off and everything went pitch black.
    “AH!” Ami screamed.
    At the far end of the library, two red lights that looked like eyes floated slowly toward them. The unrelenting crimson stare stopped them, frozen in the cold icy darkness.
    Eventually, the lights shut off right where they were, twenty feet away from the group…
    …But then, the crimson beads reappeared in front of them, turning slowly to each of them and looking them in the eyes. It was blinking.
    “YOU WILL SEE EVERYTHING.” The voice emerged from it slowly, it was static and raspy, and deep.
    “Let go! Aah!” A bloodcurdling scream emerged from Ami, but then it was cut short by a loud thud.
    “CONTINUE ON. YOU WILL FIND OUT EVERYTHING SOON ENOUGH.”
    The shining red lights dissipated in the darkness and then the lights flickered back on.
    Lyle looked around, and Steven closed his eyes, trying to pretend nothing happened.
    “Ami?!” Izzy cried and covered her mouth with her hands.
    Ami lay in a pool of blood, silent and cold.


    It had begun.















    Part Two: The Finding

    Ami was dead; she was motionless on the cold library floor… And a note was left next to her body. Steven fell to the ground and crawled backwards away from her.
    “Aah, aaaah!” Behind his glasses were eyes that just saw most horrific thing in his lifetime.
    “Ami’s gone…” Izzy looked down and turned away.
    “We were all set up to come here… Everything was planned out… But by who?”
    “How should we know?! Let’s take that book and get the hell out of here!” Steve grabbed it and sprinted to the door. He could see the streets and the walls of glass. He was so close, almost out.
    The door quickly slammed shut and wouldn’t open.
    “Damn!” He pounded it, desperate to get out. Then he looked behind him… A staircase went up to the next floor.
    “You’re kidding…” He laughed nervously. “This is ridiculous.”

    Up the stairs they went, upstairs leading to more questions and no answers. What they forgot to bring with them was the note left next to Ami… But they were too scared to be thinking logically.
    Forcing open the door at the end of the stairwell, Izzy ran into the next room and immediately began looking around. She had no idea what to do next, and neither did Steve or Lyle.
    Inside the next room were two chambers and another stack of pages…
    “God do these people love paper….” Steve picked up the stack and read the cover.
    To Steven, Lyle, and Resa.
    The words on the front were chilling. Of course they were set up, their names were even put on the document placed there beforehand…. They even predicted who would die.
    Steve flipped the page and read a random code:
    “4=U, 5=I, 6=O, *=P, 1=J, 2=K, 3=L, 0=M, +=?”
    And then it hit him… He turned to the page with the numbers and the phrase Izzy read. He put the numbers and letters together. The code unraveled quickly afterwards:
    “Who is John Galt? Where was he born? And, how did his life spark the philosophical change of that motor of the world he vowed to, ‘stop in its tracks’?”
    The lights shut off once more, and the beady red lights appeared again.
    It floated around slowly, calculating and cynical; the swift sound of a knife whipped the air and someone fell to the floor.
    “THE NEXT ROOM REVEALS EVERYTHING.” The static noise laughed and then faded once more. The lights turned back on….

    …Lyle had been fatally stabbed.
    “What?! Oh my God!” Izzy ran to Steven and held him close. The two of them couldn’t believe what just happened… In the past fifteen minutes, two of the people they once knew were dead, harshly taken away in mere seconds.
    Steven thought to himself the words that the shadowy figure said…
    ‘THE NEXT ROOM REVEALS EVERYTHING.’ echoed in his mind…

    “Let’s go.”
    “What?!” Izzy stared at him as tears fell down her face. “Why?!”
    “There’s no turning back now. We need to end this…” Steve’s head hurt badly; he felt dizzy, as if he were in a dream.
    “Are you insane? We could die!”
    “That’s a risk I’m willing to take. We can’t leave, the door’s sealed. All we can do is go into this next room.”

    She reluctantly followed him to another staircase. It was clear, the glass walls overlooked the deep blue sea. They trudged up the long staircase up to the neon doorway, and something caught Steven’s eye.
    Bodies floated up next to the glass walls, up to the surface of the water.
    He tried to ignore it and forced open the door to the next room.
    Final part: The Truth and The Dream catcher

    “YOU HAVE ARRIVED.”
    Down the neon aisle was a man in a suit. His face was obscured in the heavy amounts of light beating down on them. All they could see was his evil smile that was stretched across his face. The static noise in his voice began to fade and then he turned to Steven.
    “Hello, son.” Michael laughed, staring back at him with that spine chilling grin.
    “D-dad?!” He rubbed his eyes to make sure all the trauma didn’t make him hallucinate.
    “You’re Michael?” Izzy couldn’t believe her eyes either. She saw him die right on the street corner.
    “Yes, I very well am.”
    “But I thought you died! I saw you die right in front of me!!!”
    “Oh… One of those dummies. No, it wasn’t me.”
    “It wasn’t you I buried?!” Steven became confused, it felt as if he was just living in a nightmare… But it felt so real.
    “What do you mean, dummies?”
    “It was all part of my experiment… My mission… I wanted my son to take over my work and continue it.”
    “What IS your work?!”
    “I wanted to make a new world, with engineered clones, the new race underwater. Yatsuhiko and I both wanted you and Izzy to take over our work.”
    “Wait… Izzy…? Who’s she?” Steven yelled in frustration.
    “Why, she’s standing right next to you. Oh, she told you her witness protection program name… Resa Murcado…”
    “You’d better start giving some damn answers!”
    “Just tell me what you would like to know, and I’ll tell you.”
    “Tell me everything! Your estate, the computer, the blueprints, everything! Everything you hid from me, everything you lied about, everything you kept from me. Tell me all of it!” Steven wanted to run up to Michael and strangle him; he put him through hell just to continue his insane plans.
    “I’ll start by telling you about the bomb….” Michael cleared his throat. “The CIA recently suspected that Iraq was developing a nuclear bomb that would wipe the earth clean. Supposedly, it was their was of taking the infidels to hell, and the loyal ones to heaven. Well, when I heard this about two years ago, I started working on a way that we could return after such a devastating hit. I met Yatsuhiko in a library in the middle of Providence… She was a sweet woman. We both loved the same things and right away, we began working together to create an aftermath to this horrid conspiracy theory about a bomb.”
    “You’re not done, tell me all of it.” Steve shut the door behind him and refused to hear anything short of everything his father hid from him.
    “After that, we began tirelessly studying ways to get around this huge problem… The fact that the earth could be wiped isn’t something to take lightly. We began experimenting with cloning and then we created the first cloned human, in secrecy. But three weeks after we gave it the serum to keep it stable and alive, it began getting gravely ill…. And it died. However, we did manage to get a lot of clones to function down here… I bet you saw what was left of them on your way up here.”
    “You’re sick!”
    “We began making code names for our experiments to lower the amount of leakage of our information, in case we were finally caught in the midst of our endeavors. We named the bio dome experiment Viz Alla Ti… Bulgarian for underwater, and the cloning experiment, Plocha Zjeveni.. Czech for surface of revelations.”
    “I can’t believe you would make such an elaborate plan… Just to keep your son continuing where you left off!”
    “After that, we began taking real human hosts. We then formulated everything to get you five here… Now there’s only two of you. You’re very lucky to have lived, Isabel. Now, for the last thing before you wake up---”
    “Wake up?! What?”
    “Don’t interrupt me. You do want to hear everything, do you not? This’ll help you for when you wake up… It’ll make you understand what happens when you get the rude awakening. You’re going to continued my experiments, but in a different role.”
    “A different role? You murdered people in order to preserve them?! You’re insane!”
    “I see you’ve heard everything you want to hear. You have five seconds. Steven, Isabel, when you wake up, don’t be confused.”
    “What are we gonna see when we do wake up?”
    “…You’ll find out for yourselves. You’ll figure out finally why I used human hosts for clones… You will finally know why I killed so many people to perfect this cloning procedure.”

    Michael smiled and then the neon lights became so bright, it blinded them.
    “We lost two of them! There’s only two left!” A man in a lab coat was staring at Steven and Isabel, and then everything came back to them…

    …It was all a dream, they were the experiments, the clones themselves… Their new world was like Eden after Eve ate the apple….

    The final thoughts Steven and Izzy had before they died was that last phrase,
    “Death by words, nevermore,
    It’s now time to settle the score.
    We’ve all sinned, we’ve all done wrong.
    And now it’s time…
    Time to end it all…
    It’s that time, the time where we halve;
    Split in two
    Two dead
    Two remain
    The Perfect Equation.

    ~PLOCHA ZJEVENI
    “





    Some final Thoughts


    When I was writing this short story, or ‘novella’, I was deeply inspired by the writings of Ayn Rand, Stephen King, and J.J. Abrams. I absorbed a tiny bit of their writing styles as I read their works, and eventually, ‘Viz Alla Ti’ and ‘Plocha Zjeveni’ were created. At first, I wanted to write a short, simple story that could maybe get a couple of people a little bit enthusiastic, but then the story branched out into something far greater. No matter how much I wanted to stop the story and end it, the story forced me to continue. I put all of my effort into this story and I hope the readers of it enjoyed it, even remotely.

    References:
     Ayn Rand’s, “Atlas Shrugged”, “Who is John Galt?”
     J.J. Abrams’ LOST: Number coding
     Eric Bress’ and J. Mackye Gruber’s KYLE XY: “Viz Alla Ti” phrase.
     The Watchowski Brothers’ THE MATRIX: “All a dream”

    I was asked by over one hundred people if there was going to be a sequel of any kind, and I created it. I hope that all of the questions about the underwater base have been answered, and I hope at least a little of the confusion has been cleared up.


    Thank you so much for reading, it really means a lot.
    ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
    This story wouldn’t have been finished if it weren’t for some really great friends and acquaintances inspiring me.
    I’d firstly like to thank John Green, because after reading his novel, “Looking for Alaska”, I was inspired to write more. His writing style is great and I became inspired to write again after a two-year hiatus.
    I thank my parents Laura and Stephen for supporting me one hundred percent along the way. They really were helpful with tips and writing help.
    I deeply thank my aunt, Judi Kolenda. She’s a novelist herself, and her tips and help really were great when I was writing this story.
    All of my teachers have also been inspiring; they are all so friendly and supportive and I really thank them for it.

    Lastly, but not least, I’d like to thank my friends, all of them. They were really great when I sent them the story. They told me what was in need of improvement and what was good for the final draft.



    ABOUT THE AUTHOR
    Alek Bock, by the time of this writing, is a sixteen year-old aspiring author residing in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. He wrote many other short stories from, “The Eleventh Hour” to “Frozen Stars”. He’s currently writing Shattered Dynasty and Sky Child, two novels expected to be finished within the coming years.

    EXPLANATION ABOUT VIZ ALLA TI
    Viz Alla Ti was intended to be two to three pages long. At first, it was going to be a small, simple murder mystery that would have ended within the first fifteen paragraphs. However, it grew exponentially after writing those three pages. Now roughly twenty three pages in length, Viz Alla Ti and Plocha Zjeveni are currently Alek’s two best short story completions to date.