I didn’t know what to expect as I walked into The Stolen Time. After I had finished the steak—Was it really made out of soy?—from the food court I had been defaulting to, it felt too early to return home. After all, there was absolutely nothing in my apartment—I mean, it’s not really my apartment—waiting for me. These last several nights, only my thoughts kept me company as I waited agonisingly until I was tired enough to sleep. And, if I was being honest, being alone with my thoughts was the last thing I needed. And so with unsure resolve I had ventured to the fifteenth level and spotted an innocuous looking bar after the first few I had walked past. And this one seemed to have the least amount of people.

  When I stepped in, it was the sound of my singular footstep that defined the initial impression. Wood. This was the first time in this city that I had come across a wooden floor. The lights were dimmed, giving a lethargic, intimate feel to the place. The walls were decorated with clocks of different eras. Antique grandfather clocks. The typical analogue disc clocks you’d find in classrooms. Funky nixie tube clocks that emitted a warm glow. Simple digital clocks that radiated green. There was even a section of the wall peppered by watches. None of the clocks were synchronised. The music playing from the speakers was some kind of relaxing electronic beat with sleazy syncopation. I suspected that each beat perfectly synchronised with the passing of the seconds. Behind the bartender was a plaque that said “IT’S ALWAYS BEER O’CLOCK SOMEWHERE”. As I approached the bar, the bartender nodded an acknowledgement at me as he served another customer. I took a seat at an empty stool among empty stools. There were a few others at the bar, and a little over a dozen customers seated at the tables.

  As my gaze wandered, I saw a part of a wall with a large map of the world and digital clocks fixed to different time zones. It occurred to me that I could work out the time zone, and potentially where this city was located in the world. I checked the largest clock in the room, the neon pink digital clock behind the bar. A little past seven thirty. I quickly scanned half the clocks on the world map before landing on one that displayed the same time. GMT plus one. It included Scandinavia, western and central Europe, and a very sizable chunk of Africa. Shit, I thought, that’s still a lot of places that this city can be in. Still, it was the biggest clue I’ve had about where I was. However, I also realised that this place didn’t actually need to follow the same time as the surface above it. The absence of Sol’s gaze meant Sanctuary was free to live its hours however it liked, in which case I was back to having absolutely no clue. But if it was that particular time zone, then I would be the closest I had ever been to England since I had left.

  “Came straight from work?” came a smooth voice. His accent was an unusual mix between Yorkshire and American. I turned to him and noticed he wore a much more casual attire than mine. His trousers looked soft and black in this lighting and his thin t-shirt was positively white, which was brave given his occupation. It suddenly occurred to me that most people in the room didn’t wear the thick grey long-sleeve and trousers that most people did when they looked like they were working.

  “Not exactly,” I said hesitantly.

  The bartender looked perplexed for a moment, before he saw the white stripe just above my heart. “Ah, a tourist,” he said with a theatrical chuckle. “First round’s on me, mate.”

  “I thought everything’s free around here?” I asked.

  “Exactly,” the bartender said with a wink. “So. What’d ya like?”

  “What’s the most expensive thing you’ve got?”

  The bartender laughed. “I thought you thought everything’s free.”

  “Oh, I meant in terms of procurement,” I clarified. “What’s the drink that’s most difficult to acquire?”

  “You’ve a funny way of asking things,” the bartender said. “An Ol’ Timeless coming up.”

  I looked at him in amusement. “Is everything in this bar about time?”

  The bartender looked at me in a funny way as he grabbed a bottle from the top shelf. “Mate. Everything in Sanctuary’s about time.”

  Reflecting on how this city worked and what the Receiverists worked towards, I supposed he was right. I watched him as he poured a shot from the bottle into a glass and scooped a few large cubes of ice. “Is this your full-time job?”

  “Bartending? Nah. I do it ‘cause I enjoy it.” he said as he pulled a bottle from a fridge underneath the counter. “And because of certain benefits. Like being able to enjoy luxuries a lot more often. Vacations. Stuff like that.”

  “Vacations?”

  “Yeah. Visiting places,” he said as he placed the drink in front of me.

  “Places? You mean like the surface?”

  “Exactly.”

  I looked at him in disbelief. “Really? I was under the impression you’re locked up down here.”

  “Mate you ought to try that,” the bartender said with a nod towards the drink placed in front of me.

  It was pastel green with a mint leaf on top. I took a sip and immediately coughed. It wasn’t just that the alcohol was strong—it certainly was—but rather my nose felt like it was under siege by an olympic archer. The spicy discomfort dissipated a moment later, leaving behind no trace that it had ever been there. Aside from the burning warmth in my throat, there was a minty aftertaste.

  The bartender chortled. “Ol’ Timeless never lets me down.”

  “God. There’s no way anyone orders that sober,” I said.

  “Exactly. This Ol’ Timeless is popular after midnight, when folks get this drink to wake up from their drowsiness to continue getting sloshed,” the bartender said proudly. “It’s like magic. It extends the fun. Makes the night timeless, some might say.”

  “Remind me to never get any more drink recommendations from you,” I said half-heartedly as I took another sip. “Fuck,” I tried to keep my vocalisation down as much as possible. The woman sitting a few seats away at the bar giggled at me.

  “Nope,” the bartender said. “Anyway, what was your question again? Oh right. We’re usually not allowed to visit the surface unless it’s a part of your job, or if you have a vacation. A vacation usually comes every ten years after you start work, but fulfilling certain duties can get you more.”

  “Where have you been so far?” I asked.

  “I’ve only been to New Zealand. Oh mate. I don’t think you can ever understand how I felt swimming in the lakes and climbing the mountains,” the bartender said excitedly. His eyes glistened. “I was bloody terrified.”

  “Terrified?” I asked. “I thought you’d have the time of your life. Felt the sublime, or something.”

  “See that’s what I mean,” he said. “I felt all those other things. But most of the time I felt tiny. The openness of it all scared the shit out of me. It was overwhelming. I had no idea if the wind was going to suddenly break my limbs or not. I freaked out at all the bugs. The sky didn’t feel right. It was the experience of a lifetime, but I’m glad I’m back here. It’s probably all normal to you, but I just can’t see it from your perspective.”

  The bartender nodded at another customer and walked over to take their order. As he did, I tried to picture myself in his shoes. To imagine living my whole life down here, and taking a step under the infinite horizon for the first time. Yeah, I thought, it would be pretty crazy.

  The bartender and I sparsely chatted for a little while after that, until the bar became progressively busier and he spotted familiar faces. Having finished the Ol’ Timeless with commendable perseverance, I went for something more familiar. A gin and tonic. I wasn’t sure whether it was because my taste buds were decimated by the previous drink, but the gin tasted like spring. I had no other words to describe it. The tonic was a little more sour than I was used to, but I supposed it was a local flair on the popular beverage. I was on my third drink, a simple lager to realign my taste palette, when I heard a chirpy voice in my direction.

  “Hey.” I turned to see a woman who was by my estimate in her late twenties. She was the patron a few seats away from me who had giggled earlier. I broadly remember that she was with a shorter friend, but now she was alone. “Mind if I sit here?”

  “Go for it,” I said.

  “It’s probably rude of me, but I overheard some of your conversation earlier,” she admitted with an embarrassed smile.

  “Overheard? Or eavesdropped?” I asked.

  “Whichever you prefer,” she said coyly. “So. You’re not from around here, huh?”

  I shook my head.

  The woman tilted her head. “You don’t seem happy about that.”

  “Well,” I said dramatically. That elicited a giggle from the woman. “I was kidnapped.”

  “Oh, that’s terrible. By who?”

  “By you.”

  The woman looked scandalised. “By me?”

  “Oh no,” I laughed. “Not you. By some Receiverists. Apparently they need my help with something. Their maths homework.”

  The woman looked at me with an amused look. “Really?”

  I shrugged, which elicited a giggle from the woman. “Must be one hell of a maths problem.”

  “It really is,” I said. “Pretty fucked up stuff. From a mathematical point of view, that is.”

  She thought for a moment. “Surely it’s important, isn’t it?”

  “So I’ve been told,” I said, before taking a sip of my beer. “Something about ‘ensuring humanity’s survival.’” I punctuated the ridiculousness of that statement with my fingers.

  “Well now,” the woman said as she raised her eyebrows. “That does sound important.”

  “Yeah. Or so Lennox says.”

  The woman’s expression suddenly changed. It was as if she sobered at the mention of the name. “Lennox?”

  “Yeah. You know him?” I asked.

  “Not personally. But I’ve seen his name around. A bit of a bigwig.”

  “A bigwig? Do you know what he does?”

  The woman considered me for a moment, as if trying to gauge how much I was allowed to know. “Not exactly,” she said. “I know he’s an executive from the Reception Division. But I don’t know what he manages.”

  Executive? Reception Division? “What’s that?” I asked. “Like a division about receiving people like me from the outside?”

  The woman shook her head. “No. That’d be one of the operation divisions. I’m not sure. I’m a mediator in the Social Division. The Reception Division is kinda like… head.”

  “Huh. What a strange name for something like that,” I wondered aloud.

  “Anyway,” the woman smiled, “if mister bigwig Lennox says you’re important, then you really are. You must be working on super important stuff.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. We’ll see.”

  “Well. It seems like we owe you something.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “You’re a part of something so important,” the woman began with overacted theatrics, “and yet you tell me that we’ve kidnapped you. That’s not fair.”

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  I raised my beer. “You can say that again.” She raised her glass of some kind of clear liquid and we drank to the toast.

  “Why don’t I make it fair?” she asked in a suggestive tone. Her eyes held onto mine with a terrifying intensity.

  I was afraid to ask. “What do you—”

  The woman leaned in closely. Too closely. I felt fearful for my life. The back hairs of my neck stuck out. I couldn’t tell whether she was wearing perfume or if she naturally smelled like that. I could feel her warm breath on the side of my face. I didn’t know whether I imagined the impossibly soft contact of her lips on my earlobe.

  “Why don’t we go to whichever one of our apartments that’s closer,” she whispered, “and—”

  I backed away suddenly, so much so that I had nearly lost my balance on the stool. The woman looked at me in surprise.

  “I, uh—” I stammered. I had to say something. I had to leave. I racked my brain for a reasonable excuse. “I need to go. I, um—I just remembered that I have a meeting with Lennox tonight. Oh shoot, I might even be late for it.” Reaching into my high school drama education, I pulled out my handheld to check the time. It only occurred to me a second later that I was surrounded by clocks.

  “O-oh,” the woman stuttered. “Sure. I understand. He’s an important man. You probably don’t want to be late.”

  “No, not at all,” I concurred. “Anyway. Nice to meet you. Have a lovely night.”

  “Yeah,” the woman said awkwardly. “You too.”

  I was about to turn to leave when I realised that there was still half left in my beer. I grabbed it and chugged it down. When I had finished, I realised the woman had been looking at me like I was some incoherent artwork. I had no idea why she would be. I waved goodbye to her and left at a brisk pace.

  Stepping out of the bar, I had expected to be struck by a faceful of chill breeze and maybe the bitter smell of cigarettes. Instead, it was the sterile smell that I had become accustomed to. Disappointed, I began walking towards the elevator a street away. I had the sudden urge to visit the nature reserve that Irene had taken me to a couple of days ago. I wondered what it must have looked like at night. A perfectly simulated moon with brightly lit stars reflected from the surface of the water. God, it must be so beautiful, I yearned. More so than it could be on the surface. Without the light pollution. Atmospheric pollution. People pollution. Groups of delinquents getting drunk. Wondering whether an ill-intentioned stranger was lurking in the shadows. The artificial reserve in this city wouldn’t be like that. Sanctuary wasn’t like that. It was too perfect. And that was why I had been avoiding the reserve ever since.

  Returning to my apartment, the lights came on by themselves. As I had known they would. When the lights in my room activated, I noticed something different. On the surface of the desk, there was a box. I knew immediately what the box contained. It wasn’t Schrodinger’s box anymore. All of its uncertainty had been purged. And I was proven right when I opened it. The mathematical documents. The ones I had received in front of my apartment door one morning a forever ago. It had felt so long. The abuse was still there. The document was still barely held together by a considerable amount of tape. It was as if it had never left. As if there was no doubt I would continue to decipher its hidden meaning like a moth drawn to an open flame.

  The documents were still waiting for me when I woke up. It was the first thought in my head. A part of me wondered whether it would grow legs during my sleep and walk into the void. It hadn’t. I didn’t know whether to regard the fact with disappointment or relief. A part of me rejoiced at the sight of the very thing that had brought me so much frustration before.

  As I dipped the piece of sourdough bread into the olive oil I had acquired on my second visit to the General Grocer, I heard two ascending tones play from my handheld. Upon reaching for it, the screen lit up.

  Lennox: Oh Al my old pal you’re in for a treat!

  Lennox: Meet me at the Royal Reverie at 12:30

  I was certainly not his “old pal” as he so liberally put it, and the idea of anyone calling me “Al” grated my nerves. But turning down his invitation—it was less of an invitation and more of a directive—would be a bad idea. Where the hell is this Royal Reverie anyway? I wondered. Just as the moistened bread entered my mouth, my handheld sounded yet again.

  Lennox: Oh my bad ha ha ha

  Lennox: East of the square of L12 13-10

  My morning after breakfast was spent at my desk, going over the mathematical documents. It felt like the first time, but also entirely different. A clean slate. My fingers turned the pages ever so gently, as if this was an archaeological artefact that had survived centuries of weather, ready to crumble at the slightest touch. I skimmed the symbols for the first time without the expectation of comprehension. Without the urgency of retaining a job. Without the need to meet the demands of my ego. I didn’t know how to describe this surreal sensation aside from calling it poltergeist-esque. It was like walking the unconquerable earth after having died, and returning to it as a ghost. Accepting things for how they were without the presumption of dominion. Of course, the symbols didn’t make any more sense to me than before, but it was like appreciating a papyrus of poetry in a long forgotten language. I now noticed the composition of the page. The peculiar shapes that the white spaces made. The frequency of the unique characters on the page. There was an indescribable beauty to it. The mise en scène of the script wasn’t random. It told a story. A rich structure. So while I couldn’t parse the mathematical details, I could tell the relative importance of the mathematical symbols on the page. The parts where the author—or authors—felt insecure enough to spend more time formalising. The network implied by the densely populated references scattered across the manuscript; there was a traffic flow that could be mapped out. There was order here, even if one couldn’t parse much of the technicalities yet. I hadn’t noticed it before, perhaps too busy missing the forest for the dense trees of details. Perhaps this new perspective would be the key.

  Making my way to the floor that was mentioned in Lennox’s message, I passed crowds of people. For this exact reason, I almost always opted for lunch at one or two, Sanctuary or otherwise. Groups of students could be seen in the couple of food courts I had passed or sitting in small cliques outside. Almost half of the people were in overalls. Lines formed outside of cafes, although the speed at which it moved was impressive. The facade of the Royal Reverie juxtaposed against the minimalist storefronts on either side of it. While I doubted its authenticity, the walls looked as though it was sandstone, the faded yellow hue that had a tease of green. The flatness of the surface was interrupted by curvatures that traced between tall windows. When I walked in, it struck me that the interior strangely contradicted the outside. The surfaces were much flatter and vast, with the default colour being a pearl white. The exterior had given the impression that the inside would be quaint and cosy, coloured by details that existed for no purpose aside from aesthetics. In actuality, it felt as if the constant Receiverist aesthetic that I had become accustomed to received a white paint job and a red chequered carpet. Even the chandeliers that dangled from the ceiling resembled three segments of a double helix, with watermelon-sized white bulbs at the ends of each segment. At least the tables and chairs were wooden.

  “Hello sir,” the concierge asked. “Do you have a reservation?”

  “No,” I said as I looked around. When I noticed the concierge looking at me in puzzlement, I quickly corrected, “Oh I meant that I didn’t book a reservation, but I’m with a man named Lennox.”

  “Ah, of course,” the concierge said with a polite smile. “Right this way.”

  I followed him to a table near the back. It could seat four people, but all it had was Lennox on one side and an empty chair on the other. It was only just now, since I had spent several days in the city, that I realised just how distinct his attire was. I didn’t believe I had seen another person in this city who wore anything resembling those creamy draped robes.

  “Alex!” Lennox greeted with a lift of his eyebrow. “Great to see you again.”

  “Lennox,” I nodded as I took the empty seat.

  Lennox nodded a smile at the concierge.

  “The food will arrive shortly,” the concierge said. “Any drinks to start you gentlemen off?”

  “Absolutely,” Lennox said. “A glass of bubbly for me and…?”

  “I’ll have the same, thanks,” I said.

  The concierge nodded and walked away.

  “Friend, how are you settling in?” Lennox asked.

  I thought for a moment. A part of me still wanted to push back and say that everything was shit because I still wasn’t here of my own volition. “Well, I think,” I said. “It’s… hard not to be comfortable. Aside from the whole being trapped underground thing. And the whole lack of agency thing.”

  “That’s good to hear,” Lennox said with a smile. “And you do have agency. You have to choose to stay and do some maths or leave in a couple of days, anyway.”

  I shrugged. As I did, a waiter came by with a tray carrying two glasses of champagne. He placed a glass in front of us each. “Enjoy,” he said before he left.

  As Lennox took a sip of his champagne, I said, “So I heard you’re pretty high up in this place.”

  Lennox chuckled. “That’s an interesting way to put it. I’m not sure I agree. I’m just a humble servant to humanity’s future.”

  “But someone I met described you as an executive of the head division,” I said. “Or something like that. Surely that counts for something.”

  “Ah, great to hear you’re making friends!” Lennox said with a wide grin. “I can see what they were trying to mean, and how you might have misinterpreted it. I’m an executive of the Reception Division, which you can think of as society-wide planning and strategy for the other divisions. We’re a wee bit like administrators. Logisticians to make sure the other divisions not only operate without blockage, but that their efforts are synchronised towards the Preparation Project. Forgive me for being presumptuous, but I think you’re still trying to see us through the lens of the surface world hierarchy, my friend.”

  “The Preparation Project?” I asked.

  “It’s all in the name,” Lennox said. “I’ve already told you we are preparing for the future. The continued expansion of this city? The Preparation Project. Our efforts towards tackling food insecurity? The Preparation Project. Bringing you in to try and convince you to help us with some research? The Preparation Project. Everything is the Preparation Project. And the Preparation Project is everything. We live and breathe it. It’s all we do. It’s what it means to be a Receiverist, really.”

  The waiter arrived and placed on our table an assortment of entrees. Slices of bread, dips, and several kinds of sliced meat. Immediately, Lennox began dipping a bread slice as he placed a piece of meat into his mouth. He made varying noises of satisfaction that I would rather have not heard if I had any say. Like a fractal, my lack of choice persisted in every magnification.

  “I didn’t know it was so luxurious to be in the business of saving the world,” I remarked.

  “Well,” Lennox began after he swallowed a mouthful of food, “collective prosperity is what we’re after. Not collective poverty.”

  I tentatively dipped a piece of bread and took a modest bite. It was surprisingly tangy. “So how does the structure work here? I asked. “Who has the final authority on policy?”

  “We do. But I think that’s an awfully reductive way to view us,” Lennox said. He sipped his champagne before continuing. “We push out the official policies and strategies, but really, we’re nothing but curators.”

  “Curators?”

  “Our algorithms are constantly solving optimisation problems. Many of those are problems we aren’t even aware of. They spit out solutions, priorities, plans of varying timeframes, anything and everything. Hell, we even have algorithms that optimally prioritise between these solutions. We take these recommendations, run the numbers to validate them, and pick whatever works best.”

  My eyes went wide. “That’s insane,” I said incredulously.

  “I know, right?” Lennox chuckled as he dropped another piece of meat into his mouth.

  “Even ignoring the insanity of what you just described, isn’t that risky?” I asked. “You can’t possibly take into account every variable. And policy without any human factor is… repulsive.”

  Lennox didn’t look offended. “Sure, which is why we have entire divisions dedicated to not only making sure it works great, but also to know exactly what the limitations are. It’s worked out just fine so far. And we do have human inputs to policy outside of purely algorithmic ones. At the end of the day, that’s what our job is. We receive problems. We receive solutions. We prioritise between those axes. The same job as any on the surface, but we just have better sources for both.”

  “But what about the people?” I asked. “You might have demonstrated to me how accurate your algorithms are at predicting what people will do. But surely people will sometimes decide to not follow your policies and rules. People are just too random, too complicated to follow instructions perfectly all the time.”

  “Sure. And there are two answers to that,” Lennox said. “The first is what you said. We do have algorithms. They provide recommendations on where to assign people so they’re least likely to make trouble.”

  “But that would take ungodly amounts of data—oh.” The realisation struck me like a truck. And it evoked genuine terror in me.

  Lennox smiled knowingly. “Exactly.”

  “This entire city. Everyone’s under constant surveillance,” I whispered.

  “We have no concept of privacy here. It’s so convenient. You can’t even begin to fathom our endless, ever expanding universe of data. No one can.” Lennox shrugged as he sipped from his glass.

  “And how was that sold to everyone?” I asked.

  Lennox made a broad gesture, as if alluding to the atmosphere itself. “This. I mean, it’s pretty good isn’t it? You’ve said it yourself.”

  “And what’s the second answer?”

  “Unification,” Lennox said. “Every single Receiverist is bound by a single purpose.”

  “To prepare for humanity’s future,” I said.

  Lennox nodded with a smile. “See? you’re starting to get it.”

  “No, I really don’t,” I said. “Because that’s bullshit.”

  Without looking offended, Lennox gestured for me to go on before resting his chin on his fist.

  “It’s impossible for a large group of people to not only coexist, but to prosper so spectacularly with no other motivation but altruism,” I said. “It’s human nature to be selfish. To wish ill on other people. The only proof you need is a glimpse at the societies on the surface.”

  Lennox chuckled to himself. “You remind me a lot of Mariam. Back then. Before she became one of us.” He took a sip from his glass before he continued. “Receiverists believe there is no choice. There is only one possibility. We’re all just playing the roles we need in order for the future to happen. Because it will happen.”

  There was a pause. I struggled to make sense of what the man in front of me said. It was a permutation of words that shouldn’t compute. I unconsciously dipped the final piece of bread and brought it to my mouth. Lennox watched wordlessly. He waited until I finished the piece.

  “Let me ask you a question,” he said. “What would you do if you knew for certain that the world was going to end sometime in the future, unless you did something that was within your power to stop it?”

  This is a pointless question, I thought. “I would do the thing.”

  “Good,” Lennox said with a nod. “I expected nothing less. Now let me ask you. Do you believe the world will end?”

  The answer I wanted to say was “I don’t know”, but that would have been a lie. I knew what my answer was. I could feel it. I had felt it for a long time now. There was an unmistakable, distinct point in time that had separated the shifting of my answer, and it had been unchanged ever since. And so I gave it to him.

  “And you are a financial mathematician?” Lennox said.

  I was caught off guard by the question. “Yes. I research financial maths.”

  “Why did you choose this area of research?”

  “Well. It’s what gets published out there in the world,” I answered. “It’s what landed me a job. It’s what allowed me to… leave home.”

  “And now I will ask you just one more,” Lennox said. “Are you satisfied with your impact on the world?”

  Just as he asked this, the waiter returned with the mains. Steak pieces. Lennox didn’t speak any more after that. He didn’t even register my presence. He left me alone with my thoughts. Alone with nothing but the deafening echoes of his serrated question.