It was sort of hard to blame them for that. I probably wouldn’t have been too thrilled at the idea of harboring my own replacement.
The elevator stopped two floors down from our living quarters, and the doors opened on a sugar-scented, candy-colored wonderland. As always, the sight of the party level sent my train of thought spinning out of control, replaced by a strong desire to run laughing through the cookie garden until the Buttercream Fairy appeared and told me to stop. I glanced to the side. Nathan was grinning at me again.
“I just really like it here,” I said defensively.
“I just really like it when you’re happy,” he said, laughing, and stepped out of the elevator, leaving me with little choice but to follow him.
The party level had been designed to be managed by no more than six staff members, but had been subdivided into enough small grottos and private rooms that it was impossible to tell how many people were there at any given time. The elevator opened into the arrival area, which smelled like jelly beans and gumdrops and didn’t have a specific “candy” theme apart from “dentists are the enemy.” The randomly changing candy scents made meals an occasionally interesting experience, since this was also the only place in the building that was properly set up as a dining area. There was a cafeteria, but it was small and gray and depressing, and pretty much all of us preferred to eat in the cookie garden.
The smell of bacon wafted from what used to be the sticky toffee oasis, but had become the main station for fried meats in the morning and hot soup in the afternoon, thanks to its plethora of heat lamps and electrical outlets. According to the flyers in the old manager’s office, the sticky toffee oasis had been the only party destination to offer fondue as an option for the birthday boy or girl. I wasn’t really sure why anyone would want to eat toffee-flavored fondue on the steps of a plywood and plaster pyramid. Clearly, my lack of a human childhood had warped me in some way.
Daisy was on duty at the hot bar when Nathan and I came around the corner. He got a bright smile, which faded somewhat as her eyes focused on me. “Good morning, Nathan,” she said. “Sal.”
“Morning, Daisy.” I picked up a plate. “Nathan said there were waffles?”
“Third tray,” she said, pointing with her tongs before refocusing her smile on Nathan. It got even brighter, if that was possible. “I saved you some ham. It’s from the freezer we found last week, so we know it’s good.”
“Mmm, ham,” said Nathan. “Did you know that most natural tapeworm infections in the United States came from undercooked pork before we started importing our produce from South America? Salad tainted with human feces turned out to be an excellent transmission method for the infection.”
Daisy blanched, looking faintly nauseated. “Is that your way of saying you don’t want any ham?”
“I try to avoid pork as a rule.” Nathan picked up a plate of his own. “Breakfast potatoes?”
“That, I can do,” said Daisy, looking relieved. She opened the second of the silver serving platters and spooned a heaping pile of potatoes onto Nathan’s plate. “The fruit is down at the end.”
“I know my way around the hot bar,” said Nathan, with a smile that came nowhere near hers, for brightness, but was kind, which was really more than I would have given her. “Thanks for breakfast.”
“Thanks for eating,” said Daisy. Her blanch became a blush. “I mean, let me know if you want any orange juice.”
“Okay.”
I took my plate of waffles and previously frozen berries, stopped in front of Daisy long enough to take the ham Nathan had refused—it wasn’t like it could give me a tapeworm, since the chemicals I released into Sally’s body as part of claiming it as my own prevented any other parasitic infection from taking root—and flashed her a toothy smile before I turned and followed Nathan deeper into the party floor, looking for a table.
He finally settled at an empty picnic table that had been painted to look like it contained our recommended daily allowance of chocolate chips. I slid into a seat across from him. The waffles were pretty good, especially considering that it had been made with condensed milk—we had chickens, even a few goats, but no cows. That would have required more arable land than we could create with potting soil and fences.
Captain Candy’s had been designed to serve three disparate purposes: tourism, research, and food production. It still served three purposes. They just weren’t what the original architects had had in mind. The wonderland areas were still mostly intact, used as social space and meeting areas. The research and development labs had been repurposed into living space, with some people choosing to paint the walls white and others—like Nathan and myself—choosing to keep them primary colored and comforting. No one’s ever come up with a universal color scheme for the apocalypse, and if ours wanted to come in neon and peppermint stripe, well. That was okay.
The real factory level was being used for research, development, and all the things that went with having a team of working scientists rather than a bunch of independent researchers. I stayed out of there as much as I could. It wasn’t that people were unfriendly—for the most part, they were perfectly nice, if a little distant and occasionally wary of my nonhuman status—it was just that I didn’t understand anything that was going on there, and I had long since learned to keep a safe distance from what I didn’t comprehend. Call it the last great survival strategy.
The false factory was located on the second floor, which had been divided into two levels by some cunning tricks of interior design and elevator programming. The first level was a walkway made of plastic-coated steel gridding surrounded by a clear, waist-high plastic guardrail. It was completely wheelchair accessible, all long, gentle turns and shallow ramps as it made its way around the room, taking the most circuitous path possible. The elevator always stopped there first no matter how the buttons were pushed, since that was where the tourists were supposed to get off, and then continued down to the actual work level.
Once, the view beneath the walkway would have been all colorful, impractical machinery being tended by men and women in neon scrubs, with perpetual smiles plastered across their faces. No facial hair, pregnancies, or visible tattoos were allowed in the tourist factory, although all three were tolerated and even encouraged in the real Captain Candy. The good Captain didn’t care what you looked like, as long as you came to work and did your job the way that you were told to. The Captain’s PR department was a little more fixated on appearances, and they insisted that he run a tight ship, if only to keep those birthday dollars rolling through the door.
I think I would have liked Captain Candy. You know. If he’d actually been a real person, and if he’d managed to survive the rise of the SymboGen implants with his mind and his humanity intact.
The view from above had changed considerably since the factory switched hands, even if it all still belonged to the corporation on paper. The colorful machines were still there, but most of them had been gutted for whatever useful parts they happened to contain, and then left open to the air as they were converted into planters or small habitats for the less free-range inhabitants of our private indoor farm and animal sanctuary. The neon uniforms were long gone, along with the people who used to wear them. Instead, an observer would find Dr. Cale’s assistants moving between the machines, most of them wearing T-shirts or tank tops and jeans, a few with dirty white lab coats thrown over the top, as if to say, “I’m working in an indoor farm, but I’m still a scientist; I will always be a scientist.” The number of lab coats had dwindled even in the weeks since I’d come to the factory, as people realized that maybe some trappings of the old world were less important to hang on to than others.