The Blood In The Machine

Vix was standing in the middle of a field, next to a friend.
He didn't know who the friend was, or if they had met before.
At the edges of the open space were small houses, and something that looked like a public café, or restaurant. There were people there. All of them men.
Vix and his friend walked past the gathering of people, who stared at them with shadowy, silent eyes. They didn't much feel like joining them, or even exchanging a brief, polite moment with them as they passed. They didn't know why, it just didn’t feel quite safe.
As they walked around and towards the back of the public house, they could see the landscape opening up. Something was ending here, and something else was beginning.
It was then his friend noticed the fence, and shouted "Look!", as he pointed at it.
As they moved towards it, they could see that it was tall, maybe 6 or 7 meters high. At some stretches, it had barbed wire at the top, and at others, broken glass. And at other parts it was more of a wall than a fence.
It seemed to go on forever around them, the houses, and the open spaces between and beyond them all; but the whole place was so large that one easily failed to notice that it was completely encircled by this fence, at least until one reached the outskirts.
"What the hell is this?", his friend said.
"Looks like a fence. More a wall in some places.", Vix replied.
"I can see that. But why?"
"To keep us from entering what’s beyond, probably."
"Entering what? There's nothing out there but wilderness, as far as I can see."
Vix scratched his chin and gave it a quick thought.
"Or...", he said, "To keep us from exiting."
"Exiting what? This small village with all those rough lads back there?"
"No. To keep us from exiting our prison."
As he said these words, he felt a rush of sadness rolling up from his stomach and through his chest. It left a kind of sad taste in his mouth, and he had to swallow to get rid of it.
"A prison. Why the hell should we be in prison?", his friend said, in an angry voice.
"I don't know. Probably just stuff we've done."
"I haven't done fuck all to get on the edge with the law. Ever. Why the hell should I be here? This is bloody outrageous!"
His friend was steaming with anger now, but Vix just felt the sadness that had taken residence in the back of his throat.
"It probably is.", Vix replied. "Outrageous. But we're still in here."
"I'm getting out.", his friend said, and immediately started to climb the fence.
He instantly managed to get quite high up, but as he approached the top there was too much barbed wire to go any further without getting a nasty injury.
Vix looked at his friend struggling for a while, then he started to climb himself. But the same thing happened. As soon as he came close to the top, the wall became so dangerous that he had to back off.
Soon they both descended, and had to catch their breaths on the ground for a while.
"What do we do now?" His friend was still angry, but slightly more desperate-sounding.
"Maybe we can dig our way beneath it?"
"Of course! It can't be that deep when it is so high", his friend said enthused.
Vix though about why it couldn't, but when he took a closer look, he thought he could see a small opening at the very bottom of the fence a few meters to their right.
They ran over to the spot, and discovered that there was snow on the ground here, not sand, as they had initially thought.
"Strange.", Vix said. "I didn't notice the snow from over there."
"Neither did I, but let's start digging."
They started digging, and quickly got the light snow out of the way.
As they got deeper, they found that there was a steel wire net that seemed to stretch down from the fence and deep into the ground. They tried at different spots, but the same thing happened at every attempt. It was useless.
Totally knackered, they both eventually gave up, and sat on the cold ground in silence.
"That's it.", his friend said after a while.
"That's what?", Vix replied.
"We're stuck in here."
"Yeah. Seems so."
"I really don't wanna go back to those people. Or be locked up in here anymore."
"Me neither."
"Let's try to find another way. There must be a way of contacting someone on the outside."
"You mean like a telephone?", Vix said.
"Yeah. Or a computer. Let's look around for a bit. If this is a prison, I still can't see no guards anywhere."
His friend was right. They hadn't seen anyone who looked even slightly like prison guards. Only the men at the house, and they were far from guard-like in appearance.
"Ok. Let's have a look around."
They walked quietly past the big house with the men, and across the small field, that now seemed more like a square. Things seemed to change slightly when looked at twice in this place, something Vix found strange but still not straight-out disastrous, so he let it pass.
At the other end of the field-turned-square, they reached a small one-storey house. It looked like the command-office of a military camp in the kind of movies that had military camps in them that looked like this. Very simple and sparsely decorated, if decorated at all.
There seemed to be no-one there, but the door was left open.
They snuck inside.
The office was very simple, with a desk, a chair, a dustbin and a single coat-hook on the wall.
There were no pictures on the wall, or on the desk.
On top of the desk was a computer, but no phone.
The computer seemed old, the kind with a large tower cpu-unit standing on the floor beneath the desk, and the screen and keyboard standing on top of it connected with wires.
The computer was in sleep mode, with the kind of floating text screen-saver that used to be popular in public offices in the past, often hiding an ongoing game of solitaire - if you were to touch the mouse and wake it up from its digital dreams.
The text read: "Hello."
"Do you think it's connected to the Internet?", his friend asked in a whispery voice, as if to be sure not to wake the computer.
"I don't know.", Vix replied. "Let's try it."
He touched the mouse. Nothing happened. He pressed a key. It woke up. There was no solitaire behind the screen-saver, but a small login window on a green background. A message said "press any key to log in".
Vix pressed any key, in this case “z”, and was prompted for a password for the "guest" login.
"Shit.", Vix' friend said, still whispering, even if the computer was now awake.
Vix typed "hello" in the password field, and pressed "enter".
The hard-drive made struggling noises as it wound up to speed, and they were logged in.
"Wow!", his friend said. "How did you know?"
"I didn't.", Vix replied.
He quickly opened a web-browser and checked in on all his regular sites. Everything looked quite normal. Just like any other day sitting by his own desk checking the same websites from his own computer.
Soon he had forgotten all about the fact that he just had found himself confined in a strange prison, and that the whole reason he was standing here bent over a strange desk in a military command-office-looking office with a stranger who was now a friend was to try and get in touch with the outside world and eventually escape.
His friend had also lost himself, and was just standing next to Vix staring at the screen, reading the latest news headlines without ever clicking on them to see the whole article behind, checking the latest blog posts of new and old music, scrolling through the forums for anything that hadn't been discussed last week.
They were two imprisoned souls with the most powerful oracle of knowledge in history at their hands, but they just couldn't come up with the right question, or even remember to ask one at all.
Suddenly his friend snapped out of it, and almost shouted: "Look!".
He was pointing at the cpu-tower at the floor.
The computer's box had opened up as by itself, and inside a mix of wiring and electronics were mixed up with something that looked like transparent plastic tubes. Liquid flowed and bubbled through these clear plastic veins. It was steaming with heat, and in places the substance had started boiling.
"That doesn't look good.", his friend said.
As Vix turned around he could see that the plastic tubes of the computer had grown out of the box behind their backs and were now stretching across the room to other electronic devices they hadn't noticed when they arrived.
"This whole thing is gonna blow, we have to get out!"
At that moment Vix suddenly realized that the liquid inside the tubes were nothing but the steaming, undulating red substance that flowed through his own veins.
This machine was running on blood.
"No fucking wonder there are no guards here.", he said to his friend. "This whole bloody prison is alive!"