Captive Loss
Her stomach churned again, squeezed tighter, and introduced a knot in her throat. She fought past the pain. Death would be knocking, but instead, it was turned away by the water streaming from the ceiling. She dismissed the hunger and focused on the door.
The stone slab door felt lighter today. On this attempt, it moved a few more centimeters off the ground, but not enough to fit under it. She laid down to rest her tired fingers caused by the shallow handholds. She stretched out with the bottoms of her bare feet, touching one wall while her palms reached the opposite side. Pride flushed through her for moving the door slightly higher on this attempt.
Etched above the door lined three concave dots and one convex, the size of grapes, similar to braille. Its binary conversion would be equivalent to the decimal number one. She had a knack for recognizing patterns that helped her graduate top of the class at code academy. She missed programming. Thinking about it kept her sane while confined.
Tracking the sunbeams through ceiling holes, she estimated four days had passed. Her clothes felt oversized from the captive fasting. The stream of water appeared to be on a timer, flowing for about a minute, then stopping for the next five.
Water fell through an oval cutout on the floor, which she used as a makeshift toilet. It reminded her of the squat potties while living in Da Nang during her childhood. She timed her bathroom breaks with the cadence of the water flow, using it to clean up afterward. Beyond the first few days, bowel movements ended.
The cold of the concrete seeped in and moved her to try the door again. She increased her leverage by squatting lower, resting her cheek on the door, and placing her hands in the lowest chiseled slot. Her leg and back muscles flexed in tandem, fingers clenched tightly, as the door slowly rose. A click echoed through the room as the weight of the door subsided.
The door hung open about the height of two fists. A ratcheting mechanism must be holding it in place, she thought. Peering under the gap, she noticed a crumpled fabric in one corner, while the remaining visible area was empty. The other corners hid from view at this angle. The thought of warmth from the blanket increased the urgency to get into that room. She always felt cold, especially on her feet.
The exposed door bottom allowed a better grip as she repeated raising the door and engaging the ratchet until she could slither on her back underneath it.
The revealed room was equivalent to the first one, including the high ceiling and pencil-thin holes for sunlight. She spun around slowly, arms slightly extended, tensed to defend herself from unknown threats.
Slowly inching towards the blanket, images of creatures stirring underneath stoked her fears. She froze in place, contemplating her next move.
She kicked at the blanket with a sweeping of her leg, hitting something hard hidden between the folds. The object fell out with a thud, invoking an involuntary squeal and a sudden reflex to dive through the opened doorway.
Tripping on her foot, she landed on her butt and crab-walked backward toward the door opening. Visions of snakes or spiders crawling out for their next meal chilled the pores of her palms and soles. She noticed a rat-like silhouette was frozen still where it fell out. Was it as scared of her as she was of it?
She sat defensively, back against the door, waiting for the rat to move. She squinted, thinking it would improve her night vision but it made it worse. The rat hadn’t moved. Maybe it’s sleeping? Was it a rat or something else? Regardless, she wanted that blanket.
“Hey, you! Move you stupid rat!”
Yelling at it did not convince it to move. Maybe it was dead? Not wanting to risk being bitten, she decided to lob something at it to startle it away. Her bra was the only thing that came to mind. She took it off and tied it together into a dense ball.
She had one shot at this. She was not athletic but excelled at bowling. She hurled it underhand, using the cracks on the floor as guides.
It was a direct hit as it bounced off the rat and rolled back within her reach. The rat held its ground with no movement. A small sigh of relief escaped as she exhaled a restrained breath, believing it to be dead. She picked up her bra and cocked her arm, ready to catapult it against the immutable rodent.
Inching closer, she noticed the absence of the distinctive creepy rat tail. Closer still, it was missing ears and fur, with dark dirty-orange skin and white-green blemishes. In an instant, she recognized it, picked it up, and bit into it. The taste transported her back into mom’s kitchen when she would sneak nibbles of raw sweet potatoes during Thanksgiving preparations.
Chewing on something solid made her mouth water, and drool slipped out. She pulled the blanket over her legs, and two more potatoes thudded to the floor. She wrapped the blanket around her and sat, completing the entire tuber, with sprouting eyes and all.
Finding the food distracted her from noticing another door outlined and marked with the binary dots. This door was also labeled “0001”, which was the same as the other. These markings must refer to each room. Glancing back at the door she had entered, it unveiled “0000.”
Four bits of binary hold a maximum of 16 values. So if the pattern holds, will she have to work her way through 16 rooms? But why would the doors be marked? What purpose did they serve? Why binary? And why did the two rooms have identical markings?
She felt exhausted thinking about the meaning of the numbers and dismissed her questions for another time. She crawled back to room 0000 with the potatoes and quickly dozed off under the blanket.
After a warm slumber on a full stomach, she felt energized to tackle the next room. Jutting out of the wall was a concrete slab on an incline. It didn’t have handholds and was relatively smooth without markings. Pushing on it with her hands, shouldering it, or prying it from the wall was futile. Instead, she sat against the wall for leverage, pushed with her legs; stone dust moved in the seams. She knew this was how to open it but was still too weak.
After a few days of trying to move the door, it shifted a couple of centimeters. The slab slid back in place when she stopped to rest. After eating the last sweet potato the previous night, hunger insisted on another attempt. Taking a few deep breaths and sustaining an extended push, a familiar click was felt through her feet. The ratchet engaged.
“Fuck, yeah!”
She scrambled to her knees and peered in the crack. There was a pile of items in the corner, but she could not discern them. Regardless of their identity, she wanted to get in that room. After a few more pushes with her legs, back pressed against the wall, the opening widened and advanced the rachet until her head fit through.
Crawling inside, she scampered to the items and discovered a pillow, a stack of paper, and a large bag of trail mix. Tearing open the bag, she poured a mouthful of mixed nuts and raisins, almost swallowing them whole. Then, gagging a bit, she coughed out a few peanuts, picked them up, and stuffed them back in her mouth.
She stopped herself mid-pour into the second mouthful to conserve the food. Then, she grabbed the pillow, buried her face into it, and started sobbing while the papers fell to the floor.
Searching around the room for another door, she spotted the dots reading “0010” — which translated to 2. The door was recessed a couple of inches without any noticeable handholds. Instead, a metal crank and handle jutted out a foot above the markings out of the wall.
The crank felt like it was stuck no matter which direction attempted. Counter-clockwise was the logical direction, so she focused on producing enough leverage to move it. Naturally, her foot wedged into the recessed edge, which allowed her to use it to anchor her body. Metal grating on metal accompanied by a familiar click filled the room. The inset door rose enough to fit a piece of paper under it.
Each full rotation of the crank moved the door a small fraction of an inch. She entertained herself by folding the found paper into Origami figures in-between attempts. After a few days, with only a handful of peanuts remaining and countless rotations of the crank, the door had risen enough for her to slink under it.
Before rising to her knees, she saw a pile of large bricks stacked in the shape of a pyramid. At the top were a pair of gloves and a giant zip-lock bag of something reddish-brown. Moving quickly to the pyramid and climbing the first three steps, she reached up and snatched the bag.
In conjunction with the texture, the sweet and spicy taste of the beef jerky made her eyes water in pure ecstasy. She chewed until her jaw was tired. Finally, she lay there exhausted from the gorged meal, feeling extremely thirsty.
Taking the remaining beef jerky to the previous room, she poured the rest of the trail mix into the bag of meat. Then, she carried the empty bag back to the first room, drank from the water stream and half-filled the trail mix bag under it, then zipped it shut.
She sat against her pillow for a bit and rested before crawling back to the pyramid room with the water.
The gloves were the yellow leather workman’s type and were oversized when she slipped them on.
“Why gloves?”
She spun around to find the next door. There it was, like the previous, inset into the wall, marked with “0011.” Adhering to the binary pattern, it read 3. She didn’t want to cloud her thoughts about what it meant; she stored it away for another time.
There was no crank above the door. The only visible difference was the existence of the pyramid and the size of the room. It seemed to be more than twice the size of the other rooms, longer in one dimension than the other. She looked around the walls for additional clues, but none surfaced.
The door seemed identical to the previous one, with no additional markings, handholds, or distinctive features. She walked to the far end of the room opposite the pyramid and scanned the walls.
“Fuck, that hurt!”
She grabbed her toe and started hopping, looked down, and saw an outline of a large square inset in the floor, about three-quarters of an inch lower, causing her stubbed toe. After glancing between the pyramid and the square inset a few times, her smile masked the pain.
“Aha, I got it!”
She donned the gloves, climbed up the pyramid, and tried to pull a brick off the top. The bricks were the size of an old desktop computer. Unfortunately, the configuration of the bricks did not allow her to remove any from the bottom layers, as they overlapped.
At the top, she straddled her feet on one layer below and picked up the brick to gauge its weight. It was heavier than she expected. She remembered the only comparable item was the heft of a car tire while changing a flat. She pushed and pulled it down each step of the pyramid until she was on the floor again, able to grasp it with stable footing.
Lugging it over to the inset square, she aligned it to one of the corners and dropped it in place. Then, wiping the sweat off her forehead with the back of a glove, she peered back at the pyramid and sighed.
“One down, a ton to go!”
After three days of moving bricks, with a few pieces of beef jerky remaining, she placed the final brick down. She foregone the pyramid shape and stacked the bricks into a flat box. She assumed that the door mechanism required the weight of the bricks and not the orientation. She regretted that assumption when the door didn’t budge.
“Damnit!”
She stood on the pile and started to jump in frustration. A slight rumble sunk the pile about an inch, and the door rose about the same amount. Each successive jump inched the door open, followed by a ratchet click that held it in place.
When the pile was almost even with the floor, she ran over to the door and peeked inside. A thick rope hung down with the other end looped back up through another hole in the ceiling; the rest of the space was empty.
As with the previous room, the next door was recessed and marked “0101,” which equals five. She didn’t care at the moment what the markings meant; instead, her stomach was most upset about the lack of food.
Once fully in the space, she saw the ceiling was twice as high as the other rooms. So, naturally, she pulled down on one side of the rope, and it easily came down while the other side went up.
After retrieving the gloves, she continued pulling one side down and kept an eye on the door. Her arms were tired after about ten minutes with no door movement. She switched to the other side of the rope and pulled that for another ten minutes; still no movement.
She stopped, ate the remaining beef jerky, and folded some Origami figures to clear her mind. Why wasn’t the pulley mechanism working? Maybe the gear ratio was very high, requiring a thousand rope rotations for every inch of door movement. She rested her face in her hands and contemplated how long it would take.
“No way, can’t be!”
She climbed on the rope, placed her feet on the loop, and bounced with a hand on each rope. She felt the rope spring and the door rumble a bit. She assumed her weight was not enough to engage the ratchet. She needed more weight.
Using her blanket, she placed a brick from the pyramid room and dragged it over, repeating the process a couple of times. Next, she made a sling with the blanket, tied it under the rope, and placed a brick in it. Then, she climbed on the rope and started bouncing on it; the brick did not add enough additional weight to move the door. After a second brick was added, the rope descended once she climbed onto the rope.
A familiar click of the ratchet engaged as the door inched open. She stepped off the rope, and it rose back to its original height, but the gap in the door remained. She repeated, stepping on and off the rope until the door rose high enough for her to fit through it.
She peered through the opening and saw another rope, this time a single one that draped to the floor. Near the rope laid a basket. She stepped into the space and noticed a set of stairs with no handrails and a long landing that led to another recessed door. The door was marked “1000,” — which equates to eight.
Opposite the stairs on the wall was a row of eight large wooden pegs sticking out of holes and a red button-like artifact; all were too high for her to reach. She dismissed those and darted to the basket. Inside she found a pair of thick socks, three large mangos, a jar of peanut butter, and a pencil.
She slipped the socks over her cold feet, then bit the skin on one of the mangos, peeling it off, and exposing the golden flesh. It tasted like freshly plucked mangos during her childhood in Vietnam. After finishing the mango, she used the flat seed as a makeshift spoon and shoved a divot of peanut butter in her mouth, licking the pit clean afterward.
Satisfied with the meal, she laid down to think about the pegs and rope, then dozed off.
She noticed the pegs in the wall had a lip around the end, which may allow them to be pulled out. Pulling out the pegs and pressing the red button will probably open the door, but reaching them was the problem. The rope was in the middle of the room, more than two arm’s length from the pegs.
She climbed up the stairs, held on, then jumped towards the pegs with the rope in hand. She almost touched them. Tying a knot at the bottom and one higher allowed secure footing during the swing. She stepped further back on the landing, ran, jumped on the rope, stepped on the bottom knot, and held the top with a gloved hand.
Reaching the pegs, she pulled on one, and it stopped halfway, then repeated the process until all eight were out. Then, aiming her swing at the red button, she pressed it. The pegs snapped back in, but the door didn’t open.
“Hmm… there must be a pattern?”
The pencil in the basket was the clue. Why would she need to use it? Using the paper she found in a previous room, she started doodling, which always helped her think through problems. Looking for a connection between the pegs and the door, she connected the dots.
“It’s Binary!”
The door numbers were the pattern. Writing them down in order of 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, and 8, she instantly recognized them as the start of the Fibonacci sequence. Adding the previous two digits will result in the next. This sequence was used in estimating effort during the planning stages of a programming development cycle. The eight pegs represented the bits of a full byte.
Eight bits can hold 256 distinct values. Continuing the Fibonacci sequence, she wrote down 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, and stopped at 233, all constrained within the eight bits. She then converted those numbers to binary as a guide to position the pegs.
Assuming a pulled-out peg represented a one and the opposite meant a zero, she would have to press the button to confirm after each set. If she made a mistake, the pegs would retract, and the sequence would have to be restarted.
She took a break and ate another mango and scoops of peanut butter. So far she got through more than half of the numbers and decided to tackle the remaining numbers after an extended rest.
The next day, she was on the last number, 233, which translated to “11101001” in binary bits. While holding onto the pegs, her strength allowed her to change two or three bits at a time, and then her grip gave way. A few more swings permitted her to set the final pegs, then she pressed the red button, hopefully for the last time.
Her eyes focused on the door across the room, but her ears heard success from a snap of a relay followed by a motor humming as the door lifted open. She climbed the stairs and crawled through.
The room had a full-sized metal door with an electronic display to its right. A yellow glow from the screen showed a pulsating smiley emoticon. She touched the face; it dissolved and reformed into a note.
“Congratulations, Kylie! You’ve completed your extreme weight reduction escape adventure. You have lost 25.5 pounds; that is 5.5 lbs over your intended goal!
— Captivity Loss, Inc.”
© Tuan Pham-Barnes 2022
