WARDEN

Everyone in the class noticed it immediately. Pam was missing. The teacher wore a grave expression that she soon replaced with a rehearsed smile. Something was wrong.

“Okay class! Pop quiz.”

Every student straightened their backs. There was no time to dwell on their missing peer as sheets of paper made their way onto each desk, excluding that of Pam.

“You may turn over your papers on the hour.”

A measly thirty seconds until the needle on the clock would meet its mark. The students took the opportunity to dry their sweaty palms, and at the tap of the teacher’s heel, they all flipped over their papers in unison. A singular question graced that pure white canvas.

Where did Pam go?

They looked up at the teacher. Her eyes spoke a thousand words that no one understood. How were they to know?

A student raised his hand.

“Yes?” The teacher spoke, her voice a haze, a mere lull in the overbearing silence.

“What are the stakes?” The student asked.

His classmates were wide-eyed, shaken to the core with a reverberating terror. They each knew well enough that failing one of the teacher’s pop quizzes would have consequences. But Mark was the first one brave enough to ask. The teacher took a few seconds to think.

“The window seat.”

All the students looked at the girl sitting alone by the window of the classroom. She would never participate in class, nor speak to anyone outside of it. The window seat had claimed her, and it was bliss. To her belonged the sole privilege of witnessing the world beyond those concrete walls. She had no name, and no recollection of herself, but she was more important than she could ever know.

The class became filled with the noise of pen on paper as students began scribbling down their answers. Johannes looked around until his eyes landed on the girl by the window. She looked outside, her ears deaf to the goings-on of the classroom, and beheld a lush, green field, lit by rays of light peering through fluffy white clouds. The wind rustled the grass, and the mesmerized girl followed the motions of each blade as it swayed to and fro. A few moments later, her eyes landed on another girl who she didn’t recognize. The girl seemed almost translucent. She walked to the window, and on it wrote a message with a black marker. The girl then left, beyond the window’s field of view. The student by the window stared at the message, wide-eyed.

BREAK IT.

As if she had said it aloud, every other person in the class turned their head towards her. The girl by the window was panicking. The students began to converge on her, slowly. Johannes shook his head and reached into his coat pocket. He pulled out what looked to be a remote and pressed a button labeled “END”.

In an instant, the classroom vanished. Johannes looked defeated as he sat in a dimly lit room whirring with machinery, his ears tickled by the gentle hum of a tube light above his head. He raised his head slightly to look at an unresponsive Pam lying on the bed in front of him. Johannes raised an audio recorder to his mouth, hit “RECORD”, and began to speak.

“Attempt 88: Failure” Johannes spoke, his voice shaking. He continued in a low, tired voice. “Pam’s still stuck in her Warden Space. She sits by the window and doesn’t know who she is. The artificial construct of Pam that I made escapes, and the teacher begins a quiz to find her. The construct attempts to communicate with the real Pam through the window, but she panics and the space becomes unstable.”

With a click, Johannes ended the recording, and let out a deep sigh. He couldn’t say how long he had been at it. Where he was, time tended to blend together, layer upon layer until it became a mass large enough to smother all hope and ambition. When it became too much, and his surroundings began to buckle, Johannes would remind himself of Pam. The girl he loved. For her, he would break himself.

Johannes stood up and went outside the shack. The starry sky brought solace, and the calm air caressed his back, running its gentle fingers through his hair. Johannes took out his phone and dialed a ten-digit number. The voice that answered from the other end was his.

“Hello?” the voice spoke. The sounds of cutlery and smooth jazz could be heard in the background.

“It’s me again” Johannes answered. “Look, you have to listen to me. Pam’s gonna-“

“Oh for f- I thought I blocked this number. Stop-“

“Please, just- “

“Stop calling me. I can’t help you.”

The voice hung up, and as it fizzled away, despair found Johannes again. The sky droned and the ground beneath him began to quake.

Elsewhere, in a distant memory, Johannes sat on a dinner table at his favorite restaurant, his brow furrowed in frustration as he put his phone aside.

“Scams getting elaborate day by day” he mumbled to himself.

“You’re mumbling again”, a girl sitting opposite him spoke.

“Huh? Yeah, I know, what about it?”

She laughed. He smiled.

“So,” she began after a brief pause, “are those your dad shoes?”

“They might be. Enough about me though” Johannes demanded, raising his glass to drink out of it. “You said something about getting tested?”

“Oh, yeah. The doctors think I’m a Warden.”

“What do those guys do again?” Johannes asked. “Sorry, I get them confused.”

“Mhmm, sure you do. Wardens make spaces. Like whoever made this restaurant.”

“Oh, right….” Johannes thought about it for a moment, looking around. Every inch of their surroundings was artificially constructed by the wandering thoughts of a mysterious Warden. Was the Warden still in here? Or did they break free? Not every Warden could escape their masterpiece, but the ones that did could profit from their creation forever. A pipeline to success if there ever was one, but with a dear price to pay for a mind lacking resilience.

“If you’re a Warden, then” Johannes began, “what’re you gonna make?”

The girl paused for a moment. Her face, initially invested in conjuring a genuine response, took on an air of mischief as a joke creeped into her mind.

“Remember that rant you posted on the school website eight years ago? Something about-“

“Don’t” Johannes said, knowing where this was going.

“-pop quizzes?”

“It got me suspended, yeah, I know. I called it flowery; they called it vulgar.”

The girl giggled. “Maybe I’ll trap you in a classroom.”

Johannes sipped his drink once more. “You’ll probably get carried away and trap yourself in there too.”

“Then I guess you’ll have to break me out” she responded in jest.

Johannes scoffed, a smirk forming on his face. “I guess I will, Pam.”

Another Johannes, sporting gray hair and baggy eyes, entered the shack and returned to the room where Pam lay silently. His eyes lingered on her stagnant body for a few moments as he composed himself. He had to stay calm. He wasn’t a Warden, and yet he had made the space in which he stood, all to save her. He breathed deep, and with half a heart and a tattered mind, he uttered those words that had now lost all meaning.

“Let’s go again.”