Doubting Delilah (Chapter 3) (Patreon)

“What if I introduced you to some of them, huh?” Carrie said. “Would that make you see that they’re real?”

“But… if they were there, I wouldn’t be able to actually “see” them, right?”

“Well, yeah. They’re… like this big.” Carrie held her thumb and forefinger apart, demonstrating the few-inch distance.

“Are you… showing me how tall they are right now? Cuz I can’t tell whether you’re moving or not. I can barely even tell you have arms at all. How do you expect me to see that?” Delilah said.

“Okay, fine, so you wouldn’t actually see them, but they still have voices! You said something can be real if you can hear it, right?”

“So, you’re saying their teensy voices could actually carry through the machine?” the Omega asked. She tapped the device resting in the crook of her inner ear. “Honestly, I can barely hear you through it sometimes, even when you’re shouting at me, and from what you’re describing, it sounds like your made-up little-”

“-NOT made-up!”

“Sorry, sorry, your… regular little friends are even quieter than you. Would I be able to hear them, even if I can’t see them?”

Carrie ground her teeth and balled her fists.

“N-No, I guess not. We’ve… actually tried that before, where a Beta talked into my mouthpiece, and the Omega couldn’t hear a thing. But still…”

“So I can’t see them or hear them,” Delilah said, gently as though she was talking to a fantasy-obsessed child. “Would I… be able to feel one walking around in my hand? Could we try that?”

“No…” Carrie glumly slumped to her haunches, arms fitfully crossed. The struggle was only going downhill now. Her words came in a defeated rasp: “We’ve… tried that, too. We had a crowd of them standing on an Omega’s finger once, and she couldn’t feel a thing. God, I just… I don’t know what to… ugh.”

While Delilah couldn’t distinguish Carrie’s puny facial features scrunched with exasperation, or even read her depressed body language, she could sense in her friend’s somber voice that she was wounded at these continual blockades in reaching common ground. As sure as she still held her beliefs, the Omega couldn’t help but feel guilt at dampening Carrie’s mood so severely, no matter how brutally honest she was by nature.

“Oh, Carrie…” Delilah cooed, pacing in circles around the mountainous zone. She raised her pinky over her friend, petting the Alpha’s whole body with the smooth ridges of her swirling fingerprint in an attempt to console her. “Listen, I’m… not saying I believe now, but… why don’t you tell me about them? These “Betas.” I really want to hear.”

Carrie looked up at her with a hint of revitalized hope and mustered a smile.

Miles below Delilah’s hand where her attention was exclusively paid, the citizens of the micro-domed city districts also looked to the sky, but with precisely the opposite sentiment to Carrie. In her stress over this friction with her friend, the Omega had begun nervously walking laps around the perimeter of the mountain range, occasionally trekking straight through the middle of the valley. In just one trip around the region, Delilah had already crunched three more municipal pods into unrecognizable rubble underfoot, and she showed no signs of moving on. The surviving districts of the city were working on emergency evacuation, mostly ferrying citizens into the packed bullet trains to get them away from the danger, though many of these unlucky passengers were only transported to a hub that was seconds away from vanishing beneath Delilah’s boot as well.

Minutes later, another four micro city-pods were wiped clean off the map. Two of them were wrecked at the same time, with one fitted under the Omega’s weighty heel and the other meeting the wrath of the boot’s steel-toed tip. Some districts were accidentally kicked toward high-velocity destruction on the side of the mountains, others smeared asunder when the Omega’s foot anxiously pivoted in place, but most were simply pulverized by gigaton pressure when she stepped on them with strength that could’ve turned sand into glass then back again. As the bullet train network fell to pieces, proving totally ineffectual as an escape, the majority of citizens stampeded out of town on foot, in cars, and in planes, only praying they could outpace the slow yet inevitable onslaught of the Omega’s obliviously marching feet.

“What to say about Betas? They’re… really special. They have such a unique perspective on the world, knowing how dangerous it can be and how vulnerable they are to anything that might want to hurt them, but still, over and over, and I meet Betas who take those setbacks and turn them into advantages,” Carrie detailed with evident passion. She took a cross-legged seated position in Delilah’s hand and spoke up into her headset, to make sure not a word was lost in translation. “They look out at the world as a great challenge, something to explore and embrace even though it’s so much bigger than them. All they want is to be treated equally by others. A lot of Alphas don’t even give them the time of day, and others hunt them for sport when they think they can get away with it, and still… so many Betas are ready to forgive them, if only they can have the same rights! It’s… inspiring. And that’s why I fight for them.”

“That sounds really nice,” Delilah affirmed, and she didn’t even have to lie. Loony as the concept of Betas sounded, even the steadfast nonbeliever wasn’t immune to such ardent devotion from her friend. “I, um… wish I could think the same way about it as you, Carrie. Really I do. I think it’s kind of beautiful that you feel so strongly for something, and that you stick up for it, even though… well…”

“Even though you don’t believe,” the Alpha finished for her with a weary exhale. This was a disappointing outcome, but steadily Carrie found compromised serenity in their difficult impasse. She’d said her piece, and Delilah had done her best to comprehend these alien notions; that was all anybody could ask.

“Yeah. I’m… really sorry if you’re upset. I hope there’s no hard feelings. But we can still be friends, can’t we?”

“Yes. Of course we can,” Carrie sighed.

Now coming out of her focused reverie, the Alpha took notice again of her surroundings for the first time in a while. It was tricky to get a lay of the land when she was currently being held a solid four miles off the Earth, but judging by the mountain-speckled distant horizon, she realized they were nowhere near where they’d begun the trip. Standing up, she hiked to the nearest side of Delilah’s hand, where she peeked over the plush rounded edge as far as she dared lean. It felt like looking out the porthole of an airplane at the indistinct patchwork of microbial landscapes so far below, but still there was something eerily familiar about this area to Carrie.

“Anything the matter?” Delilah asked.

“Um…” Carrie droned. A pit formed in her stomach as she studied the many crisscrossing impressions of the Omega’s astronomic boot-prints wherever they’d hole-punched new half-mile canyons into the previously clean mountain valley. Though Carrie didn’t have the tragic answer yet, already her brow was perspiring, her heart rate ramping into palpitations. “What zone are we in right now?”

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THE END