They stop. They bang you out of the car. You cock back your head, to see beneath the oily blindfold. Someone chops you hard in the neck. They drag you, doubled over, inside.
They take your keys and the trinkets from your pockets. Your Swiss Army knife causes a buzz out of proportion to its two pinkie blades and nail clippers.
They confiscate your wallet, pulling it apart piece by piece. They demand an account of every scrap and wrapper. Your expired organ donor declarations. Your eyeglass prescription. Your student ID, ten years obsolete. Bank cards that you couldn't use anywhere within a thousand kilometers.
"What is this?" a venomous tenor shouts at you, sticking each enigma under your blindfold for inspection. "What these numbers mean?"
"Those… are phone numbers. Phone numbers of friends in America."
"Don't lie!" Another pair of hands slams you from the rear, more for the drama than for the pain.
"Codes," a neutral voice declares.
"Not codes. Phone numbers. Go ahead. Call them. Tell them I say hello."
The voice laughs without humor.
Another bodiless voice draws close to your face. "You American? Why you look like a Arab?"
You curse your failure to memorize the fourteen splinter groups. Who are these people? What do they need to hear? Answer wrong and you will never answer again. They'll kill you for your political ignorance.
"Why?" your interrogator shouts. "What kind of name is Taimur Martin?"
The question you grew up with. Your gut snaps tight. You roll the die and answer: "I am… half Iranian."
Rapid bursts of translation pass among several people. They argue, climbing up the pitches of virulent Arabic. You've never realized how much you need your eyes to converse.
"Where your passport?"
"I… didn't think I'd need it when I stepped out of the compound."
For a moment they soften, pat you on the shoulder. They shuffle around in the invisible room, collecting your things. They'll put you back in the car, return you to the school, drop you off, and fade back into whatever lunatic cabal of posturing boys put them up to this stunt.
Instead, they strip and search you. The hunt grows violent. Your body starts to convulse again. You will shit all over the floor. You will die here, and you won't even know why.
"Please, not the necklace," you beg. "That's a present. A gift from a—
"Don't call us thieves." Spit sprays your cheek. And the necklace, Gwen's good-luck charm, disappears into the political.
They want names. Names of who? It's absurd. They can spot an American from ten kilometers, if they only look. What would they do with names? Saunter up and down the street, calling them out? Still they ask, but listlessly, a dry read-through of the barest minimum script.
"Tell us what we ask. We know how to use… electricity. You understand?"
You understand. You fake a weak composure. You tell them you'll do whatever they ask.
"What are you doing here?"
You cannot stop yourself. "You kidnapped me."
Something cracks you just above the left ear. Lights explode against the curtain of your blindfold. You bite into your tongue. You vomit, stinging and dry, in your mouth.
"What are you doing here?"
"I am a teacher." Slower and slower. "I give conversational English lessons at—"
"You are stupid. Big shit. You are American spy. You are CIA."
The first objecting syllable out of your throat whips your interrogator into fury. "You lie. You liel We know why you come here. We know about your big secret."
Connections light you up at last. It comes back to you, the vanished lesson from your teacher-training days in Des Moines. The first rule of any classroom: Never resort to irony.
8
The first generation of imaginary landscapes began pouring from the simulator just as Adie settled in to her own new one. She took only a few weeks to see just what chambers the Cavern meant to mimic. She stood inside the room-sized box, watching a stream of images flicker across those living walls, the last, baffled Neanderthal standing by as Homo sapiens launched its breakout.
With her olive pullovers and her four-foot hank of hair falling like the stern line of a sponge boat in a braid down her back, she drew mixed reviews from the doughnut-packing hackers. Rajan Rajasun-daran and the signal-processing team found her a mild abrasion. Ronan O'Reilly, the econometric modeler, plied her with polite indifference. Jackdaw Acquerelli responded to her like a spooled background process. Sue Loque slammed her New York provincialism at every opportunity. Spider Lim lavished her with almost ethnographic attention. Adie, for her part, clung to Stevie Spiegel. But the scent of an old friend only made the air of this new planet harder to breathe.
Jonathan Freese, the RL director, dragged her down the mountainside to a cafe. Over a healthy shot of triple mocha, he launched into a rambling monologue on Parmigianino, Tiepolo, and the baptistery doors at Pisa. Like asking your first black neighbor over to listen to your Duke Ellington.
A marvelous thing, the greatest pleasure were allowed. Art. It's OK, she assured him. I'm not really all that into it. Freese, pushing fifty, was a good twenty years older than the lab's median age. He mimicked the general Birkenstock look. Yet he looked a shade less anarchical than the programmers who worked for him, crisper, more pigmented, as if he still got outside now and
then.
Would you care for some bran muffin? he asked. Good source of roughage, you know.
Adie declined, sticking to her herbal tea and arrowroot biscuit. Jonathan, I need to ask you something.
Name it.
He might have sold encyclopedias, or utopian communities, or patriotic evidence to Senate investigations.
I'm not sure that Ã'ò doing what's expected of me, she told him. I want you to get your money's worth.
Well, first of all, think of your first year as a learning fellowship. It's not really a question of our getting our money's worth. It's more of a question of you getting your time's worth.
Jonathan, be straight with me.
I am straight. The higher-ups are all impressed by your work.
What work? I haven't done any work.
Your portfolio. We just want to put you together with a bunch of other talented people and see what synergies come out.
What exactly is a synergy?
He laughed, without losing track of a single bran crumb. That's what everyone's trying to figure out.
She felt the force of this man's competence. He exuded an aura of the true administrator, the square-jawed command of those who understand how human organizations work. She saw why people of both sexes tried so hard to please him.
The Realization Lab is just a research facility at present. TeraSys doesn't have to get its money's worth out of us yet. Not directly, anyway. The Cavern is an experiment in assembling several advanced technologies. We simply want to see what the world is going to look like a few years down the rail cut.
But how do they pay for us?
Freese swallowed a careful packet of bran muffin and then laughed again. Something in that laugh nagged at Adie: the mirth of a man who belonged to a chain of being much larger than he was.
TeraSys has had a bit of a tax liability in the last few years, in case you've been living in Giverny and missed the annual reports. It can do no wrong, as far as windfall revenues go. R-and-D costs are the best write-offs available, and even those only make the problem worse, in the long run. What exactly is this so-called research supposed to feel like? Like any kind of exploration, I imagine. Like working up an altar-piece.