Towards evening, the man who led me to the interrogation yesterday comes into the room. He tosses a pair of handcuffs onto the bed.
‘Put them on. Behind your back.’
What now? More questioning? I stand, pick up the cuffs. The other guard aims his weapon at my forehead, and flicks it onto auto.
‘Where are you taking me?’
Nobody replies. I hesitate, then snap on the cuffs. The first man approaches me, producing a hypodermic capsule. It all seems almost familiar by now.
Yeah. The same old routine. Nothing to fear. What better way to do it? The capsule is the same pale blue as before, but his grip conceals the markings.
‘Can’t you tell me where I’m going?’
He ignores me, unsheathes the capsule. He looks right at me—but his mods have pared him down until there’s nothing left for his eyes to betray.
‘I just—’
He places two fingers on my neck and stretches the skin. I say evenly, ‘I want to speak to your boss again. There’s something I didn’t tell her. Something important I have to explain.’
No reaction. The gun is still on auto; if I struggle, I’m dead for sure. The needle goes in. There’s nothing to do but wait. I open my eyes and blink at the bright ceiling, then look around. I haven’t even been moved. I am deprimed, though.
It’s 16:03, January 7th. The guard’s chair, still in place, is empty.
I lie perfectly still for a while, feeling numb and disoriented. When I try to get to my feet, I find that I’m weaker than I realized; I sit on the edge of the bed, with my head on my knees, trying to clear my thoughts.
A wave of pure, suffocating claustrophobia passes through me. I would have died like a good little robot. That’s the worst of it: the way I calmly accepted the loss of hope, the narrowing of the possibilities, every step of the way. I would have dug my own fucking grave, if they’d asked me.
But they didn’t. So why am I still alive? What was I sedated for? If my memory has been tampered with, they’ve done a seamless job—an unlikely feat in a day. (Then again, maybe they’ve spent a year on it, and everything that persuades me otherwise is a fabrication.)
I look up as the door opens. The guard who injected me yesterday comes in; he’s armed, but his weapon is holstered, as if he knows what state I’m in. Maybe they’ve dissolved my priming mods. I query P3; it still exists. I stop short of invoking it.
He tosses something at me. I don’t even try to catch it; it lands at my feet. A magnetic key.
‘That’s for the front door,’ he says. I stare at him. He seems almost embarrassed; whatever behavioural mods I’ve seen him with before, I’d say they’re shut down now. He grabs the chair from the corner of the room and puts it beside the bed, then sits facing me.
‘Take it easy, okay. My name’s Huang Qing. I’ve got something to tell you.’
‘What?’ I’m beginning to think I know the answer. And I think again about priming—to cushion the blow, to keep myself from going into shock—but then it occurs to me that there’s probably no need.
He says, warily, ‘You’ve been recruited. By the Ensemble.’
‘The Ensemble.’ The phrase dances through my head, pushing buttons and tripping switches. For an instant, all this sparkling new machinery is clearly visible to me: perfectly delineated, separate and comprehensible—although maybe this is just a delusion, a side-effect, a glitch. In any case, a moment later the insight (or mirage) is gone, and I could no more describe the minutiae of what’s been done to me than I could determine, by introspection, which neurons make my bowels move or my heart beat.
‘You okay?’
‘I’m fine.’ And it’s true, I am. I feel a kind of abstract horror, and a remote, almost dutiful, outrage—but the sheer relief of finally knowing my fate, and understanding the sense of it, outweighs both.
This is what they meant by leniency. I’m alive. My memory is intact. Nothing has been taken away from me—but something has been added.
I have no idea what the Ensemble is—except that it’s the most important thing in my life.
PART TWO
5
When Huang leaves, I spend a few minutes wandering about the flat, making a mental list of the things I’ll need to buy. The clothes I was wearing when I broke into BDI have been destroyed, but my wallet has been returned to me, intact. Then I recall that I still have clothes in my room at the Renaissance—and that I’m still running up a bill there. I pocket the front-door key and take the stairs down, then I find a street sign and get my bearings. I’m only a few kilometres south of the hotel, so I walk.
I can’t help imagining what I’d be doing right now, if my old priorities still held sway—and the new mod does nothing to censor these speculations. Scenarios run through my head, unbidden; absurd fantasies of ‘subduing’ the mod by some heroic effort of will, long enough to put myself in the hands of a neurotechnician who could set me free. I have no doubt that this is what I ‘would have’ wanted—but I’m equally certain that it’s not what I want, now. The disparity is irritating, but not unfamiliar; my superseded goals nag at me like insistent, but insincere, pangs of conscience.
The humidity is stifling, and the streets are jammed with people; I weave my way through the Saturday-night crowds with a kind of mechanical persistence. I pass right through a youth gang, sixty or more teenagers of both sexes, all with identical sneering faces modelled on the same cult video star, all with the same shimmering, luminescent tattoos, cycling through the same psychedelic patterns in perfect synch. Not looking for trouble, says Deja Vu. Just looking to be seen.
When I reach the hotel, there’s no reason to linger. I quickly pack and check out. I detour past the airport on the way back; I’m not entirely sure why. In part, I’m just curious to know if I’m being tracked or followed, curious to know exactly how much faith BDI now have in me. I think about marching into the passenger terminal and buying a ticket, just to see if anyone stops me, but then that seems like a childish thing to do, and I walk on.
I keep half expecting to start hearing voices or seeing visions, although I know full well that such crude techniques are obsolete. Loyalty mods don’t whisper propaganda in your skull. They don’t bombard you with images of the object of devotion while stimulating the pleasure centres of your brain, or cripple you with pain and nausea if you stray from correct thought. They don’t cloud your mind with blissful euphoria, or feverish zealotry; nor do they trick you into accepting some flawed but elegant piece of casuistry. No brainwashing, no conditioning, no persuasion. A loyalty mod isn’t an agent of change; it’s the end product, a fait accompli. Not a cause for belief, but belief itself, belief made flesh—or rather, flesh made into belief.
What’s more, the neurons involved are ‘hardwired’—rendered physically incapable of further change. The belief is unassailable.
I can’t decide if knowing all this makes my condition more bizarre, or less. The mod takes no action to stop me thinking about its effects; presumably, the advantages of allowing me to understand what’s happened are seen to outweigh any conflict between the sincerity of my feelings and my awareness of their origins. After all, if I had no idea why I felt this way about the Ensemble, I’d probably go insane trying to work it out. No doubt the mod could have been designed to conceal itself, and to take steps to keep me from even wondering what had hit me—but censorship like that can be difficult to make seamless, without whittling the user down to a state approaching idiocy. Instead, I’ve been left with my reason and memory intact (so far as I can tell), free to find my own way to come to terms with the situation.