I had a long four minutes to consider the implications of what I’d undertaken, the fiction I was creating, the familiar sense of life at a remove from life. I had time to consider the presence of Albert Caldwell within me—yes, still there, always there—either directing me toward or away from the truth from his frozen little cave, I couldn’t tell which, I could never know, my existence being a dictatorship of ignorance, and at the mark, the windows erupted and fire stormed through the space, a rolling, rippling flood of plasma, incinerating carpet and paper, carbonizing the ceiling tiles, roaring like river rapids, exerting an unexpected force, a physical force—what had I expected, seaweed lapping at my legs, lambs licking at lilacs, tongues of flame and all that? Certainly not this godlike presence crushing me from all sides, reducing, suffocating, combusting within me. The flaming analysts had all dropped safely into the subspace through trapdoors, and when the ceiling collapsed, my puckering throat sucked at the deoxygenated atmosphere, even though the EOD suit had been reinforced with a carbon-fiber cage so that I was wearing, in essence, a protective refrigerator, and the O2 was flowing normally.
The crushing panic was only my neurons hurtling along ahead of the physical sensation, playing the odds, and as I lay pinned beneath the rubble, panting, stinging sweat searing my lips, the screech of steel girders shearing from their mounts piped into my headset, rebar screaming as it knotted and broke, I recalled my training and opened my eyes so that I might take in the same darkness as Vik, had he been there. Had he been there and had he survived the initial impact. A tiny flame danced around in the little pocket of rubble before my eyes, gobbling up oxygen that, had Vik been trapped there, could have sustained him for just a few seconds more. A bright red combustion thread crawled across a wafer of ceiling tile wedged against my helmet. Soon that light, too, flickered and dimmed and died. The rubble shifted now and then, and I watched and breathed and listened.
As Eden predicted, the complication did nothing to make me feel better. It didn’t do anything except fill me with the desire to do it again. On subsequent runs I refused everyone’s advice and insisted on getting exactly what I wanted. It pleased me to think I was screwing with their system, forcing them to rethink their omniscient attitude. I was really going to put them through the ringer. There weren’t going to be any surprises, oh no, not like Eden’s complication. I knew exactly what I wanted.
I was being, of course, as predictable as a sunset. I paid to do it again. I had insurance money, and the brokerage accounts had rebounded, so why not? Why not blow it all playing with fire? I should have been suspicious; Turk was giving me too much leeway, wasn’t she? Letting me control every aspect of the complication. I was supposed to be getting what I needed, not what I wanted. I said I wanted to be convinced of the existence of reality as it had been explained to me. I had been told that Vik died in Tower One, and I didn’t believe it. Put me in the office so that I might believe, I said. Turk didn’t put up a strenuous argument. The staff psychologist went along, too. Maybe, I thought, it just so happened that what I wanted and what I needed were one and the same.
So I stood again in the EOD suit, waiting to be convinced that my husband had been burned, pulverized, vaporized. I was cooked and crushed and I still didn’t believe it.
Turk listened to my list of complaints, where the complication had failed to mimic reality, where it had failed metaphorically, why I wanted it louder, hotter, with the smell of smoldering steel. She made notes and passed them along to the designers. I was pleased to be in control of something.
My complication had little to do with what was happening within the firebox, but I couldn’t have possibly comprehended that at the time. All the pre-launch histrionics, all my insistence on maintaining control, asserting my agency: that was the real complication, the site of my transubstantiation. She let me run the fireball complication six times in total. I got friendly with the staff. We made slight modifications. After the third performance I no longer needed the office, the actors, the soundtrack. Just the fire and the collapse. I really thought I was making some progress. On my own terms, as they say. By the end, we were down to bare concrete and a wire frame to support the ceiling, no more vid-screen windows, and Jerome, an ex-chemist who’d worked at ILM before Turk hired him away, casually mentioned that for about a tenth of what I was paying, he could shoot me with a flamethrower and drop some reinforced asbestos tiling from a rig, and it would only take about an hour to set up. I didn’t hear sarcasm, but kindness; I felt encouraged that he understood. He saw that I was narrowing the scope of my research, and that as I gathered more information I was discarding superfluous elements of the set. Reality was collapsing beneath the symbolic. As I moved toward the truth, ornamentation was a distraction. Jerome was an excellent actor.
The firebox was not without its merits. It was there, buried beneath the ceiling, watching the flames eat the world, that I brought myself into focus. There, just for an instant, the paper-doll cutouts (me:me) aligned and my borders felt clear, definitive. For a moment I could believe that Vik had died.
In the end, a complication is nothing more than the practical application of a philosophy that substitutes one accepted reality for another. Suppose you have a computer. You exchange its hard drive for another, identical drive. The inputs processed by the identical drive are no different. Maybe there are slight improvements in processing speed; or maybe it’s a little slower. But nothing you’d really notice. Arguably, data flowing through the new drive undergoes a spiritual alteration, affecting every letter and number you type, every image you save, but are such things visible to the naked eye? And do they even matter, if you’re not looking for them? What if someone switches the hard drive without telling you?
A complication is not an escape, but an adjustment. Not an awakening, but a deeper, clarified slumber. It’s both the well and the bucket. Perhaps you drown or quench your thirst. Nothing changes or you might benefit from the placebo effect. We’re not Scientology, we’re not Freemasons or Figure Sevens. We are simply a conduit.