by Max Barry
• • •
She got to visit Labs. It turned out to be in the bowels of the building, underground. It was brightly lit and full of techs in white coats and had two plastic, keypad-protected doors between her and anyone more senior than a receptionist. They interviewed people down here, she knew: attached them to probes and ran them through fMRIs to record what happened when they heard words. Then they sent the data upstairs to NL for analysis. Where these test subjects came from, she didn’t know. Although once while looking for a pay phone near George Washington University, she had seen a paper stapled to a light pole offering fifty dollars for volunteers for a psychology experiment, so maybe that. When the data came through the ticketing system, sometimes under OBERVABLE EFFECTS it said psychotic break, or loss of function, or coma. She tried not to think about this too much. But it was obvious that people got hurt down there.
• • •
Sashona—Smith, as Emily would never feel comfortable calling her—had changed a lot. She laughed, which she had never done at school, and found everything amazing. This struck Emily as unlikely behavior, since Sashona should have been guarding her personality to prevent segmentation. She decided it was feigned: a behavioral smoke screen. The higher levels didn’t do this; Emily had talked with Eliot plenty and had no idea of his segment simply because he gave nothing away. But it made sense for a newer poet. It made her wonder if she should be doing the same thing, and if Sashona thought Emily was trying to figure out her segment, and if Sashona was trying to figure out hers.
One day, as a tall, handsome barista delivered coffees to their café table, Sashona opened her mouth and a snarl of unintelligible words tripped out. “Love me,” Sashona said, and the barista spilled the coffee and went away and came back to ask for Sashona’s phone number. This was how Emily discovered that in the four years she had been selling blouses in the desert, Sashona had been learning words. Emily murmured her appreciation, but the truth was she was shocked. She hadn’t realized how far behind she was. How was she supposed to catch up? She had no one to ask but Sashona, and although they were friendly, she was afraid to expose her ignorance.
She decided to hope that one day somebody would appear to educate her. In the meantime, she read data and tried to pound it into thoughtful conclusions. The organization was interested in refining its psychographic model, in finding ever-better ways to classify people more accurately into fewer segments. She looked for responses in graphs that shouldn’t be there, tiny bumps in blue lines, and wrote reports on possible psychographic overlaps, and segment boundary blurring, and possible new avenues for segmentation. She had access to a vast database of shopping habits, Internet usage patterns, traffic flows, and more; if she wanted, she could drill right down to an individual and look up where they went last Tuesday and what they bought and did. But that was not very useful. No one was interested in individuals. She was supposed to look for connections between them: neurological commonalities that allowed them to be grouped together and targeted by a common word. Whether anybody acted on her work, or even read it, she had no idea.
It became harder to find a pay phone she hadn’t used to call Harry before. Every night, as she walked the streets, she half-expected Eliot or Yeats or maybe that kid in the airy suit to step out of the darkness. And then everything would be over. But that never happened, so she kept doing it.
• • •
One day she got a corrupted data set from a ticket, so she picked up the phone and dialed Labs. She was not supposed to do this. At least, she was supposed to do it as little as possible. Techs were isolated from analysts for security reasons, since techs were not poets and were therefore vulnerable to compromise. Why an analyst might want to compromise a tech, she had no idea. It seemed pretty pointless. But that was the rule. It didn’t seem very effective, either, since although the techs were supposed to be anonymous, they gave themselves away in their writing styles: one overused evidently, one had never heard of apostrophes, that kind of thing. So she did not have a great deal of respect for the rule.
“Hello,” she said when Labs picked up. “This is Analyst three-one-nine. I need a validation check on a data set, please.”
“Open a ticket,” said a male voice. She had seen no evidence of women in Labs.
“I did open a ticket, and it came back the same. I want it done again.”
“What’s your ticket number?” She told him. There was a pause. “That data set has been recompiled.”
“I know it’s been recompiled. But I want it re-recompiled, because it’s still wrong.”
“The data set is accurate.”
“Guy,” she said, “I’m looking at it right now. The p-graph is blank. I don’t know if you’ve got a format error, missing data, or what, but the graph cannot be blank.”
“It’s not blank.”
She opened her mouth, because that was preposterous. She had seen thousands of p-graphs and knew what they were supposed to look like: mountain ranges. Sometimes they had many peaks, sometimes just one, but the point was they were jagged. The lines went up and down. But as she looked at it again, she realized Labs was right. There was a line. She hadn’t noticed because it ran along the very top of the grid and was dead straight.
“Clear?” said Labs.
“Yes,” she said. “Thank you.” She put down the phone. She looked at the graph awhile.
• • •
She walked to Sashona’s desk. “Hey,” she said. “What’s synapsis?”
“What’s the context?”
“It’s in a new ticket. After ‘subject response,’ instead of a rating, it says ‘synapsis.’”
“Well, synapsis is just compromise,” said Sashona. “But they shouldn’t use that term. That’s sloppy.”
“Why?”
“It’s the ideal. The theoretical state of perfect compromise. Doesn’t exist in real life.”
“Oh,” Emily said. “I see.”
“Tell them to say what they mean,” Sashona said, returning to her work. “Probably someone new.”
“Right,” she said.
• • •
She did her best to write a meaningful report about the oddly flat graph and dutifully submitted it to the ticket system. Another ticket was waiting, but she felt distracted, and gazed at passing clouds instead. She had the feeling something was going to happen.
Six minutes later, the power went out. She rolled her chair back from her dead monitor. Heads poked up from cubicles. “I thought we had a backup generator,” said Sashona. Her voice sounded loud. Emily hadn’t noticed the hum of the air-conditioning until it was gone.
An alarm began to jangle. People’s voices rose. Rosenberg speculated about fire in Labs, which would be a problem, because a lot of those doors were time-locked. They made for the stairwells but Emily didn’t follow. Sashona hung in the doorway. “Woolf?”
She shook her head. She was feeling stupid. She had waited too long. She should have walked out of this building six minutes ago. She should have done it the moment she saw that graph.
“Woolf! It’s not optional. Time to go.”
She ran through floor plans in her head. There was no fire escape. She hadn’t realized that before. No glass cases saying IN CASE OF EMERGENCY. No one had ever gathered them in a conference room and explained where to go in an orderly fashion in the event that they needed to evacuate.
Sashona gave up on her and disappeared. Emily could go up or down. Those were her only options. She reached the stairwell and started climbing. She heard disembodied voices rising around her like departed spirits. A door boomed and there was silence but for her own breathing. She didn’t hear anyone else going down, she realized: no one from other floors. She stopped to kick off her shoes, which were helping no one. She climbed and climbed and finally saw daylight. She even jogged up the last few steps but found herself at a scuffed steel door that was chained and padlocked. She tried it anyway. She sat on the concrete and tried to figure out what next.
> Somewhere far below, a door clacked open, then slammed. This happened eight or nine times. She listened but couldn’t hear anything more. “Fuck,” she said. She was pissed at herself. She had spent too long in Broken Hill, not needing an escape route. She balled her hands into fists. Think. There was a skylight. It was secured, but how well? She went back to the door and put one foot into a loop of chain and pulled herself up, searching for fingerholds. Balancing, she reached for the skylight, but it was too far away. She heard a rasping. What the fuck that was, she did not know, but it was coming from below and getting closer. She managed to inch her way up until she was standing on the bar of the door. The chain swung and clanked like a bell. Like she was deliberately trying to attract attention. Her fingertips brushed the skylight but that was the best she could do. If she released her grip on the door frame, she could possibly grab this thing and pull it out of the ceiling as she fell. There was a very slim chance of that happening. She heard footsteps. Boots on concrete. The rasping punctuated the air at regular intervals, like breathing but not. She should have learned words. She should not have waited for someone to teach her. She should have found them somehow. She leaped at the skylight and her fingers skidded uselessly over the plastic and she fell to the concrete and banged her knee. “Suck,” she said. A man came up the stairs. A kind of man. He was wearing black from head to toe and his eyes were black, bulky goggles, like night vision gear, set into a fighter pilot’s helmet, with bulging plastic hemispheres over the ears. He looked like he could walk through fire. The rasping was his air regulator.
“Shakaf veeha mannigh danoe!” she said. This was a mess of attention words for random segments. The chances of it having any effect were about a thousand to one. “Lie down!”
He extended a gloved hand. “Come with me.” These words came out flat and computer-modulated. She didn’t move. If he came closer, she could jump him. She didn’t see a gun. She would go for those goggles. If she could even dislodge them, it would make it hard for him to chase her.
“Hurry.” The man gestured to the stairs. “There’s a fire.”
“There isn’t,” she said. “Is there.” He didn’t answer. She’d figured out by now that he couldn’t hear her. She began to walk down the steps.
• • •
The lobby had been converted to a makeshift hospital, full of white cloth screens. The windows were blacked out with plastic sheeting. Black-suited spacemen moved between them, respirators hissing. She saw no one’s face she didn’t know from level five. She glimpsed Sashona on a trolley bed but then lost her behind a screen. She was told to stay where she was. Nobody spoke to her. Or to each other, at least that she could hear. An hour later, a spaceman drew back her curtain. He wasn’t wearing his helmet and she was surprised at his youth. He had a mustache, thin and fluffy. She wondered if this was the guy who had fetched her from the top of the stairs. If so, she should have gone with narratak.
“You can go.” He began to disassemble screens.
“What was all that about?” But she wasn’t really expecting an answer. Outside, she found the others huddled on the street. It was dusk, the tail end of rush hour.
“A drill,” said Sashona. “But for what?”
“No point wondering,” said Raine. “We’ll never know.”
“True, that,” said Sashona. She was wondering why Emily hadn’t come downstairs with them. And, by extension, what Emily knew that she didn’t.
Emily couldn’t hang around any longer. She started walking and by the time she reached the subway, she was shaking. She would not do anything rash. She would come to work in the morning, go to her desk, and do her job, like always. But this had been a lesson. A reminder. The next time something like this happened, she told herself, she would have a way out.
• • •
She kept a notepad and wrote down syllables she noticed were used more frequently by one psychographic than another. On the train, she listened for deviations from the average. She picked apart the words she knew, looking for patterns. She was surprised at how obvious they were. Liberals overused -ay and -ee, the front vowel sounds. Authoritarians were thick with fricatives. She developed hunches from newspapers and TV and websites, tracked down a suitable representative, at a bar or church meeting or the grocery store, and tried trotting them out. Like a safecracker listening for tumblers. Sut. Stut. Stuh. She slid guesses into sentences and usually people didn’t even seem to register them. They didn’t make it past the perceptual filter, ignored as verbal static. At worst, they thought she was stuttering. Her hunches were usually wrong. But sometimes she saw a flinch. A tiny flare across the muscles of the face. And that was a tumbler.
It was a hard way to learn words. She could do this for a year and still know less than Sashona. But it was very thorough. It forced her to understand the underlying principles. She deduced a preference for alliteration in a segment from what she knew of the segments around it, leaping from there to lallito, a command word, and this thrilled her more than anything she had been taught. Because she had found it herself.
Once, sharing drinks at the corner bar, Sashona confided that she had trouble with segment 191. “I get kavakifa,” said Sashona, leaning forward, holding her wineglass at an angle that Emily was tempted to correct. “I can get to fedoriant. But then I’m lost!” She gestured expansively. “I can never remember.” This was part of a tale concerning a high-speed joyride down the I-48, a police officer on a motorbike, and a speeding ticket Sashona had hilariously failed to talk her way out of. But Emily was astounded. Apparently Sashona couldn’t see that the words of segment 191 were bound together. She could understand if Sashona had forgotten the entire tree. But if you knew one, you had half of the others. Sashona did not seem to get this. She had memorized them one at a time, as if they were unconnected. Like a tray of random objects in a child’s puzzle game.
• • •
One thing Emily never got over was the feeling of being watched. She wasn’t sure how, but it was happening. She tried varying her route to work, checking reflections, doubling back unexpectedly, but never saw anyone. At home, she double-bolted, but felt no safer. Her feeling was that Yeats was in the apartment. That was her impression. One night, she dreamed he came into her bedroom like a black wind and leaned over her, watching her without emotion, as if she were a thing beneath glass.
• • •
On the first Tuesday of her sixth month in Washington, she left her apartment and walked to the local train station. She rode escalators down to the platform and waited for the red line. It was warm; she was thinking about getting to her desk and taking off her shoes. A man at the end of the platform had a guitar and was banging out a song she loathed, for personal reasons: “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” The train began to pull in. In its passing windows she glimpsed Eliot.
For a moment she wasn’t sure whether she had seen him inside the train or reflected behind her. Then the train ground to a halt and the doors opened and he said from behind her: “Let it go.”
She watched the train pull out. She was sixteen years old again. Just like that. But then she turned and he wasn’t so frightening. He had aged around the eyes. He was just a man, after all.
“Are you in love?” Eliot said.
She didn’t answer.
“Don’t lie to me.”
“Yes.”
He looked away.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll stop.”
“Your next mistake will end you. This is as far as I can go to protect you. You need to appreciate this.”
“I do. I promise.”
His eyes searched her. “No more calls. Not one.”
“I’m done. I’m done, Eliot.” In this moment, she really meant it.
He walked away. She stood on the empty platform.
• • •
She did not call Harry that night. The following day, she did not call him. She had gone longer than this without hearing his voice but now it was different, because it
was the end. She felt sick. She couldn’t taste anything. It was crazy but she could no longer taste food. At work, she clicked through tickets and wrote reports but couldn’t tell if they made any sense. When it got too much, she went to the bathroom and put her head between her knees. She made herself repeat: Do not call him. She felt possessed, by a cruel, heartless Emily who did not love.
She surrendered on the third day. It was a terrible betrayal of Eliot; she realized that. He had stuck his neck out for her in ways she couldn’t quite comprehend and she had promised to stop. But the fact was she couldn’t. She had tried but she couldn’t. It had been six months and home was still on the other side of the world.
She couldn’t call Harry again. Eliot would know, or, worse, others would. There was no stay-but-keep-calling-him option. She could only leave.
Years before, in San Francisco, Emily and a girlfriend had been crossing a McDonald’s parking lot and found themselves boxed in by a group of barely pubescent boys with low pants and twitchy smiles. One of the boys had a gun, which he kept putting away and getting out again, swapping from hand to hand, and the others began to ask Emily and her friend if they knew what hot bitches they were and how badly they were about to get fucked up. This was a bad situation even without the gun, but Emily had been young and stupid, so she walked up to the boy with the gun and pulled it right out of his hands. She had good fingers, even then, because of the card tricks. She didn’t know a thing about guns, except which end to hold, but that was enough, so the boys stood around looking scared while Emily and her friend made a lot of silly threats and walked out backward.
The lesson here was probably that she should not cross parking lots in bad neighborhoods. But also, when you were outmuscled, if there was a gun around, you could get control of the situation by getting the gun.
Emily was outmuscled. She did not have a gun. But she suspected there was one in the basement.