by Max Barry
HELP!
I am trying to get in touch with everyone from the church group for our big Christmas get-together! We really want to invite EVERYONE who spent any time with us over the year.
I like to think I’m quite adept at sleuthing people down, but there’s one person I simply can’t locate: Virginia Woolf! One might think that with a name like that she’d be easy to find. Unfortunately, the opposite seems true—it’s IMPOSSIBLE to use the Internet because of all those pages about the famous writer! Very frustrating!! Anyway I was hoping someone might know SOME way to reach her, because she seemed quite attentive and interested in what we had to say!
Much love,
Belinda F.
[TWO]
Beneath her desk was a gym bag. The top layer was clothes Emily actually wore while working out, and under those was a second set she’d stashed there against this day. She logged out of the ticket system and slung the bag over her shoulder. On her way out, she passed Sashona, who was on the phone, and Emily mouthed, “Gym,” and Sashona nodded. She felt a small pang, because although they’d never been friends, for this place they were pretty close, and Emily was never going to see her again.
She walked two blocks to a small café, a place she came sometimes for lunch. In the restroom, she changed into the clothes from her gym bag: a T-shirt, a pair of frayed jeans, and an old denim jacket. She scrubbed the makeup from her face, collected a nice film of grime from the floor tiles, and dabbed this under her eyes and across her hairline. Her work clothes and the gym bag she stashed behind a toilet. She didn’t expect to see those again, either.
She circled the block and approached the office from the lane on the other side. Here was a nondescript door with a sign that said THE ROBERT LOWELL INSTITUTE OF PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH. It looked like just another doomed business renting space on the wrong side of the building. But it wasn’t. It was the public face of Labs. She pressed the intercom and waited.
“Hello?”
“Hey,” she said. “My name is Jessica Hendry, I did one of your, like, tests a couple weeks ago, and you said I should come back if I wanted?”
The door buzzed. She pushed it open and went up the narrow steps. At the top was a small waiting room, with empty chairs and an energetic television. A woman with high hair sat behind sliding glass. “Take a seat,” she said.
Emily sat and flipped through People. She had been here before. The first time, the day after she’d determined to start planning, she’d found the entrance but not gone inside. She looked up “Robert Lowell Institute” in the phone book and called them—from a pay phone, for what that was worth—and determined that yes, they were interested in volunteers for testing, and walk-ins were accepted between eleven and one o’clock. They had wanted her to come in the next day, but she demurred, because she hadn’t acquired a false identity yet. It took her a week to find Jessica Hendry, a girl Emily’s age who had no fixed address and little interest in the world beyond where she might score her next hit. Jessica took to Emily straightaway, maybe sensing a shared history in addition to the potential to scam some money, and gushed more personal information to Emily than she really needed. In exchange, Emily pressed a hundred-dollar bill into Jessica’s hand and squeezed her and said, “Keep this safe,” then stole it back when Jessica wasn’t looking, because, honestly, that wasn’t going to help anyone.
The institute had asked her to fill out a questionnaire. She went through this carefully, answering the psychographic questions honestly, which exposed her completely, of course, to anyone who divined that Jessica Hendry was her. She was segment 220, she already knew. Which should be good, because Labs could never get enough 220s.
After the questionnaire, they’d taken her to a small, bright room with a forest of video cameras. They attached electrodes to her skull and showed her TV ads. These were kind of funny, because they were not ads at all, or at least not for real products. They were excuses to broadcast words. After forty or fifty, she blacked out, and when she woke up everyone pretended she had just fallen asleep. She didn’t know what they had done to her until the report bubbled through the ticketing system. When she’d seen SUBJECT SEGMENT: 220, she’d scanned it anxiously, but there was no mention of permanent damage. She’d been pretty sure that Labs wouldn’t do destructive testing on a walk-in, but it would have been a bad thing to get wrong.
A few days later, the prepaid cell phone she kept to answer as Jessica Hendry rang, and a man chatted with her about whether she would be interested in coming in again. She said yes if there was money in it and he asked why she hadn’t put down a home address and she explained about it being a tough time and just needing to catch a break and would she get paid or not, what did it matter where she lived. Once she’d established that no one would notice one way or the other what happened to Jessica Hendry, the man said to come in anytime, they would love to see her. And here she was.
“Jessica,” the receptionist said. Emily looked up from her magazine. “You’re up.” The door buzzed.
• • •
She followed a white-coated man with no chin through corridors lined with steel-caged lamps. “So I get a hundred dollars for this,” she said. “Right?”
“Right,” he said.
“Last time I fell asleep.” She was trying to engage him, to figure out if he was anyone she knew through the ticket system. “I hope the ads are more interesting this time.”
They reached a double set of elevators. “We won’t be showing you ads today.”
“No? What, then?”
An elevator arrived. The man gestured for her to enter. “It’s a product.”
The doors closed and despite herself, her chest tightened. It was a small elevator. It felt like a very small elevator. “What kind of product?”
He scanned his clipboard. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you that without potentially polluting your reaction.”
“‘Polluting your reaction.’ You guys are weird.” The elevator numbers ticked down. “Is it, like, a bottle of shampoo, or a car, or what?”
“It’s strongly important for our tests that you don’t have any preformed expectations.”
“Oh, okay. No problem.” Strongly important. That was an odd phrase. She had seen that one in the ticketing system.
The doors parted. The corridor walls were pale blue. A calming color. The tech started walking and she followed him to a set of plastic doors, where he had to swipe his ID tag and tap a code into a keypad. Fifty yards later, the same thing happened again. During this process, she eyed ceiling-mounted video cameras. There was a second elevator and when this one stopped the walls were bare concrete, no more psychological blue. She didn’t like this much. The corridor ended at a perfectly round steel door that was twice as tall as she was. It looked like a bank vault. The door stood open and beyond it she could see a small concrete room with a single orange plastic chair. By the vault door stood another white-coated man and a gray-uniformed guy who looked like maybe security.
Her chinless tech said, “Verifying, I have prototype nine double-zero double-one eight six.”
The other man said, “Confirming prototype nine zero zero one one eight six.”
“Verifying subject, Hendry, Jessica, identifying number three one one seven zero.”
“Confirming subject, time is eight-fifty-eight, time lock has released and chamber is open.”
“What is all this?” she said. She tried to grin.
“Security,” said her tech, not looking at her. “The product is very valuable.” He entered the concrete room, which required stepping over a thick metal rim. “Follow me, please.”
She did so. The air was freezing. The walls were featureless concrete but for six bulbous yellow lights in wire cages. Four tripod-mounted video cameras were aimed at the plastic chair. In the middle of the room was a box. A huge, steel, coffin-shaped box.
“Please sit.”
“Mmm,” she said. “Mmm, mmm.”
“It’s all right, Jessica. It�
��ll be just like last time. Only this time we’re showing you a product instead of ads. I’m going to fit you with the helmet so we can measure your brain activity, okay?”
“Yeah,” she said, although she was thinking no, no, no. She sat. Even the plastic was icy. The steel box had no lid. Not that she could see. Around its sides were thick vertical rods. Pistons? She stared because she could not imagine what the deal was with this box.
The tech touched her hair. She flinched. “Just relax.” He began to fit the helmet.
“Hey, what is this again? What kind of—”
“Just a product.”
“Yeah, but it, you know, seems pretty weird for a product. So what kind of product is it?” He didn’t answer. Turn him, she thought. “Strongly important”: she had read a hundred tickets from this guy and he was segment fifty-five, no question, and she had figured out words for that. She could compromise him in two seconds flat and make him walk her out of here. She didn’t know what next. There was no next in that scenario. Not one she wanted. But why was there a box? Why the fuck was there a box?
“Almost done, Jessica.”
She had not anticipated a box. She’d thought maybe an envelope. A man sitting opposite, preparing to read a word. And before he could, she would take it from him, because he wouldn’t be prepared for a poet. These guys, these isolated techs, she didn’t think they even knew what poets were. They just did what they were told. But that plan was clearly fucked, because whatever was in this box, this thing that turned a person’s p-graph into a flat line, caused synapsis, was too important for an envelope. She had been foolish to imagine that.
“There’s a small needle in this one.”
She felt a sliver of cold enter her skull.
“All done.” The tech moved to the video cameras and began turning them on. Red lights gleamed at her. “Just clear your mind and look at the product.”
“What product?”
“The product that will come out of the box after I’ve left.”
“What do you mean, it will come out of the box?”
“I can’t tell you without—”
“Without polluting my reaction, I know, but why is there a box? What’s inside it?”
“Don’t worry about the box.”
“Just tell me why there has to—”
“I don’t know what’s in the box,” he said. “Okay?”
She saw it was true. And now that she looked, did she notice how the video cameras were covering only her? Not the box. It was so that later, after it was done and the box had closed again, people could study the tapes without being exposed. Did she notice the tech had been avoiding eye contact? She knew what that meant, right?
He placed a black device on the floor. “This is a speaker. I won’t be able to hear you, but I’ll keep talking to you throughout the process.”
“I changed my mind,” she said. “I don’t want to do this.”
He glanced over his shoulder. The man in the gray uniform hovered outside the vault door. Volteen, she thought. Carlott sissiden nox, save me from that guard. It might work. The two weren’t far apart; the tech might reach him before he drew his gun.
The guard said, “We have a problem?”
“No,” she said. “No, I’m okay.”
“Time,” the guard said. “Thirty seconds.”
“Just relax,” the tech told her. He stepped out. Shortly afterward, the vault door began to move. She expected it to clang but it closed as gently as a shadow. Then bolts fired like gunshots and she jumped. The echoes lasted forever and then all she could hear was her own breathing. Harry, she thought. Harry, I may have fucked this up.
The black speaker the tech had left on the floor emitted a burst of static. It took her a moment to realize it was talking. “Jessshhhica.” It sounded like he was broadcasting from the moon. “We’re going to give you a few minutes to relax.” Drenched in static, it sounded like: relaxssschh. “Please breathe normally and remain in a calm, natural state.”
She began to peel the helmet from her head. Part of it resisted. When she finally got it off, she saw that it was the needle, which was four inches long and wet with clear fluid. She put that on the floor and tried not to think about it. There were thin wires coming out of the helmet in a bunch of places and she followed these to a tiny gray container strapped to the underside of her chair with nothing inside but a chip and a battery. Everything in this room was self-powered, she realized. The cage lights, the video cameras, the radio speaker. They were so careful to let nothing in or out, the room wasn’t even wired. If that door didn’t open in the next few hours, she would suffocate.
“I have some good news, Jessshhica. We can actually pay you a little more. One thousand dollarsshh for your time. How does that sssound?”
So the box would be on a timer. And these techs probably didn’t have any control over it; they probably just knew when it was scheduled to open. Which meant there would be safety margins. A little time for everyone to get settled, which she could use.
“Think about what you might do with that thousand dollars, Jessshhica. Ssssomething pretty great, I bet.”
She went to the video cameras but found nothing unusual. She carried them to a corner one by one and left them in a pile with their red eyes pointing at the concrete. Whatever happened here, she wasn’t going to be in a show. She wasn’t going to be watched and analyzed and used to improve procedures. She went back to the chair and circled it. But it was just a chair.
“Jussshht another minute, Jessica. Almossst there.”
She knelt in front of the box. She touched it. Nothing terrible happened, so she ran her hands around it. It was warmer than she expected. She found a tiny seam in the steel but couldn’t get so much as a fingernail into it and wasn’t sure she wanted to. She didn’t know what she was looking for. Options. But there weren’t any.
She stood and paced. The only other thing was the speaker, so she went to that. To her surprise, it had a little compartment. Inside were red pills. She looked at these for a while. She did not think they were helpful.
“All right, Jessshica. It’s time to open the boxsssschhh.”
“Gahh,” she said. She began to walk toward the box, but her heart failed her and she retreated back to the chair. “Fuck. Fuck.” Something mechanical purred. The seam she had found cracked open and the top of the box began to rise. She squeezed shut her eyes and groped her way into a corner, curling up against the concrete and plugging her ears with her fingers. That song she’d heard the busker playing on the train platform with Eliot, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”; she used to sing that. Back in San Francisco, before she learned card tricks. It was how she’d met Benny: He played guitar. Lucy was the best earner, Benny said, so that was mainly what she sang. She must have sung it five times an hour, day after day. At first she liked it but then it was like an infection, and there was nothing she could do and nowhere she could go without it running across her brain or humming on her lips, and God knew she tried; she was smashing herself with sex and drugs but the song began to find its way even there. One day, Benny played the opening chord and she just couldn’t do it. She could not sing that fucking song. Not again. She broke down, because she was only fifteen, and Benny took her behind the mall and told her it would be okay. But she had to sing. It was the biggest earner. She kind of lost it and then so did Benny and that was the first time he hit her. She ran away for a while. But she came back to him, because she had nothing else, and it seemed okay. It seemed like they had a truce: She would not complain about her bruised face and he would not ask her to sing “Lucy.” She had been all right with this. She had thought that was a pretty good deal.
Now there was something coming out of a box, and she reached for the most virulent meme she knew. “Lucy in the sky!” she sang. “With diamonds!”
• • •
Time passed and she did not die. She did not lose her mind. In the spaces between song words, she heard things. For this reason, she kept
singing. Shrieking out the words. Then she caught a burst of static and realized it was just the tech, talking to her through the speaker. She didn’t think she had to fear the tech. Only the box. So she lowered her voice, a little, and eventually unplugged one ear.
“Ssscchtand on one leg,” said the speaker.
She removed her other finger from her ear. She didn’t move for a while, in case the box was going to talk and she needed to replug her ears. But they had said they wanted her to look at something, hadn’t they? Not listen.
“Toussscccchh your left elbow.”
She began to feel her way across the concrete. When she reached the box, she felt her way up its side. Above the seam there was no more steel. She slid her hands over the lip and felt something cool and rigid. Plastic, maybe. She pressed against it. It yielded slightly, just enough to detect. She sat back on her haunches and thought about this.
“Now your right elbow, please, Jessica.”
She crawled across the floor until she reached a wall and followed that to her pile of video cameras. She dragged one back to the box. It was probably catching glimpses of her. She confirmed the contours of the box, the plastic bubble that seemed to encase whatever was inside, and got to her feet and hefted the camera by its tripod.
“Take off your sshoesssssch.”
She raised the camera. Like golf, she thought. She swung and there was a glass explosion that told her she had missed the plastic. She adjusted her grip and tried again. This time she received a more satisfying sound. She put down the tripod and groped at the plastic, seeking damage.
“Sssssit down.”
A scratch. A minor deformation. Not big enough to work with. But it was something. It was proof of concept. She got to her feet and raised the tripod again.
“Put your foot in your mouth as far as it will go.”
She swung and swung until her arms ached and sweat ran down her face. She dropped the tripod, sure that she would find nothing but shattered plastic, but it didn’t feel as ruined as she’d expected. Her hands moved over sharp plastic edges like rough knives. She began to pry these apart and force her hand between them.