I leaned back against the wall, feeling sick. No. Not again …
“Hey Achmed?” J.C. said to Kalyani, leaning down to the phone.
“Please don’t call me that.”
“Yeah. Sorry. Trying to be funny, you know…” He took a deep breath. “There’s a key hidden in a box under the third brick on the back path. Go grab it.”
“For what?” Kalyani asked.
“It opens my gun locker, the one in the main hallway, where I keep the emergency shotguns in case of home invasion. Distribute them among the others, and you guys hole up in there, okay? Stay in one room, barricade the door … and be careful. If Lua goes nightmare, he might ignore things like locks and barricades. Guns should still work though.”
“I…” Her voice trembled. “Okay. Okay, we’ll do it.”
“Good. Take care.” He looked up at me, uncharacteristically reserved, then unholstered his sidearm. “Guess you were right, Skinny. Waiting two days to get in here wasn’t an option.”
“Do you want to tell me,” Jenny said from right beside me, “how exactly this makes you feel?”
I jumped, and suddenly felt an irrational anger at her. She stood there, scribbling, like she didn’t even care what was happening to everyone else.
“Either you are going to shut up,” I said, “or we are going to come to blows.”
“False dichotomy,” she said. “There are more than two options. We could—”
“Go,” I said, pointing back at the window.
“What?” she said, lowering her pad.
“Go. Now. Or I swear, J.C. will shoot you. Break the rules, get away, vanish—I don’t care how. But go away!”
She vanished in a heartbeat.
I trembled inside, then felt sick. The other aspects stood silently. “Don’t look so betrayed,” I snarled. “I didn’t ask for her. I didn’t want her. I don’t even know what kind of specialty she was supposed to represent.”
I waited for the camera outside to go through a cycle, counting how long we had between its bursts. A minute and a half. Plenty of time.
J.C. led the way out into the hallway.
TEN
The cameras were spaced evenly through the hallways, but with my phone, I was able to pick out the closest signals. I got into a good rhythm, delaying underneath one camera while it was still offline, then quickly moving when the next one stopped transmitting. I tried doorknobs as I passed, hoping to find one unlocked that would provide computer access.
I didn’t have luck at that, but Ngozi did spot something through the window into one office: a map of the facility on the back wall. I snapped a picture, then found my way to a spot around a corner and at the landing of a stairwell where we thought we’d be out of sight of the two nearest cameras.
Here, I took a breather while my aspects gathered around the phone to inspect the map. My heart was beating quickly, and my shirt was damp with nervous sweat. But so far, no alarm.
That doesn’t mean anything, I reminded myself. Any alarm would be silent, only alerting security. Still, this entire place seemed eerily quiet. Empty, but bright, lit up white.
“There,” J.C. said, pointing at the picture of the map, with its breakdown of four floors. One larger bit of text read: Subject testing and holding cells.
“What you want to bet she’s in there?” J.C. asked.
I nodded. We went up the stairwell—dodging a camera in the middle of the next flight—and ended up on the top floor, near those holding cells. Here, unfortunately, we encountered our first live guards. I peeked around a corner, and found them right in the hallway. They leaned against the wall, tasers on their hips, chatting softly about football.
I backed away, looking down the corridor behind me, but the map said that direction only led to a dead end at a place labeled IMAGING CENTER.
I retreated to the top of the stairs, in a spot out of sight of the cameras. “Ideas?” I whispered to my aspects.
“You could take two guards,” J.C. said.
Fat chance of that.
“I doubt we can talk past them,” Ivy said, “considering the circumstances.”
“Well,” Ngozi said. “There’s an air duct over there, down that hallway to the left.”
“Not that again,” J.C. said. He squinted. “We wouldn’t fit.”
“I wasn’t thinking of going into it ourselves.…”
* * *
I waited, nervously, hidden on the steps and barely daring to breathe as kitten sounds echoed in the hallway above.
It took only a few minutes for the two men to approach, leaving their post. Confused, they passed right near my stairwell, then continued on down the hallway, turning left. They probably shouldn’t have left their posts, but it was perfectly natural. Who wouldn’t be interested by the sounds of a lost kitten?
They’d find the sounds coming from the air duct where we’d hidden—around a corner and out of sight—Sandra’s phone, playing the meowing kitten video that Audrey had been watching earlier. It had been dangerous turning on Sandra’s phone, but we’d put it into airplane mode and used a direct Bluetooth connection between my phone and it to load the cat video.
I heard the men in the corridor nearby, calling to the kitten in the air duct. I slipped past them, around the corner. Heart pounding, I walked underneath a sign that read, SECURE AREA—SUBJECT HOLDING. Just a little farther. Sandra. I heard … I heard her voice ahead. Singing. That old lullaby that she always—
Everything flashed white.
The hallway melted into light. I stumbled, and J.C. shouted, raising his gun and spinning around. For a moment, we were blinded.
The light vanished, and I found myself in a completely different place. Instead of the hallway, I was lying on the floor in an unfamiliar room. It was a large, open chamber with concrete walls, a high ceiling, and industrial lighting.
What had happened? I’d … been teleported, somehow?
Kyle Walters stood before me: the balding, somewhat buff man in the sport coat from earlier at the fairgrounds. I blinked, looking up at him, then at the small gathering of techy types behind him. Where had they come from? What was happening?
“Welcome, Mr. Leeds,” he said, “to the future of human incarceration.”
ELEVEN
Kyle offered a hand to help me to my feet. He had a false sort of friendliness about him, the smile of a man who would be your best friend for as long as it took to sell you a very nice pre-owned vehicle.
My surroundings had gone from a sterile hallway to an older warehouse. Not dingy, but used. Concrete floors with patches covered with chunks of carpet where computer stations had been set up. The scents were no longer of cleaning fluids, but of sawdust and someone’s microwave dinner. It wasn’t messy, it was just … real?
Real. That other building had been too perfect, maybe even too generic. The kind of tech office that you saw people infiltrate in films. A too-perfect, constructed world. Hadn’t Chin said this man had bought a video game company?
But how had he made me feel like I was there? I wasn’t wearing any equipment. “What did you do to me?” I asked.
“I took you to the future, Steve!” Kyle obviously wasn’t the type of person who asked before using your first name. “You did pretty well.”
“We haven’t ever seen the trick with the cat sounds,” said one of the techs behind him, a woman with her hair in a ponytail. “Innovative.”
“You found the camera exploit as well,” another one said. “So far, only security professionals have done that. Everyone else tries something cliché like taping a picture of the hallway in front of the camera.”
“How did you do it, though?” I asked. “I’m not wearing a headset or anything. How did you put me into that virtual world?”
“We prefer the term ‘holodeck,’” one of the techies said.
“No we don’t,” Kyle said quickly. “Ignore them. We prefer a proprietary term that carries no legal baggage or IP infringement.” He slapped me on the sh
oulder, then put his arm around me.
Nearby, J.C. pointed out two men hanging back near a wall. One was the other guy from the hot dog stand, and both were packing nine-millimeters.
“I don’t like this at all,” Ivy said. “So everything we did … the incursion, dodging the cameras … it wasn’t real?”
Neither are you, I thought. Neither is most of my life.
“You’re turning VR into … prisons?” I asked Kyle.
“The natural response to current market incentives,” Kyle said, steering me along as he started walking. “Here, let me unpack it for you. Do you know how much it costs to house an inmate in the United States for a year?”
“It’s high,” I said. “Like, twenty or thirty—”
“It costs an average of thirty thousand dollars!” Kyle said. “And can get as high as sixty thousand in some states. Per year, per inmate! And what do we, the taxpayers, gain from all of that? Are the inmates at least well cared for? No! Criminal-on-criminal violence is rampant. Living conditions are terrible. Prisons are overfilled, understaffed, and underfunded. In short, we’re spending a ton for a cruddy product. How smart is that?”
“The solution seems to be to make sure fewer people go to prison.”
“A wonderful ideal, Steve! I’m glad we have people like you to deep dive into the morality of situations. But for the real world, we also need people like me—and a little practical application.”
“You still haven’t told me how you immersed me in one without my knowledge.”
Kyle led me to a window that looked in on a small room where a man lay in a bunk, peacefully asleep. Ivy and Ngozi crowded around. J.C. was playing it cool, standing back, glaring at those security guards.
“Emitters on the ceiling,” Kyle said, pointing upward. “We can engage them without the subject knowing they’re transitioning into a virtual world. That’s the key; if they think it’s real, all kinds of possibilities open up. This is the future, Steve. This changes the paradigm. It digs up the goalpost, and moves it to a completely different game.”
I looked back through the window, feeling sick.
“Right now,” Kyle said, “that man is working on an elaborate escape plan from the prison room he thinks he’s in. We’ve offered carefully calculated goals—manageable hooks he can exploit to get him closer and closer to escaping. He’s engaged, he’s excited. He thinks he’s going to do it—and in the meantime, we’re paying the equivalent of less than ten thousand a year to keep him in there.”
“Calculated goals,” I said. “Like what?”
“Our basic prison plan will offer a multitude of potential escape routes,” one of the techs said. “We’re working on a tunneling quest line, a quest line involving the befriending of guards, and a third that involves escaping using the laundry bins. Or if the prisoner prefers, they will be able to become kingpin of the prisoners—gaining dominance over the various factions, and eventually moving into a suite within the facility to live like a king.”
“What about muscle atrophy?” Ivy asked. “Bedsores? I can think of a dozen problems with this.”
I repeated the objections, and Kyle just grinned. “You’re a smart cookie, Steve,” he said. “We’re working on these issues—we have emitters that let the body move while the brain thinks it’s in the real world. Ideally, we’ll be able to use a mixture of idle and physical interaction to create a sustainable, perpetual, eco-friendly, and health-conscious incarceration solution.”
“A video game for inmates.”
“That and so much more! In our simulated routines, the prisoners have as much as a tenfold increase in satisfaction. Yes, game companies have been pioneering this technology—but nobody has been asking the most important question.”
“Which is?”
“How can we get the government to sink a ton of money into this?” Kyle grinned. He seemed to do that a lot. “Incarceration is such a nasty business to the public. They don’t want to think about it. They don’t want to interact with it. Nobody wants a prison in their back yard, but everybody wants ‘those people’ to be taken care of. Well, we can take care of them.”
Kyle rapped the window with the back of his hand. “For now, we can only simulate a simple prison facility, but we have plans. What if a prisoner could escape into the virtual world, but not know they’re in a simulation? We could watch and see if they go back to a life of crime. If they do … well, we let them live in their own world of vice, hurting nobody. But if it turns out they have rehabilitated, or might have been innocent all along, we can just let them out. It’s a perfect system.”
“It’s fake,” I whispered.
“And which would you rather live in? The fake prison where you think you’re free, or the real prison where you spend each day in drudgery? Honestly, when this project goes live, people will be begging to be let in.”
“Yet something’s wrong, isn’t it?” Ivy said, narrowing her eyes and reading Kyle. “Ask him why he needs you.”
“If it’s so great, why kidnap Sandra?”
“Kidnap? Steve, Sandy came to us. And she suggested that we approach you.”
“You could have sent me a letter.”
“We sent seven.”
I hesitated. Seven?
“Maybe we should answer our mail once in a while,” J.C. said. “You know, for old times’ sake.”
Kyle cleared his throat. “We tried working through contacts to get your attention, we tried calling, we even sent Gerry by to knock on your door.”
“You weren’t ‘taking new clients,’” the tech said. “I couldn’t get past the gate.”
It had been a while since I’d taken a case. The house staff had orders to turn away supplicants.
I stepped up close to the window, looking in at the prisoner. Lying there, eyes closed, asleep. But awake somewhere else. “Is Sandra in one of these rooms?”
“She is. But let’s not get to that yet. You asked what’s wrong with our system—and well, there are a few bugs. Turns out, human brains are very good at picking out when things are wrong. There are so many details to get right—and the processing power needed to simulate reality is enormous. We do a poor job, and the imperfections build up. Normal people last maybe a few hours in the simulation, depending on their brain chemistry.”
“The brain eventually rejects the reality,” the woman tech said. “Much as it might reject a transplanted organ.”
“The whole thing collapses,” Kyle said. “They come out of it, and we can’t get the simulation to take for them again until two or three days have passed.” He paused. “Sandy’s record in the simulation so far is eighty-seven consecutive days.”
J.C. whistled softly.
“She got kicked out again this morning,” one of the techs said, “and went on a little jaunt to the fairgrounds to contact you. Wanted to do it in person. Once she spoke to you earlier, she asked to go back in. It took for her immediately. It always does.”
“Somehow,” Kyle said, “her brain can make up for the gaps in our programming. We can transmit concepts to Sandy, and she makes up the rest, adding in the details. We need to figure out how she does this, because it could be the key. If we can get the brains of our subjects to construct their own reality, we don’t need to re-create things exactly—we can just nudge them the direction we want, and let their minds do the hard work.”
“You’re the same way,” a techie noted. “We turned on the simulation the moment you climbed in through the window, and your brain blurred the real reality into our fake one, filling in details that we got wrong, or that were too low resolution. Your brain, quite frankly, is amazing.”
I rubbed my head, remembering when I’d bumped it into that shelf while climbing in the window. My vision had flashed white. Had that been the moment?
Ngozi had wandered over to the nearest of the computer stations, and was looking over the equipment—but I wasn’t sure what we’d be able to tell without Chin here. Hell, this might be out of even his league.
Wirelessly projecting global hallucinations directly into the brain? That was some Arnaud “theoretical physics” levels of science.
I looked to the side, to get Tobias’s read on the situation. But there was no Tobias. Not anymore.
“So they need our brain,” Ivy said. “You can make your own reality, Steve, and they want to know how.”
“But they already have Sandra,” I said. “Why do they need me?”
“Try understanding a disease with only one patient,” Kyle said. “Or doing a drug test with only one subject. You’re an incredibly rare find, Steve. Your mind is worth millions. All we want is for you to spend some time in the simulation. A few years at most.”
A few years?
“No chance,” I said. “I’m already wealthy. What could you possibly offer me to live in your box?”
“Sandra is free of her aspects,” Kyle said.
Ivy looked at me sharply.
Kyle smiled. “You’re interested, I see. Yes, she asked if we could stop the hallucinations. Construct a reality where she was free of them.” He hesitated, and I caught what I thought was a sign of discomfort from him. “It … didn’t work like we thought it would.”
“When we put her into the simulation,” a techie said, “she added to the programming, making her aspects appear. And they interacted with the world we created—Sandra layered another reality on top of our virtual reality, and adapted the code. But she wanted the aspects gone … and turns out, we could help with that.”
I shivered. Something about the tone in his voice.
“Anyway,” Kyle said, “Sandy’s been very helpful. She’s showing us how the brain alters its own reality. We aren’t really sure exactly why or how our programs interact with her aspects, but they do—we’re getting all kinds of interesting interactions between our tech and her brain. One thing is certain. We can help you be free of them, like she is. No more aspects—no more nightmares. No more voices.”
Ivy looked aghast. J.C., though, met my eyes and nodded. He’d never wanted to be an aspect. He could understand how part of me just wanted things to be … normal.
Legion: The Many Lives of Stephen Leeds Page 25