by Curtis Hox
He talked affably about his time at Penn State playing Lacrosse but hating to get up early for classes (mostly in the Criminal Justice school). Like always, Towns was thoroughly entertained, and lost. He knew Max did this on purpose. He guessed Max was giving Masumi the big show.
She politely nodded, but said nothing.
Hexcom employee Max Siegen, of course, was thrilled he had two of Riodola’s main players in headquarters, as if they weren’t being recruited. If he scored them both, his boss would owe him big.
Imagine, running them at Riodola, he thought.
Now that would be grounds for a promotion.
He, beyond all things, wanted a promotion. He was officially a Hexcom media analyst. But his actual job was as an intelligence field officer in northern New Jersey, where he had lived most his life.
Max had seen enough of the world, though, to know one thing: he hated the cold. He owned a beach house in Sarasota, Florida, a little ways over the Skyway, and he would love to spend more time down there. Nothing of importance happening in Tampa and St. Pete., but they could probably find something for him to do. Maybe even Miami.
He knew Towns was sold, had seen the young man’s reaction during his first tour. Towns might be his ticket south. That was why he’d chosen to break the rules, not just bend them. If he also snagged Masumi, he’d be golden.
Max slid his security card one last time; this opened a door to a wing dedicated to Hexcom’s patented Lucid Media Projection.
Projection cubicles ran the length of the hall in recessed bays, each with a large cocoon on wheels—some empty, some with occupants. Technicians in lab coats walked the halls, making sure each projector was comfortable.
“We’ve got fifty-five slots,” Max said. “Today, twelve individuals are being tested. Hexcom plans to ramp up its recruiting since Riodola. These individuals have cleared the first of six phases, each one more demanding than the last. Each phase tests to see if you can truly project. If you can, it’s payday.”
They passed one bay, and Max paused so Towns and Masumi could see. A young woman relaxed in her cocoon on a reclining seat with foot rests. She wore headphones and large goggles that displayed a high bit-rate HD image on the inside of the shell. She appeared to be watching a cartoon. A headdress of wires extended backward like electrified dreadlocks into sockets in the back of the cocoon. She sipped on a soda and nibbled Cheetos. She wiggled her feet back and forth in apparent contentment. They could barely hear indistinct audio.
Towns had seen the procedure a few times with Max, who had persuasively argued that Riodola was amateurish compared to Hexcom.
Towns had agreed.
Masumi, still betrayed no emotion that either of them could see.
“Towns has signed the release forms,” Max said. “He’ll start his process later today.”
“Process?” she asked, peeking into another bay where technicians unhooked an older gentleman and helped him to his feet. He looked exhausted.
Max walked down the hall, letting them pause in each bay to see the projectors.
“Yeah, right now,” Max said, “they’re inducing themselves in Phase One. Watch a bunch of stuff is all. At Hexcom we prefer film as a trigger, but you can read if you choose.”
“Read?” Masumi asked, obviously startled, but said nothing else.
“Movies; I’d rather do movies,” Towns said.
Max continued. “They’re in Phase One for as long as it takes.”
They found a bay with three technicians observing a subject.
Max lifted his index finger to his mouth. The subject appeared to be asleep. Technicians had wheeled monitoring gear near the cocoon. They watched readouts of graphs on two monitors that continued to jump into disequilibrium. Max waved for them to follow him down the hall.
“That person is sleeping deeply, but projecting. She’s in Phase Two. Been at it for a while.”
“Dreaming, you mean?” Masumi asked.
“Well, yes, but strongly. Much more strongly than normal.”
“What’s Phase Two?”
“That’s proprietary. If you’d like to be assessed for possible projector training, you’re welcome to. Towns, of course, has passed because of Riodola. You’re involved, so that’s a plus.”
“No thanks.” Masumi turned to Towns. “You’re going to do this?”
“Why not?”
“You have a good job offer at Riodola.”
“They pay better here. You have no idea what they pay if you make it to Phase Six. If you succeed with all the phases … it’s a lot.”
“How much?”
Max shook his head. “Sorry.”
“A lot.” Towns said
“This is what you wanted me to see?” Masumi asked.
Towns looked to Max for permission. “Can we? She won’t budge unless she sees.”
“See what?” she asked.
Max sighed. “I knew this request was coming.”
He regarded both youngsters and wondered if he were making a mistake. He had seen an odd amount of interest in Riodola lately. The undercurrent of devotion for the bizarre ideas of Hexcom’s founders sometimes didn’t sit well with him, but he could ignore such oddities if it meant success. And they wanted Towns. And Towns wanted Masumi. Again, a large bend in the rules might be needed.
“Down here,” Max said and led them deeper into the complex.
They arrived at an observation booth with an occupied cocoon inside.
A thick glass separator comprised the other side of the space. It provided a view of a large chamber. This transparent barrier was at least a foot and a half thick. The rest of the chamber beyond it was a cylinder. Masumi craned her neck to see the top.
“Four stories tall, ten yards wide,” Max said. “Titanium tiles encasing a steel frame of reinforced-concrete ashlars. You could detonate a thousand sticks of dynamite and not rattle the place.” Max knew he shouldn’t, but he let them watch.
In the projector booth just outside the massive chamber, another one of Max’s assets, Dale Brookings, had been projecting, on and off, for a month now.
They had begun Phase One with Dale’s favorite show (Star Trek). He’d spent days on the original show, watching each episode, some more than once. He then moved on to the later versions, even the movies. By day three his lucid dreams were spiking off the charts. Max felt like a proud papa.
Dale, if you asked him, would tell you he had never experienced such intense dreams before. Max didn’t tell him they’d placed a psychotropic laced with opiates in his food. He had warned Dale, though, that watching videos with such intensity might make him feel funny.
In fact it made you feel great, Dale admitted.
Phase Two began a week later, after he signed all the precautionary documents ensuring his loyalty (and silence). He was also paid ten thousand dollars as a signing bonus for achieving Phase Two.
Not bad for three day’s work, Max heard Dale tell his parents on the phone, both of whom thought he was in community college in Passaic.
Phase Two consisted, again, of full immersion in his material of choice. This time Dale chose Clint Eastwood films, the Westerns.
At some point, while watching the films, Dale went on autopilot.
Max was there, observing. Dale was watching and listening, but half awake. He reported the experience was pleasant, especially with the drugs pumping through his system. Dale didn’t notice when they wheeled him out of his recessed bay and into an enclosed room like the one he was in now. Dale also didn’t realize that images flashed like faint flickers of distant heat lightning, bare outlines of light, actual images from the films projecting onto the walls.
They let him rest for a few days after completing Phase Two, enough to check his bank account and find another ten-K bonus. Phase Three began with more intense immersion.
This time when the technicians wheeled him into the projector room, they did so after repeating a single scene over and over again for an hour. The first discomfo
rt began as the psychotropic, combined with the inducement pattern, pushed him into a schizophrenic reality.
Dale projected immediately, then vomited.
He felt better later, he told Max, especially when he saw how much they’d given him for that challenging success. However, Phases Four and Five were much of the same, just more intense. Except in Phase Five they began with a series of soft porn with the instructions he not masturbate. In the projection room, taken as deep in the immersion process as he could go, Dale projected such real likenesses that he was reaching out for them with a massive hard-on, obviously convinced there was no need to yank on it because of the willing female in the room.
Max knew right then they had a high-level projector.
Phase Six, though, would determine if Dale could instantiate his projection. He had semi-succeeded three times already, each one a grueling multi-day projection that ended with him instantiating a pile of imaginary ore called bicarium, which disappeared in under ten minutes.
No one had fully completed Phase Six. Dale and a handful of others had mastered the process enough to build themselves a handsome bank account, but not enough to get the multimillion-dollar bonus.
For the big payday, the bicarium couldn’t disappear.
Max allowed Towns and Masumi to watch as the technicians wheeled Dale’s cocoon into the small anteroom separating the observation booth from the actuation chamber. Dale had been up for almost three days, and a fresh dose of psychotropics now pumped through his veins as images of bicarium formed in his brain. He writhed in his chair, now tied down so he didn’t fall out.
“This is what you want to do?” Masumi asked Towns.
Towns waved her to be quiet. “Watch.”
When the dark metal ingots appeared in the tall, cylindrical chamber, Masumi shook slightly, surprised she was startled.
Hadn’t she seen the same thing before, more than once, with apples and a door?
This is different …
She watched as the technicians examined the blocks of metal, keenly aware of their intentions: wealth. Brazen, undiminished desire for monetary gain.
This was not science. This was economics, as old as alchemy. She knew the implications of what such an activity meant. Whatever that stuff was, she thought, it looked valuable. To summon it out of the air … they had found the philosopher’s stone. In an instant, Masumi understood what Dr. Sterling meant by responsibility. Hexcom had different aims. Towns had been seduced.
“Interesting,” Masumi said, watching the technicians who were busy with the material.
A few minutes later, they stood over an empty floor. The bicarium had disappeared. The technicians looked up at another observation booth in defeat, this one above theirs.
“Come on,” Max said, “before someone checks if you’re cleared.”
* * *
Masumi drove back to Riodola, troubled by what she’d seen. She struggled with the crumbling foundations of her world.
Windows down, and wind beating up her hair in mad swirls, she calmed herself by singing along with the radio at full blast, unwilling to let her imagination run free. Dr. Sterling wanted her to immerse herself in this witchery.
She snorted in derision, at one point, and almost missed a turn.
Okay, if I’m stuck, it’s time for a reckoning.
Dr. Sterling’s secrecy bothered Masumi like a recurring itch.
She needed to understand a rational method to explain literary bleedover and Lucid Media Projection, or she’d go to Dr. Ross and claim she’d been duped.
When Masumi returned to Riodola late that night, she asked for an escort to the library. She used her card to gain entrance, happy the doors had been updated with electric locks. The automatic lighting followed her into the subbasement, where she presented her card again at the institute.
They had put up signage announcing the Institute for the Advancement of Spinner Society. Masumi couldn’t stop herself from snickering. Hexcom certainly beat Dr. Sterling in terms of facilities.
Masumi walked past the empty reception area, into a wide room with a few new desks supporting workstations and office supplies in boxes waiting to be unpacked.
Again, she scoffed, as if such simple places could house a competitor to Hexcom.
Down the hall, a lone doorway led to Dr. Sterling’s unadorned office and apartment.
In the old Cultural Studies Department the doors and walls had been littered with the personal stuff of idiosyncratic academics. Masumi remembered running her fingers along a framed shot of Machu Picchu, remembered standing before a large black and white of Easter Island. At a Mount Fuji photo she wondered if she would ever visit that place. There had been a few images of Dr. Sterling dancing with Maasai in Africa. There was another of her dancing with the Maori in New Zealand. In that one, Dr. Sterling grimaced with a war-face, while stomping the ground and pounding her fists on her thighs.
These new walls were undecorated, and sad. Maybe, when the personal touches found their places, Masumi might feel better about Dr. Sterling’s endeavor. One woman against Hexcom did interest her.
That’s a way to feel good about it, she told herself. A lone woman forging ahead against powerful opponents.
Dr. Sterling opened the far door before Masumi could knock.
“Come in.” She wore a bathrobe, her hair tied in a towel. The aroma of lavender shampoo filled the space. “Got the place wired up. Computer lets me know when someone enters the building. Cameras now, too. Saw you come all the way down. Nifty, eh?”
Masumi didn’t acknowledge this achievement because it seemed amateurish.
“Coffee?” Dr. Sterling asked.
Masumi shook her heard. She entered the small apartment opposite Dr. Sterling’s office and sat at the kitchenette table.
“Towns signed with Hexcom,” she said. And then, “I need to know what happened when you shut that door and entered that corridor.”
“I expected this. Alice also inquired. Eliot hasn’t recovered, though; this is too much for him. He’s being inundated with requests from his foundations for explanations. And here you are making demands.”
“I am.”
Dr. Sterling pinched in her face, as if she’d just read a poorly written student essay.
“Masumi, I shut the door, walked to the other, opened it … and found myself standing in the middle of NYC many years ago. I stayed for almost three months and saw Margery as much as possible. She thought I was an aunt of her friend Harriet Sterling. The young me was away for the summer. But I’m certain that if I had encountered myself I would have been convincing. Margery gave me a few lines of poetry and a flower, which I brought back with me.” She drummed the manuscript on the table with her fingers. “I found an interpolation between pages sixty-one and sixty-two. Take a look.” She removed the loose-leaves to the page with the interpolation. “It instantiates her flower.”
“How do you know?”
“I can do it.”
Masumi saw confidence in the older woman. She could sense Dr. Sterling wanted a direct challenge.
Is that proof?
Masumi thought quickly, realizing Dr. Sterling’s new skill should have nothing to do with their conversation.
“One thing at a time,” Masumi said.
Dr. Sterling frowned.
“You want proof beyond this?” Her finger jabbed the manuscript. “Or this?” She took a violet tulip petal from her robe pocket. “In ten seconds I can generate another one.”
“Hold on,” Masumi said, her heart threatening to trip-hammer in her chest. She didn’t want to see such a thing, not yet, not at this moment when her worldview had suffered so many blows. “Why do you want me to read a book?”
“Did you choose one?”
“Yes.” She reached into her bag and grabbed a beat-up paperback, Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame. “It’s the original translation into English. In the novel, the medieval cathedral is as much a character as Esmeralda or Quasimodo. I always wished I
could have seen it like that. I read it in high school and promised to read it again.”
“Wonderful,” Dr. Sterling said. “You want experiential proof?”
“Yes.”
“I have a room down the hall prepared for visitors. It’s simple, but you’ll have privacy. I need you to read and do nothing else but sleep. Read while you eat. Read while you sit on the toilet. No long showers. When you get tired, sleep. When you wake up, continue. It’s a big novel. You should be able to get through two or three times.” Dr. Sterling grabbed the book and thumbed through it. “Here’s the most important part. Make sure, after this marathon session, when it comes time to walk through that door, you have a part of the book in mind. Find a peaceful part, a chapter that deals with your favorite place or setting. Nothing violent or dangerous. Something safe.” Dr. Sterling stopped there.
Masumi didn’t need clarification. As preposterous as it sounded, she knew the reason for the admonition.
“Okay, but I need something else.”
“You want more proof, Masumi?”
“Of course. Why else would I do what you ask and then walk into that corridor?”
“You have nerve.”
“Only one way I’ll know for sure.”
“Fine. I’ll return to the portal—”
“No,” Masumi said. “I choose.”
“You?”
“Yes. Me.”
She wondered if Dr. Sterling’s hold on reality had snapped. They had witnessed the miraculous, and such shocks might have unhinged her. She now claimed to be able to enter a world of books. Masumi refused to allow herself to be swayed either way by the uncomfortable possibilities.
However, if she could be allowed an experiment …
“I know how to test this,” Masumi said. “I’ll choose an interesting narrative.”
“What’ll you choose?” Dr. Sterling began looking around the cramped space. Nothing much to help her there. “You’re going to pick for me?”
“Yes.”
“Send me somewhere?” A bellicose note of anger hung in the air.
“I have it,” Masumi said, knowing what to choose. “I’ll bring you the book tomorrow.”
“Go get it now.”