What remained was a curved piece of glass that encircled the entire room except for a small opening that led to the locked door. Chance squinted at the glass and could just make out several silhouetted figures beyond. A low hum suddenly filled the room, and the glass pane started to lower. It descended slowly, like a closing garage door, receding into a thin opening in the floor.
When the glass had disappeared entirely into the floor, not one of them dared to move.
Chance and Kate, Wolfie and Tahoe stood in the center of the room, bodies tense and coiled, hands interlocked.
They were surrounded by a dozen figures, men and women. Most of them wore white lab coats. Some held clipboards and open computer tablets. All stared at the four figures in the center of the room.
A clicking echoed inside the room, drawing their attention to a woman who stepped forward.
“What the hecking heck,” muttered Tahoe.
Madeline Levick’s three-inch heels clicked on the concrete floor. The provost was the only person there not in a white lab coat. Instead, she wore a form-fitting crimson pantsuit, the jacket overlapping in the front with three large buttons. Her hair was pulled back in a severe bun. Her makeup was immaculate. She looked like she was headed to a cocktail party.
She smiled widely.
“Congratulations,” she said. “You have successfully completed the escape room.”
She started to clap, slowly. The others soon joined her, the ones with the clipboards and the laptops, the clapping louder and faster, until a chorus of cheers filled the room, surrounding Chance and the others with an ovation they did not understand.
Part Five
university joins growing movement to restrict hate speech
Code of Student Conduct to Outlaw “Expressions of Hate, Bias and Discrimination”
by Leah Rogerson, Michigan Daily @Hiimleah22
(May 27, 2019) – In a letter to the campus, President Walter Lack announced that the University of Michigan was adding hate speech to its list of prohibitions in the student code of conduct. The revised code, which will go into effect immediately, now identifies “expressions of hate, bias and discrimination” as violations.
“Hate has no place on a college campus,” President Lack wrote. “Today, we take a major step forward in creating a safe place on within our community to allow our students, faculty, staff and alumni to learn and thrive.”
The change comes after a tumultuous year on the Ann Arbor campus. A noose was found in a fraternity house. Posters with the headline “Wake Up White People” were discovered on walls in several academic buildings. The posters were linked to a murky fringe group known as USA First, which espouses “white nationalism” and urges protection against “rampant immigration.” And just last month, the university was rocked with protests over the scheduled appearance of alt-right media star Vance Aniston. President Lack was forced to intervene and cancel the appearance, citing security concerns.
The revised Code of Student Conduct was developed in close collaboration with the Lenore Foundation, a group that supports other “smart speech” provisions on a growing number of college campuses.
Student activists hailed the move. “This is long overdue,” said Carla Jimenez, a junior biology major. “President Lack did nothing for years about the growing epidemic of hate on campus. Our coalition of 17 student groups deserves the credit for this historic step.”
Others expressed concern over the move. “Although we all condemn hate speech in all of its insidious forms,” said Lucy Dalglish, dean of the College of Journalism, “that doesn’t mean that we can simply overrule the First Amendment. I fear that our long-held freedom of expression is under attack here. University administrators have now become the arbiter of what we can or cannot say. This is truly a slippery slope.”
THIRTY-FIVE
You have successfully completed the escape room.
The provost’s words hung in the air, circling and curling like smoke from a smoldering fire. The clapping and the cheers filled the room for a full minute, quieting only when Madeline Levick raised a single manicured hand.
Chance looked at Kate, who stood transfixed. Wolfie and Tahoe, speechless, weren’t moving either. None of them seemed to be breathing at all. Just taking in a surreal, impossible scene.
And then the scene became even more impossible.
“What the hecking heck,” muttered Tahoe.
Desmond and Scarface – the two killers – stood deferentially behind the provost. Wolfie recognized them at the same time as Chance and started to charge towards them. Chance stopped him with a hand on his chest.
“Wait,” he said.
Desmond and Scarface stood deferentially behind the provost. Whoever the two men really were, it was clear that the provost was now firmly in control.
“Impressive work,” the provost said. “All of you. But one of you deserves special commendation for finally figuring all of this out. Chance, how did you do it?”
When Chance didn’t immediately answer, he felt Kate tug tentatively on his arm. “Chance? What is she talking about?”
“Go ahead, Chance,” Levick said. “Tell her. Tell them all.”
“Okay, now I’m just starting to get pissed,” Tahoe said. “Somebody better start explaining right freaking now.”
“It was all part of it,” Chance muttered, more to himself than the others. “All just a big game.” He fell silent, head bowed, lost in a million thoughts tangling within his head.
“It seems that your friend isn’t in much of a talkative mood right now,” Levick said. “So let me be the one to extend my personal congratulations to each and every one of you.”
“You already said that,” Tahoe hissed. “But what are you congratulating us for exactly?”
The provost smiled. “As I said, for successfully completing the escape room, of course.” The woman strode forward, heels clicking, walking in a slow figure eight between them as she explained.
“I can see that you are all a bit confused by all this, but it really is quite simple.” She glanced over at one of the young women, who immediately tapped a few keys on her tablet. A second later, a single glass panel emerged from the concealed slit in the floor. An image flickered to life on the large monitor.
Chance identified the scene immediately.
“You all surely recognize this place,” Levick said. “The Escape Room. Darwin’s study. Five strangers, working together to solve a series of puzzles.”
On the monitor, Chance, Tahoe, Wolfie, Kate and Jenny hurried around inside the room.
“We told you we’d be watching you inside the Darwin Room, and so we did,” Levick continued. “It was Chance who saw the clue in the colored M&Ms, demonstrating keen perception skills. It was Tahoe who noticed the identical rug on the Darwin family portrait. Of course it was the artist who noticed that one, and in so doing, demonstrated what we call visual and spatial processing. Here we see Kate working through Guilford’s Alternative Uses Test, a famous experiment that challenges subjects to find alternative uses for ordinary items. Well done, Kate, getting that key out of the hole with only a door magnet and a bit of a potted plant. From there, you found poor Alfred Russel Wallace, and the key to escape the room.
“But your escape was really just the beginning, Act One, if you will. Because from the moment you stepped foot in the Darwin Room to the moment we revealed ourselves to you, all of you have been participating in one of the most revolutionary experiments in modern science. We have been testing the functions of your brain, evaluating your decision-making processes and analyzing how the brain reacts to the unexpected.”
Before Chance could bombard the Provost with a hundred different questions, the image on the screen jumped to a different scene. It was a wide shot, black and white and grainy, of the lobby of 314 East Newgate Lane. Leo and Carrie were visible, standing beside the reception desk. Four others were standing nearby, at the far right of the frame. Kate gasped as two other figures appeared. Desmond
and Scarface. The video had no sound, but it seemed like a few of them were even laughing. Suddenly, they all seemed to move at once, as if on prompted by some unseen and unheard force. Carrie lay down in the corner behind the desk and Leo made his way down the hallway before splaying himself out on the plush carpet. The four others disappeared out of view. Desmond and Scarface followed them out of the frame.
The blood, Chance realized with a start. It was already on the walls and pooled on the carpet. He watched as Carrie and Leo positioned themselves near the dark stains.
The provost continued her narration. “When you all were about to emerge from the Darwin Room, we signaled that the next stage of the experiment could commence. Here just outside the room, you find the blood and the bodies and discover there are two men, two heartless killers, now coming after you. You cleverly elude them and slip into the second escape room. Inside the Pharaoh’s Room, you quickly locate the concealed trap door in the throne and drop into the hidden chamber. Again, excellent use of what our research team calls executive functions of sequencing, problem-solving and, in a high-stress volatile environment, emotional self-regulation.”
“Hold it, right there,” Wolfie said. “That scene in the lobby, the dead bodies, the blood, all of that — was just part of the escape room?”
“That is correct.”
“So Leo and Carrie …?”
With a slight nod of Levick’s head, a male lab assistant strode to the door, and opened it. Leo and Carrie walked in, smiling. Dressed in white lab coats, they joined the others standing just behind the provost. Carrie gave them a little wave.
“As you can see, very much alive and well,” Levick said. “Leo and Carrie — yes, those are their real names — are graduate students in our lab.”
“You probably don’t recognize some of the actors in our little play here because you didn’t get a very good look at them, but the four dead players from the Pharaoh’s Room are here with us as well. They are also members of our staff.”
“What the hecking heck,” Tahoe muttered.
Levick continued. “You solved another riddle in the secret chamber in the Pharaoh’s Room — kudos to you, Chance, for solving that one — and found yourself locked up tight in a shipping container.”
The image on the screen changed again, this time to a feed from a camera mounted in a large warehouse. At the center of the image was a large container, encircled by three men.
“We moved the shipping container from the loading dock and placed it upon the Colombo Express. It is just one of thousands of identical containers on the open water, headed south to Rio de Janeiro. Before you set off, we added a little halothane vapor — harmless sleeping gas — to the container to keep you out of trouble for the desired length of time.”
“You shipped us … to Colombia?” Wolfie could scarcely believe what he was hearing. “You people are crazy. Batshit fucking crazy.”
“I assure you that characterization is inaccurate,” Levick soothed. “The men aboard the Colombo did not even have bullets in their weapons. You smartly escaped by releasing the enclosed lifeboat. Again, a nice display of creative problem-solving.”
“So you were following us?” Chance asked, struggling to piece it all together. “Watching us the entire time?”
“No, no,” Levick said. “We had no need to follow you. We merely anticipated you. There was, of course, no way to know for certain where you would reach land. But given the number of hours you were sleeping in the container, we knew that it would be somewhere south of the equator, Panama or Colombia, certainly no farther south than Venezuela. There is only one road through Central America, and we knew that you would eventually have to pass through. So we dispatched Mr. Grant Kiernan and Mr. David Howard, assistant professors here at the institute, to intercept you.”
Chance realized she was talking about Desmond and Scarface. Assistant professors?
“Your scar —” Chance said, pointing at Scarface.
“Skateboarding accident, age 8,” said Howard.
“Wait,” Chance said, suddenly recognizing something. “In Panama, I watched you shoot five innocent people. You killed Jenny.”
“Is that what you saw?” asked Howard. “You saw me pull the trigger? Or did you merely hear the gunshots and see the bodies fall to the ground?”
Chance thought back to that moment in Meteti, and suddenly realized that Scarface was right. They had been hiding in the restaurant and had heard the gunshots that felled Bigfoot and his friends. Escaping around the side, they emerged to find Jenny’s lifeless body on the ground, and the killers standing over her.
“If what you’re telling me is true,” Chance stammered. “Then Jenny is —”
All heads turned at the sound of the door opening again.
Jenny Chen walked into the room.
“Hello, Chance,” she said.
THIRTY-SIX
Jenny Chen hesitated just inside the doorway. She glanced at the provost, then to the center at the room, where she locked eyes with Chance. She managed a meager smile. She seemed unsure of what to she should do next.
“Ms. Chen, aren’t you going to greet your friends?” the provost coaxed.
Jenny moved haltingly across the room. As she drew closer, Chance felt Kate’s hand slip from his own. Jenny wrapped her arms around Chance, and this time, it was his turn to be unsure of how to react. He hesitantly wrapped a single arm around her back.
“Jenny?” he sputtered.
Without pulling away, she brought her mouth close to Chance’s ear and whispered, “I am so sorry, Chance.”
“I can’t believe it.”
She pulled away, but only slightly, and locked eyes again with Chance. Forget pennies, he would’ve given a thousand bucks to read her thoughts in that moment, but her expression was veiled. She was obviously happy to see him, he could see that much. But there was something else there too, something he couldn’t read.
“I’m alive,” she said. She looked toward Kate, Tahoe and Wolfie. “Surprise.” The tentative attempt at humor didn’t land well, but it gave Chance an opening to break from the embrace.
“You see, everybody is alive,” Levick said before Jenny could answer. Jenny apparently took this as a cue to step away from Chance and take up a position beside the provost. “No animals were hurt during the making of this film.” She smiled humorlessly.
“Stage 3 began the moment you arrived in Colombia,” she continued. “This part of the experiment tested all of you in a true open-world environment: your brain function, decision-making and predictive choices. And you all more or less followed the path we anticipated for you. For instance, we knew that you would all eventually feel the yearning to reach out to your family. That is the nature side of your brain, literally hard-wired into your DNA, impossible to ignore. I personally called all of your loved ones to let them know you had all volunteered for a special mission to Haiti to assist poor hurricane victims. They were so pleased they didn’t even stop to question any of it. It’s a good thing they weren’t the ones being studied, because they proved to be poor examples of the questioning of accepted authority. We were glad to see that each of you was able to overcome that particular genetic predisposition.
“As we anticipated, your visit to Jenny’s house led you to my office in the Main Administration Building, and from there, using a little controlled action by our two make-believe killers, you fled here.” She gestured grandly to the space. “The Brendan Iribe Center for Computer Science and Innovation, a facility not even fully completed yet, and already the best of its kind in the world. Here, we are leveraging Mr. Iribe’s philanthropic support to create the world’s most advanced virtual reality experience. And I am pleased to report that you also successfully completed the VR component of our grand experiment.”
The crumbling floor, the construction worker — it was all an elaborate VR-generated scene. It had been utterly convincing. The technology was impressive.
“But of course, somewhere along the
way, Chance here figured all of this out. Didn’t you, Chance?”
Chance did not speak.
Kate looked at him with searching eyes. “Chance? You knew? “You knew about Jenny?”
That prompted a response. “No, Kate, I promise you. I had no idea she was alive. If I had, I never would’ve —” He let his voice trail off. When he spoke again, he addressed all of them. “I started to suspect something back when we were on the cargo ship. As we were running from the shooters, one of the bullets tore into the wall, just above my head. I stopped for a second to look at it, and found a wire hooked to a small box set into the bullet hole. It looked to me like a small explosive. I didn’t have time to think about it at the time, but I was pretty sure they weren’t shooting bullets at us. Those explosives were set into the walls before our escape.”
“Very good, Chance,” said Levick. “Like mice in a maze. We simply fired the explosives at the right time, in the right places, and the four of you scurried along a preordained path. Our little way of helping you to” — she made air-quotes with her fingers — “‘discover’ the lifeboat.” Levick laughed again. “It really is amazing how easy it is to trick people into thinking they are in charge of their own decisions. Fascinating, really.”
Chance said, “It wasn’t until we got here, to this room, that I figured something else out. It was the names of the construction worker and the guy he called on the walkie-talkie. Charles and Alfred.”
He waited. Tahoe understood first. “Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace,” she said. “References from the Darwin Room.”
Chance nodded. “It was too much to be a coincidence, so I knew something else was going on. That’s how I knew that we’d be okay if we jumped down.”
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