Vox Mentis

Do you remember Sasha/Smith's attention words from way back when? You should do, they were Jeremy's too.

Given the fact your new name has a hell of a reputation, just being able to say "I know your set" and demanding her cooperation with any inquiries would probably work. She's likely to assume your knowledge of her set came from higher up, and not from school way back when.

"Look, Smith," you say. "I know your set. Don't ask how, just know that I know it." A flicker passes over Sasha's face. "I need to know everything you know about words, and I'd really like your cooperation with that."

Sasha's eyes search yours. She smirks, and holds her hands up in mock surrender. "Hey, Woolf, whatever your deal is, I have no desire to get mixed up in it. But I don't really understand the question. I'm not really an expert, anyway." She launches into a story about a high-speed joyride down the I-48, a police officer on a motorbike, and a speeding ticket she had hilariously failed to talk her way out of. She tells you she has trouble with set 198. “I get korantifa,” says Sasha, leaning forward. “I can get to deforiant. But then I’m lost!” She gestures expansively. “I can never remember.” This might be a dead end. Anything you can learn from Sasha is only going to be surface stuff - rote memorization. You're looking for something deeper.

You don't need Words. You nearly broke the headguy (what was his name again?)'s lock with only will, and seduced an entire town with only natural charm.

You consider forgoing learning words entirely, but reject the idea. If you are ever going to get back to Danny, you have a feeling words are going to be important. Charm can only get you so far, and charm will get you exactly nowhere with the Organization.

Who's your boss? Go through the official channels to request training.

Unfortunately, you have no idea who your superior is. Things just sort of happen. You got assigned an apartment, a bank account, and a cell phone. All this is arranged with no apparent direction from anyone. If there is an official channel, you don't know what it is.

You decide to hope that one day somebody, some boss-figure, will appear to educate you. In the meantime, you read data and try to pound it into thoughtful conclusions. The organization is interested in refining its psychography model, in finding ever-better ways to classify people more accurately into fewer sets. You look for responses in graphs that shouldn’t be there, tiny bumps in blue lines, and write reports on possible psychographic overlaps, and set boundary blurring, and possible new avenues for setting. You have access to a vast database of shopping habits, Internet usage patterns, traffic flows, and more; if you wanted, you could drill right down to an individual and look up where they went last Tuesday and what they bought and did. But that's not very useful. No one is interested in individuals. You're supposed to look for connections between them: neurological commonalities that allow them to be grouped together and targeted by a common word. Whether anybody acts on your work, or even reads it, you have no idea.

~

Your apartment balcony overlooks the meatpacking district and sometimes you stand out there with a bottle of wine, wrapped in a jacket that never really keeps out the cold, watching the city breathe.

Every few days, you do something stupid. You stay up late, or set the alarm early, and leave the apartment in the freezing dark. You walk in a random direction for a random amount of time and find a pay phone and plug coins into it. As it rings, you remind yourself to modulate your voice, avoid identifiable phrases, and end the call as soon as possible. You tell yourself, This is the last time for at least a week. Because if you're caught, you have no doubt that the consequences will be terrible. But then the line connects, and Danny’s voice fills you, and you forget about that.

As time goes on, though, it becomes harder to find a pay phone you haven't used to call Danny before. Every night, as you walk the streets, you half-expect Eliot or Thoreau or maybe that kid in the airy suit to step out of the darkness. And then everything will be over. But that never happens, so you keep doing it.

~

One day you get a corrupted data set from a ticket, so you pick up the phone and dial Labs. You're not supposed to do this. At least, you're supposed to do it as little as possible. Techs are isolated from analysts for security reasons, since techs aren't poets and are therefore vulnerable to compromise. Why an analyst might want to compromise a tech, you have no idea. It seems pretty pointless. But that's the rule. It doesn’t seem very effective, either, since although the techs are supposed to be anonymous, they give themselves away in their writing styles; one overuses evidently, one has never heard of apostrophes, that kind of thing. So you don't have a great deal of respect for the rule.

“Hello,” you say when Labs picks up. “This is Analyst three-one-nine. I need a validation check on a data set, please.”

“Open a ticket,” says a male voice. You've 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?” You tell him. There's 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,” you say, “I’m looking at it right now. The m-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.”

You open your mouth, because that's preposterous. You've seen thousands of m-graphs and know what they're supposed to look like: mountain ranges. Sometimes they have many peaks, sometimes just one, but the point is they are jagged. The lines go up and down. But as you look at it again, you realize Labs is right. There is a line. You didn't notice because it runs along the very top of the grid and is dead straight.

“Clear?” says Labs.

“Yes,” you say. “Thank you.” You put down the phone. You look at the graph awhile.

You walk to Sasha’s desk. “Hey,” you say. “What’s syndesis?”

“What’s the context?”

“It’s in a new ticket. After ‘subject response,’ instead of a rating, it says ‘syndesis.’”

“Well, syndesis is just compromise,” says 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,” you say. “I see.”

“Tell them to say what they mean,” Sasha says, returning to her work. “Probably someone new.”

“Right,” you say.

You do your best to write a meaningful report about the oddly flat graph and dutifully submit it to the ticket system. Another ticket is waiting, but you feel distracted, and gaze at passing clouds instead. You have the feeling something is going to happen.

Six minutes later, the power goes out. You roll your chair back from your dead monitor. Heads poke up from cubicles. “I thought we had a backup generator,” says Sasha. Her voice sounds loud. You didn't notice the hum of the air-conditioning until it was gone.

An alarm begins to jangle. People’s voices rise. Rosenberg speculates about fire in Labs, which would be a problem, because a lot of those doors are time-locked.

They make for the stairwells but you don't follow. Sasha hangs in the doorway. “Woolf?”

You shake your head. You're feeling stupid. You waited too long. You should have walked out of this building six minutes ago. You should have done it the moment you saw that graph.

“Woolf! It’s not optional. Time to go.”