Vox Mentis

Come down from there

They expect you to take the stairs, so use the elevator instead. The odds of it being an actual fire are low.

You run through floor plans in your head. There's no fire escape or elevator. You hadn’t realized that before. No glass cases saying IN CASE OF EMERGENCY. No one ever gathered you all in a conference room and explained where to go in an orderly fashion in the event that you need to evacuate.

Elevators can be disabled by a passenger with a fire key so that they only go to a floor when the button is held down from within (and the close door button also needs to be held to close the door) . You might be forced to take the stairs, but see if you can't get off on the wrong floor, take a staircase that doesn't end on the ground, that type of thing.
Sasha might know the building better than you, tell her it was actual syndesis, we need to get out of here in a nonstandard way.

Edit: now would actually be a great time to use Sasha's attention words if she isn't listening. Not to compromise her, just so that you can communicate the situation quickly.

"Cosugar," you say. "Sasha, I-"

Sasha winces, her lips going into a flat line, then stares at you in disbelief. "What the fuck are you doing? Are you crazy? Do what you want, I'm getting out of here." Sasha disappears and the door slams.

Wait why do we want to fuck about in a potentially on fire building that will lock you into it if you don't act now? The last time you dicked about too hard with not following protocols you wound up in hellholemcnowhere'sville for god knows how long. Do you want to take that risk? Don't be daft get going.

Well, that report on the Syndesis word, filed six minutes ago, would indicate that this word compromises anybody and everybody perfectly. That word is so good that setting doesn't even matter.
We want to get out in a way that leads to us not being compromised.

if we must go downstairs with everyone else, let's bring a tape recorder. Who knows when a perfect (bare?) word would be useful. Edit: see if you can't get a recording device into someone else's pocket with your pickpocketing skills.

It'll be fine. The fire won't spread past Labs. It's all designed to be sealed off; nothing is going to make its way upstairs.

You grab a tape recorder from your desk, just in case. You can go up or down. Those are your only options. You enter the stairwell and start going up. You doubt there's a fire, and even if there is, you're probably safe up here. You hear disembodied voices rising around you like departed spirits. A door booms and there's silence but for your own breathing. You don’t hear anyone else going down, you realize: no one from other floors. You stop to kick off your shoes, which are helping no one. You poke your head in on a few floors, but they are bare. You climb and climb and finally see daylight. You even jog up the last few steps but find yourself at a scuffed steel door that's chained and padlocked. You try it anyway. You sit on the concrete and try to figure out what next.

Somewhere far below, a door clacks open, then slams. This happens eight or nine times. You listen but can’t hear anything more. “Fuck,” you say. You're pissed at yourself. You spent too long in Broken Hill, not needing an escape route. You ball your hands into fists. Think. There's a skylight. It's secured, but how well? You go back to the door and put one foot into a loop of chain and pull yourself up, searching for fingerholds. Balancing, you reach for the skylight, but it's too far away. You hear a rasping. What the fuck that is, you do not know, but it's coming from below and getting closer. You manage to inch your way up until you're standing on the bar of the door. The chain swings and clanks like a bell. Like you're deliberately trying to attract attention. Your fingertips brush the skylight but that's the best you can do. If you release your grip on the door frame, you could possibly grab this thing and pull it out of the ceiling as you fall. There's a very slim chance of that happening. You hear footsteps. Boots on concrete. The rasping punctuates the air at regular intervals, like breathing but not. You should have found a way to learn words. You shouldn't have waited for someone to teach you. You should have found them somehow. You leap at the skylight and your fingers skid uselessly over the plastic and you fall to the concrete and bang your knee. “Fuck,” you say. A man comes up the stairs. A kind of man. He's wearing black from head to toe and his eyes are black, bulky goggles, like night vision gear, set into a fighter pilot’s helmet, with bulging plastic hemispheres over the ears. He looks like he could walk through fire. The rasping is his air regulator.

“Fakash heva clannigh lanoe!” you say. This is a mess of attention words for random segments. The chances of it having any effect are about a thousand to one. “Lie down!”

He extends a gloved hand. “Come with me.” These words come out flat and computer-modulated. You don’t move. If he comes closer, you could jump him. You don’t see a gun. You'll go for those goggles. If you can even just dislodge them, it'll make it hard for him to chase you.

“Hurry.” The man gestures to the stairs. “There’s a fire.”

“There isn’t,” you say. “Is there.” He doesn't answer. You figured out now that he can’t hear you. You begin to walk down the steps.

~

The lobby has been converted to a makeshift hospital, full of white cloth screens. The windows are blacked out with plastic sheeting. Black-suited spacemen move between them, respirators hissing. You see no one’s face you don’t know from level five. You glimpse Sasha on a trolley bed but then lose her behind a screen. You're told to stay where you are. Nobody speaks to you. Or to each other, at least that you can hear. An hour later, a spaceman draws back your curtain. He isn’t wearing his helmet and you're surprised at his youth. He has a mustache, thin and fluffy. You wonder if this is the guy who fetched you from the top of the stairs. If so, you should have gone with karratan.

“You can go.” He begins to disassemble screens.

“What was all that about?” But you're not really expecting an answer. Outside, you find the others huddled on the street. It's dusk, the tail end of rush hour.

“A drill,” says Sasha. She doesn't speak to you. She won't look at you. “But for what?”

“No point wondering,” says Raine. “We’ll never know.”

“True, that,” says Sasha. You can tell she's angry. She's wondering why you hadn’t come downstairs with them, why you had used an attention word on her. And, by extension, what you know that she doesn’t.

You can’t hang around any longer. You start walking and by the time you reach the subway, you're shaking. You won't do anything rash. You'll come to work in the morning, go to your desk, and do your job, like always. But this has been a lesson. A reminder. The next time something like this happens, you tell yourself, you'll have a way out.

~

You keep a notepad and write down syllables you notice are used more frequently by one psychographic than another. On the train, you listen for deviations from the average. You pick apart the words you know, looking for patterns. You're surprised at how obvious they are. Liberals overuse -ay and -ee, the front vowel sounds. Authoritarians are thick with fricatives. You develop hunches from newspapers and TV and websites, track down a suitable representative, at a bar or church meeting or the grocery store, and try trotting them out. Like a safecracker listening for tumblers. Sut. Stut. Stuh. You slide guesses into sentences and usually people don’t even seem to register them. They don’t make it past the perceptual filter, ignored as verbal static. At worst, they think you're stuttering. Your hunches are usually wrong. But sometimes you see a flinch. A tiny flare across the muscles of the face. And that's a tumbler.

It's a hard way to learn words. You could do this for a year and still know less than Sasha. But it's very thorough. It forces you to understand the underlying principles. You deduce a preference for alliteration in a set from what you know of the sets around it, leaping from there to vavvito, a command word, and this thrills you more than anything you've been taught. Because you found it yourself.

You think back to Sasha's police story about set 191 and are astounded. Apparently Sasha can’t see that the words of set 191 are bound together. You could understand if Sasha had forgotten the entire tree. But if you know one, you have half of the others. Sasha doesn't seem to get this. She memorized them one at a time, as if they were unconnected. Like a tray of random objects in a child’s puzzle game.

~

One thing you never get over is the feeling of being watched. You're not sure how, but it's happening. You try varying your route to work, checking reflections, doubling back unexpectedly, but never see anyone. At home, you double-bolt, but feel no safer. Your feeling is that Thoreau is in the apartment. That's your impression. One night, you dream he comes into your bedroom like a black wind and leans over you, watching you without emotion, as if you are a thing beneath glass.

~

On the first Tuesday of your sixth month in Washington, you leave your apartment and walk to the local train station. You ride escalators down to the platform and wait for the red line. It's warm; you're thinking about getting to your desk and taking off your shoes. A man at the end of the platform has a guitar and is banging out a song you loathe, for personal reasons: “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” The train begins to pull in. In its passing windows you glimpse Eliot.

For a moment you're not sure whether you saw him inside the train or reflected behind you. Then the train grinds to a halt and the doors open and he says from behind you: “Let it go.”

You watch the train pull out. You're sixteen years old again. Just like that. But then you turn and he isn’t so frightening. He's aged around the eyes. He's just a man, after all.

“Are you in love?” Eliot says.

You don’t answer.

“Don’t lie to me.”

“Yes.”

He looks away.

“I’m sorry,” you say. “I’ll stop.”

“Your next mistake will end you. This is as far as I can go to protect you. You need to appreciate this.”

“I do. I promise.”

His eyes search you. “No more calls. Not one.”

“I’m done. I’m done, Eliot.” In this moment, you really mean it.

He walks away. You stand on the empty platform.

~

You don't call Danny that night. The following day, you don't call him. You've gone longer than this without hearing his voice but now it's different, because it's the end. You feel sick. You can’t taste anything. It's crazy but you can no longer taste food. At work, you click through tickets and write reports but can’t tell if they make any sense. When it gets too much, you go to the bathroom and put your head between your knees. You make herself repeat: Do not call him. You feel possessed, by a cruel, heartless Elise who does not love.

You surrender on the third day. It's a terrible betrayal of Eliot; you realize that. He stuck his neck out for you in ways you can’t quite comprehend and you promised to stop. But the fact is you can’t. You tried but you can’t. It's been six months and home is still on the other side of the world.

You can’t call Danny again. Eliot would know, or, worse, others would. There's no stay-but-keep-calling-him option. You can only leave.

Years before, in San Francisco, you and a girlfriend had been crossing a McDonald’s parking lot and found yourselves boxed in by a group of barely pubescent boys with low pants and twitchy smiles. One of the boys had a gun, which he kept putting away and getting out again, swapping from hand to hand, and the others began to ask you and your friend if you knew what hot bitches you were and how badly you were about to get fucked up. This was a bad situation even without the gun, but you had been young and stupid, so you walked up to the boy with the gun and pulled it right out of his hands. You had good fingers, even then, because of the card tricks. You didn’t know a thing about guns, except which end to hold, but that was enough, so the boys stood around looking scared while you and your friend made a lot of silly threats and walked out backward.
The lesson here was probably that people are dicks. But also, when you're outmuscled, if there's a gun around, you could get control of the situation by getting the gun.

You're outmuscled. You don't have a gun. But you suspect there is one in the basement.

~

Beneath your desk is a gym bag. The top layer is clothes you actually wear while working out, and under those is a second set you stashed there for just such a day as this. You log out of the ticket system and sling the bag over your shoulder. On your way out, you pass Sasha, who's on the phone, and you mouth, “Gym,” and Sasha just turns away. You feel a small pang, because although you've never been friends, you feel like what you had you might have lost by using her words, and now you're never going to see her again.

You walk two blocks to a small café, a place you come sometimes for lunch. In the restroom, you change into the clothes from your gym bag: a T-shirt, a pair of frayed jeans, and an old denim jacket. You scrub the makeup from your face, collected a nice film of grime from the floor tiles, and dab this under your eyes and across your hairline. Your work clothes and the gym bag you stash behind a toilet. You don’t expect to see those again, either.

You circle the block and approach the office from the lane on the other side. Here is a nondescript door with a sign that said THE RITA DOVE INSTITUTE OF PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH. It looks like just another doomed business renting space on the wrong side of the building. But it's not. It's the public face of Labs. You press the intercom and wait.

“Hello?”

“Hey,” you say. “My name is Jessica Hicks, I did one of your, like, tests a couple weeks ago, and you said I should come back if I wanted?”

The door buzzes. You push it open and go up the narrow steps. At the top is a small waiting room, with empty chairs and an energetic television. A woman with high hair sits behind sliding glass. “Take a seat,” she says.

You sit and flip through People. You've been here before. The first time, the day after you'd determined to start planning, you'd found the entrance but not gone inside. You looked up “Rita Dove Institute” in the phone book and called them - from a pay phone, for what that's worth - and determined that yes, they were interested in volunteers for testing, and walk-ins were accepted between eleven and one o’clock. They'd wanted you to come in the next day, but you demurred, because you hadn’t acquired a false identity yet. It took you a week to find Jessica Hicks, a girl your age who had no fixed address and little interest in the world beyond where she might score her next hit. Jessica took to you straightaway, maybe sensing a shared history in addition to the potential to scam some money, and gushed more personal information to you than you really needed. In exchange, you 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 you to fill out a questionnaire. You went through this carefully, answering the psychographic questions honestly, which exposed you completely, of course, to anyone who divined that Jessica Hicks was you. You are set 220, you already know. Which should be good, because Labs could never get enough 220s.

After the questionnaire, they’d taken you to a small, bright room with a forest of video cameras. They attached electrodes to your skull and showed you 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, you blacked out, and when you woke up everyone pretended you had just fallen asleep. You didn’t know what they had done to you until the report bubbled through the ticketing system. When you’d seen SUBJECT SET: 220, you’d scanned it anxiously, but there was no mention of permanent damage. You were 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 you kept to answer as Jessica Hicks rang, and a man chatted with you about whether you would be interested in coming in again. You said yes if there was money in it and he asked why you hadn’t put down a home address and you explained about it being a tough time and just needing to catch a break and would you get paid or not, what did it matter where you lived. Once you’d established that no one would notice one way or the other what happened to Jessica Hicks, the man said to come in anytime, they would love to see you. And here you are.

“Jessica,” the receptionist says. You look up from your magazine. “You’re up.” The door buzzes.

~

You follow a white-coated man with no chin through corridors lined with steel-caged lamps. “So I get a hundred dollars for this,” you say. “Right?”

“Right,” he says.

“Last time I fell asleep.” You're trying to engage him, to figure out if he's anyone you know through the ticket system. “I hope the ads are more interesting this time.”

You reach a double set of elevators. “We won’t be showing you ads today.”

“No? What, then?”

An elevator arrives. The man gestures for you to enter. “It’s a product.”

The doors close and despite yourself, your chest tightens. It's a small elevator. It feels like a very small elevator. “What kind of product?”

He scans 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 tick 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's an odd phrase. You've seen that one in the ticketing system.

The doors part. The corridor walls are pale blue. A calming color. The tech starts walking and you follow him to a set of plastic doors, where he has to swipe his ID tag and tap a code into a keypad. Fifty yards later, the same thing happens again. During this process, you eye ceiling-mounted video cameras. There's a second elevator and when this one stops the walls are bare concrete, no more psychological blue. You don’t like this much. The corridor ends at a perfectly round steel door that is twice as tall as you are. It looks like a bank vault. The door stands open and beyond it you can see a small concrete room with a single orange plastic chair. By the vault door stands another white-coated man and a gray-uniformed guy who looks like maybe security.

Your chinless tech says, “Verifying, I have prototype nine double-zero double-one three eight.”

The other man says, “Confirming prototype nine zero zero one one three eight.”

“Verifying subject, Hicks, Jessica, identifying number three one one seven nine.”

“Confirming subject, time is eight-fifty-eight, time lock has released and chamber is open.”

“What is all this?” you say. You try to grin.

“Security,” says your tech, not looking at you. “The product is very valuable.” He enters the concrete room, which requires stepping over a thick metal rim. “Follow me, please.”

You do so. The air is freezing. The walls are featureless concrete but for six bulbous yellow lights in wire cages. Four tripod-mounted video cameras are aimed at the plastic chair. In the middle of the room is a box. A huge, steel, coffin-shaped box.

“Please sit.”

“Mmm,” you say. “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,” you say, although you're thinking no, no, no. You sit. Even the plastic is icy. The steel box has no lid. Not that you can see. Around its sides are thick vertical rods. Pistons? You stare because you can't imagine what the deal is with this box.

The tech touches your hair. You flinch. “Just relax.” He begins 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 doesn’t answer. Turn him, you think. “Strongly important”: you have read a hundred tickets from this guy and he's set fifty-five, no question, and you've figured out words for that. You could compromise him in two seconds flat and make him walk you out of here. You don’t know what next. There is no next in that scenario. Not one you want. But why is there a box? Why the fuck is there a box?

“Almost done, Jessica.”

You had not anticipated a box. You thought maybe an envelope. A man sitting opposite, preparing to read a word. And before he could, you would take it from him, because he wouldn’t be prepared for a poet. These guys, these isolated techs, you don’t think they even know what poets are. They just do what they're told. But that plan is clearly fucked, because whatever is in this box, this thing that turns a person’s m-graph into a flat line, causes syndesis, is too important for an envelope. You had been foolish to imagine that.

“There’s a small needle in this one.”

You feel a sliver of cold enter your skull.

“All done.” The tech moves to the video cameras and begins turning them on. Red lights gleam at you. “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 says. “Okay?”

You see it's true. And now that you look, you notice how the video cameras are covering only you. Not the box. It's so that later, after it's done and the box has closed again, people could study the tapes without being exposed. You notice the tech has been avoiding eye contact. You know what that means, right?

He places 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,” you say. “I don’t want to do this.”

He glances over his shoulder. The man in the gray uniform hovers outside the vault door. Bolteen, you think. Tarlocc dissinen lox, save me from that guard. It might work. The two aren’t far apart; the tech might reach him before he draws his gun.

The guard says, “We have a problem?”

“No,” you say. “No, I’m okay.”

“Time,” the guard says. “Thirty seconds.”

“Just relax,” the tech tells you. He steps out. Shortly afterward, the vault door begins to move. You expect it to clang but it closes as gently as a shadow. Then bolts fire like gunshots and you jump. The echoes last forever and then all you can hear is your own breathing. Danny, you think. Danny, I may have fucked this up.

The black speaker the tech left on the floor emits a burst of static. It takes you a moment to realize it's talking. “Jessshhhica.” It sounds like he's broadcasting from the moon. “We’re going to give you a few minutes to relax.” Drenched in static, it sounds like relaxssschh. “Please breathe normally and remain in a calm, natural state.”

What do you do?