Kelley Eskridge (16 page)

“That piece of paper can tell you as much
as I can. If you need to know more than that, well…”

“What's going to happen to me?”

He spoke as if she were a child. “It's an
experimental program. We don't know what will happen. That's why we're
doing the experiment. Anything else?”

This time she let him go.

She read the brochure over and over in her
cell. It told her she would be subjected to a templated confinement
experience. She would be fed intravenously and catheterized. Her head
would be shaved for better conduction. Her body would be encased from
the shoulders down in a locked medical-minder case “for your own
protection.” The minder would monitor and feed and clean her out, and
electro-stimulate her muscles every two real-days while she was
incarcerated. The brochure told her that based on computer model
projections, she was likely to experience depression, anxiety, time
distortion, and loss of mental acuity; these symptoms were individual
in onset, intensity, and duration, and could not be reasonably
predicted. She agreed to a post-confinement debriefing so that her
experience of the template could be compared to other participants.

When you awaken
from virtual confinement, you may experience mild disorientation
,
the text said. The program would offer her the opportunity to remain
after her debrief for forty-eight hours at no expense, including a
complimentary session with her VC counselor. That made her shudder.

When it was time, four large men came for
her.

She said, “I want to change my mind.”

Two of them entered the cell and picked
her up from the bed, one holding each arm. “No, you don't understand,”
she repeated, “I want to change my mind. I'll take the forty years,
okay? I'm out of the program.” The two men hauled her by her arms to
the cell door. “No,” she said, and tried to twist away. The other two
men each took one of her legs. None of them spoke to her. They carried
her like a dressed deer down the hall. “No, goddamn it!” she yelled.
“I've changed my fucking mind, I don't want to do this!” But no one was
listening. Halfway down a long hallway, she stopped yelling and shut
her mouth hard enough to hurt her jaws. Fifteen seconds later, the men
released her legs and arms, and she walked shakily between them the
rest of the way to the barred gate at the end. She shook while they
completed the identity check and let her and the guards in. She shook
while they led her to a glass-walled room with a stretcher surrounded
by equipment. She shook while they stripped her and shaved her head and
laid her out on the cold table and put a drip into her neck and other
things into other parts of her. She shook while a woman with a
stethoscope took her pulse and listened to her heart; it reminded her
of her childhood examinations and she felt just a little reassured. And
then the doctor brought a syringe toward her, and all the fear sawed
back through her like a riptide. The drug curled inside her. Her eyes
fluttered. When she closed them, it seemed that she stood at the edge
of something dark and deep. She thought of Tiger, falling free; and
then she went down.

PART III
SOLITARY

11

AND NOW HER EYES WERE OPEN. AND
HERE SHE WAS,
tucked into a tense-muscled packet, wrapped tight
around herself, rocking, rocking, breathing too fast. Trying not to
know, not to begin, and above all not to count the days. But it was too
late, her mind had already leaped ahead—

—and this was the first of two thousand
nine hundred and twenty days.

She thought, what is the next thing to do?
And there was a very small voice in her brain that said

Look. See
.

No, that was too hard. She would just stay
curled into herself like a snail for a little longer, until she was
ready. But adrenaline drilled through her with each heartbeat, and her
muscles coiled like something explosive at the end of a burning fuse.
So there was nothing to do but raise her head and look around.

Light. Gray stone around her. She pushed
herself up onto her elbows and swung her legs over the side of what
turned out to be a narrow metal bed. Was there a slight delay between
the brain's impulse and the body's reaction? She straightened up
slowly; various muscles twitched in odd arpeggios in her legs, stomach,
shoulders. She felt as if she were half an inch outside herself,
ghosted, like video through a bad link.

She stood in a square cell, with a
concrete floor, stone block walls, and a flat ceiling at least twelve
feet overhead, out of reach. Everything was gray. The bed frame on her
left, pushed into one corner of the room, held a thin mattress, one
sheet, a blanket, a flat pillow. A viewscreen covered three-quarters of
the far wall. An opaque lighted circle was set into the center of the
ceiling, too high to reach. The light in the room reminded her of
lukewarm water; the air, too, was tepid, and she could feel no draft or
current. Everything was neutral, flat.

Two plastic panels with molded handles sat
flush against the wall to her right, opposite the bed. Behind them she
found her larder, shelves of simple single items. She remembered the
tests she was given, to think of egg and apple and butter, and here
were the results. Phantom food. It would not matter to her body if she
never ate a bite during her sentence; and if she never opened the
larder again, the apples would still be as firm, the cheese as buttery
yellow, as she had just seen them. Real; not real. She would never need
a toilet here, or a shower. And that led to other anxious questions:
would she feel it when her body was exercised in real time? Would her
muscles suddenly begin to twitch on their own? What if the medical
minder gave her the wrong nutrient mix and she got sick in VC? What if
the lights went out and never came back on?

If something goes wrong, how will they fix
it? she wondered frantically, turning around and around in a tight
circle in the center of her cell. And then,

surely
they aren't going to leave me all alone for all these years, they'll
check on me, they'll answer my questions, someone will come
—

She stopped herself. She only had to look
around to know that no one would ever come. How could they, into a
place with no windows, with no doors?

She sat on the floor opposite the blank
screen, slumped against the wall with her arms locked around her bent
legs. She did not know how long she had been there. Long enough to play
the idea of

no doors, no windows
over and over in her mind like a musical phrase. No way in or out,
except through the technology in the real-time world. The machines
would keep her here inside her own head for an unfathomable length of
time while the minutes clicked over on the clock in the outside world.
And those minutes would be her hours, and the weeks would be her
seasons. Snow's final month of training at Ko would be Jackal's second
year of numb gray solitude, alone, alone.

I won't cry, she told herself; and she
thought it was probably true. She was hollow now, as if someone had
stuck a sponge down her throat and absorbed everything within her.
Perhaps it would be easier to get through—and here her mind skipped
over what exactly it was she would need to get through, the circumspect
voice within her saying

no, not ready
—if
she kept that numbness, if she felt nothing. Perhaps she could move
through—again, that skip, that space where the concept of
eight years of this
simply would not
fit—like one of the balloons she released over the Ko Island shoreline
every birthday: self-contained, and empty of everything except the need
to rise, rise.

All right, then: get up. She pushed
herself awkwardly from the floor. Rise. She still had the sensation of
physical movements being out of sync. She ran her hands up her arms,
down her breasts and ribs and around her back, across her bottom and
down her legs, everywhere she could reach, and it was as if she touched
herself through a layer of plastic film. She still had all her hair: it
too felt slightly wrong. She thought of her body, the real one, laying
loose and unconscious in a medical minder; that body turning soft and
rotting subtly from within because her attention, her self, was not
there.

Don't think about that
: the
small voice was stronger now, and she let herself agree.

She made a tiny sandwich of soft wheat
baguette with butter and cheese and a slice of cold ham from the
larder. She kneaded and poked it, sniffed it, and touched her tongue
lightly to a buttery crumb. She took a bite. The food felt substantial
in her mouth, but when she chewed and swallowed it simply vanished
somewhere between her throat and her stomach. She could not eat any
more. She put it back into the cupboard and shut the panel. Then she
opened it again: the mauled sandwich was gone, and everything was new.
She closed the larder very gently.

She considered whether to turn on the
viewscreen, but the internal voice advised her to save it for tomorrow.
She stripped her clothes off, tossed them on the foot of the bed, and
crawled under the blanket. Light shone against her closed eyelids. It
took a while to remember what she was supposed to do. Then she said,
from a scratchy throat, “Dark.” The light dimmed. The pearl-sized voice
hummed approvingly, soothingly, in her brain, made it easier to lie in
the semi-dark and think of nothing at all; and she did not know it when
she finally slept.

Day 205

It really wasn't so bad. The Garbo
technology was amazing, even in this templated application. She
wondered if the engineer was still wearing her bunny slippers.

She had light and dark, room to exercise,
a place to sleep, many foods, and the viewscreen with its colorful
display programs. She was making the best of it. She sat on her bed and
told herself stories from books she had read, making up things to fill
the gaps when she could not remember what happened next. Some of the
things she invented left her laughing out loud, pleased with her
cleverness, her resilience. She played all the parts, created different
voices for the characters. She recalled poems that she knew, and music.
She sang lyrics and melodies. She imagined performing with her favorite
stars, brilliant before an unseen audience. She pretended to be an
orchestra.

She stayed busy experimenting with food,
finding different ways to wear her clothes. She constructed elaborate
sexual fantasies, touched herself for hours at a time and came in one
wave after another in rhythm with the colors on her screen. She
measured every bit of the cell she could reach, using her hands and her
feet as units. Each wall was precisely twenty Jackalfeet long, and more
than seventeen Jackalhands high, which was as far as she could reach
even standing on her bed. She knew her limits now; she could work
within them.

But every once in a while, more often
lately, she could think of nothing new to do, no better way to use the
time. She worried about running out of stories, of finding no more
songs. She began to imagine that the technicians in the real-time world
were watching her brain readings spike during her orgasms, laughing at
her. She became uneasy with herself. And she began to take comfort in
patterns, in repeatable actions, in controlled movements. There was no
harm in looking for structure. She would work it out. Through it all
she kept herself good company. She really was handling it well.

The comforting, sensible voice within her
agreed, and told her so more and more often.

Day 377

“Light,” she said. “Screen on.”

She woke quickly these days, as if her
sleep was so like her waking time that it was no longer hard to slip
from one into the other. She got up naked and stretched, ran in place,
worked her muscles and tendons. Her motion was smooth and steady.

The viewscreen flickered; she kept it on
continuously these days. She turned her back to it so that she would
not be distracted by the fractals that ebbed and flowed across the
wall. Soon the program would enter the next phase of its long cycle;
random rainbow geometrics, followed by stylized morphing faces in
primary colors, and then a sequence of animated patterned waves rolling
onto a chalk-white beach. She liked the waves best; they made her feel
as if she were always on the verge of moving forward.

After her final push-ups and sit-ups, she
rose from the floor and rubbed herself with a corner of her blanket.
She scrubbed hard to make her skin tingle and turn red. She had learned
that physical sensation was important to help her stay connected with
her body; to keep it solid against the empty space inside that
threatened to eat her one cell, one minute, at a time; against the
internal voice that seemed to be growing in power, in intimacy, and how
it sometimes gibbered instead of speaking. How it sometimes was too
loud. How it sometimes would not stop.

Dangerous ground. She scrubbed her head to
wipe the thoughts. When her mind was clean again, it was time to pick
up her clothes from the floor at the foot of the bed: socks neatly
rolled next to panties, which were folded on top of a generic pullover
shirt, which was bundled on top of soft trousers, a little pyramid of
clothes. Shoes stood next to the pile, right aligned with left, toes
pointing toward the head of the bed, in the direction that she had
after careful consideration named north. South was the viewscreen wall.
The bed lay on the east wall, and the food cupboard on the west. The
north wall was blank, where she used to imagine the door belonged.

She was dressed: time to eat. Today she
made her first meal out of granola and plain yogurt. Sometimes it was
bread with honey. A few times she simply pulled apart sticky chunks of
chocolate cake and licked the frosting off every finger. For a while
she had been deliberate in choosing breakfast foods, until it occurred
to her that it hardly mattered. There's no morning here, her voice told
her: so simple, but it shook her. She had wanted it to be breakfast, so
that she would know when it was morning and then afternoon and then
evening and then time to sleep, to get up and move through the cycle
again. But now she had first meal instead of breakfast, and she ate
what she damn well pleased.