Epigraph

content/read/010.md

@@ -1,125 +1,133 @@
-# Dr. Carter Ramirez --- 2112
+# RJ Brewster --- 2112
 
-"Listen, Ramirez, I'm just not sure if you--"
+RJ arrived at the theater early, the last few meters of the walk having been spent hastily finishing the carton of Thai. Carton and chopsticks wound up in the compost as ey swiped eir way into the theater.
 
-"No, come on. Sanders, just hear me out." Carter sighed and settled her weight against the edge of her desk. Took a slow breath to buy herself some time, organize her thoughts. "I'm just saying that we ought to look into social connections between the patients, too. That way, maybe we can see if there's some factor that's tying these occurrences together. With that under our belt, we may be able to formulate a better theory of what's going on here, even neurologically."
+"Sorry, Johansson, I'm here."
 
-Sanders looked up to the ceiling, visibly counting to ten, then shrugged. "It's just that you're talking about contagion here, Carter, like this is some sort of flu or computer virus. Not only do we have very little data to go on, but there's no indication that this is something passed from one person to another. We've had the rigs checked. Exos too. All of the data suggests random--"
+The hulking director laughed. "You're here five minutes early, RJ. What on earth are you sorry about?"
 
-"Sanders," Carter said, voice stern. "I know how the project works. I know the data. There's a lot of questions still left in the air. I'm not suggesting that getting lost is contagious. We dismissed the virus aspect ages ago. I'm merely suggesting that we might find shared factors within a social realm as well as the physiological. Surprised we haven't, actually."
+"What? I-- Oh."
 
-Carter stood her ground. No sense paling under his glare. She was lead of the research team, she could tell Sanders to do whatever she wanted him to. Or, well, strongly suggest. Hell, there was no reason for her not to. She was plugged into all of the teams that he was not privy to. He may be lead of neurochem, but Carter was above basically everyone except the UCL itself and whatever grantors were sponsoring the project.
+"Lot on your mind, kid?"
 
-After a few tense secionds, he caved, shrugged, turned his back on Carter. He nodded towards his own team.
+"Nah, I'm fine. I mean," RJ frowned, squinted. Anything to get emself in the work mindset. "Yeah, sorry. Woke up early and spent a bunch of time researching. Guess my head's still elsewhere, boss."
 
-"Look, Sanders," Carter said, following after. "You're a fantastic doctor, and I respect that, I really do. I'm not trying to impugn that or anything, and I'm not pulling labor away from the neurochem team. I'm merely suggesting that we add a sociological aspect to our attack here."
+"Well, alright," Johansson rumbled. "So long as you get your head around work by the time we start. Hey. More crew."
 
-He held up his hands in surrender, then headed for the coffee station.
+RJ bustled into the theater and made eir way down to the pit where the mics had been stored. Ey handed them out to the actors who would be wearing them, ticking off the cheat-sheet to align proper mic to correct actor.
 
-Carter rolled her eyes and let him go. She turned back to the remaining team. "We've got a hunch on the social front. Or, I do, but I think it's worth following. There's a couple of patients who are involved in the same subcultures, so maybe there's distinct ties between them. Loose ties, sure, not everyone knows everyone else, but they *are* there."
+Ey bounded back up the steps two at a time to the tech booth and set about waking the theater up. Caitlin was already delved in, so it would already be shaking its sleepy head. Ey just had to help it wake up the rest of the way.
 
-They nodded. Some looked unconvinced, but none hostile.
+RJ exchanged cheery greetings with the lights understudy as ey shrugged out of eir jacket, draping it over the back of the chair. Ey slipped eir hands carefully out of eir gloves. Contacts gleamed from eir digits, freshly polished and clean.
 
-"Let's time-box half a day to chase down these ties and see just where they lead. If they lead nowhere, fine. If we can find a way to tie them together, then we dig into all the ways that the web ramifies." She smiled in a way she hoped was disarming. "Worst case, half a day is spent tracing along the 'net, but best case, we find another avenue of research that lets us predict --- and then maybe interrupt --- future cases. Got it? Catch you at lunch."
+Ey settled into eir chair and delved in to greet the theater. It purred in recognition, brushed up against em, stretched and unlimbered. Thoughts of Cicero and Debarre, of Sasha and the lost left back with eir body, with eir hands resting lightly on the contacts in the cradles, forehead against the headrest.
 
-Carter sighed. Speeches. Hell of a start to the day. She collapsed into her desk chair, closing her eyes to collect her thoughts.
+The first half of rehearsal went by without trouble. Johansson had apparently highlighted a few areas of concern, so they began with those. From there, the cast has followed his lead, adjusting as needed per their dear leader's suggestions. RJ and Caitlin kept a script running so that they could keep up with the director and stage manager.
 
-Rather than sequester herself in an office, she had taken a desk among the team. Four foot cube walls separating her from her neighbors. Made of glass, too; token walls rather than real ones. Not that there was much room for an office in the repurposed classroom. All the same, the deliberate attitude with which she had chosen to join everyone in equal conditions had endeared her to the more stubborn among the crew.
+When the clock hit eight thirty, Johansson called for a break and informed everyone that they would be running through top to bottom after. Last chance for a full run-through.
 
-On the other hand, the lawyers-*cum*-statisticians were badly out of their element. Thankfully they had their implants and were able to spend most of their time in the office sim.
+RJ gave the purring theater some reassuring warmth and backed out of the connection, reveling in the snap of eir fingers pulling away from that light magnetic grasp of the cradles. Ey wiped eir hands dry and flexed fingers to keep limber.
 
-All the same, sometimes she wished for an office, if only for the door. A nice, thick, hardwood door. One with a solid core so that she could voice her ideas. Or scream.
+Ey spent the break walking around the theater and stage in one big, looping arc, simply listening. Hearing from the theater's perspective so often, it was easy to get wrapped in the omniscience of it all. Good, too, to hear the way that the ambient sound moved through the room, reflected off of walls and ceiling, died among the baffles. It would all be different with people in the seats, to be sure, but the acoustics of the space were beautiful on their own.
 
-Sometimes she just needed the ability to put things into words. No matter how often she tried to set things down in the notes on her phone, she always felt hampered by the small screen and her clumsy thumbs. Neither had she gone full immersive-on-the-go yet. Something about that glassy-eyed stare, the silly headband, the controllers gripped like walking weights, packed full of electronics, set her teeth on edge.
+Johansson whistled piercingly. Back to work, back to the stage. Back to the booth and back to the contented and satiny-soft embrace of the theater for RJ.
 
-At least she had a private corner in sim.
+It was around the end of the first act that RJ started having problems.
 
-She delved in rather than work on a tablet or screen. *One scream,* she promised herself. *Then I'll organize shit.*
+When one was delved in, one could always focus hard enough to feel the way their head felt against the headrest, or sense the way that their hands rested within the cradles of the grips. Trickier, sure, when one was as immersive as eir tech required. Bodies weren't a thing in that liminal space. Ey was as much the room as the room was itself. No forehead, no hands. No headrest or grips
 
-Once she left her private corner, Carter's chosen workspace, her 'desk', was totally black. Not the complete blackness of unseeing, but the vaguely luminescent darkness of *Eigengrau*, as if wherever she looked, she saw the faint light of non-seeing. It was black enough to be easy on the eyes almost by definition. At least, as much as she had eyes in the sim.
+By the time ey had brought house sound down in time for the curtain, RJ could feel a numbness creeping. A stealing of sensation. A non-feeling flowing slowly over emself from the base of eir neck outwards, stretching out along eir scalp, down eir arms, the non-sensation not-tickling along eir ribs.
 
-Black without being unnerving.
+Ey had been willing, desperately, to chalk it up to nerves or exhaustion. It had been such a long week.
 
-Scattered throughout the space were decks. Decks upon decks.
+Thoughts of Cicero, doubtless cradled in some hospital creche: strictly disallowed but nonetheless teasing around the edges of consciousness.
 
-Each was a point of light. A white rectangle with just enough depth to give the impression of being several cards stacked on top of each other but no more. Each was surrounded by a dim halo that dispelled the darkness. If she were to engage with a deck, it would fill her vision almost to the periphery with that fine velum paper. Almost, but not quite: the non-black provided a border and seemed to shine, in its own non-light way, through the paper. From there, she would be able to explore and expand that portion of the project at will.
+*Tired, yes. Exhausted. Yawns.*
 
-The decks themselves were organized into groups, surrounded by bright lines of white string --- literally string; Carter had chosen cotton string as her group delimiter. Decks within groups were linked by string, and many of these groups in turn were related to one another with more intangible threads.
+By the time ey couldn't feel the plastic of the headrest or the cradles beneath eir hands, no matter the desperation, ey began to panic.
 
-She was a ghost. A non-being. A being of nots. A gesture from her non-hand would show the whole setup from the top. The mind, ever attracted to a two dimensional representation, sometimes appreciated this aspect. The mind, ever attracted to the *hereness* of space appreciated walking through the sim just as much.
+*Panic, yes. Just anxiety. Nerves.*
 
-Even with perspective in play, the scientists and lawyers working the project had tended to alternate between the aerial view and the interactive view, with the cards positioned at chest level throughout the sim.
+All the same, it was final dress. Ey would be able to head home and catch up on sleep. Drink some tea. Hot chocolate. Pet the cat. Whatever ey needed.
 
-Everyone's view of the sim was different in its own way. Sanders, she knew, preferred an oak-paneled room with dark green carpet, a facsimile of luxury with each of the grouping lines drawn out in finest silver. Others preferred pencil sketches, harsh angles, subdued colors on a dim background, or even more abstract, textual interfaces. So long as the concepts of decks and spatiality were maintained, it was up to the individual.
+*Need, yes. Baser than want. Imperatives.*
 
-Cards had their ACLs, too. Some were visible only to the individual. Some were visible to everyone, but only on the surface, with details invisible to others. The vast majority were visible to everyone, completely open.
+By the second curtain, something was desperately wrong.
 
-Carter began creating a publicly visible grouping, knowing that others were delving into the sim along with her, visible as diffuse shapes in her dark space. She wrote in air, titled the group in her stolid, blocky font of choice. "The Social Connection".
+Ey hadn't missed any cues yet, but ey couldn't seem to figure out how to work eir 'voice'. That thing that wasn't talking. That subvocalization used to communicate with Caitlin Sarai Johansson anyone. The immersion-mouth to chat to talk to radio for help a non-entity non-thing non-here, gone, leaving em feeling exponentially more cut off from the rest of the theater as time went on.
 
-From there, she began creating sub-groupings. For cases. For leads. On and on. For the "cases" group, she tapped a few of the case decks to make symbolic links, drawing lines of cotton twine which she dropped in.
+Numb, yes. Yet strangely embodied. Strangely tangible. Strangely localized. Oh god oh god please help please help. The play. Ey had work. Ey had the theater. Ey had the room and the lines and time and space to manage. Ey had a home and the Crown and a cat and Sasha and Debarre.
 
-Two were positioned at the top of the list:
+*Had, yes.*
 
-  ------------------
-    Patient aca973d7
-    M --- 2086-01-28
-   Lost: 2112-11-08
-  ------------------
+It was the muzzle that was the kicker. The muzzle and the tail, which ey felt --- any feeling a beacon in the storm of numbness which had long since enveloped em entire --- with a piercing intensity. Felt, bordering on and then diving straight into pain.
 
-  ------------------
-    Patient 0224ebe8
-    X --- 2084-05-09
-   Lost: 2112-12-07
-  ------------------
+*Pull back,* ey begged. Every bit of training begged. Every nerve begged, screamed. *A bug, a glitch, an error. Pull back oh god please pull back.*
 
-Carter connected these two cards with fine thread. Hanging pendant from that, she switched to virtual keyboard and created a metadata label, more tag than card:
+Ey lifted eir hands --- paws? --- in a coarse, jerking motion which, along with the act of pulling eir head back from the contacts, led to em toppling over. There was no chair to catch em.
 
-  ------------------
-  Possible acquaintances
-  ------------------
+And that was when ey missed eir cue.
 
-The others, those shadowy figures, caught on to what she was doing, and got down to work, dragging symlinks of decks and expanding this new group of social connections.
+-----
 
-Carter pulled back out of the sim when her personal timer went off fifteen minutes before the time-box was up.
+The curtain went down, the lights dimmed, and then, ringing clear, a thin giggle filled the auditorium. The lead laughing at a misstep. A quiet joke to share at the pub later. No harm. Sound was off, right? Curtains would eat the unamplified laugh.
 
-She backed out and made her way from her workstation to the small counter at the front of the old classroom. She filled the electric kettle from the tap and set it on its base for tea, letting it heat up, then scooped a few heaping spoonfuls of coffee and chicory into the coffee maker. While she was in the sim, she had ensured that everyone else's rig would have an alarm for the time-box, and it was only fair that she make everyone a cup of coffee before they pulled back.
+"RJ," Sarai whispered into the silence of the theater's sim. "Stay on cue, bud."
 
-The coffee had finished brewing and the mugs were all set out in a row in front of the pot and kettle, each waiting with handles out toward the room for ready hands. Carter poured herself some of the coffee, thick and bitter, and topped it off with a dash of sweetened creamer to dull the latter.
+No answer, no apology, no acknowledgment that a note had been made. No signal.
 
-One by one, the ten techs pulled back from their workstations and ambled, glassy-eyed, to the counter where the coffee lay. Carter suppressed a smile: a horde of zombies in various states of disarray drawn to caffeine. It'd be nice, but over the months they had spent on the project, the team had settled into a comfortable ritual of meetings over coffee. The habit remained unbroken.
+"RJ?"
 
-"So," she started, once everyone was gathered around and tead-and-coffeed.
+"What's going on up there?" Johansson's subvocalization rumbled through the director's channel in the sim.
 
-Silence. Sanders wouldn't meet her gaze.
+"Something's wrong, boss, lemme back out and check up on RJ."
 
-Finally, she caved and broke down her thoughts. "Time-box is over. I think we got a bunch of good stuff done in a few hours, some not even related to the task at hand. There's definitely connections there. We've got a good number of them among the cases we have at our hands, but there's precious little data on why those connections exist. We've got a few furries, a few 'net addicts --- well, more than a few --- and we've got a whole lot of DDR junkies. None of those point to anything that would lead people to getting lost."
+"Hold places," Johansson said aloud to the theater. The open channels from the actors' mics carried a few quiet whispers in response. "Hold on, quiet please."
 
-"Man, have you *seen* DDR zombies, though?" Everyone laughed.
+Moving with a quickness which belied his bulk, Johansson jogged up to the tech booth and slipped in as quickly as possible to keep sound from leaking out. Sarai was trying to rouse RJ.
 
-Another voice piped up, "And the correlation on the neurochem side is extremely low. Might as well be non-existent."
+-----
 
-Sanders smirked down to his coffee mug before hiding the expression with a sip.
+Like a projector bulb's heat burning through celluloid film, the third curtain had signified a drastic change. Slow enough to be observed, faster than ey could hope to avoid. The few tenuous touches on reality that held RJ into eir seat in the tech booth scorched and peeled away, acrid smoke stinging eir eyes. And the numbness spiked.
 
-"No, there's no doubt about that." Carter sighed, shrugged. "So, again, time-box is over. What do you think? Is this line of thought worth pursuing? Plus-one, minus-one, zero. Sanders?"
+RJ lay on a tile floor. Dirty. Yellow. Brown specks, dark enough to be black.
 
-"Minus-one." The response was immediate.
+The tiles were completely regular, one foot on a side, obviously made of some synthetic material. Harder than linoleum, softer than stone. They were glued to a concrete foundation. No wasting time with grout, each tile butted up against the others to form a grid of thin, black lines showing where the dirt of hundreds of feet had been ground into the remaining seams. Thousands. Millions.
 
-Carter slipped her phone from her pocket and started a tally on the calculator. "Alright," she continued. "Jacob?"
+Ey couldn't move, not yet, but ey could see that the world was bounded. There was a thin plastic strip of molding around the edge of a wall. Above that, regular rectangles of blue. A wall.
 
-"Zero."
+-----
 
-Tallying as she went, Carter went around the room, The running tally took a few dings (neither of the lawyers were for the idea, she noticed), but remained net positive until the end of the line.
+"Something's not right, boss. Ey's totally unresponsive on the line."
 
-"We're left at two, then."
+"Pull him, pull him! Hit the panic!"
 
-Sanders set his mug down with exaggerated care, but otherwise stayed silent.
+Caitlin, who had backed out moments before, and Sarai both leaped to RJ's sides and pulled eir hands up from the cradles, rocking em back from the headrest to lean against the back of the chair. All according to training.
 
-"Hardly universal, so let's triage. Can I get one from neuro, one from stats and history, and would one of the law team be willing to devote an hour a day to helping us out? Just to run stuff by as we come up with leads."
+Eir body flopped lifelessly against the cheap plastic mesh.
 
-_**If** you come up with leads,_ was written on Sanders' face. She ignored it.
+Caitlin slapped the red button on the side of the rig, fingers coming away dusty. Below the desk, drives sparked to life and dumped the last thirty minutes of both sim and brain activity from the user.
 
-Prakash Das from the neurochem team raised his hand, and Avery from statistics and history volunteered. One of the lawyers, Sandra, gave a noncommittal shrug and promised some of her time, saying, "We're on shaky legal ground, I think, but we can probably keep it in check."
+"The hell?" Johansson growled, reaching in a thick pair of fingers to press against the side of the sound lead's neck. "He's got a pulse. Check his eyes, Sarai. Caitlin, call. Now."
 
-"Alright. Let's sync up, you three." Carter smiled toward the rest of the group, "Not leaving you guys behind. One-on-ones and daily stand-ups will continue at the usual times. We'll set another time-box of--" She checked her phone. "Three days, after which we'll reconvene and vote again."
+Shaking, Caitlin pulled her phone from her bag and struggled to unlock. She gave up, swiped to the emergency dialer, called out to emergency services.
 
-Sanders strolled back toward his workstation, Ramirez's eyes on his back.
+"They're rolled back, boss. Bloodshot, too." Sarai tugged back the collar of RJ's shirt, exposing eir exocortex's simple color-coded readout, set at the base of eir neck. "Blue. What the hell..."
+
+"Ey's not jacked in, though," Johansson said. A statement brooking no discussion. "Can't be."
+
+"I think--" Sarai trailed off hoarsely, cleared her throat, tried again. "I mean, do you think ey's lost?"
+
+"Caitlin, what's our status, girl?" Johansson didn't wait for a response, throwing the door to the tech booth wide and shouting out toward the stage, "Cut! Manually shut off your mics and take a seat where you are. *Do not move.* Emergency services will be here soon, and will record what they can."
+
+-----
+
+Lockers.
+
+The blue rectangles were lockers. The first hint was the vent, those five slots a few inches from the bottom of each narrow rectangle, but, as ey lifted eir muzzle from where it lay on the tile floor, ey could clearly see the locks halfway up each door.
+
+Tall, narrow lockers. Blue. Yellow tile floors. Thin tile glued to cool concrete. The scent, the very feel of the place.
+
+AwDae struggled against crashing waves of panic. Struggled to make all of this information fit in eir head. Struggled to make it all fit in with the fact that ey was currently vulpine. A fennec fox dressed in a suit, laying on the floor of the central corridor of eir old high school.
+
+"The hell?"