
The Volunteer

By

Sam T Willis

The Primer, Book 4

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2017

Sam T Willis
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Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Epilogue

Preview of The Primer, Book 5

A terrible screeching sound fills the room, and suddenly I'm awake.

I stare, uncomprehending, at the clock next to my bed, sure that I know how to tell time and yet completely unable to decipher the glowing red lines staring back at me. Something inside me is shouting: "You can't wake up! The sleep world _needs_ you," and I'm slowly coming to a realization. That sound isn't my alarm clock. I've simply chosen the worst ringer in the world for my cell phone. My hand reaches out to the nightstand, over the alarm clock that isn't going off yet, and closes around the phone, while a tiny voice in the back of my brain begs me to ignore the call and seize what little chance for sleep I have left. But people don't call before five AM unless they have a good reason.

"Good morning?"

"Ah, yes, Abhi, good morning. I'm sorry if I woke you." This is the voice of my manager, Debbie. Debbie has never called me so early. She's talking fast; I'm having a hard time comprehending what she says. "I meant to just leave a voicemail. Listen, the lab is closed today for some emergency repairs, so you needn't report into work. You won't be charged any vacation time."

A free day off. The voice commanding me to go back to sleep is only growing louder, but something about this seems wrong. All of Hamlin closed for emergency repairs? Did it burn down in the night? What happened to the subjects? I can't ask those questions on an unclassified phone, though. While violent, uncontrollable test subjects roam through the flaming countryside in my sleep-addled brain I settle for asking the vaguest possible question. "Is everything all right?"

She answers quickly. "Yes, yes, of course it is. We don't know how long the site is going to be closed at this point. Just assume, if you don't hear from me, that you're not to come to work indefinitely. If you had any food you left in the refrigerator let us know, and we should be able to compensate you if it spoils. Do you have any other questions?"

If she's worried about _food_ it's unlikely that the apocalypse I'm imagining is real. Unable to bring my mind up to full speed this early, I mumble something to the tune of, "No, I understand."

"Good, that's good. I don't mean to rush you off the line like this, but I need to call everyone in the group before they arrive and find the street closed. Enjoy your day or days off; I'll give you another call to check in soon." She doesn't even wait for me to say goodbye, just hangs up as the last few words come out. Or, perhaps the more likely possibility, I fall asleep before the conversation closes, and she hangs up once she realizes I'm no longer responding.

It's just after seven when I wake up to my actual alarm. I'm feeling substantially more coherent, to the point where I'm able to complete such complicated tasks as hitting the "dismiss" button on the clock. I don't actually remember the call until I'm getting ready for a shower, and it dawns on me that I could simply go back to sleep _again_ with no consequences. Something about that seems wrong—or perhaps wasteful—so I choose to go out for coffee instead. From then on I follow my normal morning routine as if I were getting ready for work, and am out the door at quarter of eight with my laptop bag over my shoulder. It's a cold morning, still dark, but the coffee shop is only a few blocks away. I spend most of the walk reminding myself that I'm not going to be accosted by a roaming group of volunteers, and only realize that I've forgotten my coat when I've practically arrived. There's no point in having a mental argument, just like there's no point in imagining what happened at Hamlin.

I get my drink and a breakfast sandwich, and set up with my computer in a comfortable chair facing a large window. From there I can watch the sunrise if I so choose, or look at...something...on the Internet for a while. But I can't actually think of anything I'd be interested in looking at. Cat pictures, maybe? The first thing I see when I log in is my notebook, still open from the night before, on gradual neural pathway redefinition.

I'm not going to _work_ first thing on my unexpected day of freedom; that would be a huge waste of time. But, at the same time, I'm likely very close to a breakthrough, and if I'm going to be out of work for any appreciable period I'll probably lose track of my thoughts and be set back hours upon hours. Working on this now is really the only responsible thing to do, and it's not as if I had any grand plans for the day as it was. I nod to myself, as if I need some physical affirmation that the cat pictures can wait, and begin studying my notes and drinking my coffee. It's in this position that I pass the better part of the morning, and I resume work back in my apartment after lunch, and before long the entire day is gone. Perhaps I'm not built for days off.

Two weeks pass in much the same way, without any further contact from work. At this point I'm relatively sure I've been fired, and they simply never bothered to tell me. My mother, who's been calling every day since I told her what's happening, is convinced I should give up on the job and move back home. I'm not sure how long I'll be able to fend her off, but I have no interest in sharing an apartment in Queens with her after several years of freedom. My brother would spend the rest of his life laughing at me. Besides, my paycheck arrives on time and ungarnished in my bank account. It appears that the government is content to pay engineers to stay home and waste time. Not that _I've_ been wasting time. Even without access to our lab, or any of the test data, I've been nearly free of distractions and had no meetings. I'm making great progress on all the unclassified work on my plate. When—if—I finally receive the order to return to work, I'll be ready to dive back in. Even if I'm weeks behind schedule on cat pictures.

One day, when my imagination is running particularly wild, and it's unseasonably warm for December, I hop on my bike and take a ride up to Hamlin. It's a short and scenic trek, so even if I can't find any hints about what happened I can enjoy watching the birds as I ride. The access road is closed—just as Debbie said it would be—walled off by a few layers of the portable concrete barriers they use for blocking off lanes on the highway. Someone wanted to be sure no one came to work, I suppose. I turn my bike around at the barrier, curiosity still chewing on the back of my skull, and start to ride back. Only something catches my eye as I start pedaling, a trail that leads up into the woods on the right. I wonder why I've never noticed it before.

With this new subject to focus my curiosity on, I lean my bike on a tree and follow the trail into the woods and up the rather steep hill that borders the site. This land probably belongs to someone; I'm probably trespassing right now—to say nothing of the chance that _someone_ could be wandering these woods—so every few steps I resolve myself to stop, turn around, and head back to my bike. The resolution finally takes hold when I get to the top of the hill and the trail seems to vanish. Right, so there was nothing to that, the notion has been satisfied, and I can get back to work. Only a big, old tree perched at the top of the hill catches my eye. It has rung after rung of strong branches, like it was grown specifically to be climbed. Up in that tree, maybe twenty feet off the ground, there's something hanging from a broken limb. I watch it swing back and forth in the wind a few times before deciding that it's a massive set of binoculars. Weird. My nerves bubble up again, and this time I'm able to convince myself to retreat down the hill to my bike without any trouble. It's just a bird watcher or a hunter or something; none of my business.

I get back home and bury myself in my work. With the nagging weirdness of the situation hanging over my head I find that it's best to do as much math as possible to keep my mind too busy to wander. I'm drawing a diagram by hand at my kitchen table when my phone finally does ring, late on a Tuesday morning, and I've gotten so used to the all-consuming quiet that the horrifying screech of the ringer—which I seem to be physically incapable of remembering to change—nearly gives me a heart attack. I take a deep breath and steady myself, then pick the phone up without looking at the incoming number.

"Good morning, Abhinav speaking."

It's Debbie again, the first human voice I've heard that is neither my mother nor a cashier since the last time we spoke. "Ah, good, hello, Abhi. This is Debbie. I'm so sorry we've kept you waiting. Have you been enjoying your time off?"

Frowning at the paper in front of me, I carefully erase a covalent bond. "I, what? Yes, I guess. I've been wondering, you know." I didn't just wake up this time, but I'm still struggling to form a coherent sentence. "Is, I mean, _work_ ready? To reopen, I mean."

She takes a sharp breath and hesitates before responding. "That's what I'm calling about, actually. I can't get very deep into the subject on an open line, but suffice it to say Hamlin will not be reopening." My heart seems to seize itself up a bit, and suddenly I'm all cold inside. "The damage, apparently, was too great to repair, and the site is being closed."

I could have climbed that tree and seen exactly what the lab looks like now. That perch probably has an amazing view of the whole site, especially with all the trees bare. Not that that would make a _difference_ , but I would _know_. I could see the burned out husks of buildings, signs of a breakout, _something_. "What does that mean? For the project," I walk over to the window while I'm talking, like there are going to be any answers out there. "What happens to the project?"

"As I said, I can't get very deep into this subject on the phone. We've reserved a conference room on Friday at 2:00 to have a proper meeting and discuss where we go from here. You're not being laid off or anything like that, so don't worry yourself too much. Are you able to make it Friday?"

If they want to see me Friday that means I'm not fired. Though, actually, they might just want to fire me in _person_ ; I'm not sure how firing works. Can I still be fired if I'm not laid off? Are those things different? I should ask if those things are different. "Absolutely. Yes. I can be there." Or my mouth can just say whatever it wants to say.

She sounds genuinely pleased by my answer. I think it's a good sign. "Excellent. I'll email you the address right after we hang up. And I look forward to seeing you again on Friday, and starting to return to some semblance of normalcy."

"Right. I'll see you Friday. Thanks, Debbie." I move the phone away from my ear to hang up, but hear her call out at the last second.

"Abhi? Are you still there?"

I bring the phone back so quickly it kind of hits me in the side of the head. "No. That is, I didn't hang up. I'm still here." I somehow manage to stop talking after that, fighting the urge to apologize for just how poorly I'm communicating.

The happiness in her voice has been replaced by a stern gravity, and she's half whispering like someone nearby might hear. "Please don't discuss this with anyone else from work. Not everyone is being invited to the same meeting, you understand, and we don't want to give people the wrong impression."

That feels vaguely ominous, but it's not as if I've been spending my days off hanging around with a bunch of coworkers. They've all disappeared along with my other obligations, so it shouldn't be difficult to comply. "I understand."

"Excellent. Thank you, Abhi. I'll see you Friday."

When Friday afternoon finally arrives I'm at the bus stop across the street from the law office where our meeting is to be held. I've arrived almost half an hour early because I was convinced I was going to be late until about thirty seconds before the bus arrived. Now I'm just sitting on the bench, staring across the street at the parking lot and waiting for someone other than me to arrive. And hoping those people don't notice me sitting at the bus stop. I've spent every minute since I talked to Debbie imagining worst-case versions of what happened at Hamlin—terrorist attacks, mass test-subject escapes, a disgruntled coworker burning down one of the buildings—thereby compounding my anxiety to unsustainable levels. It's about all I can do at this point to sit on the bench and remind myself that there's nothing to be worried about. Businesses have floods and fires all the time, they find temporary places to operate, and no one has a panic attack. That's all this is.

With only five minutes left before 2:00, after several people I recognize have already walked in, I stand up, check to make sure I didn't sit in something, then cross the street, go into the building, and find my way over to suite 109, where the meeting is to be held. The receptionist points me down the hall, to a conference room with a heavy door, which has been propped open, and a wall of blacked-out windows. There's a table inside with two thermoses of coffee, a pitcher of water, and some pastries, plates, and cups. A few people are eating or drinking. I can't imagine keeping anything down at this point.

Debbie is there—she must have arrived even earlier than I did—standing at the very back of the room, and clutching a small stack of envelopes. We make eye contact and she nods, then I slip my way in and find a chair off to the side, where I won't be in anyone's way should they want to get some food. There are several other managers I recognize present, all standing up in the front. Over the next ten or fifteen minutes several more engineers and scientists file in, until there are about two dozen of us, most of whom I don't know. When they finally seem satisfied that everyone is present, more than ten minutes after the meeting was supposed to start, one of the managers takes the prop out of the door and closes it.

Debbie clears her throat and begins addressing the assembled group only after the door is fully closed. She projects well, perhaps too well given the size of the room and crowd present. "First off, thank you all for coming on such short notice, and we apologize for the inconvenience and uncertainty of these last few weeks. It has been a difficult time for all of us, but today will be the first step towards a return to normalcy. Two weeks ago, during second shift, there was an event at Hamlin. There was substantial property damage, and several people were injured. We will not be discussing the specifics of that event at this time."

I get this sick feeling in my stomach. Everything I've spent the week imagining has come back in force. There were two dozen subjects on site, three different generations, plus the animals, any of whom could have caused substantial property damage and injuries. The idea has hit me in the head and driven out all the other doomsday scenarios. It should have been obvious that someone was going to get hurt. We should have had more precautions, heavier doors and better locks. Debbie's still talking, and I catch myself after I've already missed several sentences.

"Suffice it to say, with the Director unavailable, the viability of our program had to be evaluated at the very highest of levels. Following debate in Congress, it was decided that our project remains extremely valuable to National Security, but that there is an opportunity here to be more efficient. The SSPO is being combined with another, similar, effort under the umbrella of the Department of Defense. A subset of our engineers, scientists, and support personnel, you all and a few others, will be offered positions in Washington D.C." There's a murmur through the room now. "We intend to compensate you fairly for the relocation expenses, and for the disparity in cost-of-living there. We will distribute your offer letters shortly; please look them over before you leave and let us know if you have any questions or concerns. Don't feel obligated to make any decisions today; I realize this is a lot to take in at once, but you'll find the offers are quite generous, as we are very serious about retaining every last one of you."

She goes on and on, talking of the logistics of the move to Washington, and the time frames involved, as well as fielding the occasional question from our group. All the while, the other managers slowly work through the room, distributing "Strictly Private" envelopes, one per person. I'm outside myself, floating between the idea that we are responsible for a massive security breach of some kind, a breach that resulted in volunteers being hurt, and that the job I've worked for the past six years has simply ceased to exist. My choice is to accept this new position or go back to Queens, essentially. A manager I only loosely know—I think he comes from the Delivery division—stops himself directly in my line of sight and offers a sealed envelope with my name printed on it.

"Abhinav Howell. That's an unusual name."

I accept the paper, jumping a bit at the odd introduction. I try to smile back at this man who seems to be waiting for something. "My mother in Bengali and my father was Irish. I don't think it's a very common mix."

He nods, like my answer is acceptable. "Interesting, interesting. Don't, uh, let me keep you from your offer letter. Let me know if you have any questions."

I look down at the envelope in my hand, but don't open it yet. There are more important things bouncing around in my head than work. Than future work, specifically. "The incident at Hamlin: was it one of our subjects? Has containment been broken?"

He smiles, showing me every one of his teeth, and shakes his head. "Absolutely not, that was the first question I asked as well. We haven't been given the details on what actually transpired, but we know for certain the subjects were safely quarantined throughout the event."

"And the Director? What happened to him?"

Looking over his shoulder at Debbie, who's still going on, now about 401k rollover options, he simply states: "That information has not been made available at this time."

Nodding, my wild fears largely assuaged, I open the envelope and slide the packet of papers about halfway out. The number on the front page, a third of the way down and highlighted in bold type, stops me there. It's more than a twenty-five percent raise. The job title indicates I'm actually being offered a promotion. They certainly are serious about keeping us. Squinting at the paper like I might be seeing it wrong, I pull it the rest of the way out and cock my head to the side.

The Delivery manager, still standing in front of me, interrupts my train of thought. "Any other questions while you have me here?"

I look down at the paper, then back up at the man in front of me, over at Debbie, and back down at the paper, trying to figure out how all of this makes sense. It seems intuitively obvious that something very bad has happened. But, at the same time, it wasn't one of our volunteers that caused it, and it wasn't bad enough to shut down the program. They wouldn't let us start again if the incident was directly related to our work, certainly not so fast; I'm being paranoid. And that really is an awfully large raise they've put on the table, though that seems to be an argument against this being a "business as usual" type of thing. A mass of different thoughts is swirling around in my head, and I'm unable to hold one in place for long enough to finish it. I can't help but feel like I'd know exactly what happened if I'd just climbed that tree. Finally, after realizing that I'm very rudely occupying this person's time without answering his question, I shake my head.

"No sir, I believe that's all of them."

He's already started walking away, off to the next engineer in his stack. All around me, similar conversations are starting up and winding down, and the looks of shock I see must be similar to my own. This is truly bizarre. At some point, my thoughts turn to finding a way to get out of my lease, and I realize I've decided to accept the job.

The holidays have passed, and now I'm in a minivan with three people from my former project: one who was in my group and two from the Encoding department. We're heading down to our temporary home in Washington, a hotel. Our new employer has been kind enough to rent out a block of rooms for all of us. I have two suitcases in the trunk behind me, the rest of my home furnishings remain in my apartment until further notice. If I'm going to pay for two more months of rent, I intend at least to use the place as a storage unit. The drive is long, traffic is terrible, and though I don't really have much in common with these particular coworkers, there's only so much time you can pass in awkward silence, or hiding behind headphones. Eventually, conversations are bound to happen.

The driver, a man I barely know, is in his fifties and talking through a mustache that reminds me of a push broom. He spends most of the ride trying to bring the rest of us around to the subject of work. He knows we shouldn't be talking about these things in this setting, and that his passengers aren't comfortable with it, but he's persistent, and able to eventually get his way. It starts with more mundane subjects—time tables and expectations of the new organization—before he herds us towards that one inevitable topic.

"Weird they just up-and-closed Hamlin like that, isn't it?"

The woman next to him, who seems to know the driver, says: "They don't want to talk about this. You shouldn't either."

The mustached man scoffs audibly. "They didn't mic my van. You think I'd ever let someone mic my van? This is a safe space, and not in the pampered, Millenial way of saying it. We're all coming from the same place and going to the same place. Besides, everybody's already thinking about it anyways."

The guy next to me is probably the most extroverted of us, and the easiest to bait into this sort of thing. "I've heard a few different things. The only thing that seems to be a hundred percent is that Director Hall is either dead or in a coma. Even without property damage that's probably enough for them to shut the SSPO down."

The mustached man grunts. Or maybe laughs? It's hard to tell. "You don't have to be timid here, kid. We can all stomach the real story. Old Pat being dead isn't news to anyone."

Shifting in my seat, and looking around a bit for a sign that anyone else is uncomfortable with this conversation, I interject. Quietly. "I don't think we should be talking about this. We don't have the need-to-know. It's irresponsible to speculate when we haven't actually been told anything."

The guy on my left talks right over me, leaning up towards the front seats as if to physically remove me from the conversation. He's loud, like he's excited. "One guy said it was a car crash. That the Director was drunk, smashed his car through the security gates, and plowed into some random kid. It would have been a huge scandal, if he made it through the crash long enough for the press to get a hold of it. I think the other guy died."

Now the mustached man scoffs again, this time almost spitting on the steering wheel. "That, right there, is some bullshit. Have you ever met Pat Hall? That man was _married_ to his reputation. He'd never so much as allow himself to be photographed holding a beer. Probably wanted to make sure he was squeaky clean, so he could turn our little triumph of biochemical engineering into a run at the Presidency in a few years."

The woman in the passenger's seat is practically rolling her eyes out loud. "Why don't you just enlighten all of us, Art, since you're so sure? What is this great conspiracy all about?"

Art smooths down his mustache, then rubs his hand over his bald head, and turns to look at his group mate with this strange expression. Like he's suddenly afraid of the conversation he's insisted upon having. He stares in silence for several seconds, glancing back at the barely-moving traffic only instantaneously, before finding the words to continue. "Conspiracy might not be quite the right word for it. Now, I don't know much for certain, besides what we've already established about the Director, but I've been able to piece together the most likely scenario from talking to a few of my friends on the security force, and from making some educated inferences.

"Here's how I think it went down: 003-001, the pet volunteer the Director was keeping in the main building, his head went _pop. _No way to pinpoint exactly when or how it started, what triggered him, but he went out of control and hurt a whole bunch of guards. Didn't kill anybody." He's gesticulating enthusiastically, barely touching the steering wheel and barely acknowledging the road.

"There would be no way to keep it quiet if one of our own was killed, but he did some real damage to a lot of people. The volunteer single-handedly disabled most of our on-site security force before going after Pat himself. Now Pat, he had it hard-wired into these volunteers' minds that they were to protect him above all other things, that's no secret, and no matter how far off the program 001 was, he couldn't hurt the Director. But it put the fear of God into him just the same, enough to set his ticker off. Massive cardiac infarction, my friends. And Pat, knowing he was the only one who had any influence over this crazy son of a bitch, and knowing that he was about to keel over, did the only sensible thing: put a bullet in the volunteer's head. The man is a hero in my estimation, but you see why they can't say a word about the incident officially."

The guy sitting next to me laughs, but it's fake and not very convincing. "Except you made it all up. They'd have had us in a damn war room if a subject went that far off program. There's no way that happened."

Shrugging, Art brings his voice back to its normal, less crazed tone. "How do you know they didn't have 'us' in a war room? You didn't honestly think we were the only group of brains they talked to in the last three weeks, did you? I've been keeping tabs on that law office they brought us to, and a couple of other semi-secure facilities in town, there have been more than a dozen different meetings, with all different combinations of people, by my estimation."

"You're just making yourself sound crazier, Art." The woman in the passenger seat sounds like she's heard all of this before. I get the impression she's been putting up with Art for years. "Tell them about the artificially inflated zinc prices next."

Art cocks his head to the side, he's forcing himself to stay calm when he clearly doesn't want to. "The prices are _de_ flated, that's the point! No, though, never mind. Forget about that. Believe what you want to believe. I've got two witnesses who say Director Hall, along with at least seven guards, were admitted to the hospital the night they closed the lab. Everybody but the Director looked like they'd been beaten up. HIPAA regulations prevent me from getting a better read on the diagnosis, but I don't toss my theories around lightly."

They go on from there, arguing back and forth about the details of Art's story, or about the feasibility, or other explanations, or anything else. I stop listening and stare out the window at the horizon that never seems to move. Art's theory is obviously flawed, I know that without a doubt, but I'd only be shouted down if I interjected, so I contradict him in silence. Even without management's reassurance, I'd never believe an 003 would attack without being specifically ordered to do so. The 002s make me nervous, though. Even if management says they weren't involved.

Art's paranoid ranting reminds me of my mother, in a way. She practically begged me not to go to Washington, and not just because it moved me ever farther away from her. Every conversation I've had with her since has devolved into a lecture on The Emergency. Something about the job offer has convinced her I'll wind up in a secret government prison somewhere. At least now I have a much better understanding of where my overactive, paranoid imagination comes from. She'll calm down after she has a few weeks to get used to the idea, just like I've calmed down about the incident at Hamlin.

While we wait in the main lobby, outside the security checkpoint, Art is sitting uncomfortably close to me, leaning over the armrest and into my space. And talking. At great length. It seems, because I haven't loudly opposed his theories, that he thinks I agree with him. Because of this, he appears to like me. So I get the long version.

"The project, at this point, is a chicken with no head, you know? It should just fall down and die, but there's just enough juice left in the nerves that it keeps on doing what it _was_ doing like nothing ever happened. Which is not to say that nothing is changing here. This is a very different chicken from the one we're used to, with or without a head. The next six months are going to be extremely interesting, from an outside observer's standpoint."

So far I've deduced that the man has two conflicting opinions of our former Director, but he slips in and out of them seamlessly. On one hand, he looks up to Director Hall as a visionary leader, the only man who could ever push a project like ours through the mess of red tape and naysayers in Washington. On the other, he thinks of Mr. Hall as a foolish egomaniac who only cares about our work as far as it affects his reputation. This apparent contradiction doesn't seem to bother Art, nor does it slow his train of thought. If anything, it gives him more to say.

"Now, I don't see how they get us through the next budget cycle, all things considered, if they blew a chunk of our money cleaning up after you-know-what. And keeping the media clear of the place in itself must cost a fortune. I'm guessing that's the reason they split us up: different sets of engineers, sent to different research sites all over the country, dumped in different budget umbrellas to share the load. The smaller the negative numbers are the easier they are to hide, no matter how many ledgers you're talking about. They probably sent most of us out west. Do you have any idea how much of the West the government owns? Just about the whole damn thing, the Bureau of Land Management saw to that as far back as the eighteen fifties. Now, we've got all sorts of research programs just like ours running across the country, specialty defense projects with varying levels of potential, and they all got together and picked who they wanted when ours collapsed. With no head the chicken just dies eventually, you understand. It's exactly like that in the bureaucracy."

Thankfully, while he pauses for breath and a sip of water before the next confused and rambling explanation, a young woman with a large "ESCORT" badge comes out through the heavy security door, nods hello to the guards, and crosses through the turnstile. Her smile is huge, and she looks each of us in the badge instead of the face. When she speaks her voice is overly loud and each word carefully enunciated, like she's a kindergarten teacher.

"Hello, everyone, sorry to keep you waiting. I'm Lisa, I'm going to be your escort for the first part of the day. We're going to get you all signed in now, and then we'll head down to the security office to start getting your new badges ready." She folds her hands together and rests them against her stomach. "It looks like this is a pretty big group. I need to emphasize something to you, and I really can't stress this enough: you must follow me at all times today. Until you get your new badges, you are not permitted to travel _anywhere_ within the facility without an escort. Every hallway is alarmed, and our security response times are unmatched. I mean that: if you hear an alarm it's probably too late. Should you need to go to the bathroom, pretend we're in school, and come ask me. I'll arrange something for you. Do not so much as lag behind the group or peek in a doorway. This is very serious business."

While I've always considered Hamlin a secure facility, this appears to be an entirely different animal. I give Art a glance out of habit before standing up and getting in line for the turnstile. Lisa keeps explaining logistics as we're allowed through one by one, and as the guards pat each of us down and make photocopies of our existing badges. The guards keep one copy, and each of us is handed a high quality color print of our badge. After the entire group is through the checkpoint, she swipes her badge next to the heavy metal door leading further into the "facility" and it opens itself. Pausing for a moment to count the group, she resumes explaining the rules associated with our new place of work.

"You'll notice on the floor there are different colored stripes along each hallway. These are an easy reference point, and you should make note of them. White is neutral, if you're authorized to be in here you're authorized to walk in a white hallway or into a white room, like a bathroom or the cafeteria. Your new badge will have one or more colored flags printed on it: these flags tell you where you can go. A person with a blue flagged badge can walk down any hallway, or enter any room, with a blue stripe on the floor. If you attempt to enter a room that is not marked for your color the alarms _will_ sound. As I'm sure I mentioned before, our response times here are excellent, and not to sound melodramatic, the red dot on your forehead may be your only other notice."

The smile on her face is still big and toothy, and completely inappropriate given the words coming out of her mouth. "You'll receive an informational packet, complete with helpful diagrams, during your official security briefing later today. There really is quite a bit more to it; I'm just giving you the absolute minimum information required to keep everyone here safe and happy."

She brings us to a door marked "Badging," which has a white stripe leading into it, and stands next to the door while the line arranges itself. We proceed in, one by one, to tell the photographers our names, hand them the photocopy we received a few minutes earlier, and stand for a picture. Each person takes under a minute, but this process still seems to stretch on for the entire morning.

When not being actively photographed we stand around in a dazed and awkward silence. This facility, with its stark white walls and intense fluorescent lighting, is much more intimidating than it was earlier, when we were sitting outside. It feels as if we've entered a new level of secrecy— or of importance—that we didn't even know existed. Disconcerting is the best way I can think to describe it. Several minutes later, when we've all been processed, our cheerful and patient escort claps her hands as if something we've done impressed her, and begins walking and talking once more. It seems our next destination is the "onboarding" room, where we will receive a series of briefings and informational packets. And lunch will be provided.

Later, having survived a first day that was equal parts terrifying and boring, and managed to return to my hotel home, I decide to stop at the Starbucks just next door for something. Anything, really, other than being alone with my thoughts or listening to another endless set of instructions. Or talking to Art again. My brain is filled with the contents of a half-dozen different briefings. There's not much room left for anything else.

I settle on a tea, an ice water, and one of those little food packs as my stand-in for a proper dinner. Exchanging as few words as possible to complete my transaction, I get in, get my order, and leave. Without a careful look, I push open the glass door out to the street, and it thumps against something I didn't see. That something yells out and falls down. It appears to be a woman. I stand there, shocked by her sudden appearance and in a kind of panic, watching the door close and the stranger fall to the ground, holding her forehead, in slow motion. All of the dumbest thoughts my mind can generate bubble to the surface. My hands are full. She couldn't have possibly been there; I would have seen her. I should be helping her up. Why am I not helping her up? Who walks so close to the sides of the buildings?

Finally, the paralysis lifts, and I put my drink and food down on the sidewalk next to me, then reach out to help my victim up. "I'm—" I've forgotten how to make words. I'm almost sure I know how to talk, but it takes an impossibly long time for anything to actually come out.  "I'm sorry. Really. I should have been looking before I opened the door, and I shouldn't have opened it that fast...."

She takes my hand and lets me help her up, while I make the most repetitive apology anyone ever has because no one has stopped me from talking yet, and I can't seem to control my voice on my own. Still rubbing her forehead with her free hand, she's at least smiling at me, which I suppose is better than expected. Most people don't smile at strangers who knock them over. Of course, that's just an assumption I'm making, it's not as if I have extensive experience knocking people over. Only, she _did_ appear quite suddenly, so maybe it's not really my fault.

"It's fine. Don't worry about it."

My apology interrupted, my momentum breaks and I take a second to calm down. It's fine, she said it's fine. Everything is fine. But there are things I should still be doing, obligations I have as the party who did the knocking down. It's only now, when she's upright and I'm actually capable of managing my thoughts, that I realize the woman I'm looking at is breathtaking. As in my breath, quite literally, goes missing while I stare dumbly at her. She has strange red hair that seems to change shades as it goes down, and her eyes are a pale blue that looks like it's been digitally enhanced, to the point where I'd need to stare into them longer than would be appropriate in this situation to determine if there's some trick of the light happening. Which I am—I now realize—actually doing.

I look away, then at her again, and she's still beautiful, and maybe she looks a little familiar somehow, but I need to stop staring at her. Really. Still, we're just standing there in silence and I look worse by the second, and she's just going to walk away, only she's not walking away because I'm clearly supposed to say _something_. "Right. That, I mean, that's good. You're okay, you're not hurt or anything, I mean?"

Her hand slowly comes down from her forehead. It's a little red there, but not cut or anything. Doesn't seem to be a hematoma forming. "Really, it's no big deal. You don't have to feel guilty. Got a thick skull; it'll take more than a little door to stop me." She looks down at something and pauses. "Were you, uh, planning to give my hand back?"

Oh my god.

I look down, and I'm still holding her hand like an idiot, and now _my_ hand has gone numb and sweaty and I let go with a little push that makes it feel, in retrospect, like I'm throwing her hand away. This is really going very poorly. "Oh no, I'm sorry. I didn't mean, I mean...."

"Slow down." She doesn't sound the slightest bit annoyed, and she's still smiling, and still standing there even though I'm no longer physically restraining her. "There's no need to keep apologizing, really. Here, I'll introduce myself, that'll make things easier. I'm Candace, nice to meet you." Candace holds out her hand, the same hand I've just relinquished.

I slowly accept it, gripping as lightly as possible so as to avoid over-squeezing, pump twice and let go. This motion requires all of the concentration I can muster, and it's only after the handshake is complete that I'm able to introduce myself. "Hello, Candace. I am Abhinav. Abhi." Okay, that wasn't terrible. I mean, I should have used the contraction, stretching "I am" out into two words sounds unnatural and stilted, but if that's the worst of my trespasses I think I can forgive myself. But where is this going? What do people say to people they've just met? "I'm really very sorry about, uh, before, getting all flustered and knocking you over and everything. I don't usually..." What? Get flustered? Of course I get flustered. What a terrible way to start a sentence. Where can I possibly go from there? "...hit people with doors."

With her hands on her hips, Candace shakes her head. "You're doing great. I can _almost_ believe you've interacted with other humans before."

I clear my throat. "Yeah, sorry. I mean, sorry, sorry for apologizing so much. Was there something?"

She rolls her eyes theatrically, smiling all the while. There's something unnerving about how much patience she has with this completely failed conversation. By now she should be running away, full speed, to free herself from the awkwardness. "I get it, you're sorry. If you're so bent out of shape about this whole encounter, maybe you should offer to buy me dinner some time to make it up to me."

Is she serious? "You're...propositioning me?"

"Wow." Candace pauses, taking a step back and looking around at the sky, or perhaps some street lights and second floor windows. "That's a really gross way to put it. I'm _helping_ you, Abhi. This is the part of the conversation where you ask me out, I accept, and we exchange phone numbers."

Okay, then, this seems to be legitimate, and not just something I'm imagining. I'm going on a date, then. All I have to do is respond, and not screw it up too horribly. "All right, that sounds good. Do you want to give me your number, or should I give you mine?"

She clicks her tongue. "You have to _ask_ me or it doesn't count."

"Right. Sor...." I stop myself, she already told me to stop apologizing at least twice, and thus apologizing is exactly the wrong thing to do. The fact that I'm able to make a conscious decision regarding the words that come out of my mouth indicates that I'm getting better at this. Just need to focus. I cock my head to the side, and decide to steal her trick from a moment before and rewind the conversation a little bit. "It's a pleasure to meet you, Candace. I'm very sorry about that collision a moment ago, please allow me to make it up to you. Perhaps I could buy you dinner this weekend?"

Now her smile is wider, bordering on a grin. She does this little bob, a kind of fraction of a curtsey. "It would be a pleasure, Abhi. May I see your phone for a moment?"

Confused by this sudden change of subject, I hand over my phone without questioning it, because I'm apparently incapable of thinking about more than one thing in a short time span. She unlocks it, swipes around a bit, and punches something in, then hands the phone back to me just before hers vibrates. Of course. That makes sense.

"There. Now we've shared. You're still on the hook to call me, though. You asked _me_ out, after all." She looks down for a second, then back over at me. "And I'd love to stay and talk in the street for the rest of the evening, I really would, but I've actually got to get home now. Dinner. Don't forget. And make it nice."

"Yes ma'am. No, not ma'am, I mean, it was nice meeting you. I'll talk to you later." And with that, I turn and start walking away. My brain has already rewritten my memory of everything I said at least twice, and now I'm really not sure what just happened. It feels like things wound up too positively, and that it can't possibly be real.

"Abhi?" She calls out when I'm a step or two away, making me stop and turn. "You forgot your stuff."

Right. Because I'd spent upwards of a minute _not_ mortified with myself. I do my best to smile while rushing back over, crouching down, and getting my food.

This is going well, I think. I've devised a strategy wherein instead of talking I'm spending most of the time listening to her talk. While she speaks I think up more questions, to induce her to keep talking, thereby tricking myself into feeling like I'm actively conversing, and thus steadily growing more comfortable in her presence. I only rarely have a moment to pause to wonder if, by mapping my conversation out ahead of time like an algorithm, I'm dehumanizing the experience and, perhaps, disrespecting my date. Candace seems to understand, at least to an extent, the difficulties that accompany introversion, and she's likely perceptive enough to catch on.

Having now seemingly exhausted the subject of food—both at the venue I've chosen and in our lives in general—I've decided the next logical subject to turn to is work. I ask her what she does for a living, in some way that approximates what I've mentally scripted. She seems amused by the question.

"Nothing, really. I just go from guy to guy, getting them to buy me whatever I need. The best ones just give me money. Usually I juggle a few at a time, just so there's no risk." She stops, presumably to watch my reaction, which can't be terribly animated. Perhaps I develop a facial tick in response, or all the color has drained from me. Whatever she sees, it leads her to drop the act unprompted. "I'm kidding! Obviously. You could have played along a _little_ bit. Truth is, I run a website. I blog a little, but mostly I manage a few other people who do the real writing. I get by on ad revenue and subscriptions most of the time. How about you?"

Now I pull out a trick, which I've been practicing in my head for at least fifteen minutes, wherein I don't allow the conversation to turn to me, because I have more follow up questions. "Wait. What do you and your team blog about?"

"We're all over the map. Politics, science, pop culture. Having a niche subject is too limiting, really, we try to skip that and just have a strong voice across all the different writers." She pauses there, mouth open like she's about to continue talking, but it takes a second or two for her to decide what to say. So I'm not the only one who needs to put effort in to hold a coherent conversation. "Now is when I'd usually make a joke about the site actually being porn, but I think you might faint at the suggestion. Instead, I ask you: what do you do?"

I'm woefully unprepared to actually speak to this woman. With all the new rules they've given us, I don't even know how much of my job description I can actually disclose publicly. Still, at this point I've paused for far too long to start thinking of an excuse without looking like a callous jerk, so I'm going to need to say something. I should be able to just speak, and trust that whatever comes out will be reasonable. So I give it a try. "It's hard to say, really. I mean it's not hard to pronounce or anything, but to describe what it is. I guess you could say I do brain research?" Why was that a question? Perhaps she didn't notice. She's not starting to answer, or anything, so I just keep talking. It's bound to get better eventually. "I work on a team that concentrates specifically on the flow of various chemicals through the brain, what happens in your head when you have a hard decision to make, what does forgetting physically look like, that sort of thing. It's all very boring."

She reaches across the table and puts a hand over mine, triggering my instinct to pull away, but somewhere in me is the presence of mind to realize that that would be an awful idea. These moments are small victories, but I consider them victories all the same. "Judging by the way your face lights up when you think about it, it's not boring to _you_. That's the first time you've said anything about yourself all night that you didn't have to stammer over. And I don't blame you; being a brain scientist is a pretty cool line of work."

Staring down at her hand, I'm painfully aware that I'm blushing, and that there's nothing I can do about it. I could easily transition this conversation into a long description of my work, speak in great detail about the formation and manipulation of pathways via outside stimulus, but none of that likely falls into the realm of "okay to talk about." So I sit in relative silence, clearing my throat a little bit to fill the space with _something_ , and shift about in my chair. She lets go of my hand, still smiling.

"If you'll excuse me for a second, I think I'll put this awkward pause to good use."

Candace stands up, apparently unaware that her bag is sitting on her lap, sending the whole thing end over end towards me. It lands face down on the ground near my foot after a slow motion trip, and somehow I'm able to find the presence of mind required to slide out of my seat and start cleaning up the mess. Before she even has a chance to come over, I'm picking up pens and receipts and stuffing them back into the bag. She has three cell phones, apparently. I make a note of it, something else to ask about. She crouches down next to me, straightening the bag up.

"Thanks," she says, with a quaver in her voice that I'm probably imagining. She's looking around for something, glancing back and forth between her bag and the ground. "Do you see my license anywhere?"

I begin looking around specifically for that card, before eventually finding it pinned most of the way under my right shoe. I pull it free and take a look at it for a second, I don't even know why. The room seems to go totally silent as I read her full name. Candace Kensington. I can't place it, but reading it makes something in my stomach lurch.

A sound pulls my gaze up from the license. Candace is there, right in front of me, all blurred and staring at me with her strange, pale eyes. It's the eyes that do it, I think, and I know where I know them from. My heartbeat doubles and doubles again, my crouch collapses, and suddenly I'm sitting on the floor and struggling to loosen my tie. Can't breathe. Candace Kensington is giving me a panic attack. She's still close to me, looking around and yelling something. I can smell all of the candles in the room, all that smoke, and it's choking me. Without quite deciding to, I start to lean backwards, and it appears there's someone there to slowly lower me to the floor. Everything is blurred and spinning, and I'm in a cold sweat. Just keep breathing, Abhi. Don't worry about 003-001. It's just a name, just a coincidence.

Candace is looming over me, somehow menacingly, all of her blurred except her eyes, and holding my glass of water. Her license is still digging into my hand, the only object I can feel for sure, and I think I shake my head to refuse the drink, hard to tell how much control I have over my body. With no choice in the matter, I lay there on the floor trying to get control over my nerves, and trying not to think about Ian Kensington, for far too long.

I'm at work and trying to convince myself that I've forgotten about the debacle of last Friday. Perhaps if I think really hard about my assignment I won't even remember it happened. But that didn't work all weekend, and it's not working now. I have this vague claustrophobic feeling, exacerbated by the yellow lines that tell me where I'm allowed to go, the excessively bright fluorescent lighting, and my uncomfortably small cubicle. My desk is a shade too low, and my legs feel crammed in whenever I sit at it, and there's hardly room for anything besides my PC, keyboard and mouse. We've filled this space beyond its intended capacity.

The email sound emerges from nowhere, snapping me out of the haze I've sunk into. Finally, an excuse not to stare at protein chains and fail to summon the requisite concentration to do anything with them. The message, titled "Parameters," is from a lead engineer from Washington, not from Hamlin. The email simply reads "005 parameters attached. Plans are tentative, time frame is six months." Well now, that seems aggressive. We must not be changing much from the aborted 004 design. Good to know that someone thinks we were close to actually having a viable Primer.

After I double click the attachment, it only takes three or four bullets from the abstract section for me to feel like a cartoon character whose jaw drops all the way to the floor. These parameters were clearly written by someone with little knowledge of the project's history. I keep reading, as if staring at a car crash while more and more vehicles pile on, disgusted but unable to look away. Silence has spread over the room around me; I presume my coworkers are reading the same thing I am. I'm shaking my head through the second page, then the third, and people are starting to whisper to one another. This is all—somehow—too ridiculous to speak of out loud, and finally I decide that it simply cannot be.

So I get out of my seat, push the chair in, and walk calmly over to Debbie's new office at the edge of the room. The door, which has a "My door is always open!" sign tacked to it, is closed. I knock, because being agitated is hardly a good excuse to barge in on someone—especially someone who can fire me. She calls me in a second later, and I close the door behind me. Her hand is still sitting on her mouse; I assume she's reading the email, and that means she probably knows why I'm here, so I don't waste time on that.

"Do you have any insight into who wrote these? Their connection to the actual science is tenuous at best."

She lets go of the mouse, pivots in her chair, and folds her hands together on the desk in front of her. "I didn't know this was coming any more than you did, though I had my suspicions. Director Hall used to write the parameters himself, with the help of the senior staff, I have no idea who is in charge of that end of things now." She waves her hands in the air, as if physically throwing the idea away. "Out of my pay grade. I understand your concerns, and I won't tell you they're not legitimate. They very much are. I'm going to push back on these parameters as best I can, and I'm sure they'll meet us somewhere in the middle."

I want to tell her that "the middle" is still five years beyond what we're capable of today, but in my addled state doing so would probably bring on another panic attack. "Please make sure you find out where these are coming from; whoever wrote them has a fundamental misunderstanding of what we do. We're just starting to get a grasp on decision making—the finer points of it, not the crude and noisy remapping we were doing before—but they're looking at a whole different level. They're talking about making a blank brain."

She jumps a bit, and her head cocks to the side. "Where does it say that? I've read the whole document, there's no mention of a 'blank brain' I can think of."

Perhaps I've done too much reading between the lines. But I have too much momentum to just let it go there. "I didn't memorize it, but they talk of directly walking back connections. I mean, they mention removing memories, we aren't even _close_ to understanding the storage mechanisms involved. Fundamentally, if you're removing memories and replacing them...I mean, you're almost making a new person. You'd might as well build a functioning brain from scratch. That's off the deep end. It's not something we can do, not for years and years."

Debbie leans forward now, stretching her neck out as much as possible to bring her face as close to mine as she can without actually moving her body. "Abhi, please stop worrying about this. I'll do what I can to convince upper management that these parameters won't work, but I can't make any promises."

That pang I felt at the relaunch meeting has returned. This whole concept could be extremely dangerous. Even _more_ dangerous than the work we've been doing. It feels like we're crossing an invisible line. "I mean, what in the test data would even point them in this direction?"

She sighs. "Neither you nor I can answer that question. You know we don't have a complete picture. And there are very good reasons for that, the first of which is that we don't _need_ a complete picture to do our jobs. Did you really expect that everything would remain exactly the same after we moved out of SSPO? There's a fundamentally different culture here, and we need to adapt, or we won't last very long. Am I understood?"

I tell her I understand, and the conversation winds down, but I'm more confused than ever before. I return to my desk with my head swimming, tiny snippets from the thirty-five-page document full of wild assumptions popping in and out of my thoughts. As the day passes I grow more and more confused, and by the time I go home my mind is a tangled mass. Nothing in it makes sense anymore. I'm angry at myself for not being able to keep my composure when faced with the possibility that my date may be related to one of our volunteers, and I'm angry that whoever took this program over understands so little about it.

The next morning I'm back at work with a much clearer head. It's not clear by any means, but it's better. I've managed to convince myself that there's no need to even find out if Candace is related to Ian Kensington. In the end, he volunteered for the program, and I'm sure he must have discussed the risks with his family beforehand. The idea that he may have had a family should not make me feel guilty. We've all driven ourselves mad enough about the failure of the 003 Primer, this doesn't change anything. They were volunteers. They made educated decisions.

I'm far less resolved on the issue of the 005 parameters, despite the time I've had to organize my thoughts. There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of just how deep into the brain we can see. They're talking about writing and inserting memories, as if we could just record a video and download it into a person's mind. There's no academic institution in the world that I'm aware of—and I'd think I'd be aware—that can translate thoughts into pictures, or the reverse. The idea that we'd make that sort of leap in under six months, and still have the capacity to generate and encode a Primer package—I just don't know why anyone would ever expect that to be possible.

When I arrive at my desk I find that Debbie has sent me an appointment to meet with someone named "Megan" about my questions in a conference room today. The address book doesn't tell me much about Megan: she works in a division called Storage, which we didn't have at Hamlin, so she appears to be native to this place. That's literally the only thing I learn from looking her up. So I have another thing to keep my mind occupied and not thinking about Candace Kensington until my meeting arrives. Not that the date ended that badly; she stayed until the panic attack ebbed enough for me to have a conversation, and she seemed both understanding and sympathetic. I don't know. There's nothing I can do about it now.

A good portion of the day passes with only marginal productivity, and the time for my meeting arrives. Or, rather, the time ten minutes before my meeting arrives, and I'm suddenly convinced that this conference room is farther than I've anticipated, and that I'm going to get lost on the way, and that I might as well leave my desk immediately, after quickly consulting a facility map, to ensure that I don't miss the meeting entirely and spend the rest of my life wondering what it was that Megan had to say. So I check the map, leave my desk, and walk to the conference room, all of which takes one minute combined. Then I let myself in, sit in one of the chairs at the table, and wait. Nine minutes pass, the appointed time arrives, and then a few more minutes pass. It's three-forty-two when the door opens—a full twelve minutes late—and I've spent that time trapped in my head, growing still more nervous and perhaps a bit angry.

Megan is young, probably under thirty, and very short, with a face that, somehow, reminds me of an ewok. She's wearing a bright blue and green short-sleeved button-down shirt, unbuttoned, with a white t-shirt underneath. The smile on her face in confident and unsettling. She drops herself down into the chair opposite me without bothering to close the door behind her or extend her hand for me to shake, and starts rotating left to right, then right to left, over and over, stopping herself with her feet after she's turned about forty-five degrees. It's maddening.

Her voice is strange, like her throat is filled with gravel, or like she's been smoking for decades, and it sounds like she used to have an accent and is, perhaps, trying to hide it. "Hey. They tell me you've got questions about Storage."

That's it. No introduction, no information volunteered. Perhaps I'm allowing my unsettled state of mind to influence my opinion, but I really don't like this Megan right now. But I'm obviously being silly, and I need to just forget about that. "Yes. Hello, my name is Abhi. My concern is with the parameters for the 005 series. You're familiar with the parameters?"

She clicks her tongue, like she's pretending to chew gum. "Yup." It's as if she's enjoying this.

I try not to be annoyed. This is all in my head, no one is antagonizing me. "Good. Okay, so my concern is that there's a fundamental disconnect between what we're expected to do, and what our project has actually concerned itself with thus far. They're asking for a package that can directly translate human memories into data. That's something that will take years to produce."

Megan draws her head back and looks up at the ceiling rather than at me. "No, it won't."

"What do you mean, it won't? There's been no meaningful research into the subject, and we don't even have the required equipment to start tracking brain activity. There's no room in this place for it; at Hamlin we had a much larger space to work with."

"Cool."

The clipped answers, each less helpful than the last, are a waste of time. I don't think she has any intention of clarifying anything. I've been trying _very_ hard not to allow my frustration to seep into the conversation, but at this point there's nothing I can do. All I have is frustration. "Who, I must ask, _are_ you? You don't come from the old project; I don't understand why we're even talking."

She stops rotating and scoots herself up to the edge of the table, using pelvic thrusts to slide along the floor rather than putting her feet down. It takes a long time, but she doesn't seem to care about making me wait. "Listen—and I don't know how much you're allowed to know, you don't have a magenta badge stripe, so this is all kind of out of your area—I'm going to clue you in a little. None of this is new to us, to the people who worked here before you showed up. We've been specializing in memory mapping for a couple years now, and we're really getting good at it. Not there yet, obviously, but with a few more months, who can say?" She holds her fingers up, doing quotes in the air. "The 'fundamental disconnect' here is in your understanding of what happened to your project when they shut Hampton down. You joined us, we didn't join you, and that means our project drives the parameters now."

With my eyes closed, I take a few deep breaths and a few seconds to parse the information in front of me, and with careful thought I'm able to retroactively make sense of things. We were just one of two, perhaps more, groups working on essentially the same technology from different points of view. There's no way of knowing how many variations on our work are out there, nor how far along the project can be now that we're able to pool resources. I'm unsure how I feel about this development. For the time being, though, I know why the parameters read as they do, and I'd prefer to get myself away from Megan as quickly as I can. So I open my eyes.

"I think I understand now. Thank you for clearing that up; it's been a pleasure meeting you. If you don't have a reason to keep me, I think I'd like to get back to my desk now."

Mentally exhausted, I choose to turn on the TV in my hotel room immediately upon returning from work, rather than expend any more energy trying not to worry about the various things I've spent the day worrying about. A quick sweep through the channels reveals nothing terribly gripping, so at the beginning of the second pass I stop at the first instance of the news I find. It picks up in at the end of a story about a lacrosse championship. After that goes away, the picture cuts back to the anchor, and she starts talking about some sort of attack from earlier today. She says the police believe the subject may have been on PCP.

"Before we continue, we'd like to pause to warn any viewers watching with small children that the following clip contains graphic violence and may not be appropriate for all audiences."

The warning gets my attention, and I turn to watch more carefully. They cut to a low resolution video from a security camera, probably one mounted on the side of a building. There's a crowd of people walking in either direction on a very wide sidewalk, and suddenly there's screaming. It doesn't come with any sound, but you can see the screams on the people's faces. The crowd starts to break away from one spot, it's hard to tell what's at the center, but the panic spreads quickly, and soon they're knocking each other over to get away.

Once it clears out a little there's a man standing awkwardly in the middle of the frame. He has a slight build and black hair, and he's leaning over to one side at an odd angle. Two people are lying on the ground near his feet, and he stares at someone in the crowd for a second, then charges forward in a straight line, kicking that man in the back as he tries to run, knocking him to the ground. His movements are jerky and almost inhumanly fast. He's moving like one of ours.

They cut away from the video, and the reporter is back on the screen. "Truly, truly disturbing footage. The police tell us that, thus far, there have been no fatalities, though several people have been admitted to local hospitals and are in serious condition. Police haven't disclosed the names of the victims yet, as not all families have been notified. The suspect in the video, John Pastore, was apprehended by police at the scene, and is currently in custody. We'll keep you informed of further developments in this story as they happen. In other news...."

She seems to trail off, or perhaps I time turning off the TV perfectly with a slight pause in her cadence. I load up my laptop and begin doing something that is likely ill-advised: looking up this story on the hotel's less-than-secure wireless connection. The traffic could definitely pass as casual interest in what happens to be a pretty striking story, but for me it's work research. I don't think we've ever had a subject named John Pastore—I'm good with names—and that worries me. I find a full length version of the shortened clip the news was showing, and the violence is no less shocking this time. He moves so quickly, only ever stopping to choose and assess the next victim for a second or less, almost exactly like one of the 001 series. Only he's not part of _any_ series, so one of these unknown doppelganger projects is having a very bad day.

Something like this had to happen eventually.

I push the thought out of my head and resume Googling until I find a second camera angle that shows the rampage from across the street. You can make John out in the crowd, and the video quality is a little better. It seems like someone bumps shoulders with him, and that's the only visible trigger. Of course, it's most likely a sound-based cue, and these cameras aren't fitted with microphones at all, let alone one that could pick up tones at the edge of the audible spectrum. This video continues clear through his fight with the police, he breaks an officer's arm so dramatically the bone pops through his skin and his sleeve. It ends with an officer putting a stun gun on the back of his neck. There's no way drugs could account for this behavior; seeing John disarm and incapacitate a half dozen police officers removes any doubts.

This is a terrible thing.

My face has gone numb and my thoughts are all clouded. All except for this deep sense of guilt. It seems so obvious that someone would get hurt—now that it's happened.

I go to work early the next morning—because I'm once again trying not to think about all the things I have time to think about while I'm at home—and there's an email waiting for me with a bright red subject line and a reminder set for seven this morning, an hour from now. Work on the 005 parameters has been suspended temporarily, the Storage team is being pulled in for an emergency assignment. They don't go into details on what the emergency assignment is, but it's easy enough for anyone with a passing familiarity with what we do to put the clues together.

While I'm reading through the temporary marching orders, an appointment appears in my inbox, also for seven this morning. The subject line is in all capitals: "REVERSE ENGINEERING – PRELIMINARY STRATEGY SESSION." Megan forwarded it my way, with a little note added: "Looks like one of yours. Come help figure out where you guys screwed up."

So charming, that Megan, even though she's wrong about where Pastore comes from. Which means that he wasn't Primed here, and there's at least one more program like ours out there. The appointment is filled mostly with Storage people I don't know, and scheduled for a conference room where everyone is allowed. I pick out Art's name on the list as the only other familiar one, and resign myself to three hours of intense social displeasure as a fair trade for learning more about what happened with John Pastore. I clean up a few loose ends over the course of the next hour, before most people are even in for the day, and let my manager know where I'm going to be for the rest of the morning.

As always, I wind up arriving in the conference room too early, well ahead of seven, but I'm not the only one this time. There are a few older engineers, and perhaps a manager or two, setting up the whiteboard on one wall and a projector on the other. There's a yellow legal pad—stamped with a big, red "SECRET" on the top and bottom—and pen waiting at every seat, and a water cooler in the corner with a big stack of cups in it. It appears they're planning on locking us in. It's comforting to know that I'm not the only one who's shaken, but at the same time it brings to bear the idea that I'm not being paranoid. No matter how, the fact that it happened at all changes everything. I choose a spot on one corner of the table, farthest from both screens, and sit down in front of a pad. After a few seconds of waiting in awkward silence, I introduce myself to the men who are rather distractedly preparing the place, and wait for the meeting to commence.

Once the room is full they shut the door, which quickly ends all small talk. Everyone seems to share an understanding of the gravity of the situation. There are no introductions, the men who were here before me go straight into the presentation. They play a quick version of the video, with both angles I've seen, and a third feed I couldn't find on the Internet. Much of the footage is cut out, but the point is made. Apparently custody of John Pastore was transferred from the Baltimore Police Department to the FBI, and he's being brought down here today, so we're expected to develop a preliminary plan for determining the cause of his behavior before he arrives this evening. There will likely be a second three-hour session in the afternoon.

A man in a brown suit with a red tie seems to be leading the presentation from a spot in the corner, next to the two big screens. "All of you have probably had enough time to form assumptions about Mr. Pastore. I, for one, assumed he was a wayward test subject from the Hamlin lab. All indications are that that is not the case. We've been in contact with every research organization under the umbrella of the United States Government in the last twelve hours, and John Pastore has never been a volunteer, nor even a candidate, for a research program of any kind. Furthermore, he has never applied for, nor been issued, a passport, and we believe he has never been outside the country.

"Intelligence services report that the likelihood that a foreign project with results similar to ours even existing is extremely small, and the chance of Mr. Pastore coming in contact with it smaller still. We will not allow assumptions like the ones I've just discounted, and countless others you may still have in your minds, to affect our thinking here. In this room we are concerned with cause, effect, and the physiology of the human brain. With this in mind, I'd like to open the floor to all of you. We don't have very much time; we need to come out of this room with a plan to determine where this behavior came from."

What follows is, unequivocally, two and a half hours of chaos. Engineers from all different groups, with all different specializations, all try to announce and explain their ideas to whomever will listen, steadily growing louder as they do. The group of men leading the meeting take shifts at the whiteboard in the front, frantically taking down important points from whatever conversation they can hear at the time. A sect of introverts, at least a third of those present, spends most of the time just sitting in our seats, trying to process one or more of the pseudo-arguments going on around us. I scribble several pages of notes in silence. By the time things finally calm down my hand is aching. The side of it is coated in black ink, all the way down to my wrist. For the first time in a while, my mind is completely occupied by work, and the effect is therapeutic. The academic curiosity involved in reverse engineering Pastore's behavior temporarily distracts me from their violent connotations, the things I've been thinking about since I first saw the video.

The idea occurs to me during a lull in the conversation. The behavior Art was ascribing to 003-001, to Ian Kensington, was much more like an 001 or 002 than his conditioning would allow. Our whole methodology evolved between the 002 and the 003 Primer; even if the 003s were essentially a failure they couldn't fundamentally change the Primer. The data just wasn't there. We now have two potential instances of 001-like behavior where none should exist. There's a very real chance that our science isn't nearly as sound as we think it is. I scrawl down a whole extra page on the subject, pushing myself further down the road to tendonitis, while the discussion starts to become more focused and settled, and a plan of action starts to take shape. I'm probably the only one in the room who's not paying rapt attention to the whiteboard.

By lunch a plan has started to come together. We have a variation on a Functional MRI in the building, which is capable of mapping the electric impulses in the brain at a much more granular scale than the standard, medical machines. Even if we can't directly translate brain activity into thought _now_ , we can capture the data, as much as possible, for dissection later. And in the meantime, with some strong imaging alone I should be able to detect signs of our conditioning packages—subtle hints of brain scarring where pathways have been rerouted. We won't be blindly flailing, though none of us seems to have seriously considered the possibility that the subject will be quite beyond reason, and violent, and capable of breaking free of a facility that is not designed to act as a prison.

We adjourn for two hours for lunch. I've chosen to use the time to pursue other lines of reasoning. If Art's theory has any validity, there should be some record of 003-001's anomalous behavior within our files. We would have to record the death of one of our subjects, at the very least, so I'm going back through the test data on the 003 series to see if we have any hint that the subject was involved in a violent rampage. The record for the 003 package is still wide open, and the data is unchanged from the last time I looked at it, as if nothing of interest has happened in three months with the entire series. 003-001 is indeed marked deceased, though, and the cause of death is "GSW." There are no notes regarding the circumstances, nor any anomalous behavior. A dead end.

I close out of the file and turn around to get a drink. Art's standing behind me, he was clearly watching my screen, and he has a wide smile on, the corners of which disappear up under his mustache. He nods, like we have some secret understanding, and it strikes me that I haven't given this conspiracy theorist enough credit. His paranoia appears to be driven by very strong attention to detail, and if he doesn't know exactly what I'm thinking, he certainly has an idea.

Art reaches over and down, to the corner of the desk next to him, picks up a giant coffee mug, and takes a drink, still looking at me. His voice is hushed, not a whisper, but certainly not his normal, jovial tone. "You've got to be careful about looking at that here. Never know who's behind you. And they'd never write anything interesting, like we talked about, at this low of a classification. You need a _real_ clearance to see what really happened, the kind they don't give the eggheads. But it's good that you're starting to get curious. I tell you: these people are in way over their heads here. We are too, but we can at least _see_ it, we can try to break it down piece by piece until it makes sense. They just want to plow forward, and who gives a damn how many rampages there are along the way."

If I ignore the mixed clichés and platitudes, I find myself agreeing with the man. Perhaps this stands as a sign that my mind is starting to deteriorate. I stand up and step out of my tiny cube, looking around as I do. The room seems to be mostly empty; just about everyone has gone off somewhere for lunch. Still, there are a few people practically right on top of us, it seems foolish to start talking right in the middle of the office. "We should go back to the conference room. It should be empty."

His smile shifts to one side, it's some kind of smirk now, but he doesn't say anything, just nods and follows me back to the place we've spent the whole morning. The whiteboard is still coated in notes, but the room is completely empty. I sit back down in front of my legal pad, he sits in the seat of a total stranger, and there are a couple beats of silence. Art, of course, breaks it.

"If I tell you something big, will you swear you won't repeat it to anyone?"

I look up from my notes, startled by the middle-school level question. There's an earnestness on Art's face that matches how immature he just sounded. "In advance? It would be meaningless without knowing what I was swearing about."

"Still. It's killing me, being in here today and not bringing it up. You've got to swear to keep the silence so I can get it off my chest. Everyone from Hamlin is probably done here if what I know gets out."

I choose not to answer right away. It's easy enough to make guesses about the nature of his secret, but there are about a thousand different directions I could take it. I've been occupying a kind of limbo state, between suspicious and paranoid, and this feels like an important decision. I feel I've fundamentally changed my relationship with my employer over the last twenty-four hours, and I'm not sure that I'm willing to go much farther than that. But the employer I felt loyal to no longer exists, and I've already accepted the idea that I share some of the responsibility for the injuries done to all of those people. So I take a deep breath. "I promise. I won't say a word."

Still smiling, Art leans in very close and lowers his voice even more than before, despite the fact that we're the only people in the room. "I've seen this guy before, this Pastore. At Hamlin. He was driving a big white panel van into the parking lot when I was leaving, the day before they shut everything down for good. There were two in a row, I remember thinking it was strange, I even wrote down the license plates. The gates were locked open; the gates are _never_ locked open that late. So I ran the plates, both vans were rentals. Signed out to a guy named Harvey Petranko."

I tilt my head to the side and keep my voice low to match his. "I thought only police could run license plates."

His eyes go wide, but he waves my question away. "That's not important. This is the big thing here, new stuff. The cleared visitor book at the guard station in the main building had a half-filled-out entry right at the end. One of my guard friends saw it. Harvey Petranko, Health and Safety."

"I still don't understand. John Pastore worked for Health and Safety?"

"Health and Safety of _what_? SSPO didn't have an office with that name, nor does Homeland Security, and Harvey Petranko smacks of an alias. Who goes by Harvey these days?" Art apparently recognizes the fact that he's about to start ranting on a series of less and less important tangents, stops himself, runs his hand through his mustache, and lowers his voice even further than before. "You want to tell me what the Baltimore Berserker and another guy were doing at Hamlin after working hours, with rented vans and fake names, just before the Director winds up in the hospital or dead and some wink-wink disaster shuts the place down for good?"

I close my eyes and see an image of a bulky pair of binoculars swinging from a tree branch. I have no idea what this means, my mind is filled with conspiracy theories so wild that even Art would laugh at them. I open my mouth to say something, with nothing in particular in mind to say, but the door clicks open, and the man in the brown suit walks in. Art leans back and folds his hands over his stomach, nodding hello to the meeting facilitator.

Over the weekend I take a road trip. On the surface, I'm there to get the last of my things from my old apartment before the terms of my lease are finally over, but I have something altogether different in mind. I've focused in on the idea that John Pastore and Harvey Petranko, if they're not the same person, were part of some kind of terrorist organization. Pastore hasn't said anything that would so much as hint at that kind of a background, but it's the only thing that makes sense. They broke in after work with two rented panel vans and stole things. Our servers were their most likely target; two large vans could house hundreds of terabytes of data. They used the stolen data to apply a Primer to themselves, and it didn't go as well as planned. The idea that this technology could be stolen and repurposed by anyone terrifies me enough to forget just how implausible the whole theory is. It's only rarely that I have enough mental clarity to remember that I'm making this story up as I go along. I have no actual evidence of anything.

It's very cold today, but there's no snow on the ground. Physically, the climb is easy. When I'm nearing the top of the hill, I hear some twigs snap. Ahead of me. Coming toward me is a pair of oversized binoculars with a patchy beard and a slight limp. The binoculars drop, and now a blond man, about my age, is staring at me like I've frightened him. I'm probably giving him an identical look. We both stop walking when we're about ten feet apart and just stand there in silence for a few seconds. It's during that time that I realize I'm looking at 003-002, one of only two people who have ever been Primed and been completely unaffected.

My knees threaten to buckle. It's all I can do to remember to breathe.

He breaks the silence, as I'm not in a fit state to actually speak at this point. "Lots of birds out today. I think I saw a peregrine falcon." He taps the binoculars against his side for emphasis.

His name comes to me in a flash and fills my head. Nathan Werner. Nathan Werner. Don't say Nathan Werner. We've never actually met. This is good, as long as I don't say his name. He has no reason to think I know who he is. Better to remain a passing stranger. Because I'm so wonderfully skilled at deception, I'm sure he'll have no choice but to believe me. "Birds. Yeah." My hands, as if with a will of their own, shoot up toward my eyes to mime binoculars. Brilliantly done, Abhi. He doesn't suspect a thing.

Obviously a bit suspicious about the stranger who apparently can't speak in full sentences, Nathan Werner takes a step towards me. There's something vaguely threatening about it, even with a smile on his face. "You work down there, don't you?"

At least it's something I don't have to lie about. I don't even have to take too long to think of my response. "No." The answer seems to startle him and he narrows his eyes at me. I use the pause to come up with a little something extra to say. "It doesn't look like anyone works down there anymore."

He frowns, apparently I've disappointed him again. "I guess you're right. Something must have scared them off." He makes a short sound—somewhere between laughing and choking—then resumes limping down the hill. He speaks again only after he's well behind me. "Don't feel bad that I caught you. Normally I'd do a whole cat-and-mouse thing, but I'm just not feeling it right now, having some personal stuff. The point is: you're not in any danger, so you can stop looking at me like I've got a gun on you."

The smart thing to do in this situation is to let him walk away without responding to what appears to be a nonsense comment. The man mentioned danger for a reason, and given who he is and where we are, it seems very important that I do the smart thing here. Somehow my mouth has a different instinct entirely. I'm not sure when it gained the ability to exclude me from the decision making process. "I'm afraid I don't understand."

Nathan continues trekking down the hill, yelling a bit now to make sure his words make it up to me. "Sure you don't. Take care of yourself, buddy. Try to do better next time."

It's a bit too much for me to unpack, but my brain tries to anyways, and I stand on the side of that hill in silence for a long time after he's gone. It starts to get dark after a while, and I haven't even been up to the tree, plus I'm starting to freeze. There's nothing left to do but go back down; I already know the binoculars are gone. Nathan obviously knew I was from Hamlin, but he shouldn't have even known Hamlin existed; he was out of the program before we ever brought his group on site. Still, it's as if my feet have sunk into the frozen ground on that spot, and I can't get myself to move for the longest time. He thought he knew who I was. I wish I knew _who_ he thought he knew I was. Or who he thought would be following him.

By the time I can actually force myself to move again it's so dark in the woods that I'm practically stumbling into trees on the way down. The trail doesn't seem nearly as well-groomed with only the starlight to guide me, even the streetlamps on the road leading to Hamlin have been shut off. I fall twice on the short walk before I emerge from the woods, pick up the street, and follow it a half mile down the road to the bar where I chained up my bike, shivering all the way. I can only imagine what Art would say if he knew what I know. Not that I even know what I know.

John Pastore, the "Baltimore Berserker," has been in the facility since last week, under constant monitoring. They're running him through a series of different stress tests: extreme temperatures, fatigue, and low oxygen environments. All while making detailed maps of his brain activity. He's been lucid and nonviolent the whole time, and has vehemently denied any knowledge of his rampage, let alone what would cause it. According to him, this was the first violent outburst in his life. No human mind has ever been monitored this closely before. We still have nothing but guesses as to the origin of his conditioning.

I have in front of me a series of MRIs, along with a few sets of blood work, all from this one subject. He's officially been assigned Alpha-001 as his series number, though I voted for Patient Zero. Or, more accurately, I silently pretend that I would have voted for Patient Zero had I been asked, knowing all the while that no one asks me anything. I feel somehow guilty for my own thoughts, as if just questioning the agency's taxonomic preferences is a great crime against an unassailable force of good.

All day I've been glancing back and forth between my screen and one packet of papers or another, and now I'm finally able to confirm the first of a thousand suspicions: the Primer used to recondition this brain is a replica of what we did with the 001 series. A crude and inexact one. There's no way to tell how the conditioning was actually administered. I'd need an extremely detailed physical from _before_ the delivery, complete with the kind of MRI's we're doing now. As it is Pastore barely has medical records at all. It seems the only doctor he bothered to see—for the last five years, at least—is a psychiatrist. I'm told we're still working on getting those records, but I can't imagine they'd explain everything.

One of the only things I know for certain is that whoever Primed him didn't do what we do. Delivery checked him for the tell-tale inner ear damage our packages would leave behind. It wasn't auditory, so even if someone stole our research they understood it well enough to develop their own delivery mechanism. You could—in theory—do it any way you wanted if you had the brain conditioned to watch for the signal. Perhaps the data they stole was incomplete; though that wouldn't explain why the abnormal behavior has essentially disappeared. We've never been able to mask the symptoms, even with a team dedicated that that specific purpose. If someone _did_ steal the data at all they must be working with someone with extensive training.

I shouldn't be thinking about this. It's not my job to come up with a narrative. It's my job to find the science behind the narrative.

I type up a preliminary version of my results, without my personal theories, and send them over to Debbie for comment. Because she gets a thousand emails a day, though, and because I'm not willing to wait for feedback, I get out of my chair and go over to her office, opening the door that claims to always be open with enthusiasm. She jumps a bit at the sound, and I immediately regret the decision, but then I push that regret away. Few other people would feel guilty for opening a door, I tell myself, and in my mind that translates into a resolution to be more assertive overall. Standing in Debbie's doorway, I decide I'm quite sick of being meek, I'm going to be more of a Type A personality now, and furthermore I'll be a Type A personality that realizes he's standing awkwardly in the doorway, in silence, before the situation becomes unsalvageable.

"Hi! Just so you know...I just sent you over, I'd call it a _draft_ of my thoughts regarding the images of Alpha-001. Of his brain, I mean. If you could look them over as soon as possible, at your convenience of course, I would very much appreciate it."

Still apparently a bit rattled by my sudden appearance, she takes a few seconds to reply. "Yes, okay. Thank you, Abhi. In the future, you don't need to come over here to let me know I should read the email you sent me. I read my email; I'm not going to miss it."

I frown and look at the floor. The carpet is thin and grey. "Sorry about that." Or I could stop apologizing and dig up some imaginary reserve of willpower for this conversation. "It's just, I have some concerns. Given what happened with Alpha, and some of the rumors that are floating around, I'm concerned that our system isn't as _closed_ as it's supposed to be. Scientifically speaking, exposing volunteers while they're in a symptomatic state to the world at large, to an unknown number of variables, it compromises the results, you understand? Everything we've done to this point, it's supposed to be closely controlled testing...I don't know. If something like Alpha can happen, I mean, I'm not sure how to express it. It's frightening."

Debbie slides a mostly empty yogurt cup out of the way, perhaps to clear a path so she can vault the desk and choke me without getting yogurt on her pants. "Rumors going around? What rumors, specifically?"

When I imagined this conversation, that was not a question she asked. As such, I'm not terribly prepared to answer it. But I try anyways. "People are saying that 003-001 went off-program and rampaged, similarly to Alpha."

"He did not."

"His profile says that he died from a gunshot wound. Why would he be shot if he _wasn't_ rampaging?"

She sighs. "I don't have an answer for that. But I _do_ know that it would be irresponsible for us to speculate on the cause, just like it would be irresponsible for you to perpetuate any rumors that may be floating around on the floor. Classified information is serious business."

"Think about it, though." These thoughts have been trapped in my head for so long they're just pouring out now, completely of their own accord. "They don't even list a death date in the file, but I know he was alive the last day I was in Hamlin. Was he killed in transit, here, or before? And why: how was he behaving? Where are the latest updates on his condition? Did they even attempt to transport _any_ of the subjects, or are they still back there? Or did they all die as well?"

Debbie takes a long time to answer, and when she does her words are measured and slow. It's clear I'm making a huge mistake, but I'm already committed, and she's already answering. "Neither you nor I have Need-to-Know for any of those topics."

When I make a mistake I like to make sure it sticks.

"That's a ridiculous answer, Debbie! Of course I _need_ to know what this volunteer was doing at the time of his death, why he needed to be shot. This is potentially critical data! The 003 Primer was an _unprecedented_ failure for our program. We need to know everything, we need to understand exactly what happened, or I don't understand how our program even remains _viable_." I don't mean to raise my voice, but there it is, loud and easily audible outside the office, hanging there.

She never gets heated, though. Like maybe I'm not the first employee to come in here and freak out. "People with higher clearances than you and I, and a much better appreciation for the big picture, have decided that that information is not going to affect your work. Whatever it is, you can hold on to the idea that it's not important enough to change directions for."

I stare at her, dumbfounded. I have no argument to counteract a complete dismissal of reasoning. Part of me wants to shout at her more, to try to prove that this is a ridiculous way of thinking. The extent of my tirade has started to coalesce in my mind, and my hands have gone numb. I'm not sure I could continue arguing even if I tried, not with my shirt collar choking me and each breath more difficult than the last. In an effort to stave of the impending panic attack, I give up on the argument, turn around, and walk back over to my desk without so much as looking back over my shoulder.

Nearly having another panic attack reminds me of Candace. It suddenly doesn't seem nearly so difficult to talk to her, not compared with deconstructing the Baltimore Berserker and shouting myself out of a job, and I need something to occupy my mind other than this place for a while. I've found that I'm able to call her up and ask for a second try without even over-thinking the conversation ahead of time. Perhaps I'm too distracted to be nervous. I call her after work and she agrees quickly—very quickly—leading me to wonder if she's the type that actually finds panic attacks endearing. I didn't know that type existed, and even now I doubt it. Still, she seems to be blind to my bumbling, or willing to tolerate it far more than I'd expect a reasonable person to. All the better for me.

We're to meet up at a quiet, casual sandwich place I found on the Internet. I'm hoping that removing the fancy restaurant aspect of the date will lower the stakes for me internally, and dissuade me from attempting to use any silly strategies to trick her into liking me. I've arrived at the place almost directly from work, having gone home only to change my shirt, and I've been waiting at a table with my coffee and a menu for more than half an hour. The wait staff probably think this is obnoxious, but I apologized in advance and promised to tip well because of the trouble. I'm using my newfound wealth as a tool for coping with my social ineptitude, because I don't use it for much else.

Candace actually arrives a few minutes early, which makes me smile, and then immediately makes me think that she intended to get here before me, and will now likely be mortified that I was _so_ eager to start the date that I arrived even earlier than she did. But that's not how I think any more; I'm not going to panic just because the thought of panicking occurred to me. A Type A personality would not be intimidated by this situation; a Type A personality would greet her with measured enthusiasm and say something nice. Since I'm just pretending, though, I settle for standing up, walking around the table, and pulling her chair out for her like a gentleman. For a moment I'm actually proud of myself for averting a mental disaster. This is going to be much easier than last time. I probably won't even need to remind myself not to think about Ian Kensington.

I think I resist sighing out loud.

We greet one another, and I stand there like I'm going to push her chair in, even though that's a mindless thing to do, then go back over to my seat and pick up the menu I've already looked over thoroughly, because now that I'm thinking about that morbid, confusing link between us I'm having a hard time behaving like a human being. She's looking at her menu too, which is good, because it gives me a moment to recover. I take my moment and fill it with slow, quiet deep breaths to avoid drawing attention to the fact that I'm already on edge. I will not be falling on the floor on this date, and I'd rather she doesn't get the impression that I'm going to.

With one finger stuck between the two pages of the menu, she folds it and puts it down almost on the table, resting on her forearm. Apparently the quiet has gone on long enough. "I didn't think you were going to call after last time. I'm happy that you did, though, and I'll try not to do anything, you know."

I put down my menu and shake my head, perhaps too vigorously. "No, no, don't worry about that. I don't want you to get the impression that I need to be handled with kid gloves. I'm much more composed today, I promise. That was a fluke event that will not be repeated."

She smiles and looks back down at her menu, biting her lip a bit as she reads. "But you've had those before, right? It's nothing to be embarrassed about."

Sighing, I try to think of a good way to steer the topic away from me. But then I remember that I'm avoiding gimmicks this time around; I'm not going to get caught up in my head with some inane strategy. I'm going to be honest. "Just a few times. Obviously, I have, you know, an issue, not an issue, I mean, a _thing_ with social anxiety. And there are rare occasions where it can be a bit overwhelming."

"Well, I'm flattered that dinner with me 'overwhelmed' you, but there's really no need to be nervous. I'm not going to bite. And you're doing very well."

Right. My response dies in my throat. She's being too nice about it and that's, somehow, making the whole thing worse. The server arrives, smiling, while I struggle to remember how humans interact with one another. I have no idea what I've ordered. Finally, lacking anything else to break through the wall of awkward silence that's growing between us, I steer the conversation away from me. I feel like a heel doing it, but there's only so much mileage one can get out of "social anxiety disorder." "Why don't we just pick up where we left off? Let's see...." Don't ask about her family. Ask about literally anything other than her family and this will all be fine. There are other topics, just think of another topic. Why aren't there any other topics left in my brain? "Do...uh, do you have family in the area?"

Damn it.

She doesn't respond right away, and I feel like I see her wince. My stomach turns, because even though I imagined that reaction—I must have imagined it—I feel like I already know what the answer is, and I really don't want to hear it. The silence is growing again, and she slowly, awkwardly swallows her water, looking at the tablecloth in front of my chest, her eyes kind of going back and forth between nothing and nothing. This is the worst possible reaction, really. So I move to salvage things.

"I'm sorry, I shouldn't have asked. We should talk about something else. Do you, uh, read? Books?"

Candace sighs. "No, it's fine, I'm sorry. I shouldn't be thrown by such a simple question." She sighs again and looks up from the table, at my face. Her strange, pale eyes are kind of glassy, and still microscopically moving from side-to-side. She's not quite making eye contact, and I won't force the issue. "The short answer is no. My parents have been dead for a long time, since I was a kid. I have a brother, but we don't speak."

Okay, that wasn't so bad, and now the danger has passed. We can move on, we can still salvage things, and all we have to do is never broach the topic of family again. "I'm sorry to hear that. I mean, your parents, specifically, I'm not sure if I should be sorry about the brother part." Why am I still talking? Why won't the words stop? "I'm still fairly close with my older brother. Not physically...which is a strange thing to say, but he lives across the country. We speak online often, and sometimes on the phone."

"I only ever hear from my brother by mail."

That look on her face. She's so pale and red at the same time. I should do something, but I'm completely at a loss. It feels like everything I say will just make it worse. But I can't just pretend she's not about to break down sobbing at the table. So I have to say _something_. "Are you all right?"

She has her eyes closed tight, the beginnings of tears rolling down, and it's a long and awkward moment before she's able to actually respond to me. "Sorry. No, sorry, I'm being _stupid_ , and I'm really sorry. We weren't even close." She takes a deep breath, then exhales slowly, over the span of about ten seconds. "My brother, Ian, disappeared about a year ago. He sent me some crazy sounding letters before he did, and I think he's probably dead. I'm very sorry to dump that on you, I barely know you." She laughs weakly, though she's clearly crying. "I think I just passed you, as far as awkward date freak-outs go. Can you give me a second? I'm just going to go...you know. Compose myself."

Candace gets up and leaves the table, headed for the bathroom. I'm secretly thankful for the minute alone. And that she held the conversation up by herself for a bit. I've got the confirmation I didn't want, and I'm wondering how this relationship can continue. It's probably a conflict of interest, or at least a thing I should disclose to my manager. And then I realize what I'm thinking, and I feel like a terrible person, because I'm worrying about whether I should tell work about Candace, not whether I should tell Candace what happened to her brother. Obviously I shouldn't tell Candace about her brother. And obviously I shouldn't tell work about Candace, not after asking about her brother like that. She needs to know, though, she was just crying, and she's never going to hear a word about it. I just need to not talk any more, I think that would be best for everyone. I just need to sit in silence and stare at the floor.

The audiology team comes out of Alpha's room, waving me in after they shut the door. I stand up and brush some imaginary dust off of my pants, tuck my clipboard under my arm, and proceed into the room with a deep, sighing exhale. This is the first time I've ever actually been in the Baltimore Berserker's presence, and I'm going alone. The room seems well secured, though. There's a glass wall between the two of us, with several vents in it, and metal bars running between the two layers, which are probably bulletproof or something otherwise secured. Not that he has a gun. I pretend I'm at ease, telling myself that after days of tests it's unlikely that I'll be the one that finally makes him snap, and that even if he does, the glass wall should keep us separate. It helps a little; and I sit down on the swivel chair on my side of the room and call through the vents to him.

"Mr. Pastore. You can call me Abhi. I'm pleased to meet you."

He looks at me, his eyes exhausted and pulled down by heavy bags. It makes me feel like we're torturing him, and I suppose I wouldn't put that past us under the circumstances. His voice sounds vaguely mechanical, and I can't tell if this is a social compensation mechanism he's developed to hide his conditioning, or if it's simply exhaustion. "Hello, Abhi. Nice to meet you. Is there any chance you're the man who decides when I can go home?"

Normally the volunteers, once Primed, show no interest in returning to their former lives. It's as if they forget about them entirely. I'd wonder if they're all unable to vocalize the desire, inhibited by the conditioning. But they all chose to give up their former lives, which is likely the largest factor. They had nothing they were interested in going home to. "No, unfortunately, I don't even know whose decision that is."

His voice is lower, but the inflection is still mechanical. "Funny. Everyone seems to say that."

"Right. I'm sorry, things can be muddled around here." Sighing, I pick up my clipboard and hold it up in front of my face, between the two of us. "I'm sorry if you've heard these questions before, because you certainly have, but there's great value in repetition under the right circumstances. Please note, our conversation is being recorded for research purposes, but what is said in this room is considered inadmissible in a court of law, so you shouldn't reserve anything for fear of incriminating yourself. Understand?"

He looks at me, then down at the floor, and responds with a grunt. I take that as a yes.

"Have you ever, to your knowledge, been hypnotized?"

We proceed through the twelve-page survey, and he gives all the same short, one-to-five word answers he gave before, despite the questions being reordered. All indications are that we're dealing with a lucid individual who is either a skilled liar or isn't lying, who has been identified as a possible paranoid schizophrenic according to his medical records. There's no history of memory loss, though, and even without access to antipsychotics, we've seen no indication of deteriorating mental state. In an extreme situation like this, even a person with a clean psychological history would be expected to show signs of stress-induced deterioration, but there's really nothing. He appears to possess a capacity for self-discipline consistent with military personnel, despite complete absence of military training from his background.

If someone stole the 001 series package, they managed to compartmentalize the effects much better than we have. It's almost exactly what we were trying to create with the 003 series, too: a Primer that can be turned off. Hidden. I conclude the interview and thank Alpha-001 for his time, then exit to find there's no one waiting to go in after me. The clock says it's just about five, the end of the day, but I don't feel like I can call things off just yet. I go straight back to my desk, sit down in front of my computer and start digging through old records. There has to be something here. Ian Kensington's record is the first place I look, but I have it memorized, and it hasn't changed since the last time I looked. That's a dead end, so I turn to the next file on the list: 003-002, Nathan Werner.

It's locked.

I close my eyes and imagine him standing on the hill. He seemed to be in control of his faculties. Nervous, but not excessively so. I couldn't see any trace of darkening blood vessels on him; the only thing that seemed unusual was his limp, which could be explained any number of ways. Is there a chance that we succeeded, that he's like Pastore, just waiting for the right cue? He thought I was following him. It would make _sense_.

I click the file again, and get Access Denied again. How can they lock me out of the entire record? What could they possibly have to gain from locking me out? I mean, if they know, and maybe they do, then why are we even looking at Pastore? If they know what's going on with Werner then they _must_ know about Pastore. But who would "they" even be? I'm being crazy at this point, making up wilder and wilder stories with bigger and bigger holes in them. The next file is 004-001, Allen Hartley, and it's not locked. He's listed as deceased with an SCD code. Suicide—but that doesn't make sense. He shouldn't have been physically capable of suicide, I built that part of the Primer myself, though in retrospect I'm wondering why I would agree to something like that. It seemed perfectly natural at the time. I've seen the reports, I know the Primer worked, and my signature is all over those parameters. This is a forgery. Someone is tampering with these records.

My heart starts to feel tight, like my lungs are crushing it, as I stand up. Talking to Debbie has been unproductive lately. I push my chair in with my eyes closed, but open them in time to see her exit her office and start to cross towards me. It's the end of the day, and the room is just about empty, and suddenly I'm filled with crushing doubt. This is just paranoia. There are reasons why they would lock a volunteer's record, and why they wouldn't come to me about the complete failure of my portion of the Primer. And keep me on, despite downsizing the staff to a small fraction of its previous size. I flag her down, with a smile on my face.

"Abhi. Hi, hello, you should head out." She sounds hurried. She wants to leave, but this will only take a minute. She's still walking, too, like she's going to pass me without breaking stride. "Have a good night."

I move out of my cubicle, and into the pathway behind it, positioning myself partially in her way. "Yes, hi, Debbie. I was just leaving too, but I needed to talk to you about something quickly. I've been looking back at past test subjects for any sign of the behavior anomalies we're seeing in Alpha, but I've run into some roadblocks, and some confusing information. In particular, when I pulled up 004-001's record, he was listed as dead—a suicide, no less." She stops walking. "I thought that had to be a mistake. Obviously I would have been _told_ if my part of the Primer went so far awry."

My manager sighs and gives me this strange, hard look, one that's menacing in a way that I can't place. It's not a mannerism I've ever seen from her before. "Abhi. There's no delicate way to put this." It's on her face. My part of the 004 program failed miserably and all of my work is flawed. Why would they keep me on for this long? Why bother bringing me down here at all? "You need to stop asking questions."

The blood rushes from my face, and I'm suddenly cold. My mouth won't seem to stay closed. "I don't understand."

She turns away from me, towards the door, and she's almost whispering, so I have to lean in closer to hear clearly. "You seem either unable or unwilling to respect the boundaries of your clearance, Abhi. People notice these things. You're putting yourself in danger. I don't know how else to put it."

The volume of my voice spikes of its own accord. "You asked me to solve a problem, but I need data to do it! I'm trying to do my _job_!"

" _Is_ that what you're doing, Abhi? Are you completely sure?"

I can't believe this. What else would I even be doing? The idea that I would have some kind of ulterior motive is...I don't know. Do I have an ulterior motive? I can feel myself getting flustered before I even speak, and I need to end this conversation before I talk myself into a corner and start admitting to all manner of things I've never done. "Of course I'm sure! I can't believe this. I'm a good engineer, Debbie. I'm doing my job."

And she starts walking away again, leaving me there, flabbergasted. "Go home, Abhi. Come in tomorrow with a fresh head, ready to do your job without so much curiosity. I can't give you any better advice than that."

I stand there for a good long while after she's gone, just thinking about the idea that _I_ could be suspected of doing something underhanded, and building layer upon layer of righteous indignation up. Finally, when my feet start to complain about standing in one place for so long, it occurs to me that I'm only incriminating myself by remaining here in this state, and I leave. But I can't go straight home; I'd just sit around thinking about this all night, and come to work tomorrow even angrier than I am now. This situation requires drastic measures.

Perkins is a respectable looking bar two blocks from my hotel, hopefully far enough that none of my coworkers will be there, because I intend to sit at the bar for a very long time. I order some food and a beer and drink in silence, occasionally looking at the muted TV. It's funny how easy Wheel of Fortune is to follow, even with no sound and no subtitles. I imagine Jeopardy! would be frustrating, though; you'd never find out if you were right. My food comes, and I eat it. An indeterminate amount of time passes.

It's very dark outside when my phone rings, and it occurs to me that I may have fallen asleep staring out the window. It's on the fourth ring before I manage to pull the thing free of my pocket, and by then I've accidentally accepted the call without getting to look at the ID first. I stare blankly at it for a second, unsure of why I'm holding the phone at all, until I hear Candace's voice.

"Hello?"

Right. I'm answering the phone. That requires speaking. I put the thing next to my face like you're supposed to. "Hey. It's Abhi." Something seems to be amiss. "Wait. I didn't call you."

She laughs a little. "No, I called you. I just wanted to say that I'm sorry for freaking out on you the other night. I'd really like to give our first date a third try, if you're still interested."

Ha! She's still interested! Perhaps this isn't the best time to have this conversation. Too late for that thought, though. I'm already talking. I don't remember making _that_ decision. "No, no, it's great, you were great. I mean, not, you know, crying and everything, that wasn't great. But that wasn't your fault. Hey, you know what? Maybe you should come meet me down at Perkins now. We'll catch up. And nobody will freak out."

"Are you okay? You sound like, I don't know, are you drunk?"

Yes, yes I am. But she doesn't need to know that. "You know what they say: I'm not as drunk as you think I am." I replay the logic of the joke in my mind and find it wanting. "No, wait. I'm _not_ as _drunk_ as _you_ think I am. Wait, that was the same. What's the joke? I can't remember the joke." There's a long silence, and at the end of it I'm fairly sure that she's hung up, disgusted by my drunken idiocy. So I do the only logical thing. "Hello?"

She's silent for a few more seconds, then I hear a deep breath on the other side of the phone. "Perkins, you said? Stay there, I'll be over in a few minutes. And don't drink any more, Abhi. You really don't sound good."

"You have got yourself a date, Miss Kensington. I'll be the guy at the bar watching Law and Order."

The last hour is a blur. I'm sitting on a grey and white couch now, holding a half-empty glass of water and staring at the floor, trying to will myself sober and failing. Over my shoulder, there's a framed picture of Ian Kensington, probably taken when he was in High School, smiling at me. This is exactly the wrong place for me to be, but my legs feel like they've been bolted down. I'm still angry about what Debbie said, about that place really not trusting me to look at the records of volunteers I helped Prime. I pull my phone out of my pocket, intending to either call in sick for tomorrow or quit entirely, not sure which one I'll do. Candace interrupts me, though, before I finish dialing.

"You shouldn't call people when you're drunk, you know. It's a surefire way to say something you can't take back."

I look up at her, bewildered by the sudden advice. She's so beautiful, and she's being so nice to me, and she was so sad about her brother. Her brother is dead and she doesn't even know, and instead of telling her before I just worried about my job. Like they can decide who I'm allowed to talk to. I could keep being loyal, and stupid, while they call me a spy for doing my job, or I could do the right thing. My voice starts coming out on its own, making the decision for me. This is probably not smart. "I have to tell you something."

Her eyes go kind of wide, like the voice I'm using is way too grave, which it probably is, but maybe it should be. Maybe that's appropriate. She sits down on the arm of the couch all the way across from me. "Talking to people while you're drunk is a pretty easy way to say something you can't take back, too."

I wave the warning off, spilling a bit of water on myself in the process. "Never mind. I mean, don't worry about that, I'm not worried about that." I'm actually very worried about that, but I can't seem to control what I say. "It's too important."

There's something weird about the expression on her face, a kind of impatience there that doesn't match her words. The part of me that notices doesn't seem to have any influence over my actions. Candace turns her eyes from my face to the spot on my pants where I just spilled the water. "Take your time, Abhi. Maybe you should sleep on it, tell me tomorrow if you still want to."

Tomorrow. That's good advice. I decide to take it, then I decide tomorrow is too far away and I've got to just start talking _right now_ or it's never going to happen. "Candace: I know what happened to your brother. When he disappeared. He signed up for a research project, the project I work on, with the Department of Homeland Security. He was a volunteer, they're all volunteers, in a behavioral conditioning program meant to tap into the peaks of human performance through a series of...."

She interrupts, her voice hushed. "High-pitched tones."

"The delivery method isn't important." Wait. Why did she say that? No, my mouth is still running. Come back, mouth, I miss you. "I don't know the exact circumstances, but your assumption is correct: your brother is dead. I'm sorry to tell you like this, and I know it must be very shocking. I'm also sorry I didn't tell you sooner."

Candace turns away from me, stands up, and walks over to a bookshelf across the room. She returns bearing a manila envelope with a piece of paper sticking out, and hands that paper to me, all without saying anything. It's a photocopy of a handwritten letter, addressed to her. The writing is sloppy, and rather than reading it right away I look up at her. She's just standing there, staring at me, her eyes are glassy but her jaw is clenched; all the weakness from a few days ago is gone. I look down and read the letter.

Dear Candace,

Please don't rip this up. I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. You can rip it up if you want; you probably already did, or set it on fire or threw it away or something. I sent a bunch more, so please just don't destroy all of them, ok? This is really important, and I am so sorry. I can't even begin, ever, to apologize to you as much as I want to. Please believe me. I know that you can't forgive me. I'm sorry.

You'll find enclosed a photocopy of an informational packet I got from Percival Zogby at the Selective Service System office in Washington DC. I was drafted a couple weeks ago, even though there's no official draft going on. I know you don't believe me. Look at the packet, there are official seals and signatures and everything.

The other three pages in the back I took from his desk while he wasn't looking. I think it's a list of all the other guys they picked to go with me into this program of theirs. I'm sending it to you, hoping that you can make contact with at least one of them. Call them up or send them letters, but do it soon. There's not much time left. I don't know if they're like me or if there's something else wrong with them or what, but you should be able to figure out what it all means. You're much smarter than I am, and you have more time.

There's something really wrong with this program, Candace. I don't know what it is. They're picking out guys who are crazy, who have no real connections, no lives, and they're promising they can fix everything like magic. They won't say how, but I know. When I was in Percival's office I heard this high pitched tone. You know, Kensington ears are better than a dog's. They were sending me some kind of message. Telling me I was a weapon, or that I was nothing. I don't know. It's all really garbled in my head. They're using the sounds, they're going to hypnotize us or something, and they're acting like it's the freaking cure for craziness.

I don't know why I'm sending you this. I don't know what I expect you to do with it. I'm going to try to run away, and if I can get away I'll send you another letter. I know I'm not supposed to contact you, and I'm sorry that I am. I'm sorry if I'm making you remember, I'm sorry for everything. You're just the only person I have, even though I don't really have you. I'm sorry, Candace. I'm so sorry. I never meant to hurt anyone. I love you.

Love,

Ian

I let my hand fall down flat when I finish reading it, my heart pounds, and my mind is mostly blank. This doesn't make any sense, I want to ask five thousand questions at once, but every time I think of a new one I forget one from the list. There's one thing that sticks out above all the others, though.

"No one was drafted. That wouldn't be ethical, let alone _legal_. I mean, the Nuremberg Code—it's international law. They're all volunteers, we have the paperwork on file, all the releases they signed. He was mistaken." Even as I say these things the evidence seems to crumble away in my mind. Signatures can be faked. Details can be glossed over. What real person would volunteer to become what Ian became? "Are you sure this is real? The details, he wouldn't know these things. And Mr. Zogby...where did you get this? When?"

Finally, mercifully, Candace sits down. "I got seven of them total in the mail over the course of two days, starting right after my brother started missing his court-mandated therapy sessions."

Seven copies. Who would mail seven copies? "And you have a list of volunteers? You have seven copies of a list of volunteers for the SSPO?"

"I don't think there were any volunteers. My brother certainly wasn't—he didn't even have the legal authority to make that kind of decision for himself. If it would ever be legal to begin with. Those boys were drafted against their will."

I find myself backing up for some reason, pushing my spine into the arm of the couch like I'm trying to get away, but unwilling to put much effort into it. This is a terrible conversation to have right now. I'm in no condition to talk about this, and she's in no position to know anything about this project. I need to get a copy of the information she has and get it to the Security office immediately. And not say another word. That's exactly what I should do. "But we were _explicitly_ told this was on a strictly volunteer basis. Mr. Zogby is in charge of recruiting, yes, but you can't _draft_ people into a Medical research program. And there hasn't been a draft since Vietnam."

"Percival Zogby is dead. I saw it in the paper a little ways back. They don't tell you anything, do they?" She doesn't look like she's going to cry any more, and her voice has a hard edge to it. "My brother had serious issues. He's been heavily medicated at all times since we were kids. Your 'project' promised him a cure, and they gave him sound-induced behavioral conditioning. I know you can't tell me what it did to him, what he was like before he died, or how he died. We don't have to talk about this any more tonight. I'm going to go to bed. I'll grab an extra pillow and a blanket for you, and you can sleep on the couch. Think about the work that you do, and we'll talk tomorrow."

It's bright when I wake up; my legs ache the whole way down to my feet. I remember my head spinning for hours and it feels like I didn't sleep at all. It takes a long while for me to realize that it's not very early in the morning and I need to get out of here, change, and go to work. I force myself to sit up, stand after only a couple of tries, stagger my way across the room like I'm on a boat, and let myself out. Only the door doesn't open, because I've apparently been bolted in, and it's the kind of lock that requires a key on both sides. My mind has already decided upon an appropriate worst-case scenario: Candace has already left for the day, gone out to wherever she goes for work, and she forgot and locked me in, and my cell phone died in the night and I'm going to need to climb down the fire escape. Then I'll forget my wallet somewhere in the apartment and I'll be stuck on the street, unable to go home, to work, or back to Candace's, and I'll die of panic and starvation.

My stomach growls in time with a door closing behind me.

It's Candace coming out of the bathroom, her hair is wrapped in a towel, but she's dressed. Perhaps it was the shower turning off that woke me up. She's smiling, and I'm not sure how much of last night I remember, but I do know that she was sober the whole time. She remembers the whole thing.

"I see you've realized you're trapped. Sorry about that, I just didn't want you to run off before we had a chance to talk. Figured you might not return my phone calls anymore after last night." She pauses there for me to respond, but I can't really find any words.

"Okay. I'm sorry I got you into this, too, and I'm sorry I showed you the letter, I know you've got to be going crazy right now. But working for bad people doesn't make you a bad person, Abhi, and you shouldn't feel guilty about any of this. They lied to you just like they lied to my brother. That's what bad people do to people who have things that they want."

She sounds so calm and so practiced, and my brain is moving in slow motion. How can she be sure the program is so wrong? Can a few sentences in a hastily written letter, from a person with a history of psychological issues, implicate a major, government-backed research project? But that calm voice, combined with the look on her face...I don't know, it's like she's waiting for me to say something specific. It's like she's been waiting for it the whole time she's known me. "You've known I work for the program all along?"

She hesitates for a second, like she's trying to build a lie, or decide if she should lie at all. She closes her eyes and shakes her head. "I figured it out on our first date. I should have said something, but you were, you know, and then last time I—there just wasn't a good time."

I grunt my response, apparently unable to produce actual words while I process our relationship to this point now that I know what she knows. I knew she was too patient with me. Now I'm sorting through what I remember of what I told her last night, trying to decide how much wrong I've actually done, and an idea occurs to me. It's a stupid idea. A fascinating, stupid idea that I have no business thinking about right now. My mind has this tendency to lock on, at the expense of everything else, and I can't seem to control it. No matter how inopportune the time.

"What was your brother's diagnosis? His 'psychological issue'?"

The end of the towel flops out of place as Candace cocks her head to the side. "I don't think I ever knew. He used to tell me about the whispers he heard when we were kids. Mostly he just seemed to have a really terrible temper. But it was different, it was disconnected, like. Something bad would happen, and he would barely react, and the next morning he'd be smashing holes in the walls and screaming for hours. Like he was reacting to everything on a huge delay. Why?"

This is only half a thought, and it's likely half of a stupid thought, but it's there and it's in the driver's seat in my brain, and I can't think about anything else until I give it the attention it seems to feel it is owed. How did we even _know_ something like that before we started Primed 002s and 003s? "I don't think they were lying, not completely, to him about controlling his episodes. This comes back to the Baltimore B—" no, no, I can't be talking about this. This is a bad idea. Why am I still here? I swallow hard. "Please let me out, Candace, I need to leave right now."

She rushes across the room, eyes locked on mine, towel falling off of her head. "No, don't stop. _What_ about the Baltimore Berserker? He's one of them?"

"No, that's not, I, but...."

"He _is_! You're a terrible liar, Abhi. You should look at yourself in the mirror. You must have thought about this, not just last night, but before, even if you didn't know your program was essentially _kidnapping_ people. But brainwashing them to act like _him_? There's no way to justify that. I mean what I said, that you shouldn't feel guilty about the work that you've done so far, but things are different now. You can't go back to that place and just start helping them again, not knowing what they do to people. And knowing what _those_ people do to people."

I'm backed up against the door, pinned in place by a woman who's almost a foot shorter than me. No doubt I look horrified staring down into her face. This is why they don't trust me; it's the same reason she's expecting me to say something. Am I supposed to make this decision now, with her in my face like this? This seems crazy. I'm stammering, struggling to maintain composure. "What, you want me to quit?"

"You could do that. It would be a start. It wouldn't stop them from destroying more people's lives, though." Candace turns and starts walking away, releasing me from my spot against the wall. Not that I have anywhere to go, other than follow her into the kitchen. "You could do something heroic. You could destroy the place from the inside."

Wow. She's not looking at me, and I can't tell if that was a joke or not. It seems like it wasn't a joke. Obviously she hasn't thought about what I would look like "destroying" a place from the inside. Mostly it would be standing around, stammering, while business around me went on as usual. "I'm not the heroic type, Candace. I'm sorry to disappoint you. There's nothing that we can do for your brother now, anyways. It's best to move on with our lives. Perhaps I'll start looking into schools that could be hiring, or something else in the field, but my skills have gotten very specific."

"Okay. Thanks for the consideration, I guess." She pours herself a mug of coffee while talking. "Listen, I don't want you to take this the wrong way, but you need to get out of my apartment. My threshold for people flippantly dismissing crimes against humanity is very low."

And I did sound callous, or something on that spectrum. There's no way for me to come out of this conversation not looking like an insensitive coward, and feeling like one too, other than promising to burn down the building where I work. I guess that's it for this relationship, then, and I still need to get home and take a shower. But first, an idea. A cowardly one, but an idea. "Wait. I'm sorry; that came out badly. I could do _something_. I could slow things down. Just—kind of—do a bad job, and maybe find little ways to trip other people up too. It shouldn't be too hard; they've got us boxed in with a bunch of unreasonable expectations and crazy restrictions. Everyone's got to be at their wits end already."

She takes a sip of her coffee and smiles. "There we go. Was that so hard?" Still holding the carafe in her other hand, she pours a travel mug and slides it towards me. "Go get yourself cleaned up. And don't get fired."

The primary issue with sabotaging my own project is that I actually _like_ the work that I do.  I mean, I like it when it's not being dictated to me by maniacs who don't even know what a hippocampus _is_ , let alone what they're asking me to make it _do_. I've received a number of emails this morning, in the time between when I was supposed to arrive and when I actually did, thanking me for my participation in the Alpha research, and for my report. They say they no longer wish to keep me from my work on the 005 program. I'd honestly just as soon go to sleep as do anything with the pounding in my head and the ache in my legs and neck.  I'm starting to get paranoid, to wonder if some secret police force is monitoring Candace's movements, knowing that her brother contacted her before joining the SSPO. Before being drafted by the SSPO. Maybe that's the source of this distrust, not the questions I've been asking. Maybe I should stay away from her.

My mind darts to John Pastore and an incomplete train of thought from last night. Did the people who Primed him promise to "cure" his mental illness? Perhaps that was actually a part of the program at some point. I'm clicking through the oldest records I can find almost at random, reading blurbs here and there. The more I read, the more I suspect that this whole program started as a wild shot in the dark. We had animal trials, at least, but the people who made these notes had no idea what they were doing with a human brain, and I can't believe they were ever allowed to actually alter one. Now that I think about it, though, we're using what they learned, essentially by accident, as the basis for everything we do. Enhancement of the basal ganglia and increased adrenaline production are almost a given.

An email comes in, the sound effect makes me jump, and the train of thought it gone. It's just a standard demand for progress reports. Timeline can't move to the right, blah blah blah. I love when they send these emails to just about everyone in the facility all at the same time. People are hitting Reply All, and they're firing back message after message. I'm sucked into a black hole of reading identical emails about our great progress.

No one from my team has chimed in yet, probably because we've only been back on the 005 project for half a morning, so I decide to rain on everyone's parade at the same time. I scroll back to the original email and hit Reply to All, at least I'll be able to waste a few seconds for hundreds of people. That should count as successful sabotage. Without even lying, I make it clear that we are very far behind, that the Alpha incident was a huge drain for the last couple weeks, and that my team isn't going to be able to catch up unless we can have a new supercomputer. Something monstrous.

It's something we used to talk about, back when I cared about completing my tasks as quickly and well as I possibly could: a world class supercomputer for running pathway simulations. It would have come in handy for each of the packages we built in the past, but they run in the millions of dollars and we never had the guts to make a formal request. If I know engineers, there will be dozens of them salivating over the idea of bringing in one of the largest computing clusters in the world. With any luck I'll get some backup, management will take the request seriously, and we'll waste months just trying to pull together money to buy it. Or even better, we'll waste months fighting about it.

That's the last bit of actual work I do for the rest of the week, I spend the rest of my time thinking about John Pastore and the magical, schizophrenia-curing, disappearing Primer. Now it's Monday morning. I had only slight contact with Candace all weekend. Not that I've been pining for contact with her or anything. I arrive a bit late, perhaps 7:10, because I have very little motivation to arrive at all. Megan is leaning on my desk when I get there, and eating a doughnut with pink frosting and rainbow sprinkles on it. She's got a big smile on her face, sprinkles are falling off with each bite, and she seems to be making a concerted effort to grind each one into the carpet under my work area, where they will remain until enough ants converge on the spot to take them all away. I do not like Megan. She doesn't appear to be leaving.

With all the surliness I can muster, I push past her and put my bag down on my desk, then pull my chair out and sit down like she isn't even there. The cubicle isn't big enough for two people, but I've committed to pretending I'm the only one here. The passive-aggressive chess match continues from there, as she continues to eat her doughnut and not actually speak to me, chewing with her mouth a little bit open so I can hear it better. I log on and she crumples up the napkin, reaching across my keyboard to carefully deposit it in the miniature garbage can on top of my desk instead of the full sized one that's five feet away. I lean down and plug in my headphones, but while I'm putting them on Megan finally breaks, knowing that with music I could potentially filibuster her for hours.

"Hey—before you disappear into dubstep land, wanted to know if you'd heard anything about the Berserker?"

I look up at her for a second, roll my eyes, and look back at my PC. "That's what this is about? They took my team off the Alpha effort last week, haven't heard a thing."

"Well _I_ was still on it until I got in this morning, but now the guy is _gone_."

I suddenly wish I was holding something so I could drop it for dramatic effect. "What do you mean, _gone_? What's in his cell? Was there any notification that?"

"Wow, relax buddy. Not an international incident. Word on the street is they took him out over the weekend to give some other facility a crack at him." She turns around and starts rifling through my pencils, and there's not even anything to find there. Just pencils. The noise is grating. "I just thought it was sudden, and I thought maybe you North-Nerds figured something out and didn't tell us. Guess not."

North-Nerds. I roll my eyes again as she starts to walk away. Then I realize that Megan is probably onto something, someone has the Alpha mystery figured out, which piques my interest. They either know what caused his behavior or they're confident they can track down the cause without any further input from him. "Wait. They didn't say anything else to you, just took your main research project in the night?"

She stops walking and rotates around on the ball of one foot, grinning like she thinks I'm stupid. "You make a lot of crazy assumptions, bro.  Management reassigned us all back to 005 full time. Not that we were ever really off it to begin with, translating memories is translating memories. We're still going to be banging away at the data from the Berserker's scans, it's the best stuff we have. Great idea on the cluster, by the way. That's going to make our lives so much easier."

There is that unwelcome side effect, yes. Hopefully it's a while down the road, and I come up with some other mechanism for preventing progress by then. "How far have you gotten? With his scans, I mean? Can you actually make sense of memories?"

"Sense being a relative term, maybe?" Megan stands herself up straighter and shifts her weight around like she's preparing to speak for a long, long time. "We're definitely on the right path; we've got a visualization algorithm that can pull data out of the scans, at least, but it has a hard time making the pieces fit together, like the brain is encrypting them. We're very much in uncharted territory, as far as mapping out connections between episodic and semantic memory to form the underlying structure, to make _real_ images and not just noise, but I feel like it's right there, you know?"

Her eyes are kind of clouded over, looking at my face but not focused on anything, as she speaks. I miss that feeling. "It's going to be a mess untangling these things enough to make changes, I tell you. I feel like if we even try we're basically going to fry somebody from the inside out. But we're getting bits in read-only mode, at least. Like, we know this guy used to smoke _so much pot_. That's an easy one, because we can map it to the chemical, and because it's all he ever seems to think about."

Hurray, we've developed a new, more expensive, drug test. We're really changing the world for the better. I sit there for a bit and don't say anything, hoping she'll get the hint that the conversation is now actually over and she can continue on her merry way, but it appears she's willing to just stand and stare at me indefinitely. I'm growing more uncomfortable by the second. So I clear my throat, scratch my head, and come up with something to say. "That, uh, sounds really interesting. Let me know if you have any breakthroughs. I've got to get back to it now, though. Deadlines looming."

She tips her glasses a bit like some kind of mock salute. "Yeah, I get it. Let me know if you get too good at solitaire, we'll find something a little more challenging for you."

I don't think—if someone _here_ made a package for John Pastore—that they would have been able to keep it out of our system or delete all traces of it after the fact. It's one theory out of thousands, but it's at least one I can look into. So I've rolled back into our package archive to start digging for unfamiliar data. The Primer packages, the ones that are actually used to rewire the human brain to behave like one of our volunteers, are all still there, and they're all accounted for. Nothing new, so if he was Primed at all it had to have been as an 001 or an 003, no other possibility. So far most of the order sets are sealed and listed as tactically sensitive information, which is a disturbing discovery in its own right. But the data is classified, the extra label doesn't necessarily mean anything; I'm just being paranoid. Then I remind myself that almost every paranoid assumption I've made in the last few weeks has proven true.

I go file by file, looking for something I can actually access, watching dates for something that could have been delivered right before Hamlin closed. There's one package, which has no title, that meets my criteria. The file is tiny, and it's not sealed as tactically sensitive. I pull up the metadata first, because this could be just a random scrap someone started putting together and then versioned out, or ditched entirely. It was encoded for the 001 series, but it says it was created last year. The 001 program has been dormant for much longer than that. I'm guessing someone was just messing around, maybe getting a feel for the different types of encoding, since there's no risk in creating orders for a series of volunteers that haven't been actively tested in years. And that someone decided to check the box for "Delivered" for some reason. I shake my head to stop myself from making too many assumptions. There are any number of logical explanations for something like this. I scroll through the list of authors and see a bunch of usernames I don't know, plus Art's, then close out and sit there, staring at the file for a few seconds before I actually open it.

It's a silly waste of time, though, as the whole instruction set is just a couple words. And then my brain makes sense of those words. "Baltimore. Westbrook Towers. Sixth floor. Six." It could just be nonsense, but that looks a lot like an address, and an 001 with only an address in its head is the biological equivalent of a homing missile. My hand finds my phone and dials Art's extension while I stare at the screen, only half comprehending. I have become a robot, operating without free will, and while the phone rings I search the Internet for that address. I'm scrolling through results, looking for something useful, while internally chastising myself for using a work computer for this, when Art answers.

"Hey, Abhi. What can I do for you?"

His voice makes me jump. I don't know why I wasn't expecting him to answer the phone, but I wasn't. I'm off in another world by now, deep in the second and third pages of Google's results, uncharted territory from whence no one has ever returned. It takes me a while to say anything, and the words I find are staring at me in bold black letters on the screen like a pair of binoculars hanging from a tree. My brain is melting. "Nathan Werner."

He clears his throat. "003-002. What about him?"

Somewhere deep down, a voice of reason digs its way through the rubble that was once my brain. "Perhaps we shouldn't talk about this on the phone, now that I think of it. Do you think we could—no—after work. Could we meet after work somewhere for a conversation?"

"Sure, buddy, sure." He's eating something crunchy. "Five fifteen at the, uh, how about that bar by the hotel? That's convenient."

"See you then." And I hang up without officially ending the conversation, as if I'm having a phone call in a movie. Then I squint at the name on my screen, as if I can make sense of all of this just by thinking about those two words. We wanted to kill him. People are following him. This has to mean the Primer didn't fail, not the way we were told it failed. This is so many things I can't even calculate, it's proof that the SSPO lied to us, it's proof of attempted murder, it's a ball of fire melting my insides and making my stomach churn. I stare blankly at the screen until five, then rush to Perkins, checking over my shoulder several times as I do to make sure I wasn't followed. If they're following me, they're being careful about it.

Art's already at the bar, and he already has a beer in his hand. The bartender gives me a look while I approach, and I try to remember if it's the guy who was serving me the night of the drinking accident, but most of the details from that time are unavailable to me. I take a seat next to Art and order one of the beers on tap at random, as well as a water, intending to devote my attention to the water almost exclusively. I'm unclear on what I want to say to Art, on what I can hope to get out of him, but here we are, and I need to try to do something. So I start with the name.

"What do you know about Nathan Werner?"

He dumps about a quarter of a pint down his throat before answering, then wipes the excess foam from the ends of his mustache with the back of his hand. "I know he's a dead end, and I know what you're thinking. I've checked him up and down, looks like a clear case of the Primer not doing its job, just like they said. Forget about him."

My drinks arrive, and I look at them while speaking very softly. "If you've been checking into him, you must know where he lives. Baltimore. Westbrook Towers. Sixth floor. Six."

He turns slowly, voice only half in the moment. "Why did you say it like that?"

"You really don't remember?"

Art leans back slowly, draping his arm over the back of his chair and staring at me with his mouth a little open, like he's about to say something. Then he brings his right hand up in front of him, like he does to emphasize his words. The he clenches that fist, shakes his head a little bit, and hits the bar lightly with the bottom of his hand. It's like I can actually see the machinery in his mind grinding away at the problem. When he finally arrives at the solution he's stroking his mustache again. "Jesus H. Christ, son, how did I miss that?"

With that understanding between us, I let him run the conversation, and he goes through a bunch of things I've thought of, then pulls up a video of the statement Nathan gave to the press when he returned from parts unknown, and between the two of us we come up with theory after theory for what it could mean, but none of them stand up under much scrutiny. I don't tell him I talked to Nathan, and I don't mention the binoculars in the tree; I feel like I can't even think about that. Eventually the conversation meets its logical end, there's nothing more we can figure out by cycling through the same few bits of information, and we agree to part ways and pick this conversation up later. It's an unsatisfying way to leave things with one of the few people I can actually express these concerns to, but it will have to do for now. I watch Art walk out of the bar and back towards the hotel—he hesitates a bit when he sees I'm not leaving with him—and take out my phone once he's out of sight. I need to talk to Candace, I think, but my brain isn't up to it yet. My fingers dial up my parent's apartment automatically, like it's the only number I ever call.

I consider hanging up immediately after sending the call. No matter how much I'd like to solicit her advice there's simply no way I can tell my mother about any of this. Not that she'd have any idea what to do if I _did_ ask her. But she was right about the job. There's something wrong with it. I should have gone home. The ringing ceases, and the answering machine comes on. She must be out. I have no idea what to say.

"Ma. It's Abhi."

Almost immediately I hear a near-frantic effort to pick up the phone. "Abhinav! You sound tired."

"I _am_ tired, ma."

"That's not what you called to tell me, though. You have bad news; I can hear it. It's that job, isn't it?"

All that from seven words. I'd be impressed if I didn't know ahead of time that she'd assume anything remotely negative from me would be about work. But I can't say a word about that, and I can't _lie_. So I just need to equivocate. "I met a girl, actually."

"And that's bad news? I see. She must not be Bengali, is that it?" She pauses, and I'm at a loss to fill the silence. "I'm _kidding_! I'm the last person to judge on such things. Just tell me: would I like her?"

"I think so." I've made a miscalculation. This has been calming in a way—pretending things are normal—but this conversation could go on for hours if I don't find a way out. I try the simplest one I can think of. "She's very smart. I'm actually headed over to meet her right now—I'll have to call you again later to talk about it."

"Wait! You haven't given me her name yet. I need to Google her."

"Goodbye, ma. I'll talk to you soon."

I give Candace fifteen minutes warning and head to her apartment on foot. She's waiting at the building entrance when I get there, so there's no need to buzz, and we head straight up to talk. I can't tell if my paranoia is growing in proportion with the danger, or if there is no danger at all and I'm just being paranoid. I give her a brief account of things, glossing over the science of it wherever possible, leaving Art out of the discussion, and skipping Nathan and his binoculars. It just feels dangerous to bring that up out loud, I can't put my finger on why. She listens patiently, with this thoughtful look on her face that makes it difficult for me to keep track of what I'm saying. As it is, I think I get all the relevant information out, but then I start to ramble on, not adding any meaning, but completely unable to stop.

Eventually she gets the hint and intervenes. "It's good that you're looking so hard into all of this. Why are you telling me, though? What does this have to do with my brother?"

I frown. "You know why, and now you know that I know you know why." I pause, sorting that out in my head, and then nod in confirmation that it all works out logically. "So we can stop pretending this is just about your brother. I'm in, okay? I'm committed to this."

There's a look of bewilderment on her face, she appears to be struggling to decide if she should be shocked, relieved, or unaffected, and her face cycles through the three with alarming speed. She eventually settles on mild surprise, which feels appropriate to me. "You don't even know what you're committing to."

What _am_ I committing to? I'm much less sure than I was a second ago. "You're trying to destroy the program. You think we kidnap people, brainwash them, and make them do terrible things. I think you're right."

And, as if by magic, the look of surprise is gone. I don't know what to call the expression she has now, something like rage, I guess. She doesn't sound angry, though. "You're more perceptive than most. But you haven't thought this through. Being 'in' this means losing your job, potentially going to jail, and maybe being kidnapped."

"Or having one of our subjects sent to my home to kill me." Her mouth hangs open a bit, but no words come, so I keep going. "Nathan is still alive, and I'm reasonably certain he blackmailed the SSPO into giving him a bunch of medals and a cash settlement. These people are dangerous, or they were with Director Hall at the head. Whoever runs it now seems to be clueless, and everything is disorganized and confused, so there probably won't be a better opportunity to move on them. They're so concerned with keeping everyone _insulated_ from everyone else that no one has a clear idea of what they actually want to do. I think I can keep operating in the project, for now, like we talked about before, but...."

"You're seeing what you want to see, Abhi." She grabs the envelope from her bookshelf and pulls out a thin stack of papers, the corners are folded over twice to keep them together. "This is the list my brother sent me, every person who went into the SSPO with him. I've attempted to make contact with every single one of them, but only two ever returned from the program. One is your friend Werner, the other is a doctor named Gilbert Stevenson. He died suddenly a couple months after returning; no cause of death given in the obituary. There was no autopsy, no police report, no funeral service, and the body was cremated. Two dozen people, and only one of them is still walking around out there. Werner has something amazing on them, that's the only explanation. You don't have anything amazing, you have a bunch of guesses."

"But they don't _know_ who I am. Obviously, we know who all of the subjects are, and you only have guesses about Stevenson. He was discharged from the program, by the way. Some people are resistant to the Primer packages, or the delivery mechanism, we've never really been able to devote much to that research." But if Werner didn't really resist the Primer, why should I believe Stevenson did? "The easiest explanation is extensive hearing loss in the upper register, which would leave him only able to absorb a fraction of the information. That would have dangerous, unpredictable effects, though, there's no research there, either, which really serves to underline how irresponsible the program can be about safety."

Once it's clear to me that I'm rambling, talking more to myself than to her, I manage to stop. But by then she's already walked away and sat down in front of her laptop, typing away at something. I turn around and strain to see, but the angle is terrible. Instead, operating under the assumption that she's given up dissuading me from helping, I resume speaking.

"If I'm being unrealistic, please enlighten me. What is it that you expect to do?"

She sighs and stops typing, leaning in close to the screen. "I'm going to get the evidence, clear and inarguable evidence, of exactly what your program is doing. That evidence is going to go up on the Internet, and we're going to generate _so much_ outrage that the government will be shamed into shutting the project down. Hopefully some people, the people who made the irresponsible decisions you were talking about, will go to jail. But the main idea is to stop the weaponization of the human mind."

That's a terrible, apt description of what I do. All the more reason. "You should talk to more of us, more people from the program. There's a guy I work with, his name is Art, he's been looking at this stuff on his own, he seems to know all sorts of people, and he's been with the program for as long as there's _been_ a program. I'll give you his number, let him know you're going to call."

"No." She minimizes something and types three letters in whatever window she's got open. "No on half of that, anyways. Put me in touch with Art, give me his full name, plus an address and a description, but you stay out of it. And before you turn that into an argument, listen. I've been talking to people who work in your program before, people who used to work at Hamlin, and people who worked here before you merged, and a couple other places. You didn't know that, and none of them know that either. That keeps me safe, and it keeps you guys safe from one another. I'm guessing you think Art is trustworthy, but if you bring this, whatever we are, to him directly, there's a chance he runs the other way, and it kills us both. Literally kills us. I'll take the phone number too; that could come in handy."

I give her his cell number and the rest of his information, including his room number at the hotel and the best description I can call to mind. While doing this I give up on the couch and walk over, which makes her put whatever document she typed Art's information into off the screen and brings up a multi-tabbed web browser. She has about a thousand tabs opened, so I can't see the titles of any individual one, but the one she has on screen is a "find my classmates" site. She's logged on as Nathan Werner. I lean in close to the computer, squinting at the list of names from Nathan's graduating class.

"What is this?"

Candace shrugs and closes the tab. "Nothing much. Looks like Werner was friends with the Baltimore Berserker in High School." She looks over another tab quickly, then closes it, and does the same with another after that. "Oh, and they kind of might have lived together for a couple years. Right before Werner was drafted. Now _that's_ a funny coincidence."

Time passes. I go to work and don't do work, and I spend as much time as I can with Candace. She has different times cordoned off, when I'm not supposed to contact her, which I've learned to neither ask nor worry about. I spend that free time reading just about everything there is on her website, archives going back for a few years, and trying to find an apartment that's within my price range and within walking distance of hers. It's not that I'm stalking her, though this behavior would look like stalking from the outside. I've also been looking for jobs in the area too, but almost everything nearby is associated with the government, at least tangentially.

In the past few weeks I've grown more and more awed by Candace. I'm sitting in her apartment now, trying not to listen in while she yells at one of her writers about some seemingly trivial misstep. They seem to be afraid of her. I mean, I'm a little afraid of her, but for different reasons. Our Chinese food is getting cold, so I start serving up both of our plates while she winds the conversation down. I've timed it close enough to right that she can drop herself on the couch and pick her food right up. She's smiling when she returns to the room—despite how angry she sounded on the phone just seconds ago—and she picks up a dumpling before even sitting down.

"This mistake of yours. How bad is it, really?"

Right. That's where we were. "Depends on what time frame you're looking at. I mean, half of the people working on the project are scheduled to miss weeks here and there to learn how to program, and they're just as likely to mess around as actually do anything worthwhile when they get back. I never thought they'd bring the supercomputer in so fast, though, if at all. It's only a matter of time before it's doing most of the work for them. Did I mention they're calling it the Abheatbox? As if I have some personal ownership of the device. I don't even understand what a cluster has to do with beatboxing. Let alone the vaguely racist connotations. You'd think if there's an in joke there that I'd, you know, be _in_ on it, but...." Right. Rambling.

She never breaks eye contact, I feel like she never blinks, and the frown on her face is more one of concern than anger. Which is good. I've done more for the program in getting that computer purchased than I could have developing the parameters, but she doesn't look as if she'll hold it against me. Instead, she opens her mouth, as if to speak, then shakes her head, dismissing whatever idea that was, and stares at nothing rather than saying whatever she was thinking of. Finally, the silence gets the better of me.

"Care to share?"

She jumps a little, like she'd forgotten I was here. "Hmm? Just trying to put the pieces together. One of my sources says that the new set of "volunteers" is supposed to come in soon. That they've been remodeling the whole floor below you to accommodate them."

That would be just like them. A whole empty floor right below us, and still we're crammed in together like sardines. I clear my throat, thoughts not even fully formed in my head as I start speaking. "Then we're running out of time." Time for what? It doesn't seem like anything, even a complete public exposure, would stop the program fast enough to protect the people in the 005 program. "I'll volunteer for Primer development. I won't be able to get away with stalling as much, but it'll give me a chance to watch the progress more closely, and should show rather definitively whether or not they still trust me. If they let me on it means my work is good, so Hartley didn't really kill himself, and they don't really think I'm sticking my nose in things too much."

Candace leans over and shoves her still-full plate a little further away. It really does seem like there's something else bothering her, beyond the normal looming menace of the shadowy government organization she's sworn revenge against. Most of the volume has dropped out of her voice. "That's a good idea, Abhi. Thank you for throwing yourself into this so completely, it makes things much easier."

I scoot towards her a little on the couch, and match her hushed tone. "You can dump more of it on me, if you'd like. We're partners in this. You know you can trust me."

"Right."

The conversation fades into an uneasy silence, and she gives me this little smile. I move in a little closer, not entirely sure what I'm trying to do. We've been meeting each other for weeks now, there are aspects of our relationship that should be clearly established, but I can't help but feel that they're not. My social awkwardness makes it impossible to tell what the extent of the relationship is without some kind of confirmation, and I'd really like to know for certain. Of course, I'm terrified of putting the question into words, which is why I've chosen to loom ambiguously, closer and closer to her. The act allows me to retain plausible deniability for the longest possible span, a thought which I'm clinging too. The suspense accumulates in my mind, and I grow more and more convinced that this is a very foolish thing to do, that she had no interest in me romantically. And then she speaks.

"I have a 'date' coming up. One of the guards from Hamlin, I think he was there the night it happened."

Of course, business. I stop my descent, thankful that she saved me the embarrassment, and surprised that, in the seemingly hour-long silence, I only closed an inch or two of the distance between us. The declaration seems odd, though. She's never given me specifics about the other people she talks to before. I suppose this is a sign of increasing trust. "Who is it? I might know the name."

She rolls her eyes. "Which is exactly why I can't tell you, and you know that. There's a difference between letting you have a little more to work with and blowing up the entire business model. Can you imagine how obvious it would be if you ran into someone at work who you knew was talking to me? You'd implicate all of us before you even realized you were talking."

"While I am probably not the greatest liar in the world, I believe you're exaggerating at least slightly."

"I believe 'probably not the greatest liar in the world' is a huge overestimation of your capacity to deceive people."

I sit back a little bit, giving her a more reasonable amount of personal space. "Well, I'm sorry, but we aren't all cut out to run underground spy syndicates."

"Which is exactly why only one of us does, Abhi."

In a twist of fate that seems like it was consciously designed to point out just how bad my supercomputer idea really was, Megan has become one of the most enthusiastic members of the Abheatboxers. And they're calling themselves the "Abheatboxers," which may be the most obnoxious name in the history of names. It's like everyone secretly knows that I didn't actually want the thing, and they're trying to rub salt in the wound. Megan makes sure to stop by my desk on a daily basis to talk, in great detail, about all the things she's doing with my computer, like I have some personal stake in it.

They're making huge progress decoding memories. She talks about her work with at least as much passion as I used to, and it would really make me miss it if she wasn't clearly built in a lab somewhere for the specific purpose of grating on my nerves. She's constantly dropping crumbs all over my work space and writing little notes to herself with whatever pieces of paper on my desk she decides must not be important to me. I can barely listen to her, so consumed am I by deep, visceral annoyance. The one tiny upside to this relationship is that, during her four or five visits each day, I pick up all possible news.

She thinks I should really come down and see a firsthand demonstration, the Abheatbox is doing all of the work in eliminating noise, the compression algorithms the human mind uses are beyond comprehension, soon we'll be able to extract terabytes of information from a single brain scan, piece together huge chunks of their lives just by figuring out a few keys. I go from annoyed to fascinated to terrified every time I can force myself to pay attention.

Today, while I stare up at her, eyes half glazed over and half focused on the different colors of crumbs that have accumulated in the hair she has sitting on her shoulders, it occurs to me that nothing I'm doing is having an appreciable effect on the momentum of this project. No amount of procrastination on my part is going to slow down the 005 Primer delivery, and nothing Candace is working on is going to amount to anything before these people, potentially dozens of people, have their lives stolen from them. Without literally committing suicide by setting fire to the place and destroying any storage backups we have hidden in bunkers across the country or whatever, those people are doomed. I must be ignoring her even more obviously than usual, at some point Megan seems to notice.

"But hey, if you've got stuff to do I don't need to waste your time on this. A lowly peon like me could never comprehend all the brain bending work you guys from up north are getting done, right?" She appears to be looking for a response, but I'm in no way prepared to supply her with one. "Fine, I can take a hint. I'll go queue up some videos from the inside of someone's head and, you know, change the face of neuroscience forever. Maybe I'll strap myself into the MRI later and see what I can dig up. See you later, nerd."

She drags a hand along the outside wall of my cube as she turns and walks away, sliding my name plate out and dropping it on the ground accidentally on purpose. Megan gives just about the smallest pause a human can perceive before continuing to walk away, and I choose grabbing the nameplate off the ground and putting it back up myself over engaging her in any further conversation. My brain doesn't even have the effort available to loath her as thoroughly as I'd like, so wrapped up am I in the idea that I'm staring futility in the face, at least short term. I look over at the clock and sigh; still over an hour left before I can leave here. Then I grab my desk phone and dial Candace's number.

"What is it?"

She sounds angry; perhaps I've interrupted something. Today wasn't blocked off; I'm sure of that, I reaffirm the fact in my mind several times before I respond. She had a "date" yesterday. Today is free. "No. I mean, yes, hi. It's not anything, nothing. I just wanted to check if you were home. I'd like to come by after work."

Time passes before any words come through the phone. It sounds like she's rustling it around, maybe the phone is inside a series of plastic shopping bags and she's pulling them off one by one. It has an unpleasant, echoing quality to it. "Don't come tonight."

I clear my throat, needing a moment to think. I'm almost certain she's never been this reticent before. Could there be someone there, perhaps? "I'm sorry? Is there something preventing you from speaking, or has something happened? I'd really like to come by and talk about a few things tonight."

"I'm taking the night off." Her voice is a hard deadpan, so devoid of emotion that it has to be forced. "And don't call me from work." My concerns shift considerably with the realization.

"Okay, that's fine." The guard from Hamlin. She's been stewing on something since last night. If I'm actually her boyfriend, if I'm actually her friend at all, then I have an obligation to do something here. It seems obvious that I'm going to fail completely in this capacity, but I need to try. "It does sound like you need to talk to someone, though. I could come over, and we can forget about work for a while. Would that be okay?"

Another long pause. When she speaks again she's almost whispering. "You know what? Do what you want, Abhi. Do whatever you think is best."

I arrive at Candace's apartment building directly after work, without stopping at home to change, and hit the button labelled "Brown" because there is no Kensington button. Just another thing I'm not supposed to ask about. She buzzes me up without saying a word. When I get to her floor her apartment door is already open a crack, so I don't need to knock. All of the lights in the place, at least the ones I can see from the front door, are on. She's sitting at the kitchen table, and there's a tissue box with no tissue sticking out turned over next to one of her arms. Her hair is pointing in every direction. She is also, apparently, wearing pajama pants. She didn't sound sick on the phone.

Closing the door behind me, I cross the living room to the kitchen table and sit down adjacent to her. At some point she looks up from the table top, giving me this angry, bewildered look that I really can't figure out. We sit that way for a short time, and my resolve is the first to break, which is obvious, because I don't have anything to be resolved about. So I ask the obvious question.

"What happened?"

She drops her hands to the table, squeezing a tissue between them, and locking her eyes there instead of so much as glancing at me. "You said we were going to forget about work, Abhi. Please leave it alone."

It takes substantial presence of mind to form a response to that which is potentially productive and completely noncombative. "I'm not asking from a work perspective. I'm not thinking about work right now. Something is bothering you and I really want to help."

She carefully tears a thin, half-inch strip down the edge of the tissue, and repeats the process once she's done. "You shouldn't make me say it. You're going to feel terrible when you make me say it, and I break down again, when I've composed myself especially for your visit. If you can't leave it alone you need to get out of my apartment, and we can talk tomorrow or next week or never."

So I get up from the table. And I already feel like a terrible jerk, knowing at least vaguely what she's thinking about, and realizing that I'm more interested in it from a work standpoint than a personal one. Whatever this is, it's worth fighting to learn. "I'm sorry it's painful for you, but hiding it isn't going to make it go away. Maybe there's something I can help with. Maybe just saying it will make you feel better."

Candace finally looks at me, and her eyes are puffy, reddened, and just starting to water again. The expression alone is enough to make me want to cancel the request, but it seems she's already made the decision. "He was there the night of the thing, the guard I talked to. But that's obvious. He told me what happened, Abhi. I _know_."

"It _was_ your brother, then?"

Pinching the strips of tissue between her thumb and forefinger, she waves them around a bit, unenthusiastically, watching the little strips of paper dance around instead of watching me. "Nathan Werner broke into Hamlin that night. He snuck in, he tied up most of the guards, killed some of the test subjects, including my brother, and kidnapped the others."

I forget, for a second or two, what this means to her on a personal level, and only think in terms of what it means about the project as a whole. A pair of binoculars are swinging in the breeze in my head, and I can see that nervous smile on Werner's face. He's been affected the whole time, and he thought I was following him. I almost died on that hill. This whole time I've had no idea. He could have done it in a second. "He told you this on a _date_?"

She stares hard at me, as if her eyes could transmit what she wants to say and save her from having to vocalize it. It doesn't seem to work. "There's always something you can latch onto, in someone's head, that gets you an inside route, almost instant trust." She's staring at nothing now, letting the papers hang limp from her fingers. "You were easy. I just had to be _nice._ "

I'm almost certain this is what being punched in the stomach feels like. "What does that have to do with anything?"

She lets out a long, rattling sigh, and pauses for a second or two after every few words in order to steady herself, but I can hear the cracks in her voice all the same.  "I'm very good at making people talk to me, Abhi. So good that now I know that Nathan Werner shot my brother, and that we've been wasting our time. My date thought he was helping. Or he wanted to see me cry."

She walks away from the table, out to her bedroom, and closes the door. I decide not to wait for her to return, or to just mope there pointlessly, and instead do something at least slightly useful, and walk over to her door. There are no audible sounds of crying, so I discard the idea of directly consoling her and skip to practical advice. I don't actually have any words planned ahead when I start speaking, a rare thing for me.

"I've been working on a theory, and if Nathan killed your brother I'm probably right. I think the 003 Primer, the one we used on Werner and your brother, was more successful than we thought. I think the same thing happened to John Pastore." My head is spinning on the idea that Nathan is working for some kind of outside agency, or that he was directed to attack Hamlin, or that there's some heretofore unknown flaw in 003 that accounts for his behavior. Just the idea that we could have _accidentally_ achieved something like that, a person who can exist in society as if they're unaltered, then summon an almost superhuman capacity for violence when triggered, it seems like a dream. And then I think of what she must be thinking about.

"Don't try to find him, Candace. Please. I don't think he can fully control himself. I saw him a few weeks ago, in the woods near Hamlin. He's paranoid, or he's really being watched, definitely on edge, and he could slip into a violent rage—like Pastore did—if he becomes agitated. There really wouldn't be any way for a normal human to stop him. The subjects—their motor functions are greatly enhanced, and they have access to a cocktail of hormones on a voluntary basis, adrenaline and the like, that give them incredible strength, speed, hand-eye coordination and reflexes. Leave him alone. The real enemies _made_ him. _I_ made him. I'm just as much to blame for your brother's death as Nathan is."

Out of momentum, I leave that thought to float while I stand there, leaning with my hands on either side of her door jamb. The door opens slowly, creaking as it goes, and there she is, staring up at me, eyes even wetter than before. Her mouth is open a little, and it moves like she's whispering something, but there's no sound. A second later, she punches me in the stomach. I've never been actually punched in the stomach before, but it's much worse than the emotional equivalent. My torso drops downward and the air shoots out in one giant gasp, and I find I'm unable to pull in any more to replace it. She doesn't hit me again, for which I'm grateful, as she appears to be very, very strong for her size. It's only when I'm finally able to force my lungs to inflate again, and the dizziness subsides somewhat, that she says anything at all.

"You _saw_ him?"

I survived talking to Candace a bit more, and convinced her that confronting Werner is suicide, and after a long conversation I'm confident she's back on board with hating the program that stole her brother and made Nathan into a killer more than she hates Nathan himself. The anger didn't go away, though. We haven't slipped into a casual conversation in days, and the anxiety machine that lives inside my head keeps telling me that the speech I gave was too effective. I'm sharing the blame now.

This morning they've closed off the entry corridor at work for three hours, no one is allowed in or out of the building for any reason. In the event of a fire they _may_ make an exception and let us out. Our lives are only so important. The security office doesn't state as much in their announcements, but it's clear that we're being held prisoner temporarily while the 005 "volunteers" are brought down to their custom-built floor. I haven't been able to catch so much as a hint of a roster, not even the number of recruits. Everything around the group is hermetically sealed, despite the fact that I'm building new brains for them. From my cubicle I can see out into the main hallway, and there are two armed guards—their hands resting on giant machine guns—posted there, blocking the entrance. It's as if peeking at our own test subjects is an offense punishable with death.

I do my best not to look out there, though the temptation is constant, because that would probably be considered suspicious activity, and we obviously can't have any suspicious activity coming from a member of the Primer team. I've got my assignment pulled up in front of me, my portion of the pathway work for the new Primer package, and it's all new territory for me. None of the familiar material, on reflexes, fight-or-flight response, or conscious decision making, falls under my purview. Everything I'm doing is about memory. Every step I take has to be locked in with the storage team, with Megan and her people. We've given up on memory deletion, at least, for the time being, along with insertion. Those will probably come back for the 006 generation, and I have to tell myself that generation will never be Primed. The young men and women who are filing into this building right now are going to be the last people we ever ruin with our ridiculous brain tampering.

My duty is to build the mechanism by which we can stop these poor souls from remembering that they're mindless killing machines when we don't want them to be mindless killing machines, so that they can go out and be mindless killing machines without ever feeling a shred of remorse. I suppose, in that way, this is better than the 004 package. Back then I was tasked with preventing a miserable man (who knew exactly what terrible things we were going to make him do) from killing himself, depriving us of the chance to make him do terrible things for us. I'm simply creating ignorance this time around, and I can assure myself over and over that ignorance is bliss. Behold, the power of positive thinking.

Megan requires updates at least twice daily, so she can punch the mechanisms-in-progress into her algorithm, her simulated brain, and test how we're coming along. There will be no mistakes, and there will be no room for improvisation. Anything I do that resembles sabotage will be caught within days, and my participation in the project will come to an end. It also leaves me no room to procrastinate. So I spend my day plugging away at the Primer, earnestly working on it. I'm enjoying the challenge of having my hands buried deep in brain chemistry again, and absolutely hating myself now that I know what I'm actually doing. I'm not sure how long I can sustain this cognitive dissonance. Art, who isn't on the Primer team, has one hand planted on my desk right by the edge of my monitor, and he's leaning on it, watching me and stroking his mustache as if he's impossibly deep in thought.

I don't know how to speak to him these days, knowing that he's probably talking to Candace, but I can't let him know that I'm talking to her as well, that we're part of the conspiracy together. Or maybe we aren't, and he refused her and he's gone the other direction, watching her to gather evidence to turn her in, and if that's the case he surely knows that I've been working with her, and that could be why he's watching me right now. Or I could be insane. The whole train of thought is pointless and ridiculous, and it makes me smile in an involuntary way.

"Share the joke, son, I could use a laugh."

I look up at him, half confused, the progress I was just making on the package now hopelessly lost. Now that that brain power has been freed up, though, I'm able to use it for more productive things, like making up lies. "I'm sorry, I was just thinking about how impossibly subtle they're being about bringing the new subjects in."

"Yeah." He picks up his planted arm and hooks it around the corner of the cubicle wall, leaning away instead of towards me. "I guess they tried to order some 'Welcome, Volunteers!' banners, but they couldn't afford them. Something about wasting a bunch of money on a big albatross of a cluster."

I shrug back at him. "The rest of the engineers talk about that thing like it's a national treasure. It's a wonder they ever got anything done before we bought it."

He does a silent kind of breathe-laugh, smile stretched wide into the depths of his mustache. "Maybe we didn't, kid. Maybe we were just spinning our wheels before." The smile slowly shrinks, and he leans back in, then closer than before, lowering his voice to something like a whisper. "We had a good talk a little ways back, when we met up after work. We should do that again real soon. Before my transfer goes through."

Before I can ask what he's talking about, a grating voice calls out to us from down the aisle. "Hey now!" Megan approaches, because she can't stay away for more than a couple hours. This woman doesn't seem to realize that people can send emails and make phone calls when they want to communicate. We don't _always_ have to be in the same room. "I know you guys are madly in love, but there's a policy on public displays of affection. I'm going to have to ask you to break it up."

We stop speaking, though this feels like an admission of defeat. Or guilt. Or something. I turn to Megan, share a moment of silent annoyance with Art, and wait for the unwelcome arrival to leave. She doesn't appear to have any plans to do so, as she's now standing there in the aisle, her arms stretched out above her head like she's been frozen doing the wave, grinning like the idiot I want to believe that she is, even though I know better. It takes her several seconds to give up on a response to her homophobic comment, after which she gets to the point.

"Today is a historic day, my friends. A day unprecedented in the records of man. I stand before you a pioneer of the highest order, for I have stared into the very depths of the human psyche and lived to tell the tale!" After she finishes the brief speech, which I have to assume was prepared ahead of time in order to maximize dramatic effect, she finally lowers her arms.

Art turns back to me. "So. Tomorrow. Beers at the same place as last time. We're on, right?" I nod in response, watching as Megan goes from theatrically proud of herself to theatrically impatient in the span of a second or two. "Great. I'll catch you later, kid. Try not to let this clown get you into trouble." He scoffs as he walks past Megan, shaking his head.

I sigh and turn towards the great pioneer. "I'm so happy for you. The Primer is coming together, then?"

"I'm so glad you can finally pull your attention from gazing lovingly into that geezer's eyes to join the conversation." She claps her hands together. "This is way bigger than the stupid Primer. I mean, not really, from a work standpoint, but for the _SCIENCE_ of it? You need to come with me _right the hell now_."

So I make a show of rolling my eyes. She's given me a sales pitch along these lines at least every two days for the past couple weeks, and while this is definitely the most spirited one thus far, I find myself unmoved. "What's the big news this time? Judging by your past 'breakthroughs,' I'd say you're in danger of overselling this one."

Still acting things out with a clownish exuberance, Megan slumps forward, hanging her head and arms like an abandoned marionette. "Okay, maybe a few of my earlier revelations weren't the exact greatest achievements in human history, but never mind them. Never mind any of the things I came to talk to you about before. Never mind anything that you've ever heard or read or thought in your miserable, misbegotten life, because this blows them all out of the water. The version of me that was excited about those things is dead. The new me murdered her for having such low standards. You need to come see!"

I sigh and get up, agree to go, and follow her down to the Storage lab. Megan's always working in there, presumably because it's about eight times the size of a standard cubicle, and now that Pastore is gone it's basically just a desk, an MRI machine, and a couple computers. She's got her monitor up on a huge TV mounted on the wall, and the first thing she does is pull up a few images from one of Pastore's brain scans. We've both seen these plenty of times before, it's nothing new, but she's got it open in some program I've never seen. She looks over her shoulder, back at me, smiling like a maniac, then turns back, types a few things in, and hits the little green "play" arrow in the top-middle part of the screen. At first nothing happens, then slowly text boxes appear and start filling the bottom of the screen.

"I don't even know, man. Maybe we should just get a pizza. I don't know, you decide."

Megan stops it there, turns around, and leans back a little farther. "That's a perfect translation right there, no noise, no mistakes, and that was real time. I can extract coherent language out of this sumbitch whenever I want, as long as I know where to look. Every scan has a different key to plug in, like the encryption in the dude's brain is changing minute to minute, but once you get a hang of it you don't need a whole lot of computing power on the back end. What do you think?"

I think it's astounding. Or horrifying, to think that a doctor could take a picture of your brain and find recordings of conversations from who knows how long ago. But, at the same time, she's been talking about things along these lines for ages. "That's it? I thought this was a given. I thought we couldn't even start on the Primer without this."

Again with the long, protracted sigh. "Okay, that was just a test. And you failed, incidentally, but it was one of those tests where there's a lower, remedial threshold you can hit and still get to go on to the next grade. That's where you are, Abhi, in the slow track. Let's hope you do better next time." She turns around, opens a menu, hits something, then selects a whole bunch of different checkboxes from a new window and hits the green triangle again. She takes a few slow steps back, eyes fixed on the TV, as the whole screen goes black, and a picture starts filling in slowly in large, low resolution chunks. The picture gains clarity bit by bit. It appears to be a field of dark blue, with purple splotches on it, and tan and pink little cartoon bits here and there.

And then I get it, and I blink over and over. "It's StarCraft."

"Hells yeah, it's StarCraft." She holds her hand up, above her head, and right near me. "Up top! Come on! Fine, whatever. Fifty-five percent, man, fifty-five percent. That's you. This is a damn-near photo quality picture pulled out of the guy's memory, pieced together from the most advanced compression slash encryption that you could ever imagine, man! His head is filled with them, too. It seems like all the guy ever did was smoke weed and play StarCraft, but that's beside the point. This thing is _unprecedented_. It's _insane_ that we're looking at this. How are you not peeing in your pants? I'm standing in a puddle right now, and I already saw one of these like half an hour ago."

In truth, I am speechless. My mouth is dry as I stare up at a near-perfect recreation of a screenshot from the game. There are blurs where the units should be, the information is probably much harder to piece together for motion, but the buildings look exactly as I remember them. Pastore was, evidently, a Zerg player. My hand reaches out to grab hold of a chair, but there's nothing in the immediate vicinity to sit on. Finally, at a loss for what else to do, I start stammering.

"This is, I mean, thank you, this is incredible. I can't believe we can get that far. The ramifications of this technology, I mean, for law enforcement, or forensics, and especially _medically_ speaking, the applications are almost endless. Alzheimer's research alone could leap forward decades with this." No it couldn't, because we don't research Alzheimer's and we don't share. "No. I can't believe this is being wasted here. That we're just using it to...."

The words fall out of my mouth and shatter on the floor, and Megan's staring at me, her eyes as wide as mine must be. Maybe she's realizing, right along with me, that this isn't amazing, this is somewhere between a horrible shame and an unthinkable crime. This is exactly the wrong place for this technology to be born. I think I'm going to throw up. As carefully as I possibly can, I bring a hand up to cover my mouth, and speak in a slow and quiet voice, trying not to let out anything that should stay inside. "This is really incredible. Thank you for showing me. If you'll excuse me, I think I have to go back to work now."

For the rest of the day I imagine the horrors of the near future, when they'll close people off from their pasts with impunity and import our artificial memories to replace them. In my mind they're well on their way to creating an army that doesn't even know it's an army. I get so caught up in the worst case scenarios in my head that I fail to notice when five o'clock comes, and I miss five fifteen much the same. Eventually Debbie walks by, carrying her coat, and reminds me to turn off the printer and the lights before I leave. It's after six now, and I'm the only one in the office other than the guards. The trance ended, I pack up for the day, turn off my computer and run through the energy conservation worksheet.

Once that's complete I decide to head straight to Candace's rather than stop at home, or bother to call ahead. We're scheduled to meet tonight—I think—and I'm late enough that it's not as if I'll be barging in too early. The walk isn't long, I'm going at a pretty good pace and can get there in fifteen minutes, and when I arrive I hit the button to buzz her apartment. It only takes her a second to answer.

"Hello?"

"Hey. Sorry I'm late. Buzz me up?"

"I think you have the wrong apartment, this is...."

Another, much gravellier, female voice cuts her off. "Hey! I know that voice. Abhi, what the hell are you doing here?"

I can hear her starting to grumble something as she releases the button, silencing herself.

Megan is up there, in her apartment, where I'm supposed to be, and my cover is blown immediately. What the hell does she want with Megan? And why would Megan be interested in helping her? I was sure she was a sociopath. Not that she's necessarily in this for the same reasons I am. I mean, at first, I was in it for a _date_. It occurs to me Megan could be too, now that I think of it. I don't actually know how Candace...I don't know. My brain is a blur now, but I've got to say something now. Or I suppose I could just walk away and pretend this never happened. That's the only thing I can think of.

"I'm sorry for interrupting. I'll call tomorrow."

This time Megan's the one that hits the button, like Candace has washed her hands of the situation completely. "No, wait! Abhi, you've got to come up. This is perfect, this is seriously exactly what we need."

The lock buzzes open, presumably it's Megan letting me in against the apartment owner's wishes, but I only hesitate for a second before going up. How long has she been on board? How many others are there? It seems as if every time I'm not with her, Candace is working with one of my coworkers instead. There's some weird knot in my stomach, and my enthusiasm for the cause is missing, like Megan being here means that we must not be doing the right thing. I knock on the door when I get to the right floor, and Candace lets me in. Megan is sitting at the kitchen table, leaning forward on her crossed arms, and looking over at me with a big grin on her face. It's starting to look like that expression is permanent.

"Never thought you'd have the guts to join the rebellion. Especially since that cluster you bought is—wait for it—Abhi- _mazing_. Should have known, though, when you had that little conniption today. Way to play both sides of the fence, bro."

I close the door behind me, sigh, and look at Candace rather than Megan. "It had to be her, of all people? You couldn't find anyone else?"

She rolls her eyes at me and walks back over to the table. "It's none of your business who I've found and who I haven't. She just happens to be here right now, when you show up unannounced. There's a reason you're supposed to call ahead, Abhi."

Megan leans back, still grinning like a fool. "Oh snap, you're in trouble, man. Calling ahead is, like, the first rule. You're new to this, aren't you?" She looks at Candace, her tone changing substantially. "He's new, isn't he?"

"Never mind." She sounds almost annoyed enough to satisfy me. "Megan, this is Abhi, Abhi, this is Megan. Obviously you know each other already, but I wholeheartedly _do not care_ about your relationship before today. You two need to figure out how this works going forward."

Scratching her face in an odd, compulsive way, Megan starts talking to a space on the wall above Candace's head. "I'm noodling something right now. It's only, like, twelve percent of an idea, but this is really probably perfect. We've got the MRI, right? We've got all those brain scans from the Berserker, right? I can dig images out of the guy's brain all day and no one will say a word, but there's so much in there I'm not going to have any idea where to look for something worthwhile. So far it's picture after picture from video games, and one that I'm pretty sure was porn. I can send you that one, Abhi. I can tell you're interested."

It's disturbing how much intelligence, and competence, is buried under that crusty, grating exterior. She has an excellent train of thought going, when she's not making off-color comments, and I pick it up where she trails off.

"You're right." An unfortunate start, so I pretend it never happened. "I can show you exactly where to look, the locations most affected by the delivery of the Primer, the formative experiences. We can get pictures of what happened, the dialogue as best he can remember it. That's some measure of proof, at least. We'll see how the Primer got in there."

Candace is sitting there silently, hands folded in her lap, frowning and looking down. When she starts talking over me it's very quiet, enough that I barely notice she's speaking, and only stop after I've missed the first few words already. "Find Nathan Werner in there. I want to know exactly how in-control he is, I want to see what his behavior looks like, and I want to see if he's the one spreading this. I want to know why the killed Gilbert Stevenson, but left him alive. Pastore must know something. Everything starts with him."

The conversation dies right there, and stays dead for a long time. The three of us all seem to be off on our own tangents, thinking about what we could see tomorrow. It seems so ridiculous that we didn't collaborate before, provided we can actually trust Megan not to turn everything over the second she has a chance. I alternate between being excited about breaking this open and being absolutely sure that we're going to get caught tomorrow. We'll either save the day or go to prison. Or be murdered, I suppose. They could always have us murdered. A few feet away, the kitchen tap is dripping every four seconds; the noise is driving me crazy.

First thing the next morning, Megan devises some pretense to send me a meeting request that blocks my calendar out for three hours. I can spend most of the morning in the lab without concerning anyone; it makes sense given my role in the Primer, so I don't hesitate to accept it. I consider letting Debbie know where I'll be, but our relationship has become a silent one since she gave me the grave warning, and I'm not inclined to be the bigger person now that I've proved her suspicions right. My coat is draped over my chair, my screen is locked, and I'm off to the storage lab to see what I can find.

Megan has the door locked when I arrive, and puts me through some rigmarole about a secret knock, which I never would have agreed to in the first place, before letting me in and locking the door behind me. The large screen is split between four different MRI images from John Pastore's brain, and without saying much of anything I sit myself down at the PC to have a closer look. My obnoxious new partner does everything she can to distract me while I try to find the appropriate memories. It's a slow process even without her explaining everything that's happened on the Internet in the last twenty-four hours, like instead of sleeping she just memorizes everything people add to Reddit. With the distraction it's downright infuriating, and I have to keep telling myself silently that this might be the only day I'll have to work so closely with her. Once we find the memory we can end our relationship.

After a few false starts, two of which bring up more images of StarCraft, I manage to locate a particularly promising memory. Using the options Megan showed me on the first couple tries, I start the image rendering process, lean back in the chair, fold my hands behind my head, and roll backwards several feet. "I think I've got it this time."

She looks up at the screen, which is a large grey field with a few vaguely flesh toned blocks on it so far, and squints. "You're sure it's not going to be, like, a bar mitzvah or something? That's a lot of faces."

The image slowly renders, and the hard drive and fans on the workstation spin violently, trying to keep up the effort. There's a pounding on the door. The pounding pauses, long enough for me to shoot Megan a panicked look and for her to force a relaxed expression, then another set of pounding. And a muffled woman's voice.

"Abhi? Is Abhi in there?"

Why on earth would Debbie be looking for me _now_? I didn't have anything with her this morning. On the screen, it looks like the grey field is a wall of concrete blocks. There's a brown line almost bisecting the picture, too, and it's all starting to come into focus. My brain keeps telling my hands to do something with the keyboard, but I can't form a clear enough thought to determine _what_. Megan has crossed the room during my hesitation, waited through one more round of pounding, and opened the door just wide enough to stick her face through. Dear God, this is where it happens. This is where she turns me in.

"Hey! Hi, Debra, right? Megan. We actually met a couple times. Sorry I've got your boy sequestered in here for the morning, we're just finally turning the corner on memory visualization, and I need that genius brain of his to finish the job. I promise I'll give him back in one piece."

So Megan is better able to deceive on short notice than I am, which I suppose isn't a high bar to clear. I can see Debbie's hand on the edge of the door, like she's going to force it open, and Megan kind of steadies her own hand on the other side, ready to slam it shut if she tries. Her voice isn't raised any more, she doesn't have to yell through a door, but she definitely sounds aggravated.

"Abhi. I need you to come over here immediately."

The fact that she called right through Megan without so much as acknowledging her presence is likely not a good sign. There are a couple almost recognizable human faces up on the screen now, one of them appears to be bleeding from a wound right over his eye, and I can't help but feel like I _know_ that face. It's too early to tell, so I need to keep her out of the room. I hit Ctrl and P to bring up the printer menu, but don't send the print job yet. Hopefully Megan takes the hint. Then I get out of the chair and walk over.

"Debbie. Sorry, I meant to tell you where I'd be this morning, but your door was closed, I didn't want to disturb you after.... It will only be a little while longer, I promise." As I speak, Megan clears out of the way and I take over blocking the door.

Her face is agitated, angry probably wouldn't be the right word, but she's looking more into my chest than my eyes. "I've been looking for you for over an hour, Abhi. We were _supposed_ to attend a briefing for the 005 Primer at nine thirty. It's nine forty-seven."

I sigh in relief. Then my heart stops, because I just sighed in relief right in front of her like the biggest idiot in the world. Her eyes widen, as I'm sure mine do, and before I can react Debbie shoves the door the rest of the way open and turns her head to point right up at the giant display. The picture is hanging there, almost fully rendered, three of the 002s in the Asia building at Hamlin, one of them wounded above the eye. Nathan Werner's face is there, as clear as day near the left hand edge of the screen. He appears to be holding a stick, and there's another man there I don't recognize. The print menu is sitting in the middle of the screen, blocking out a chunk of the picture. We stand there frozen, while Megan rushes across the room. She slides to a stop in front of the computer and clicks something, possibly the button to send the screen to the printer.

Half out of breath and still clearly frazzled, Megan is the only one in the room who's able to muster the capacity to speak. "Look at that, we finally got a successful test. That's great news, kids." She closes the window while speaking, banishing the image from view clumsily, even though it's been too late for quite a while. "I guess we can stick a fork in today, right? Sorry I kept him from the meeting thing, and you too, but this was big. This was a big deal."

"I know what this was." She turns right towards me, closing the short distance between us and holding a finger up near my face. "The Pastore files were closed to you for a reason. What are you _looking for_?"

My mind is a complete blank; I can't find the concentration to do anything more than wonder why the people in that memory are holding sticks. I take half a step back and sputter. "Debbie, I don't understand. I wasn't looking for _anything_."

Her eyes wide and unblinking, Debbie follows my step with one of her own. "Bullshit. Do you honestly think I don't know what I just saw? What happened that night is being closely guarded for a reason."

Fully composed, breathing much more normally than I can, Megan interrupts, her voice raised slightly. "Hey, hey, calm it down, Debra. I'm getting the sense there's been a misunderstanding here, and it's probably my fault. I didn't know Abhi wasn't supposed to see the Pastore files. I'm still allowed to look at them, and quite frankly, they're the only decent brain scans I have." She's got one hand on her chest, over her heart, and the other is reaching towards Debbie as she walks over. "I needed Abhi's help to finish this part of the project off, to finally pull a real image out of a person's brain, and to be honest I never even considered for a second that we might see something classified. I don't deal in State secrets, Debra, I'm a techie. Again, I'm really sorry, I've clearly overstepped my bounds here, but you shouldn't be yelling at Abhi. He was just helping me out, he didn't even know where these scans came from."

The tension in Debbie's entire body seems to wane somewhat, and her eyes dart back and forth while looking at the ground, like she's reading something that was written there. The hard edge has melted out of her voice. "Is that true, Abhi?"

With both of them looking at me, and my mind shouting at me over and over that I'm about to ruin the most impressive lie I've ever witnessed, I manage to form a response of nine coherent words. "Yes. I'm so confused I can't even tell you."

She nods and chews a bit on her bottom lip. "Right. I'm very sorry I let my temper get the better of me, these deadlines have put me on edge, and the last hour hasn't helped." She looks over at the screen, which just shows an MRI, Pastore's name isn't even written on it. "You two finish up here, I'll see if we can get a recap of the briefing set up for this afternoon. Please be more available in the future, Abhi. Things are moving at a breakneck pace these days."

We exchange goodbyes, and my manager leaves the room. Megan walks over and closes the door behind her, making sure to lock it, then heads back to the printer to pull out the almost photo quality screen shot from inside Pastore's mind. I take a long, shuddering breath, my vision is going all blurry. I can smell the toner, all the dust in the air, and the fluorescent lights are flickering slower and slower. I try to say something to Megan, to let her know what's about to happen, but I have no idea what sound actually comes out. My legs fall out from under me.

The rest of the day is a blur. Debbie never comes back about that briefing, and I spend most of my time just staring at the screen like everything on it is written in a language I don't know. At exactly five, Megan appears at my desk, tapping hard on the cubicle wall and sending a jolt through my body. I look up at her, confused, and she nods, like we share some kind of deep understanding, when I'm barely sure I know my own name.

Eventually she pulls up on the shoulder of my shirt and starts walking towards the door, calling out, "Come on, Akbar, she's expecting us!" as she goes.

I stare, uncomprehending, as she walks away. It's not until she's out of the room that I manage to pull myself out of the chair, grab my coffee cup, and head for the door. I'm beginning to wonder if this was an actual panic episode, or if I had some kind of seizure and am in need of medical attention. The thought occupies my mind for the whole walk to the security checkpoint, and I never catch up to Megan. The guard on duty asks me to step out of the line and empty my pockets on the shining metal table. If I wasn't already in a daze this random search would set me off again, but as it is I react as if I'm in slow motion. This doesn't feel real.

I probably look like I've been drinking as I pull out my wallet, keys, and contact case and put them on the table. Megan is nowhere to be seen, and I suddenly need to speak to her very urgently. I don't have the picture on me, at least I don't think I do, but doubt creeps in while the guard pats me down carefully. So much of the day is hazy in my mind, I wouldn't put it past myself. And I have to wonder if my partner in crime has the picture, if she was searched too, and if she's already been detained for questioning or execution.

"Thank you, sir. You can take your things and proceed through the far right turnstile."

The guard's voice makes me jump—I'd forgotten he was there—then I put my stuff away and start walking again. Megan isn't waiting for me right outside the door, nor at the entrance to the parking lot, nor anywhere on the path to Candace's apartment. She disappeared so quickly I'm convinced they pulled her out of the line and sequestered her for interrogation. Possession of a picture. I wonder how they'd react to something like that. Prison, at least. When I arrive at the building I mash the buzzer clumsily with my shaking, sweating right hand, and Candace lets me in without saying a word. I take the stairs two at a time, moving quickly for the first time in hours, and find the door closed but unlocked. I feel like I should announce Megan's detention, and the loss of the picture, before she can so much as greet me.

But she's standing there, by the computer, leaning over her to see the screen. I can see the picture from the doorway, irregular and bumpy from being folded in half over and over, resting on the desk between them. The fear dissipates some. I've allowed myself to forget just how clumsy and disorganized my employers are without Director Hall. Even if they suspect foul play they'll spend a week or two tripping over themselves before they act on it. The thought doesn't put me at ease, but it helps.

Candace points to the screen, at something blocked from my view. "Could that be him?" She turns her head part of the way around, not enough to actually look at me but enough to give me the idea. "Come over here. Tell me if you think this looks like the same guy."

Megan is shaking her head while I'm walking across the room. "The guy is too generic looking, there's no way to know without a better picture. Find his Facebook page or something."

"This picture is the same as his profile picture. I've got the girlfriend's up...."

The screen flashes from window to window as I arrive, and I find myself looking down at the essentially crumpled printout. I felt like we'd let it render better than this, this one looks all blurry and grainy. Megan's got the pointer finger of her right hand resting just below the face of one of the figures, the guy holding two sticks who isn't John Pastore or Nathan Werner. Candace has a Facebook photo gallery up by now, refined to pictures tagged "Jeff Truax," and it looks like there are a whole bunch of them. He looks like kind of a big guy, brown hair cut short, no obviously distinguishing features. We're all looking back and forth from the blurry piece of paper to shot after shot of this guy. I suppose it's possible that they're the same person, but I really can't tell from this. He could be anyone. So I ask the obvious question.

"Why are we looking at this person specifically?"

Still clicking through the gallery, pausing for several seconds on each picture to compare, Candace's voice sounds distant and annoyed. "He's been on my list for a couple months. Same High School graduating class as Werner and Pastore, shared a house with both of them right before Werner was drafted. He's got an arrest on his record too, for aggravated assault; I found it in a police blotter. It's not the rampage John went on, but it's not nothing."

"I kind of hope it _is_ this guy." Megan is clearly not taking this as seriously as the rest of us. She sounds like she's about to laugh. "What a hottie!"

"Your list?" Something catches my eye while I'm trying to ignore Megan. I lean forward and stick my hand close to the screen. "Go back one."

Candace abides.

The lighting is terrible, it's a picture at a winter bonfire from the look of it, the only light is red and the ground is a kind of glowing pink. Truax is standing a few feet from the fire, with no shirt on, and he's in this strange arched-back pose like a comic book hero or a professional wrestler, flexing every muscle that's readily visible and holding his mouth wide open like he's screaming. Even in the terrible lighting I can make out darkened trails all over his torso, blood vessels carrying an unnatural cocktail of hormones all over his body, just like they do on our volunteers when the fight or flight response is triggered. The effect is subtle, so hard to see in the dull light that I have to squint for a long time to make sure my eyes aren't playing tricks on me. I take a step back and clap my hands together once.

"That's the guy. He has absolutely received a Primer." The importance of what I'm seeing starts to sink in. This man is waiting to become a second Baltimore Berserker, but he's twice John Pastore's size and he already, apparently, has a history of violence. "He's dangerous. There's really no telling what could set him off."

Megan picks up the picture, looking from it to the image on the screen, and back and forth, trying to find the resemblance that's made me so sure. The humor appears to be gone now. "We need to get a look at his brain, see how this happened to him, if it really did. He's made it this long living in the public domain, with just the one piddly little assault. We can talk to the guy."

I'm supposed to be somewhere. My hands pull themselves into my chest. "Oh no. I'm meeting Art." I pat my pockets, no cell phone. Never picked it up after work. "Candace. I need you to call him, get him to come here."

She turns all the way away from the computer for the first time. "Abhi, I don't think that's a good idea. We're supposed to keep you _separate. _It's bad enough you just outed him. If he knows you two know...."

I cut her off, my voice raised in an unfamiliar way. "He's in, right? You can't tell me he's not in. He set you up with the guard—you know the one. I know he did." I try to move on quickly. "He's in, we're in, and this is an all hands on deck situation. Let's dispense with the makeshift security measures, our necks are all about to be stuck out about as far as they'll reach if we're going to hunt down Truax. Please, Candace, call Art and let him know I'd like to have our talk here, not the bar." The fog is gone from my mind.

Candace pulls up the number in her phone, the contact doesn't have a name written on it. Another of her security measures, I guess. She passes it over to me, pressing send at the same time, and I put the thing up to my ear even though I wasn't really expecting to be the one to do the talking. That's okay, nothing crazy is going on, I'm in control. Deep breaths. The phone rings twice before he picks up.

"Didn't expect to hear from you today."

It takes me a second to remember how to talk. "Art, it's Abhi. I'm at Candace's apartment, and I'd like to move the talk we were going to have here."

"Don't say names on this line. That doesn't sound like a good idea to me, son. She's a civilian; I know she has beef with the program, but that doesn't mean you can talk about this kind of thing in front of her. There are certain, invisible, lines that you just can't cross."

I hadn't anticipated needing to sell the idea to him. In my mind this was very cut-and-dried. But I can handle this, my brain is working things out, solving the problems on its own before I consciously choose to. "The invisible lines have already been crossed, and she's more involved than you realize. Me...." Don't say any names on the line. "We've got someone else here too. We need you to come, if only to confirm the identity of the person driving the second panel van."

He coughs into the receiver. There's a long quiet period on the phone, I can hear swallowing. Like he's drinking his entire beer before he finally answers. "Jesus, kid, you don't pull any punches. You've got to be subtler on an open line, you know." He follows that with another long pause. "Let's stop talking before you implicate all of us in something any more than you already have. I'll finish my damn beer, and then I'll join your little party. I hope you and Candy Girl know what you're doing."

We exchange goodbyes and end the call, then I hand the phone back to Candace, all the while turning something Art said over in my mind again and again. "Candy Girl? Seriously?"

She pockets the phone, rolling her eyes and sighing. "He has a daughter in her twenties that he rarely gets to see since the move. I simply appealed to his paternal instincts. Not everyone can be seduced, Abhi. Or should be."

I've succeeded in making the situation exponentially more awkward, and harming my self-esteem at the same time, so I let the subject drop. We turn to finding out what we can about Jeff Truax beyond what Candace already has in her file. He works at a sports nutrition store in a mall in the Baltimore area, not too far away, but not too close either. He doesn't seem to have a current address, or perhaps he lives with his girlfriend. His hobbies include drinking and working out, working out while drinking, and amateur mixed martial arts, which all seem like incredibly irresponsible things for a person with altered brain chemistry and a hyper-developed sense of aggression to do with his free time. I'm beginning to think Nathan Werner would be safer to confront.

Art eventually arrives, and Candace buzzes him up, and we make our way through the quick and awkward small talk phase of the encounter as fast as we can, complete with Art displaying exactly as much distrust for Megan as I would expect from a sane person. When the conversation hits an expected lull I take things over. My mind is clear, and the words flow out almost exactly like I hear them in my head.

"We're out to catch the SSPO, or whatever it's called now, on some massive human rights violations, and get real, solid proof. I'm guessing you know that none of our volunteers are actual volunteers—that alone is enough—but we have reason to believe the administration has allowed unstudied, unpredictable and _Primed_ subjects out into the public domain. Not just the Baltimore Berserker, but one of the 001s, Nathan Werner, and a man we've just discovered, Jeffrey Truax, who we believe was driving the second panel van."

"Hold on now, son." He looks from side to side, at Candace and Megan, before locking his eyes on me. "You're sure you want to have this conversation? You're sure about everyone in this room, even this joker?"

He's looking at me like I'm the authority. So I speak authoritatively. "Megan is solid. Candace is solid. I'm not afraid to talk about anything in front of them."

He gives a tiny nod, takes a step back, and adjusts his belt, then opens his mouth to say something, stops, strokes his mustache once or twice, shakes his head, and starts in. "I like what you've got so far, but if that's _all_ you've got you're in a sorry state to get anything done."

Sure, that's something like constructive criticism. I'm on something of a high at this point, speaking to these people without needing to carefully plan out my words ahead of time, not pausing to criticize myself or second guess every disclosure. This feels amazingly natural. This feels like _work_ used to. "We don't have anything physical, any real substantive proof, that's the problem we're out to solve here. These things can't simply happen without leaving a trail, and that starts with the package you wrote, you know the one I'm talking about. It proves that some part of this organization knows Werner was successfully Primed, they know he's a danger to the public, and they're doing nothing about it. That's the single biggest weakness I can see, along with some means of proving the volunteers aren't volunteers beyond the little bit we've already got."

Art's been listening to me this whole time, stroking his mustache and shaking his head as years of conspiracy theories and miniature interrogations line themselves up in there. "Documents that prove volunteers are actually slave labor aren't exactly publicly available. Maybe at the Selective Service System, but I don't have an in there. Public shaming is the right angle to take; the only thing they're scared of is people seeing what they're doing, that's the whole damn point of having a democracy, so to speak. But I've got something a damn sight better than Nate Werner to do it with. I talked to two men in the Bureau, known them since college, who tell me our bosses are shitting their britches right now. They're in one hundred percent panic mode."

"Can you drop the theatrics?" Megan flops down on the couch. "We get that you're the king of conspiracies. Are you going to share, or should we start guessing?"

Art sighs hard; it's obvious how much he likes being the one to make the big reveal, and Megan has this way of sucking the life out of it. Still, that shouldn't matter. "That night, you know the night I'm talking about, we had almost two dozen active 002 series test subjects go missing. Now, I'm assuming our friend Ms. Kensington has shared Werner's role in tearing Hamlin to pieces that night. Homeland Security, the FBI, the NSA, they're operating under the assumption that Werner kidnapped every last 002—they know about the rented vans just as well as we do—and they're scrambling to find them. You find those crazy bastards first and put one in front of a camera, or you find proof that they're at large to begin with, and you've got these people by the balls."

And there it is, everything makes sense. I slap the wall next to me, just to feel the solid surface on my hand. "That's why they're following Werner. I mean, really, that's why he's still alive. Blackmail." My God, though, that's a ridiculous plan. Why on earth would anyone _try_ something like that? How would anyone kidnap two dozen superhuman maniacs? He has to be working for someone else. "He's the one who's Priming people. That doesn't even make _sense_ , but there's no other way—I mean, he lived with them. How would he even _do_ it? He doesn't even have a degree, let alone the equipment. He's spreading the Primer, made his friends into Alphas, for lack of a better term, and got them to help with the kidnapping. It's all the more reason to try to talk to Truax, though. He's one of the only people in the world who might know where the subjects are." Complication after complication arises in my head, questions that I answer and then forget all in one incredibly fast chain of thoughts. It's exactly like working on the brain at its best, but logistics instead of chemistry.

"Debbie's going to share the memory visualization news with everyone, if she hasn't already, and they must know Pastore was at Hamlin. They're going to mine his memories; that may be what they were looking for all along. Megan, you're the gatekeeper there, the only one who can stand in their way. Pretend you're helping but _please_ don't find anything. Nothing about Werner, nothing about Truax, nothing about the 002s. Get in _early_ , like five AM, and do whatever you can to slow down or misdirect their search."

Megan's staring at Candace rather than me, and after I follow her eyes there I'm self-conscious for the first time in the whole meeting. It's like the spell has been broken. "Man, wow. You must have had _so much coffee_ since work. You were basically asleep last I saw you. You can tell the truth, Abhi: are you on speed right now? Do you have a drug problem? Do we need an intervention?"

I'm unable to respond eloquently. The version of me that was talking a mile-a-minute is missing. "I'm _trying,_ Megan. Please."

"Relax, man. I can do the 'I'm bad at my job' act for a while, I learned how from your masterful display. I can't stall forever, though."

Apparently sensing that my capacity for running an underground syndicate has been exhausted, Candace takes over the conversation. "You won't have to. We're going to move, either on Truax or Werner, as soon as possible. We'll make them understand what's going on, I'm guessing they already know to some extent, and we'll get them to show us the 002s."

I can still see Werner in my head, the muscles in his arms and neck tensed. He's waiting for a confrontation. "Don't try to talk to Werner. He's being watched and he knows it. There's a chance, at least for now, that they don't know who Truax _is_. He also might not be nearly as dangerous; the secondary Primer is comparatively crude. I mean, no matter how you look at it, there's no way of knowing—he could, _anything_ could trigger the Primer, we don't even understand."

She walks over and puts a hand on my shoulder, stopping the circle that could have gone on forever. "We've got it. We'll be careful, but we have to be fast. Those two are our only chance." There's not much left to do from there. We discuss and dissect the small semblance of a plan we have so far for an hour more, then everyone goes their separate ways. It's going to be difficult to sleep.

It's just after seven in the morning. I've been essentially staring at my inbox since I arrived, unable to accomplish anything, because I'm convinced the plan has been given away somehow. An email pops up, from Megan, which is probably the last warning I'll get before everything collapses. I look around, realize looking around probably looks more suspicious than not looking around, take a deep breath, and open the email.

"Hey, buddy. It looks like I'm going to be shut up in the lab for a while, some dudes need me to check on a thing for them. Don't know yet if they'll be impressed or disappointed. Don't wait up for me, we'll catch up on the weekend. Everything is cool."

I look around again, sure someone is standing over my shoulder, then delete the email when I confirm I'm alone. And then I realize I should read it more closely, in case she's embedded any clues as to her condition that I missed. And then, after I restore it and read it a few more times, I start making up code words and phrases that we _should_ have planned to use ahead of time for exactly this type of scenario, since it was clear yesterday that this was exactly what would happen. I delete the email again, permanently this time. Impressed or disappointed? What on earth does that mean? I hate Megan.

The day progresses very, very slowly from there, as I spend most of my time convincing myself not to find excuses to walk back and forth in front of the door of the Storage lab, because that would be obvious and suspicious and exactly the wrong thing to do. At some point during this everlasting nothingness I receive a meeting request from Debbie—a retread of the one I missed yesterday, the briefing on the 005s, but this time it's scheduled to be down in the basement. In the facility they built just for the subjects. I don't think I even have access to that part of the facility, but Debbie added a note saying she'll walk me down when the time comes. The meeting isn't until the afternoon, and we're the only people on it.

I stew my way through the rest of my morning, and through lunch, and eventually Debbie arrives at my desk, holding a badge with no picture. My name is printed on it, along with today's date where my photo should be, and all up and down each side are purple and black stripes. I've never seen purple stripes in the facility. She hands it to me, and I catch sight of the matching one she has on, hanging in an extra clip off of her main one. Without the luxury of a second clip, I slide mine onto the back of my other badge.

"Are you ready?" Her face is pinched, like she just ate something sour.

I nod in affirmation. "I suppose so. Have you been down there before?"

Without answering, she turns and walks out of the office, not even waving for me to follow. I make the assumption that I should and find her in the hallway right near the door that leads to the checkpoint, at a door that used to be unlabeled, which is now tagged with purple stripes. She swipes her second badge, the door beeps in the affirmative, and we both enter and go down a floor. At the bottom, she swipes again to get out of the stairwell, and opens the door into the lower floor.

Directly in front of us is a single long pathway, with a purple stripe running the length of it, which leads all the way to the far end of the building. On either side, the walls are made of huge panels of thick glass. There are a number of unmarked doors along the backs of those long rooms, and there are two sets of glass doors with badge scanners on them, one on each of the transparent walls. Inside the glass rooms are soldiers standing at attention, each at the foot of an immaculately made bed, though there are a few empty spots at the near end of each room. For expansion, I assume. On my left, about two dozen men, all with crew cuts and wearing identical sets of grey sweatpants and t-shirts, standing with their hands folded behind their backs, with their eyes locked on something invisible. In the room on my right there are two dozen women, dressed the same as the men, and at attention in exactly the same way. There isn't so much as a flinch amongst them, even when the heavy door behind me slams shut.

A man comes from around the corner at the end of the hallway, from a room beyond the end of the glass ones that I couldn't tell was there, and starts walking towards us. He's big, broad shouldered, wearing a full suit and has his black hair cut exactly like the volunteers, but shining with gel. He's no one I recognize, and his badge is turned back towards his stomach. He stops by the set of doors closest to us and waves for us to come over, it looks like this meeting will just be the three of us. His smile is huge and toothy, his teeth so perfect they might be false. I leave my spot by the door first, and I can tell by the shadows that Debbie follows shortly thereafter. He starts talking just before I pull even with the door.

"It's a pleasure to meet you. Your extracurriculars yesterday worked out better than expected, didn't they?" His voice is deep and loud, and sounds like it's echoing around in the glass hallway. It makes me swallow despite myself. "Since you missed the last meeting, you've secured some special treatment. A sneak preview."

I follow his eyes, over towards the subjects on my left, who still haven't moved. I'm unsure of what I can say in this situation, I feel like any words out of my mouth will just implicate me in something, but my fear will become too obvious if I don't say anything at all. "Sir? I don't believe you told me your name."

He waves a hand. "Pretend I don't have one. I want to know what you think of the new crop of volunteers."

There's something subtly intimidating about the way he's speaking, like he's emphasizing every few words in an unnatural way. I imagine myself taking a deep breath, because to actually take a deep breath would look suspicious. "They're not what I expected. I thought they would be civilians again."

"But they are." The huge, shining smile on his face seems to hold some secret malice to it as he raps on the glass with his knuckles. The hollow thunk echoes through the room, but still the subjects don't budge. "Almost fifty volunteers, in peak physical and mental condition, and not a single day of military experience between them." That doesn't make sense. Regular people don't just stand still like this, for this long, certainly not this many. There should be a sneeze by now at least, or a nervous tick of some kind, but there's been nothing. "I believe you'll find this group takes things more seriously than the last few. That's a reflection of how we view this project now. The days of idle research and experimentation are over."

He casually tosses aside years of work by dozens of highly intelligent, dedicated people like they're nothing. It's the voice of a man who writes unreasonable parameters, requirements with no connection to reality, and expects everyone below him to break their own necks rather than disappoint him. The realization distracts me, but I don't miss the obvious.

"They're already been Primed, sir? That's unprecedented—we've never laid a Primer on top of a Primer before. The results could be, well, they _will_ be unpredictable, but they _could_ be dangerous. And this information would be _key_ for us to consider while developing the next package. I'm afraid I don't understand." I want to stop speaking, but can't manage it voluntarily. Luckily for me, when he interrupts the muscles in my throat essentially seize up, making talking over him almost physically impossible.

"Relax. They haven't been Primed. We've only temporarily reduced their willingness to make decisions on their own, making them more open to suggestions. It's a trick my Nevada team picked up from some of your work, as a matter of fact. Drug free, reversible, with no lasting side effects."

His Nevada team. There's yet another group working on the same basic set of technology. How many more of us could there be? How many more subjects? I can't ask those questions, though, so I choose to make an observation instead. "This is the largest group we've ever worked with."

He leans in, close to the glass, smiling at the statue-like people on the inside. "Is it? We must have had a particularly enthusiastic crop of volunteers. It seems as if there's room in there for a few more, if you know anyone who could benefit."

I try to stow all of the paranoia, all of the suspicions away for later, when feeling them won't mean the end of my life. But he's definitely trying to intimidate me, I'm sure of that. There's no reason for him to stand so close and smile so wide if this isn't a show. But what does he have to gain by scaring me? Why not just fire me? Or lock me up or kill me, for that matter. I'm not supposed to be thinking about this right now, he can see me thinking about this, and I need to say something to end the pause. Anything. "I'll keep that in mind." I'll keep that in mind? What on earth would be the point of that? "Not that, I mean, I'm going to go ask people the volunteer, that doesn't seem appropriate. Just, I'm not sure how to respond to that."

He slaps me on the back suddenly, hard enough to knock me forward a step, but still smiling. "Try to relax. This is an exciting time: we're taking Director Hall's vision to levels he never imagined. He was a great man, a brilliant man, but his grasp of the potential of this program was fundamentally limited. He was in his own way, really. We're going to make him very proud, if he's watching from up above. You're going to be a big part of it. I've been following your work for quite some time now, and it's very impressive. Your work on reverse engineering Alpha, in particular, has proven _instrumental_ in moving this program forward."

My fifteen pages of guesswork? I'm not sure what he's trying to convey to me. "Sir? I'm not sure I understand what you mean. There wasn't anything particularly groundbreaking in my write-up...."

"You'd be surprised, but we'll have to talk about that later. I'd love to spend all day here talking with you, I really would, but my responsibilities are, unfortunately, myriad. The relevant data will be made available to you, I'm sure, in the coming days. You're welcome to stay down here as long as you'd like, get to know the subjects, see their quarters, et cetera. You'll find your new badge grants you access through these doors. Don't worry, you're one hundred percent safe in there, they're no more dangerous than trees.

"I'm sure I don't need to stress to you that everything you see down here is to be strictly guarded information. Only a few of your coworkers will ever have a reason to see or know about this floor. Consider this your exposure to the _key_ information to develop the next Primer. Your work to this point has been critical to moving this program forward. I want you to know that. We greatly value the contributions you will continue to make. The date isn't going to move. You will have the Primer ready. These people will be _perfect_. It's been a pleasure meeting you, Abhi. I'm sure we'll speak again soon."

He doesn't wait for me to respond, but turns on the balls of his feet, like a robot, and walks swiftly down to the end of the corridor, to the invisible door at the end of the building. I spend the better part of an hour in the hallway, long after Debbie leaves me alone. The big man never emerges again. When I've had my fill, and I'm sure that these people don't behave like people any longer, I head back upstairs and up to my desk. There's a voicemail waiting for me.

"Abhi." It's Art's voice. "That drink we were going to have? How about tonight?"

"It's not that I don't trust your judgment, it's just that there's a lot to be said for the segmentation of knowledge, especially under present circumstances. The adversary, for one, is using segmentation expertly, specifically to stymie efforts such as ours, and by failing to do the same we are potentially placing ourselves at even more of a tactical disadvantage than the considerable one we already _have_. Especially given the caliber of people you're sharing information with. You get me?"

It's become clear to me that Art is not entirely on board with the hierarchy of our insurrection as I understand it. It's not clear whether he regards me as the leader, or if that's a role he's reserved for himself, but he definitely views Candace as an outsider. I'm guessing he hasn't gotten to know her very well. "They're trustworthy, they've both proved it more than enough. And Candace, I mean, this isn't just a side thing for her, she's poured her _life_ into it. It's the only reason she even lives here."

He leans back on his stool and looks around, just to reconfirm it's only us and the bartender in the place. "Let's cool it with the names, son. You never know. This spot is burned after this conversation, by the way, and I wouldn't talk in that apartment anymore. Every time you reuse a location you compound your risk." How positively Orwellian. "Fact of the matter is that the girl is a kid, and a kid with hurt feelings. She's damn smart and she has her uses, but it doesn't change the fact that her judgment is fundamentally compromised by a desire for revenge. The other one is a snake through and through. She's only with us until it stops being fun, then we're sold up the river, and thanks to that little show yesterday there's not a damn thing any of us can do about it."

I'm beginning to understand that I made a mistake. Not bringing the whole group together; I still believe we'll make progress much faster this way, but trusting Art to be anything other than exactly what he is...that was shortsighted of me. I have no doubt that he has a set of secret reservations about me as well, one that he'll probably share with Candace the next time he sees her. "If the purpose of this meeting was simply to badmouth people then I think we're finished here."

Art starts rotating his empty pint glass on the bar with his thumb and forefinger, staring into the traces of foam the beer left behind on the edges. "We can skip the dramatic parts, I just wanted to make my objections known. Keep it in the back of your mind. The thing I really want to talk about is my transfer. I got word the other day that they're shipping me down to New Mexico, to a whole different lab they've got out there. Said it's that or early retirement, my choice. Didn't give me much time to set my affairs in order, either, but I suppose that's just as well. Living in a hotel makes moving easy.

"The big thing is where they're sending me. I told you before that they chopped the team up into little pieces, didn't I?" He doesn't wait for an answer. "I dug and I prodded and I harassed people for weeks to get a map of where everybody else wound up. Turns out a sizable portion of the veterans from the Delivery teams got sent to a lab in New Mexico. Obviously, nobody was willing to say bupkis about what they're doing there. Since I got news of the transfer I took a couple more shots at the guys I know best down there. Still got mostly stonewalled, but a couple choice nuggets slipped through."

I blink at him several times, wondering how long I'm supposed to allow the dramatic tension to build up before he feels he can reveal these "choice nuggets." My patience winds up breaking before he's satisfied with the suspense. "And?"

"An old friend of ours showed up there a little ways back. In a cage." I stare, uncomprehendingly, at him. "Oh, for crying out loud. Who did we have in a freaking cage that mysteriously disappeared not too long ago? Little guy, just wanted to go home?"

"What do they want with Pastore?"

"Names, son. I'm serious. The same thing they want with the 003 Delivery team. I think they want to make copies."

Why revive that 003 program when we're going full-steam on the 005s? It occurs to me that Art doesn't know what I know, what happened today. So I—very carefully—describe what I saw downstairs. The state of the volunteers, the facility, and the man who wouldn't tell me his name. He watches my eyes the whole time, like he's trying to determine if I'm lying to him. At least this is just about the longest I've ever seen him remain silent. When I'm done he flags the bartender and orders another draft.

"Hard to believe. I've never seen that guy before, and I watch the entrance regularly to account for new employees and visitors. I have detailed notes going back to before we transferred."

That just seems ridiculous to me. "Why have you been watching the entrance longer than we've worked here?"

"Never mind that. The point is the guy either never leaves or he has some alternate means of egress. Or you've come unhinged. There are three more ways into the building that I know of, two fire doors and a cellar access port. If his office is in the back of the building the most likely spot is the cellar port. Wouldn't have to reengineer the fire alarms to use it, either, just stick a decent set of locks and some heavy security doors and there you are. I'll make putting eyes on him top priority next week, think I can set up across the alley at a window. I think that's unclassified office space up there, shouldn't take too much convincing."

Temporarily amazed as I am that he already has a surveillance plan in place, I'm not convinced he's focusing on the right information. "I think the more important thing is how those subjects were acting. He said his Nevada team inhibited their decision making. Said they learned the trick from me."

"Kudos to you, then." The bartender arrives with his replacement beer, and Art pauses for a long time to enjoy the start of it. "Still, dropping bits to you like that: I don't like the smell of it. It feels like a ploy. I don't like what he said about Hall, either. You sure it was 'in his own way'?" He pauses for much less time than it would take to answer the question. "I think this guy's a pro, and I think he wants you on his side. You couldn't get any of the volunteers to say a word to you, though? You try poking them with sticks or anything?"

We've come a long way from the chicken with its head cut off theory, apparently. "They were like mannequins, but I wasn't going to risk provoking twenty-five of them in a locked room. Primed or not."

"Smart, I'd guess, if I didn't want to know just how deep this 'inhibition' runs. Maybe try to get one of them away from the others, I don't know, I'm just spitballing. Do what you can in the time you have, just don't take any crazy risks." He drains the rest of the beer with impressive speed, then puts the glass down hard and leans over towards me, lowering his voice considerably. "I talked to our girl this morning. She's comfortable going up for a visit with the other guy tomorrow. The big one. I'm taking the day off anyways, got lunch with my daughter while she's down from school. After I'm planning to pick her up in the van around four."

Tomorrow, then. My heart rate has jumped by twenty or so, just from thinking about going up to see Truax. How could Candace be comfortable _already?_ These things take careful planning, we should work out the logistics carefully, perhaps make maps, purchase tranquilizer guns or pepper spray or something. But there's speed to worry about too, I suppose. There's no telling how quickly the mysterious 'they' will get through Megan and see a picture of Truax, or find the 002s, or something we haven't even thought of. "You can't go without me. Just wait the extra hour, please. She's going to, I don't know, she won't be careful enough, and this is our only chance. There's no way to know what will set him off. He must have a coping mechanism of some kind that's mostly working, but that's no guarantee of safety."

"You've got it, son. It's dumb of us to all go together, but we already burned that bridge. Don't make me worry about your judgment too, though. This isn't a romance; this is a job. A damned dangerous one."

Perhaps the stress of the last few days has compromised my decision-making, because this afternoon I've decided to take a risk that I normally would never consider. Since I arrived at work today I've been operating under the assumption that the guards are going to close in on me any second, at exactly the same time they subdue Megan, Candace, and Truax, if they haven't already gotten all of them. Art will probably be free until he makes it home from wherever he went with his daughter, I've decided, and these delusions have become indistinguishable from reality. With this in mind, I decided after lunch to use the only thing I have available to make it more difficult for the guards to close in on me: the purple stripe on my badge. So I've gone down a floor to spend my time with forty-eight people who don't seem to be people anymore.

The man from yesterday doesn't look to be around today—off intimidating some other poor soul at some other lab, no doubt—so a heavy silence hangs over the vast open space. I've told myself over and over that these people haven't been Primed, that they're not nearly as dangerous as the volunteers than I'm used to, but that doesn't make their blank stares and rigid posture any less disconcerting. They remind me, somehow, of alligators, standing perfectly still, ready to consume their prey the instant it crosses their lines-of-sight. The documentation hasn't completely assuaged my fears, either. Apparently the inhibition program really is completely reversible; according to the notes they've opened up to me the subjects revert on their own in a week or two if the inhibition isn't reinforced. If it isn't reinforced, though, there's a withdrawal period. A violent withdrawal period. Still, as I remind myself every few minutes, they were reinforced this morning at six AM. The logs show everything was perfectly normal. Even if they never reinforce again I have six days before I'm in any danger.

I'm trying to be cautious anyways. As much as possible. Allowing myself to be sexist in the name of self-preservation, I've chosen to enter the female side of the room, select the least physically imposing volunteer, and bring her over to a room near the far back of the floor for a conversation. In my addled mind I've convinced myself that the sheer size discrepancy will keep me safe, despite hours of 001 and 002 observations that prove otherwise lurking in my memory. They respond to their series numbers—which is convenient, as I still haven't been given any names—and they follow simple orders. I've managed to get 005-014 into the room at the back of the floor and close the door, all without being killed. She's standing next to a chair now—apparently she can't actually decide to sit on her own—and staring through my head, at the back of my skull. I assume she still blinks, but I haven't caught her doing it yet. After a few moments of allowing my heart rate to slow I'm able to sit down myself, and hopefully actually learn something.

"Please, sit down." She sits in the chair; her movements are completely mechanical. It occurs to me that I should have prepared notes, made a list of questions or had some flash cards or something, because my mind is a complete blank. Blank, I mean, other than extremely detailed visions of this woman activating like an 002 and brutally killing me. But I have to start somewhere. "What is your name?"

"005-014."

I allow myself to sigh on the basis that these people are unlikely to be swayed by social cues, then rephrase the question. "Before you were given a series identification number, what name did you use?"

"I've been asked not to say."

Of course she has. Her voice is totally expressionless, as if she's been deprived of all emotion in addition to all volition. If there's actually no Primer involved, no injection of new information into the brain, these people should be very malleable. So I decide to try, in the most confident and forceful voice I can summon. "I am in charge here; my requests supersede those you've heard already. I ask again: will you tell me your name?"

"You're not in charge here."

Of course I'm not. I pretend to write some notes, to reinforce the idea that I'm here as part of the project rather than conducting personal research. I try to say "Very good," like that was a test, but I'm not sure if any sound actually comes out. As I look down at the paper on my clipboard something catches my peripheral vision. They're all standing there, the other twenty-three women are right outside the glass door of this glass room, staring at me with their dead, expressionless eyes. Bile rises up in my throat, and I turn to look behind me at the other chamber. Twenty-four men, in a very similar clustered formation, all staring directly at me. I'm beginning to think that I should leave. As casually as I can muster with a numb set of hands and a suddenly remarkably dry mouth, I lay the clipboard down on my lap and look back at 005-014 as if nothing has changed. She looks exactly the same as a moment before.

"I think that's a good start, but we'll stop here for today. I'll return tomorrow to continue...."

"No."

I had been standing up, but the interruption makes me pause in this half-bent-over posture, clutching the clipboard to my chest. "Excuse me?"

Neither her inflection nor expression has changed at all, she's still sitting bolt upright and staring like a mannequin, but now I'm imagining a hint of menace in 005-014's voice, and I can't make it go away. "You don't work on Saturday."

Right. Of course. So they're still aware of dates, that's something to think about. I finish standing up, mildly reassured, and step towards the door. "You're right, I'd forgotten. You may stand up and exit the room ahead of me. I thank you for your assistance today."

She stands while bending as few joints as possible and walks towards me in slow, uniform steps. I'm holding the door open, and as she passes she addresses me again, more quietly than before. "You should be careful, Abhinav Howell. You're not in charge here."

Then she walks one step out of the door, stops right in front of the other twenty-three volunteers, pivots, and turns back to face me. They're all staring at me, and now that I'm right in front of them it looks like they're blocking my path. This is—I don't know what this is. That man set this up. At least I'll die knowing that I wasn't being paranoid. The fact that we're moving on Truax today is definitely the right decision, there's no time left to delay. I can either barricade myself in the translucent room and wait for the man with no name to come back, or to risk being set upon by two dozen people with altered brain chemistry and a totally unknown set of orders. I stand there for a long time, the door in front of me hanging open because I don't dare reach out and close it.

There's no guarantee that man is even coming back. There's no food and no water in here, no phone either. My heart is pounding so hard I'm not sure I could walk if I tried. I could literally die down here if I try to wait it out. I could die either way, really. But that makes no sense from their perspective, even if they know everything. This is a message. I swallow hard, telling myself that this was specifically designed to scare me over and over. It's working. I can smell the detergent they used to mop the floors, and everything's a bit blurry. I'm going to fall over if I don't do something now, and that seems somehow even riskier than trying to leave.

"Excuse me." There's no reaction. None at all. "If you'll just move to the side, form a path for me so I can get through." Several of them glance down at the floor, but nothing else. I swallow hard, then take a step out of the room, into the tiny space they've left for me there. Still, they don't move. The door behind me slams itself, and I jump a little, bumping into two of them. They don't snap and beat me to death, they don't do anything, as if they're made of stone.

"Right. Sorry. Just, it's, you know, a little close in here. Excuse me please." Then I edge off to the side, walking in tiny, shuffling, sideways steps towards the exit. They make no move to pursue or attack, just stare and do absolutely nothing to accommodate my passage. It seems to take an eternity to cover the ten yards to the door, then I swipe my badge on the reader, the mechanism thinks for an agonizingly long second, and suddenly I'm free. Free to stand in the middle corridor and listen to my heart pound until I can find the strength to go upstairs, sit at my desk, and listen to my heart pound until Candace and Art pick me up at five.

I'm mostly recovered now that I'm sitting in the back of the van, trying not to think about what happened this afternoon. I'm certainly not ready to put the experience into words for my colleagues. They let me slide in and become a silent participant in the ongoing conversation. I stare into the trunk, at the pile of luggage Art has stowed behind me, while they talk. They've been together for more than an hour—perhaps Art's lunch ended early—and have devoted a substantial amount of time to planning out the encounter we're about to have. According to Candace, Truax works until closing tonight, so we should have more than two hours where he's a captive audience.

The plan at this point consists almost entirely of Candace keeping him calm and gaining his trust while we explain the situation. Then, when he's been involuntarily indoctrinated into our resistance, we try to get him to help. There are no contingencies for him refusing to tell us anything, and if he turns hostile our entire escape plan is "run away." There's no way to know ahead of time how much he knows beyond the bare minimum, and we have to be careful not to push too hard, and to make it clear that we are, in spirit, on the same side. We intend to keep him safe. It's not the most impressive sales pitch in the world, but it's all we have. Candace has a lot of practice convincing people to share with her, we have to believe this can be left safely in her hands.

We pull into the mall parking lot before six thirty, but before we're all the way out of the van, Candace's phone goes off. It's not her normal ringer, though, it's this kind of spy music ringer that I've never heard before. She digs a phone I've never _seen_ before—at least the fourth one in her collection—out of her bag, unlocks it, and mutters something under her breath. Art slams the door, looks like he didn't notice her stopping. I lean up between the seats while Candace locks the phone and shoves it back into her bag. So it's private. That's not going to deter me.

"What's going on?"

She sighs and shakes her head. "There's someone in my apartment." Then she unbuckles her seatbelt and gets out of the car as if they're nothing worrisome about that sentence.

Slightly incredulous, I climb out and follow her between the rows of cars. "What do you mean? How do you know?"

Candace doesn't miss a stride, and she doesn't look back. "It's fine. Motion sensor cameras pointed at the door and windows, they text me a photo any time someone enters. Looks like there are three of them, no discernable uniform."

My heart just about explodes, and I rush to catch up with her. This seems like the sort of thing a reasonable person would freak out about. "Shouldn't we call this off? Go back there, or call the police or something?"

"It's fine, really. There's nothing there they don't already know about. My laptop is in the van, all of my phones are on me. Going home now would just mean getting arrested. This happens every so often. I'll just call Megan later to remind her to avoid the apartment, and everything will be fine."

That's provided Megan hasn't been taken prisoner already. I remember something from earlier, something we should have had done by now. "We should have some kind of system to let each other know we're okay. In case we get separated or something."

"Good point." She pulls out another phone, the one she uses for her business, and pulls up her own website. After a few seconds, she seems to find what she was looking for and shows the phone to me. It's the comment section on a long article from last year, part two of a three-part career retrospective on Aerosmith. "If we happen to be separated, leave an anonymous comment here. Make it clear who you are without saying your name, and something to indicate you're okay. They watch my website, but this thread should be obscure enough."

I stare at the URL, forcing myself to memorize it. We should have done this two days ago. Megan should be posting a comment there. I take a deep breath, this all suddenly feels like a heist movie, but all we're doing is trying to have a conversation with a guy. It has to go better than my last conversation. It _has_ to. "Got it." We've arrived at the door, but we're standing outside, waiting there like something more needs to be said. I say the first thing that comes to mind. "Something has been bothering me for a long time. Why didn't you and your brother ever speak? You obviously still care about him."

Her expression is angry, like I just insulted her deeply, but it melts away in a second. "When we were kids he killed our parents. I found him with the bodies." She drops the second phone in her bag with the others, turns, and pulls the door open.

You don't just say something like that and then walk away...but that's exactly what she does. Suddenly we're in the mall—the health food store where Jeffrey works is straight ahead, at the T intersection at the end of a long hallway, giving us plenty of time to watch the place as we approach. Art's waiting there, and I stop next to him to let Candace get a bit of a lead. To make it look like we're not with her. Since she's showing no sign of stopping, even under the circumstances, my choice is to stick to the plan or blow our only shot at not appearing suspicious. After a few seconds I start walking, separating myself a little from Art. That's not actually a part of the plan, but I feel like having three parties operating mostly independently might provide an advantage in the foreseeable future, and neither of my companions seems compelled to argue. She expected people to be in her apartment? Why would they move _now_?

I cross to the other side of the corridor, so I can see Truax's store from a different angle than the other two, and there he is. He's working one of the registers in the back, or maybe he's standing at an information desk, talking to a bald man who's holding a big tub of something. The bald man appears to be agitated, possibly shouting. I pull out my phone, switch it to the camera, and zoom in on them. Jeffrey's upper lip is curled; it might be twitching. He's definitely being berated, and it looks like his blood vessels are showing hints of darkening. He closes his eyes for a few seconds and takes a succession of deep breaths. This is a man that is barely sustaining control. It occurs to me that confronting him, as opposed to Nathan, was a bad decision. Why didn't we even consider talking to Nathan? I rush around the remote control helicopter kiosk and intercept Candace, slipping my phone back in my pocket and grabbing her by the arm. My voice is hushed.

"This is a bad idea. The SSPO is in your apartment. I shouldn't have asked about your brother before; you're probably not thinking clearly. Truax is already agitated. We should call this off for now. This isn't the right time."

She pulls her arm away, giving me a look like I'm the one who's being reckless in this situation. Her voice is without inflection, almost like an 005. "They're probably FBI, actually, and don't worry about them. Focus on the goal here. The guy works five days a week without killing anyone, and you think he's going to suddenly lose his mind just seconds before we walk in the door? The odds are infinitesimal. Just like our chances of finding your 002s without his help. Now go up ahead and look at something in the store before he sees us talking."

I can argue fruitlessly and ruin our cover, further increasing the chances that something terrible will happen, or I can do what she says and hope for the best. The choice is clear: I walk forward with long, quick strides while she slows down a bit, and once we're a couple yards apart I go back to a natural pace, enter the store, and find a display full of fish oil supplements to examine that puts a whole wall of shelving between me and the danger.

My heart won't stop pounding as I imagine a team of FBI agents dusting Candace's apartment, finding my fingerprints everywhere. That, and a child version of Ian Kensington, covered in his parents' blood. This was the dumbest possible time to ask, I've screwed this up badly. I shouldn't have gone downstairs today, either. I've done everything wrong—never calmed all the way down—and set myself up for this. It's getting hard to breathe again, I can smell the fish oil through the bottles and the rubber coating on the weights behind me, and it's making my stomach twist. My eyes close, trying to force the panic down, and I can hear the bald man's passionate tirade against the quality of this particular batch of whey winding down. It occurs to me that Truax is likely fighting a similar sensation.

"Aren't you going to say anything?"

The voice that responds is quiet and measured, as if each syllable is a part of a dam that's threatening to collapse. "I've already given you a full refund, sir. I'm sure the manufacturer would like to hear your feedback, though. Each canister comes with a customer response card, I suggest you fill that out and send it in. Hopefully that will prevent this from happening to anyone else. You never know, they might send you something complimentary for your trouble."

The bald man with the raspy voice mutters something only semi-intelligible in response, and my eyes open to see his shadow turn and walk away. Now I know I've chosen my browsing spot poorly, I'm unable to monitor Truax for circulatory changes, so I start walking towards the end of the shelves between us, away from the register, to loop around and settle in over there. Candace's shadow crosses the store and approaches the counter as I do.

"Jeff? Jeff Truax, is that you?"

There's a pause before he responds, and when he does his voice is much calmer, more natural, and certainly louder than before. He has amazing self-control. "It's entirely possible. You could try asking again, but with a smile." He pauses for a second, I assume waiting for the smile he requested. "Much better. Now, who is this beautiful girl, and how does she know my name?"

She's leaning one elbow on the counter and playing with her hair with the other hand. She starts with a fake laugh, and her voice sounds like it's coming from a different person. "I _knew_ you wouldn't remember me. I'm Candy, I used to have the biggest crush on you in high school. But I was two grades younger, and you were always with that girl back then."

Again he pauses, frowning in thought. "Sorry, I can't call you to mind. But I'll remember you from now on. What can I do for you today, Candy?"

"Okay, I'm going to sound like a total crazy person here, but I wasn't actually surprised to see you just now. I promise I'm not stalking you. I was actually wondering if you could do me a huge favor. Again, it's going to sound crazy. Feel free to say no."

Art comes in and stands at the end of the shelf, right next to me, whispering. "How's your girlfriend doing?"

I'm annoyed, I'm missing things, I'm about fifteen seconds from losing control of my central nervous system, and Candace is certainly not my girlfriend. Still, the fastest way to end the conversation is to answer in a whisper. "She seems to have his guard down. No idea how she gets to the 002s from here, though."

Art nods and claps me on the back. "Gotcha. I'm ready to jump in if things go south, just give me the signal." And he walks down to where I was standing before, close to Truax but hidden from view.

"Like I said, feel free to say no." Candace folds her hands in front of her like she's either praying or begging, and raises her voice an octave. "Please don't say no."

Jeff is looking down at his hands, scowling at them, but he doesn't seem to be losing control. "I'm really sorry, Candy, but I don't know anything about the guys Nate went to war with. And I'm not really on speaking terms with him anymore."

She slaps the desk, making him jump. "Damn. I'm like, out of time, you know? If I can't get a real interview with _one_ of these guys I'm going to fail journalism. I feel like they all got together and decided to get unlisted phone numbers and secret addresses. You know _none_ of them has a current residence? Three of them are dead, that was the easiest thing to find, Nate won't say a word, and the rest of them are freaking ghosts. This was the worst article idea ever. I'm screwed."

"Hold on." He leans forward, looking around and lowering his voice. "You talked to _Nate_ about this?"

"Yeah, obviously. All he did was joke around, though. He said he kidnapped all of them." She pauses for a tick, just to see him wince. "He was a real jerk about it. I told him I was going to talk to you, too, and he said you didn't know anything about any of them. Way too defensive about it, so I thought there was a chance there. He said to 'leave that asshole alone if you know what's good for you.'"

His breathing has sped up considerably, and the muscles in his arms keep flexing and relaxing at random intervals. His shoulders have dropped down and he's stretching his neck out, towering over Candace. Both of his hands are planted flat on the desk, close to her. His words are slow and quiet again. "Yeah, I don't know anything." His head cocks to the side, like it's moving of its own accord, and I can see the darkening veins on his neck. She should know what that means. She should be backing off now. "Don't know anything about anything. That fucker. I'll tell you what...no, no, true blue, I won't tell you, not even on that asshole."

While he talks I slowly make my way towards the two of them, and the end of the shelving unit. Now that I'm this close I can't actually watch him anymore, not without it being painfully obvious, but I've got to do something. Candace isn't stopping, she doesn't seem to care how close he is to snapping. The stakes are too high, she's not going to let this go, she's upset and she's not thinking clearly and it's my fault that she's pushing this too far. We should have gone back to the van. I lean around the shelf and catch Art's gaze, giving him big eyes to silently indicate danger. He nods solemnly.

Candace is oblivious. Purposefully oblivious. "You _do_ know something, I knew it. Reporter's instincts, ha! Please, please, please tell me! I'll totally make it worth your while; my GPA is, like, dangling by a thread here."

He sighs a long, rattling sigh. " _I. __Said. __No._ " We need to run away. We need to get out right, right now. " _Get out of my store. __Now._ "

Art comes out from around the shelf, putting himself right next to the edge of the counter, between me and Jeff. He's got one thick finger pointed up at the massive soon-to-be berserker and this look of Art-style indignation that would probably make Truax laugh under different circumstances. "You calm yourself down, son, you're talking to a _lady_." This is not the kind of intervention I was looking for; this is not productive. He thought the big eyes thing was a signal; he thinks he's helping. I screwed it up again. "You're going to tell the girl what you know about those missing boys."

Truax squeezes the edge of the counter hard, knuckles turning white while his veins grow darker and darker. Every part of his body seems to be moving in different directions in tiny jolts. He's as much hissing as speaking. Why the hell aren't we running away? " _What is this_?"

Art leans forward, putting his hands on the counter to match Jeff's, and raising his voice far more than he needs to. "You want to know what this is? This is a _god damn wake up call_." People are staring. Everyone around us is staring. Candace grabs Art by the arm and pulls him back, berating him. It doesn't seem to affect his momentum. "At this very moment, in a God damn government lab, there's a team of spooks literally digging through your friend Johnny P's brain looking for this answer. They're going to find it, son, it's only a matter of time. They're going to get the rest of those boys, and then they're going to come here and gun you down for knowing about them. Get your head out of your ass and tell _us_ so we can beat them to it, or I've got a right mind to beat it out of you."

The darkened blood shoots out of Jeff's heart at bullet speed, covering all of his visible skin with pulsating black trails. This is over. I grab Art by the shirt and pull as hard as I can, while grabbing Candace with the other hand. My voice is as loud as I can make it.

" _Get out of here! Find Nathan!"_ They hesitate, Jeff has put one foot on top of the desk, and I find a few more decibels. " _GO!"_

Candace and Art take off running, and in slow motion Truax jumps off the desk, over my arm, and starts chasing them from behind. His movements are spastic and jerking—the telltale signs of human restraint trying to gain a foothold—and I run after him as hard as I can, tackling him from behind. Only it's as if he's made of bricks, my whole bodyweight barely changes his course at all. I hang on for dear life, trying to dig my feet into the floor tiles, and though he's still running and dragging me along he twists around enough to hit me across the face with the side of his hand. Nothing makes sense after that, but I keep my hands gripped as tightly as I can. There's another blow, and more after that. I'm sliding down, holding on to his legs, unable to see anything through the blood in my eyes. At some point I mercifully lose consciousness, thinking only about holding on.

My eyes open, and I'm staring up at a drop ceiling with an IV stuck in my arm and some terrible swelling on my face. There's a tube under my nose, lightly blowing air up—obnoxiously blowing air up—but I can't do anything to remove it. My arms are unresponsive, or impossibly heavy. I try the rest of my body, tentatively, and it seems like I still have sensation. My muscles simply don't function at this time. There's a loud clap nearby, and a huge head leans into my field of vision. I can't see well enough to know more, and I can't place the voice through the cotton in my ears.

"Abhi. I'm so happy to see you awake. You gave us quite a scare."

I'm watching Candace and Art run away in my mind, in what I hope are memories and not simply wishful thinking, and it seems like they're far enough ahead to get away. My grip on consciousness is a loose one right now, though, and the subtle difference between thinking a question and asking it aloud seems to be beyond me. "Are my friends all right?"

"That was friends, plural, correct? Interesting." Lucidity and dread creep into my mind in equal measures. I'm speaking to the anonymous man from yesterday. If that was yesterday. "If you're referring to the man who did this to you, I'm told that the police had to resort to lethal force, unfortunately, after he killed one of them. If you were with someone else on your little field trip as well I'm afraid I can't speak to their safety. There were a number of injuries; the news can give you a better idea of the specifics than I can."

I'm at a loss. My phone is sitting on a table behind him, I could probably reach it if I could lift my arm. Literally all I can do is lie here, assume they got away, and try not to say anything to implicate them or myself. I can't believe how stupid we were.

He stands himself up—evidently he was sitting—and walks around to the foot of my bed. He picks up the clipboard sitting there, clicks open a pen, and writes something quickly. "I can see that you're tired, so I won't keep you up any longer. Those drugs, I'm sure the side effects have left you exhausted." He shakes his head, frowning, and claps me on the foot. "You should give your mother a call as soon as you're up to it. I spoke to her earlier, but I got the sense she didn't believe my assessment of your condition. Get better, Abhi. It seems like that brain of yours is solving more of our problems every day. I can only imagine the great things we're going to do together now that the _obstacles_ are gone. We'll make sure you have an MRI before discharge. Just in case."

He walks out of the room slowly, whistling. I lay there for a long time doing nothing but thinking, mostly because my body won't do anything else. My phone looks much further away now that all I'd have to do to get it is roll over, it seems that I have at least one broken rib in addition to my head injuries. I'm solving his problems. I'm getting rid of obstacles. Obstacles like the only people who know where the 002s are. The closest I can come to the phone, after trying for a long time, is reaching one hand about halfway across my body. I give up and hit the button to call the nurse.

A man in blue appears after a moment, and I find I'm unable to actually make myself speak. Noises come out, but my mouth doesn't seem to want to move any more than the rest of me. Apparently one question was my limit. He's talking to me, I realize, but I can't process anything he says. There's a smile on his face. Perhaps this is the first time he's seen me awake. With my only responsive hand I point over at the phone on a table just a few feet from me, and hold my finger in that position until he noticed the gesture and figures it out.

"Sure, buddy, sure, I'll grab that for you." He walks around me, he was doing something over on the other side of the room, and gets my phone. "Don't try to do too much just yet. You caught a nasty beating. Do you remember what happened?"

I stare at him, unable to nod, shake my head, or speak. He hands me the phone and goes on talking, like he has these conversations all the time, and can pretend he's hearing my half of it.

"People are saying you're a hero. Made that guy drag you until the cops got there. All the way out into the parking lot. It could have been much worse than the Berserker." He claps me, gently, on the leg, which appears to be the only part of my body that isn't injured. "I'll leave you to it. Don't push yourself too hard, you need sleep now. Your texts will still be there tomorrow."

I watch him exit the room, then struggle to position my phone in a place where I can actually read what's on the screen. It seems to take an eternity, and most of my energy reserve, to get it there. Then I unlock it, head for Candace's website, and pull up the Aerosmith article. The comments are all old, and they seem to go on forever. I scroll and scroll and scroll.

The very last comment is four months newer than the rest, dated from today (probably?) and from "Journalism Student." I read it carefully.

"Thank you for the article. It really helped the old man and me get through a difficult time. If you're still out there reading through these, we would love to meet up some time to talk when you're able. Let us know, and good luck. Thanks again."

So Candace is much better about resolving ambiguities than Megan. She didn't mention Megan, though. She probably hasn't resurfaced. That's a bad sign, or a sign that there's only so much information you can cram into a purposefully cryptic forum post. I try to fight through the muck in my brain in order to form a coherent reply.

"Dear Journalism Student: I, too, just made it through a difficult time, so I'm glad to hear that you're doing well. Unfortunately, I still feel trapped. It feels like someone's cracked my head open and started poking around inside, if that makes any sense. Anyways, good luck to you too. I think I was wrong about the birdwatcher. I think he might be a professional. You should stay away from him after all."

I hit send, hoping I wrote it well enough to make sense, and let the phone fall on my lap. Hopefully Megan's okay too, hopefully they can find each other, and hopefully they realize that none of them are safe now. I hope I'm wrong about Nathan and the man with no name. That's a lot of things to hope for, and I'm too tired to keep thinking about it. I decide to call my mother, knowing that the anonymous man or his people will be listening in, but I can't seem to find the phone that's sitting on my chest, and my eyes have closed of their own accord. I drift off into a fitful sleep, dreaming of the contents of my own MRIs.
Epilogue

Nate Werner

Nine days later

When Chelsea gets home I'm sitting in the bedroom, staring at a piece of paper and trying to figure out how to explain myself while the screaming in my head gets louder and louder. This is the worst it's been in months; I can't even remember how I used to fight this down before. The pen in my hand snaps in half when I hear the door close, and ink runs down into my sleeve. She's looking at the open suitcase sitting on the counter, I can tell because she's not talking, and I'm in no way prepared to explain myself out loud.

"Nate?" She's walking around the apartment, looking for me. "Nate, what's going on?"

I manage to stand myself up, thrown the broken pen in the garbage, and walk to the bathroom. Responding out loud doesn't even occur to me as an option. When I turn the tap on to wash the ink off my hand the sound draws her over. I stare down at the water and ink and try to breathe slowly.

"Why wouldn't you answer me?" I'm not sure I'm physically able to produce coherent speech. I realize that she can see my reflection, the trails of darkened blood vessels all over my face. Her voice drops substantially when she arrives in the doorway. "Nate. Look at me. I need you to tell me what's going on."

The water is so cold, numbing my hands, but the rest of me is on fire. The ink is long gone from everything by my sleeve, but I keep moving my hands under the water just the same. Inertia is all I have right now.

"Seriously, Nate, answer me. You look like a crazy person." She pauses. I don't say anything because I can't say anything. "What am I supposed to do with this? You're leaving, I assume, but you don't have the guts to even talk to me about it?"

That's right. I don't have the guts to do anything. I don't have the brains to do anything, either, not without people dying. Don't talk to me or you might catch it. Just give up and leave me alone. Please, just leave me alone.

"This is bullshit; you know that? Are you going to go on a rampage next, is that it? Did you and your buddies have a secret pact to go crazy and beat up strangers?" The screaming is so loud. I'm staring harder and harder at the water, not blinking, and Chelsea's voice is going up and up. " _Talk to me_. I cared about Jeff too, you know. You don't get to act like his death is a personal attack on you."

My knees are shaking and every muscle in my body is tensed, the only images I see in my head involve broken bones. I open my mouth, I need to say _something_ , but all that comes out is a cough. I can't quite bring myself to look at her. There has to be some way to get her to walk away.

"You look horrible. You've got these—I don't even know what they are—on your face; you need to sit down. Come sit down, we don't even need to talk, but you can't go anywhere like this. I'm not going to let you go anywhere."

My phone is ringing. Answering the call is automatic, it's muscle memory to pull the thing out of my pocket and pick it up on speaker. My voice still doesn't work, instead of any sort of a greeting I push out this weird sort of a grunting noise, and Chelsea stares at me like I've just done something horribly wrong, still blocking the doorway. A few second pass in strange silence, then a woman's voice comes out of the phone.

"Hello? I'm looking for Nathan Werner."

This is easier than answering Chelsea. This I can do. To some extent. "Yeah."

There's an edge to the woman's voice, like she's fighting to remain calm. Or I'm projecting that because I have to consciously decide, multiple times every second, not the smash the phone through my girlfriend's face. "Good. I'd like to talk to you about the murder of Ian Kensington."

My brain explodes out the sides of my head. I turn off speaker on the phone and pull it up to my face as fast as I can, as if that will somehow make that sentence disappear. Chelsea has grabbed my phone arm, sending bolts of lightning straight to my spine, demanding that I strike but I'm not going to strike and I can't talk to this person and to Chelsea and think at all and not turn into a fucking berserker right now. I need to hang up and get out of the apartment as fast as I can, that's all I can do.

"Who is that, Nate? What's she talking about? Talk to me."

"Don't hang up, don't you dare hang up. I know everything."

My mouth is held together by burning hot tar, leaking down my throat, I'm pushing to get past Chelsea but she's holding on to me and standing in my way and I can't be sure how hard I'm pushing. My tongue is a chunk of dead flesh, immovable and choking me, and I have to fight it to make any sound at all. "Let me go. I need to go."

"Who hired you?" The voice on the phone won't stop. She doesn't even make sense, but she won't stop. She's trying to make it worse.

"Please, just tell me what's going on." Chelsea starts to cry, she's anchoring herself against the doorway with her feet, I must be pulling hard. I'm hurting her, I need to stop hurting her. "Get off the phone."

"Get away from her. We need to talk right away. More people are going to die because of you."

Just for an instant, I must have blinked or something, I lose it. I grab the molding around the doorframe and pull myself through as hard as I can, sending Chelsea sprawling onto the floor, dig my fingers into the drywall and rip the piece of molding free, spin around and stab the thin piece of wood into the wall over her head, like two inches from her face, driving the thing so deep that it comes out the other side and hits the floor in the next room. She's screaming and crying at the same time. It was just a split second lapse, and I let go of the molding, other hand still smashing the phone into the side of my face.

"Get away from her before you hurt her, Nathan! Get out!"

The woman screaming at me in the phone is right. There's no time to grab my suitcase, I step over Chelsea, rush across the hallway and leave the apartment, heart pounding in my ears. My right sleeve is covered in dust and ink and I can hear the screen of my phone cracking in my ear, I'm gripping it too hard. The hallway is empty and Chelsea isn't following me yet, so now I'm running for the stairs, and it's finally quiet enough for me to ask a question.

"Who are you?"

"My name is Candace Kensington. I want to meet you, but you'll need to listen closely. You're probably being followed right now, and I can't have you bringing them to me. Do you think you can calm down?"

I haven't calmed down in over a year. I just almost killed Chelsea. What the hell am I going to do? What the hell _did_ I do? Stopping in the staircase on the landing between the second and third floors, I sit down with my back against the cool cinderblock wall and listen to the screaming in my head and the pounding in my chest. "Give me a few minutes."

###
A sneak preview of

The Primer, Book 5

Coming in 2018

She's good at this. She's not pretending too hard to care about me. Not enough to induce a recoil. This is a well-run operation and I was wrong to talk to them. Nothing to do about it now, though. The limits on what they know are arbitrary, and I don't get to impose them. I turned it all over and the ground it all up before; now it's all a meaningless pulp. They fill the hole with words and It never works because there are no sides to the circle, but when they have enough words they pretend it's full and they pour on a layer on concrete. We can pretend the story is finished and we can pretend it matters and we can walk away before the concrete starts to crack.

"Mr. Kimbrel? Are you listening?"

I tell her I want to move out west. Los Alamos, maybe. Do they still work in Los Alamos? She slaps me hard across the mouth, but that's wrong. That's a man with shining black hair and a clipboard and he's not here. There's blood in my mouth and the air smells sour. The lights are so bright I can't keep my eyes open and I can't think straight. How could I hack it at a National Lab when I couldn't even handle General Education?

"There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable longstanding American concepts of 'fair play' must be reconsidered."

"Who are you quoting?" My eyes circle back around and find the pretty one. The edges are curling up. This is what happens. This is why you don't let this happen. "Mr. Kimbrel? I think we should stop here. We'll pick this up again at another time."

I say to wait and I say it calm. My voice is steady. I say I don't want to stop here, that I'm going to try hard and it's just that sometimes I have a little trouble with the edges. The pretty one understands. She's seen people like this before, people who sat in the chair in the dark and couldn't find the right words. I can see I'm making her think, and I try to remember the question for her. Every two days, maybe, Harvey came by, or maybe less. We talked all the time, any time of day. I get along with liars.

The other one sits back down but her face is hard like she doesn't want me to be able to answer. I stare at the cup of water and try to keep it in my mind, try to convince myself to drink it to prove it isn't sour. My hand won't lift up, but I'm trying. It's raining hard on the pavement, doing the firefighter's work for them, but it's already too late. Anybody could see my arrangement is gone. I can see something sticking up from the bricks like a human hand but burnt and blackened. No one has seen me yet, and it makes me wonder if I'm really here. The raindrops on the flashing lights create a prism effect. Tiny, instantaneous rainbows thrown across the police. There's a human hand in the brick pile.

"They found more than one. They're still pulling them out, and you can't help us find the guy who did it because you drank your brain into mush. Please, tell me why I'm still talking to you."

I tell her I can't find anyone but I can help because I was there, and the other one doesn't believe me. Everyone knows I was there. Everyone saw me there. I wrap a hand around the cup of water, but I can't grip it right. I squeeze too hard and it crumples a little, water splashing out the sides. Hands aren't used to this kind of thing, and they're making me use my left. I wasn't thirsty anyways. I ask if I answered the last question and I ask if they have another question. It's getting hard to see for the holes and I want to get this done before I fall in.

###
Who is the man with no name?

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About the author

I write stories like ninjas skulk around in the dark: constantly. Most of them disappear into that place where short-term memories go instead of becoming long-term ones, but occasionally I manage to pin one down before it escapes. When I'm not pursuing an endless procession of characters and scenes through the catacombs of my brain, I'm chasing two diminutive demons (my son and daughter) through the recesses of our house in Schenectady, NY. When these two worlds collide, one question arises: "Daddy, how do you make up this crazy stuff?"

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