Insidious Read online

  But there was more to it than that. Chris realized the real reason it felt so good was because he had earned this privilege.

  Six years of service to Vineaux Genomix. Dozens of projects seen to completion. Endless weekends filled with overtime. Hours of politicking with the right people. Sucking up, actually. Chris knew he had mastered it. He unerringly identified the crucial people and inserted a positive concept of himself in their minds. He preened himself toward the image of a successful company man, dressing in well-tailored shirts and slacks. VG was a technology company with younger people at the helm than ever before, so he reinforced a forward-thinking image by avoiding the ties and jackets worn by the old guard.

  Chris’s blond hair was short, but not too short, taking advantage of his smooth face that everyone found so innocent looking. He kept trim through discipline and a regular racquetball schedule. The muscle wave machines or a steady stream of toning pills would keep his shape, but Chris opted for the schmooze time he could squeeze out of a racquetball game with a higher-up.

  The hardest part had been watching his VR entertainment quotas with ironclad control. Chris knew the execs considered non-training VR time when selecting their best people. Too much VR time meant less productivity. Even the rank and file had to log every minute, and they were paid in fantasy time as much as euros or dollars or Earth standard credits.

  His fingers ran across the tiny European Union badge on the edge of the armrest. He knew being a company man put him in the elite. On Earth or off, if you didn’t work for a world corporation or a government, you made a subsistence living under the poverty line. VG enjoyed more success than most corporations, so all the better. Heading toward executive level put him another step toward the pinnacle of power.

  He dug out the manual he’d been handed in the office before leaving. “Take this seriously,” his boss, Vic, had said. Chris still found it odd that a morale-building offsite exercise came with a manual at all, much less a hardcopy. Why hadn’t they sent the file to his link instead? But he’d read it, love it, and ask for more as long as the company kept paying him his 16,000 ESC per year.

  He looked at the manual again. The white cover bore no picture or graphic lending weight to the sparse wording it held. It said, “Synchronicity Behavioral Codes. Confidential.” Then it went on to make threats in small print about what would happen to anyone who read it without authorization. He started scanning the manual. It reminded him of some of his parent’s real books he’d read as a kid. Chris learned like an AI burst downloading an encyclopedia. He looked over the structure of what he had to absorb for the exercise.

  Synchronicity is a place of acceptance of new ways of thinking. It is a place to throw away what you know and rebuild it from scratch.

  He winced. “Another take on how to think out of the box,” he said under his breath. He didn’t want to spend his time on the giant, deep space retreat taking some cheesy class filled with corporate propaganda. Synchronicity was a luxurious hotel, a science station, and the personal toy of the company president, Alec Vineaux. Although its exact location remained secret, the manual explained that it trailed the orbit of Earth by more than eighty million miles. Even the sleek, wicked-fast spaceplane, which hadn’t stopped accelerating at one gravity since they left, would take three days to travel from the airstrip in Brussels to the station.

  He forced himself to continue paging through the archaically styled booklet.

  All orders are to be obeyed without question. Failure to comply with any order is grounds for expulsion from Synchronicity …

  He flipped through the booklet once and came back to an explanation of what would happen first at Synchronicity. He scanned line after line of meaningless crap. Then something caught his attention. Cold.

  One of your initial tasks will be selecting gear for your stay. You will be allowed to select one set of gear from many with slight variations. Each set is a full body suit in which you will spend all of your time. The gear is composed of light plastic. It will cover every part of your body including your face. We have made every effort to make the gear as comfortable as possible.

  Exiting your gear is only allowed in the privacy of your own quarters. Any person who leaves assigned quarters without his or her gear or who removes their gear outside their quarters will be expelled from Synchronicity. The violator’s contract with Vineaux Genomix will be terminated.

  Chris read the passage three times. He believed it only after reading it the third time. Then he stopped believing it and read it again. Did they really mean it? He read on.

  Outside of your quarters, all communication takes place through your link. An intermediate protocol will be added to obfuscate your name and sex. You will know others on the station only by their obfuscated names. Attempting to communicate your real name, sex, or VG rank will result in severe sanctions and possible termination of your contract.

  A steward came by and delivered some cold lunch. Chris picked at it for a while and thought about things. He knew that Alec Vineaux himself considered these trips to Synchronicity special. Chris thought that their leader, known for being a bold extremist, might have invented these rules. So maybe it wasn’t a joke. But how could anyone enjoy Synchronicity while being forced to wear a freak suit the whole time?

  After lunch, Chris selected the passenger’s list from the services the plane offered through his link and located his associate, Jack, on the map. According to the plane, his friend sat in a row to himself three chairs back. Chris braced himself and rose, not quite trusting the acceleration as constant. The flight deck had turned perpendicular to the wings to make everyone comfortable under the thrust, but Chris half-expected something to shift at any moment. He’d taken gravity for granted for too long.

  He spotted Jack and made his way into his row, settling in next to his coworker. Jack had his eyes closed so Chris pinged him through his link. Jack blinked and looked over.

  “Hey, Chris. Nice flight, eh?”

  Chris found a sound curtain service and activated it through his link so he could speak with Jack privately. The sounds of the spacecraft dropped away.

  “An amazing ride, even by VG standards. But on the long side. I have a question about the manual. This booklet isn’t serious, right?”

  “It’s on the level. Didn’t Vic tell you? Make sure you’ve read that before we get to Synchronicity.”

  “There’s some crazy stuff in here that’s hard to take seriously. And why the hardcopy? Why can’t we just download it to our links? I suspect this is all some kind of joke.”

  Jack turned to look at Chris. For a moment, it seemed he wasn’t going to answer at all.

  “Listen, Chris. Go with this. I’m telling you to go with this, and I mean go with it one hundred percent. Alec makes and breaks his execs on this program. If you don’t want to be at VG, then don’t get off at Synchronicity and stick with the flight back. Otherwise, take a Chinese pill and read the manual.”

  When Jack told someone to take a Chinese pill, he meant to toe the company line. The Chinese bloc sourced half the GDP of the Earth, and they were the only nation powerful enough to ignore the world government set up by the United States, Brazil, and the European Union. Even Japan had fallen to their might, the focused productivity of billions of people willing to do whatever their companies required. Here in the West, company people heard stories of Chinese workers forced into labor with VR fantasy time quotas as low as one hour per week and yearly pay scales of less than 1,000 ESC.

  “Yeah, no problem, man. I didn’t expect it … that’s all.”

  “It’s only for a couple of weeks. Just take the pill. You won’t be sorry.”

  Jack flipped off the sound curtain. Chris took the hint that the conversation was over.

  Well, that went unbelievably bad.

  Chris sat in shock, absorbing the speech. Jack had meant it. Hadn’t he? Or was this some kind of massive joke they played on the new high-level execs?

  It has to be a hazing thin
g. I’ll clamber into some ridiculous suit, then they’ll bring me out, have a good laugh, and that’ll be it. Then the rest of the trip we’ll be living it up, getting a taste of the good life.

  Chris clung to this new idea in desperation. But he knew he would read the manual anyway, just in case. He had too much invested in his career to go wrong at this critical juncture.

  He spent the evening reading the manual in short bursts. He got a picture of a world that ran on different rules than Earth. On Synchronicity, you had to obey any command given to you by a robot. Everyone wore plastic suits that looked like a cross between gothic armor and motorcycle leathers. Personal VR quotas were zero, but the shared virtual environment, nicknamed “Vera,” had a two-hours-a-day requirement on it. There were no dining rooms. Everyone ate in his or her quarters.

  Chris tried to imagine such a lifestyle. The suits were modified to hide everyone’s identity. Speech was restricted to link transmissions. The gear stripped away all the personalized cues of link communication, such as the sex of the speakers or their accents. Names were filtered to last names and then remapped to other names automatically.

  Chris wouldn’t know whom he was dealing with, and they wouldn’t know whom he was, either. A total reboot of the social graph.

  The gear described in the manual bore color codes. Chris would be wearing blue as a first-time participant, which put him at the bottom of a hierarchy that replaced the normal company ranks while on the base.

  It was all too disturbing to absorb in one read. Chris tried to find the hidden opportunity in it all, but he could only focus on what he’d be losing—his reputation, his network of friends, everything he’d worked for. He felt tired.

  The amazing lounges of the spaceplane made comfortable beds. Chris ordered his to recline and he tried to find sleep.

  ***

  Chris awakened after several hours and spent the morning trying to relax. The manual and the disturbing rules kept his mind running in circles. He ate a lavish meal of filet mignon and stretched it out over a few glasses of wine. An hour after he finished eating, the plane reached the flip over point, and everyone strapped in for a ten-minute maneuver that aligned the vessel for deceleration.

  A quick check of the news from Earth didn’t offer any prolonged entertainment. All the same, old stories were percolating through the news agencies. China continued to ignore edicts from the U.S and Brazilian-dominated world government. It had resumed pressuring India to relinquish its neutrality and join its Asian political bloc. The Brazilians threatened to alter their trade laws if the United States wouldn’t lower the cost of its industrial robot exports.

  Chris opened some of his work accounts and checked up on things here and there. He couldn’t bring himself to get deeply involved in anything. He had to work from the data cache on the plane since the communication delay between Earth and the plane had grown to several minutes. Besides, he felt as if it would ruin his flight. After all, wasn’t he supposed to be taking it easy at last? This trip served as his victory lap for all the hard work. But he found it hard to remember what people did while they weren’t working.

  From what the manual intimated, he’d need to concentrate and focus fully if he wanted to impress Alec and the other leaders of VG. From what Jack and Vic told him, his handling of the strange base rituals could affect his career. It didn’t sound much like a vacation at all.

  During the rest of the voyage, he agonized over the manual and caught fragments of entertainment videos piped into his link from the VG-licensed archives. He avoided logging any VR time even though it seemed that he had little else to accomplish. He thought it would look out of place: a promising young exec chosen for his intelligence and work ethic, logging fantasy time even as he headed for Synchronicity.

  “We would like to remind you that no pictures of Synchronicity may be committed to link memory,” a voice said through his link. “You are required to submit to link memory audit before leaving the base. Any contraband information about the base such as cached maps or point-of-view captures will be erased. Thank you.”

  Chris’s link presented an agreement that required that he relinquish his privacy rights on his link memory while at Synchronicity. He accepted the conditions as he gathered his loose items for the docking procedures. He thought of all the clothes he had packed that were useless now, unless the rules about gear did turn out to be a hoax as he hoped.

  “Please secure your belongings and fasten yourselves into your seats. The passenger deck will be rotating into its docking position momentarily.”

  Chris belted himself into the lounge. The perceived angle of gravity changed as the plane’s passenger deck rotated to realign with its wings. At the same time, the passenger seats rotated until everyone faced the rear of the plane. Chris piped in an external view from a camera attached to Synchronicity and watched the arrival from the point of view of the station hub. He heard and felt orientation jets firing as the plane slipped inside the giant spinning ring.

  The spaceplane was designed to land on the spinning surface of the station’s inner surface just as it performed atmospheric landings. It hovered above the oncoming steel, and then lowered straight down until the landing gear touched the surface. The sound of the tires came through the fuselage along with the sensation of acceleration, pressing first back into the seat and then slowly angling downward as the ship began spinning with the base. Applying the brakes produced a sensation of speeding up and growing heavier until finally, the runway crawled along and Chris’s weight approached Earth norm, pulling him toward the floor of the spaceplane.

  The idea of landing the plane in deep space seemed spectacular to Chris. He supposed it made sense to design the plane with one landing system that could function for both its Earthside landings and its rendezvous with the giant space stations. Also, the passengers wouldn’t have to disembark in zero gravity. If the computer made an error, a disaster might ensue, but Chris hadn’t heard of anything like that ever occurring.

  He blinked and brought his natural vision back to the fore. The interior still bumped and vibrated as the landing computer directed the spaceplane off the runway ring and into a docking slot. Within the minute, the spaceplane had attached itself to the inside of a thick cylinder that formed the Earth gravity zone of the station.

  Thick, structural spokes visible through the windows dwarfed the plane, bringing home to Chris how large Synchronicity was. The spokes connected the main cylinder to the central hub where the fusion plant sat. The cabin crew started walking through the aisle again, preparing to help the passengers disembark.

  An automatic announcement told him that two doors were the only way into Synchronicity. A map flicked into his head with green lines marking points of egress to his right and left. Chris headed toward the left, sensing the line there was shorter. He came to a thin walkway that connected directly to the base. As he entered the dim metal corridor, he imagined he could feel the vast, cold emptiness of outer space around him.

  His link picked up a new guidance service so he activated it. A solid green line appeared over his course down the corridor. At the far door, it split into six lines, four of them red. He came to a room with six identical exits. He glimpsed someone at a counter speaking with a robot down one of the red marked lanes.

  The guidance service superimposed green and red lights over Chris’s view of the lane entrances. He chose a green lane and walked into a dark room the size of a large closet. A robot had been mounted within, sitting over a smooth black counter. It had a vaguely humanoid head and thin arms, attached by a cylinder that protruded from the wall.

  “Luggage, please, on the counter. Also, empty your pockets and place all items onto the counter,” said a synthetic voice.

  The machine produced two black boxes and opened Chris’s luggage. Most of his clothes went into the larger of the boxes.

  “What exactly is the purpose of the sorting here?”

  “Many items will not be allowed. I will separate out
the illegal items and detain them.”

  Chris watched glumly as most of his toiletries followed his clothing into the large box. He assumed that everything would be fine since he hadn’t packed anything out of the ordinary.

  “This item. Identify,” the robot said.

  Chris shifted uncomfortably. “Uh, that’s a one-charge stunner.” He looked at the simple black device in the skeletal fingers of the robot. His father had given him the stunner when Chris had left the United States to go work for VG in Europe.

  The robot hesitated before placing the stunner into the small box. Then it pushed the small box forward.

  “These items are cleared,” it announced.

  Chris blinked.

  “The small box is what I can take in? What about all my other stuff … what happens to it?”

  “Your screened items will await you when you return,” the machine told him. “Please take your cleared items and follow the green line through the reception area.”

  “I don’t need many clothes, I guess, but what about my other things, my cleaner, depgel, and all that stuff? You know … my toiletries?”

  “Everything you need will be supplied from company stock,” the robot said. “Please take your cleared items and follow the green line through the reception area.”

  The green line directed Chris to the left of most of the passengers. He looked over and saw that Jack had stayed with the main body. He realized that Jack would be going to pick up his old suit. Chris remembered it was called gear here. Since Chris was new, he’d be separated out where he’d pick out his gear.

  He headed over toward a side door, along with six or seven other people whom he assumed were also following their link maps.

  “Please enter one at a time and select your gear. Women to the left please,” a voice announced in his head. Chris saw two women in the group move over. He gave them a quick evaluation. One stood a head taller than the other did—a blonde, very statuesque. He thought she fit the picture of a stereotypical Swede. The other had curly black hair and a round face. Chris decided she looked friendlier, although less striking, than the other woman.