Luminarium (36 page)

It wasn’t the tiredness, the gravitational pull of the bed, that was keeping him from getting up and getting dressed for the interview. He sat for a long time leaned against the headboard, folding open and back the various tools in the Swiss Army knife. Blades, saws, files. Pliers, scissors, bottle- and can-openers. An awl. A chisel. A plastic toothpick. He stared at the little emblem, the cross within the shield.

Who were these people? He knew who they were, he told himself. If not specifically, then generally: a bored, random hit squad of listserv dweebs, out to make his life hell. He could barely even contemplate the alternative—that it was people actually trying to honor George, to avenge him in some misguided way. People who—was it really possible?—may have had his trust, even his participation. People loyal to George. More loyal than Fred.

Whoever they were, they were spying on him. Would they now involve Mira in this? Simply to humiliate him, if this was a prank? Or to blackmail him, somehow, if it wasn’t? Was she in danger? The idea seemed farfetched, but his spinning mind reeled out farther still, wondering if Mira herself were in on it, if this helmet study were nothing but an elaborate ploy to brainwash him, make him psychologically malleable, implant subconscious messages or the like and soften him up to do the conspirators’ bidding.

Then, sensing no ground beneath him and madness all around, he was scrabbling all the way back to the prank scenario, telling himself to get real, to get a grip, hurling the multitool across the room, bounding up from the bed, cursing himself for the wasted time. A one-minute shower. A shave in quick, perilous strokes. Throwing on his semblance of a suit. He was about to leave the knife behind, but thinking he might be able to get a telling reaction out of someone were he to casually produce it on the programming floor, he retrieved it. Then he was leaving the rabbit hole of his old life behind—out of the hotel room, out of the elevator, striding into the sun-dazzled parking lot, into the future, which welcomed him with a brightness perhaps too bright even for Florida. So bright that, despite himself, he took it as a sign.

According to that
iron-jawed self-expert whose book Fred had been making his way through, the CIA had perfected a set of techniques that, when unflinchingly employed by agents or their trained henchmen, could totally eradicate, replace, or otherwise modify a person’s most deeply held beliefs. Average citizens, the author claimed, could reap the benefits of this groundbreaking governmental research as well, to rid themselves of the beliefs that limited them and held them back. All one had to do to banish an unwanted belief was to associate it with a massive amount of pain.

Though Fred still had a few lingering reservations about applying CIA coercion tactics to his already beleaguered brain, as he piloted his revoltingly over-freshened minivan down 408 toward the research park, his bowels braiding, his heart pumping electricity rather than blood, he felt more or less ready to try anything. After that last cyber-volley of guilttripping harassment, he wanted his job back more badly than ever, so badly now he was racked with the terror that he’d mess up the interview somehow, come off looking angry, or desperate, or unhinged. Maybe he was all of the above. Maybe all his creativity was spent. Maybe without George, he was all but useless to begin with, destined for this or that dead-end cubicle. Maybe everyone knew it but him. One by one, as each of these non-empowering suppositions arose, he locked in on it, feeding it with his focus until it made his entire being pulsate with despair. Then he slapped himself on the head, repeatedly, with both hands.

It was amazing, oddly impressive, how many non-empowering beliefs his mind could produce in a single minute. Within the space of five, the beatings they necessitated had resulted in a not insubstantial amount of pain; his head throbbed, as if a long metal claw had begun twisting into the vertebrae below his skull. And yet, despite all this punishment, the therapy seemed to be backfiring—the more he hit himself, the more non-empowering his thoughts became, as though his mind had dug in and was now returning fire:

     —
broke—

     smack

     
—living with your parents—

     smack

     —
going gray in your thirties—

     smack

     —
going to grovel for a job in your own company—

     smack

     
—better suck them off while you’re at it—

He hit himself so hard he nearly ran off the road.

Nestled in tracts
of surrounding suburbia, far from downtown Orlando, farther still from the no man’s land of walled-off theme parks and resort hotels, the research park—home not only to Armation, but also to NAVAIR, SAIC, the Naval War College, and dozens of other firms comprising 80 percent of the country’s military simulation industry—was a place anyone not in the know could easily drive by or even through without realizing they’d just been anywhere in particular. Unlike Los Alamos, it wasn’t a community. No residences, only isolated, fortress-like constructions, spaced a few acres apart and set back on sprawling grass plots bordered by neat rows of trees along winding roads with names like Ingenuity Drive and Challenger Parkway. Few cars drove along these roads, and in all Fred’s visits here, he’d not once seen a pedestrian.

Armation HQ was a recessing ziggurat of white stone and black glass. Maybe by decree, maybe through some less conscious process, the cars in the lot out front were hierarchized by wealth and beauty: luxury sports cars and sedans closest to the entrance, cheaper and more utilitarian models farther out. Despite a free space a few yards from the door, Fred decided not to buck the tide, and steered the minivan over next to the groundskeeper’s pickup.

Somehow, he was twenty minutes early. Awkward to drive back out at this point—for all he knew, upper management was tracking his movements through those tinted windows. He left the engine running and the AC blasting to keep his sweat level to a minimum, and ran through potential talking points, improvements to the simulation code, including the possibility of creating a playback feature (inspired by his inability to replay the appearance of that George avatar) so that military, fire, and police commanders could save and review the exercises step by step at their leisure. Checking his reflection in the rearview, he was dismayed to see a patch of stubble he’d missed under his jaw, and a bright red sunburn on his nose and cheeks. His jacket and slacks didn’t match in bright light. The checkered fabric of George’s shoes was torn at both heels.

He looked like a clown, he thought.

Like a clown-whore, even
, Inner George offered, ever helpful.

By already-learned reflex, Fred slapped himself with either hand, and then set about picturing that new Fred, that future Fred, with an even tan and an actual suit, pulling up to that free space out front in a Benz convertible; passing the day in a big corner office; clocking out while the sun was still up and tooling over to the barbecue joint down the road; describing for a table full of listeners—nameless, faceless, as yet, only their sheer gift of witnessing coming through—how nervous and lost his poor former self had been sitting out in the rented minivan that long-ago day.
But it was all for the best
, future Fred would say. Fred heard the words so clearly, this time, he could wait no longer. He quaffed the last of the coffee, crunched a breath mint, and waded through the morass of sunlight to the entrance.

In the lobby, a heavyset security guard, assembled from equal parts fat and muscle, eyed his approach from behind a trapezoidal desk. Fred had seen him several times on his previous trips down here, but the guy at least affected not to recognize him.

“I have an appointment,” Fred said, after a few seconds of the guard not asking.

“Who with?”

It occurred to Fred that he wasn’t exactly sure who the interview was going to be with. He assumed Erskine would be there, but wasn’t certain. He’d been picturing a whole table of executives and senior project managers, a whole pack like the one he and Sam had run into in the virtual stairwell.

The guard asked for his name, then for an ID, then turned Fred’s driver’s license this way and that for half a minute while checking the appointment screen.

“Human resources,” the guard said. “Fourth floor.”

“Human resources?”

By way of an answer, the guard handed him an orange visitor’s badge on a long-snouted alligator clip bristling with sharp little teeth, and pointed him toward the elevators. Fred clipped the badge to his Barneys jacket, feeling sympathetic pain as the teeth bit in. He’d never been to human resources, and didn’t know what to make of the fact that he was being sent there. Had they decided to reinstate him without so much as an interview? But if so, on what terms? Had they settled this, too, by fiat?

The elevator arrived. He boarded with a balding engineer in a lab coat, and a programmer whose monobrow he recognized from his avatar, but who didn’t seem to recognize Fred. In the corridor on the second floor, as the engineer stepped out of the opening doors, a man in a green jumpsuit dotted with sensors walked past holding a blackvisored helmet under his arm. From the back of the helmet protruded a bundle of black wires ending in dangling, gold connectors.

“Did they paint that VR helmet? Was it always black?” Fred asked the programmer. He remembered it as bright, maybe silver, but maybe it was just getting mixed up with Mira’s God helmet in his mind. He’d watched a soldier testing the helmet out last time, jumping around with a laser tag rifle in a gray, padded room. The technology could make the Urth experience more immersive, but so far it had disagreed with the inner ear and made the soldiers throw up.

Monobrow nodded and was about to say something, but taking in Fred’s orange badge, seemed to think better of it. On earlier visits, Fred and Sam had been issued aquamarine badges. Fred didn’t understand the badge system well enough to know exactly how bad an insult orange was meant to be. The programmer got off on three, a warren of coding cubicles Fred had visited a few times before. A good many of the programmers visible through the open doors looked like Monobrow—the short hair, the polyester, short-sleeve button-downs—like they wouldn’t have been at all out of place coding late-model punch-card computers for IBM in 1966. Their cubicles were either bare of any personal effects whatsoever or otherwise filled with model jet fighters and the more or less omnipresent early-model Starship Enterprises and Mr. Spock action figures. They got along uneasily with the sometimes hippified transplants from the gaming and movie animation industries, who’d been known to buy their own clothing, go to hairstylists rather than barbers, and talk to women (although, as such traits were viewed with suspicion by middle management, even the most metrosexualized of the transplants tended to downplay their fashion sense). With a pang, it occurred to Fred that the New York crew, a happy, nerd-chic medium of designer clunky glasses and retro Atari T-shirts, would probably fit in perfectly; and even as he was thinking this, in the instant before the doors slid shut, he caught sight of Conrad and Jesse stepping out into the aisle between cubicles, dopey smiles on their faces and gleaming new computer stacks in their arms; a pair of sunglasses perched in Conrad’s Afro; Jesse’s hairy toes galumphing in flip-flops. Their first day down here, and already natives. Since this morning, in the back of his mind Fred had been wondering if Conrad and Jesse might have been his cyberstalkers, his mystery messagers—secretly fighting the power and avenging George’s memory. Seeing them now, though, Fred simply couldn’t imagine it.

On the fourth floor, he found himself in a second lobby, before a second high-walled front desk. The receptionist, middle-aged, platinum-haired, told him in a Long Island accent to have a seat and pointed with a long, lacquered fingernail at an alcove sporting a low-slung black leather couch, matching chairs, and a glass coffee table stacked with issues of
Jane’s Defense Weekly
and
The New Republic
. Too fidgety to sit, he paced and gazed out the window at the company grounds, an otherwise blank grassy area in which a single paved path led to a fountain. Fountains, for some reason, were ubiquitous in the Orlando area, and everywhere it was the same design—a shallow, round pool, a single high jet of water. One could see them from the air upon takeoffs and landings, aspurt in the housing subdivisions and industrial parks that stretched to the horizon, as if global warming were already wreaking its havoc, causing the land to spring leaks as it sank into the ocean. His next thought, more a feeling than a thought—an intuition that there was no escape here, no fundamental difference between this tidy little cosmos and the one from which he’d flown—was gone the instant it appeared, beaten out, as, automatically, he whacked his head with an open hand, then brought the hand down just as quickly, before the receptionist could look up and see.

A fair amount of time after the wait began to seem interminable, she emerged from her fortification and ushered him down the hall to another cubicle farm. He wound up at a desk behind which sat a meaty woman with a squarish face and puffy eyes, in the process of blowing her nose. He thought he could see a family resemblance between her and the security guard at the front desk. She treated Fred to the same suspicion, at any rate, before tossing out her tissue and gesturing him to sit.

“Mr….” She checked her screen. “… Brounian. You’re here about finding a position with us, is that right?”

“I … had thought that was the idea, yes.”

She sounded stuffed up. It seemed like an allergy, or a cold, rather than bereavement. He pushed his chair back an inch. A chest cold could be fatal to George.

“I can enter you into the database,” she said, without enthusiasm. “There are some forms you’ll need to fill out. Can I see your résumé?”

“My
résumé?
”

“Mr. Brounian. We can’t proceed without a résumé.”

“I—” Fred remembered he had his résumé on his hard drive. He took his laptop out of his briefcase and booted it up. “I think there’s a misunderstanding. I’m here for an interview. About a specific job.”