The next morning Reg took them back to the simulator and had them each run over the controls separately, without review. Then he taught them physics the old-fashioned pen-and-paper way. No projectiles were involved. They talked a lot about gravity. Brad and Eddie sat with an empty chair between them.
Finally Reg stretched and said, “I want to give you a little background on our present situation.” They looked up at him, and Rosa flipped to a new page in her notebook. “No, no notes on this. There’s some disagreement as to how much we should tell you until you’re fully trained. I’m of the opinion that if you’re going to be IA Teams 3 and 4, you need some information.
“IA exists because we know there are worlds out there with intelligent life. We believe that at least one of them has achieved travel capacities far beyond our own. Our deep space sensors have indicated that. Which means that someone out there is ringing doorbells.”
“What have the sensors shown exactly?” Brad asked.
“Gravity flutters.”
“Gravity flutters?” Brad said.
“Gravity doesn’t seem like a thing that should flutter,” Trevor said.
“Yeah,” Reg said heavily. “I’ll give you an outline of the math in a minute—you won’t really understand it yet.” He glanced out the window. “We’re accelerating all our programs here, not just the training program. If they ever come here, we want to be ready.”
“Ready for what, exactly?” Rosa said.
“We have no idea.” Reg sighed. “But your training is broad. We have a course in recognizing life-forms—because if someday you meet an alien and it’s not carbon based, you don’t want to walk right past it. Or accidentally step on it.”
Trevor laughed, and Reg shot him a look.
“You’ll learn the ins and outs of space travel, and also take anthropology, sociology, ethics …”
“Anthropology?” Eddie said.
“Yep. We’re preparing you to deal with space travel, and with potential contact with another world. Pay attention in Space Geography—the lines are shifting all the time. Did you know the Russians are claiming Mercury is theirs?” Reg scowled.
“Will we help negotiate space boundaries?” Rosa asked.
“No, those decisions are made at a higher level. But you need to recognize them. You’re going to be flying diplomats with ray guns.”
“Do we really have ray guns?” Rosa said. The guys pointed their fingers at one another and made sizzle noises.
“Sure,” Reg said. “They’re just lasers. Had ’em for years. And we’re developing a line of Tasers to work on different neurological systems.”
They were silent for a moment.
“Are we going to meet aliens?” Trevor said.
“Yeah. Maybe not now, but someday. Something’s causing those gravity flutters.”
“Could it be a black hole or a supernova?” Eddie said. “Something like that?”
Reg shook his head.
He showed them some of the math, and he was right, they didn’t understand it. He was giving them some homework when his phone buzzed. He checked the screen, then motioned them up and led them to a building they hadn’t been in before. The trainees peered into rooms as they passed—lots of equipment and a faint chemical smell—some kind of lab building.
“Is this headquarters for the resistance to the zombie apocalypse?” Trevor asked Reg. Reg snorted.
“This is Newton Hall,” he said. “But we call it Nightmare Hall.”
Trevor caught Rosa’s eye. “Zombies,” he mouthed.
Reg led them into a room with a tile floor and two hospital beds. They had wood-grain head- and footboards and thin white sheets. There was equipment on the wall behind them—suction machines, blood pressure cuffs, oxygen nozzles.
“Um,” Trevor said.
“They must have heard about your ass,” Eddie whispered.
Trevor flushed.
“Day after tomorrow you’re going to do your duty for science,” Reg said. “And Eddie, we’re going to need that permission form. Did you get it back yet?”
Eddie’s flush rose into his blond hair. Like a plow going into corn, Rosa thought. Maybe. I’m from New Mexico—I’ve never actually seen that. “Uh, yeah,” he said. “I’ll get it to you after class.”
“Good,” Reg said. “Can’t let you do this without it.”
Eddie nodded, but didn’t look at Reg.
“Some crackerjack neurobiologists designed this for us,” Reg continued, rubbing his hands together. “This is classified. We don’t want bad guys getting ahold of it and using it for the wrong thing.”
“Hospital beds?” Trevor said. “I hate to tell you, but the rest of us know about them.”
“But you can totally see how bad guys could use these to destroy the world,” Rosa said.
“They’d probably race them down the hall,” Eddie said. “I know I would.”
“Listen up, you knuckleheads,” Reg said. “Because they’re going to take your blood in a minute.” Reg rubbed his hand over his scalp. “This isn’t a test for you, understand? We’re sending you in order to get data for the people designing this thing.”
“Sending?” Rosa said.
The trainees looked at one another.
“It’s a simulation,” Reg said. “They’ll inject you with some significant drugs, show you a video while you’re going under, and your brain will continue the movie. You’ll experience everything as though you were actually there. They’re practicing syncing people, so ideally you see the same thing.”
“Couldn’t you send some secretaries or something?” Brad said. “We’re valuable assets. You shouldn’t experiment on us.”
“Being a ‘valuable asset’ is a position of service, not privilege,” Reg said. “But if you have to know, they want guinea pigs who have psych and intelligence testing on file so that they can evaluate the results.”
“Oh,” Brad said. “They need smart people.”
“He’s one ‘et’ short of being an asset,” Trevor whispered.
“How can you make someone see what you want?” Brad said, ignoring him.
“Hell if I know,” Reg said. “They dim the lights and give you some drugs and stick wires on your scalp. You’ll give Frankenstein a run for his money.”
“A helpful analysis, Reg,” a woman in a white lab coat said as she walked in. A phlebotomist came in with her and set her plastic tub down on one of the narrow tables that swung over the beds. “I’m Dr. Sue O’Donnell. Nicole’s going to take your blood while we talk.” She motioned them to the beds and they perched on the edges. Nicole and her cheerful frog scrubs approached Rosa first.
“We’ve been able to induce detailed hallucinations for some time,” Dr. O’Donnell said. “The trick was synchronizing them with another patient’s, and making them interactive. The short version is that we change your frontotemporal interactions.”
“What’s the long version?” Trevor asked.
Nicole ripped open an alcohol wipe, and its sharp scent cut the air. It was cold on the inside of Rosa’s elbow. She drew Rosa’s blood and moved on to Brad.
“Keeping in mind that you signed a nondisclosure agreement,” Dr. O’Donnell said, giving Trevor a long look—probably thinking about his doctor parents—“we alter the connectivity among the temporal, prefrontal, and anterior cingulate regions.”
“I’m with you,” he said.
“We synchronize the gamma oscillations in your thalamocortical networks. We inhibit prefrontal and limbic attentional systems to allow the hallucinations to work. The mind wants to hallucinate,” she said. “Just think about dreaming—you stop daytime sensory input, and the mind makes up its own. Or take Charles Bonnet Syndrome.”
“When you lose sight,” Trevor said, “you have visual hallucinations. Researchers think you always have them, but everyday visual input overrides them.”
“Very good,” Dr. O’Donnell said. “We just work with your brain’s natural inclination, and give it direction.”
Nicole dropped three vials of Brad’s blood into her plastic tote and moved over to Eddie. He stuck his arm out and sat like a fossil, listening to Dr. O’Donnell.
“We’ll have you wired up. You’ll see out of your own eyes—your own brain, actually. The person monitoring you will see what’s going on and will give prompts to produce the story line they want. You’ll hear their voice, but you won’t find that odd.”
“Will one of us do the monitoring?” Brad said. “Will one of us be in charge of it?”
“No,” Dr. O’Donnell said.
“Maybe,” Reg said. “Good idea, Brad. I’ll look into that.”
Brad beamed, but the doctor gave Reg an inscrutable look.
Nicole labeled Eddie’s vials and started working on Trevor. He scrunched up his face and turned away.
“You’ll experience the world the way you do every day—your senses will be intact, they’ll just be stimulated a different way. You walk by a lemon, you’ll smell a lemon, understand?” Dr. O’Donnell said. Rosa nodded. “You won’t know it’s a simulation.”
“So the person in the sim will just react on instinct, right? They won’t know they’re being manipulated?” Brad said.
“That’s right,” Dr. O’Donnell said.
“Can we die doing this?” Eddie asked.
“If you’re stabbed, you won’t bleed and you won’t die, but you will see blood and you will feel pain. You’ll think you can die.” She looked at each of them in turn. “The physical effects won’t be real. The psychological ones will be. What you experience, you will really experience.”
Nicole walked out, carrying her plastic tote with twelve vials of their blood. She hadn’t given Rosa a sticker or a princess bandage. Her pediatrician at home still gave her candy. They laughed about it, but she always left the place with a grape sucker in her mouth. For some reason, the tan bandage on her arm made her feel like an adult more than the apartment had.
“Tomorrow night, no food or drink after midnight.” She raised her clipboard and uncapped her pen.
“What’s the simulation going to be?” Brad asked.
She smiled at them and her eyes crinkled. “We’re just trying to see if we can get you synced up, so the situation itself doesn’t really matter.” She shrugged. “Don’t worry about it. You’re just guinea pigs.”
“Who could worry about that?” Brad asked.
“Once we get this perfected, it could be an incredibly effective training tool.” She smiled again, nodded to Reg, and left the room.
“Do you know, Reg?” Rosa asked. “Do you know where we’re going?”
“I do. But I ain’t telling you.”
“I hope it’s historical,” Eddie said. “The Middle Ages! I want to joust.” He faked a lance thrust.
Trevor blew his lips in derision. “I’d want to go to Renaissance Florence and hang out in Michelangelo’s studio.”
“They’re not sending you to ‘hang out’ anywhere,” Reg said.
“What about you, Rosa?” Eddie asked.
Rosa flushed. “I want to go to prerevolutionary France, when the dresses were gorgeous. I want to go to a ball.” She couldn’t believe she said that out loud. Rosa Hayashi—space pioneer, and fashionista.
“You’re not going back in history,” Reg said.
“What about you, Brad?” Trevor said. Brad shook his head. He wasn’t giving these people any more information about him than he had to, because he had an idea.
“I’ll come to your ball,” Eddie said to Rosa, “but I’m wearing my armor.”
“Yeah, Michelangelo and I will come to your partay,” Trevor said.
Reg sighed deeply and led them out of the room. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s exactly how it’s gonna happen.”