Rosa knocked on Eddie’s door the next morning, checking to make sure he was up. He opened it.
“You’re pretty, but you’re too damn loud.”
“Clean clothes. And a shave?” she said. “I’m impressed.”
Brad and Trevor came out of their apartments. Brad looked rested and was wearing a tailored shirt. Trevor had dark circles under his eyes, but he gave Eddie a fist bump. They walked together to the building where the simulation would take place.
When they got to the room where they’d been before, Dr. O’Donnell was there but Reg wasn’t.
“We’re going to go ahead and get you prepped,” she said.
“Is Reg coming?” Rosa asked.
Dr. O’Donnell frowned. “He was delayed.” She hesitated. “There was a break-in at the office.”
They exchanged an alarmed look.
“Someone went through your personnel files.”
“How can they tell?” Brad said.
“Every document has an embedded thread. The photocopy machine keeps a record of the chip numbers—what was copied and when. Last evening someone copied parts of your files, including the twelve-page psychological profiles you filled out before you came here.”
They were silent for a moment.
“Couldn’t it just have been someone involved with this?” Trevor said. “Sort of reviewing our charts?”
“No,” Dr. O’Donnell said. “They would have recorded it properly. We’re very good at recording things properly.” She gave a wry smile.
“That’s a little creepy,” Rosa said.
“No kidding,” Brad said.
“Um, you said you’re trying to sync two people, right?” Trevor said. “But there’s four of us.”
“Two trips!” Dr. O’Donnell said, her blue eyes shining. “We’re sending Brad and Trevor first.”
“Give Michelangelo my best,” Eddie said.
The nurse—Nicole—came in and started IVs for Brad and Trevor.
Reg came in a few minutes later, looking as disheveled as a bald man can.
“We still on here?” Dr. O’Donnell said.
“Yeah,” Reg said. “They want to get the data from the simulation.” He added, “They’re going to dispatch Young and Moloney—send them to the source of the anomaly.”
“I didn’t give the trainees anything yet,” the doctor said, “in case you needed them, too.”
“No,” Reg said. “We wouldn’t send them no matter how bad it got.”
“How bad what got?” Eddie asked. “What anomaly, exactly?”
“It’s nothing,” Reg said, and they learned something new about him: he was a terrible liar. “Just a little gravitational disturbance.”
Trevor stared, bug eyed, at Rosa and Eddie. He reached over, grabbed a pen out of Nicole’s plastic phlebotomy cart, and dropped it. It fell down, just like it was supposed to.
Reg rolled his eyes. “This,” he said, “is why we don’t send trainees.”
Friesta Bauer knocked on the door and opened it at the same time.
“You start yet?”
“No,” Dr. O’Donnell said.
Ms. Bauer glanced at her watch. “Go ahead.” She turned to the trainees. “I’m your monitor—I’m going to be seeing everything you’re seeing, but I’ll see it through my own eyes. It’ll be like I’m an observer in the crowd.”
“We give you a modified paralytic so you won’t thrash around much,” Dr. O’Donnell said. “But you’ll still be able to talk.”
“I don’t want any paralytic,” Eddie said.
“You’ll be able to move in the simulation,” Dr. O’Donnell said. “It’s similar to what they give you for surgery to keep you still on the table. But unlike surgery, when you wake up you’ll remember everything. It will make a memory, even though it never happened.”
“This is deeply weird,” Rosa muttered.
“This is fascinating,” Trevor said, walking over to examine the syringes that Dr. O’Donnell had laid out. She beamed at him. “Reg, would you lower the lights, please?” He did, and Eddie was grateful for the darkness. The doctor motioned Brad and Trevor onto the beds.
“Don’t you have to be in bed?” Rosa asked Ms. Bauer.
“No,” she said. “I don’t get the drugs. I’ll know what I’m seeing is a simulation.”
Nicole picked up a syringe, held it upright, and tapped it sharply, then inserted the needle into a side branch of Brad’s tubing. “This may feel a little cold,” she said. Then she did Trevor’s. Trevor wiggled his toes—must not have been the paralytic. A couple of techs came in and put five round electrodes on his chest, then skinny leads on his scalp. Then they wired Ms. Bauer to them, and Dr. O’Donnell injected more drugs.
They switched on a screen, and a video montage started—fields in midsummer, and then a tornado, dark and twisting, and the sky an eerie green. A woman screamed for a little boy as he abandoned his toys and ran into the house. A bike lay in the yard beside a stuffed monkey. On the porch a pile of yellow Legos spilled out of a sand bucket—pictures to give them images to draw from.
Rosa gave Trevor what she hoped was an encouraging smile, then exchanged an uneasy glance with Eddie. They were next, and she was not comfortable with public hallucination.
Dr. O’Donnell placed Ping-Pong balls cut in half over Brad’s and Trevor’s eyes. She picked up two final syringes and injected two cc of clear liquid into their tubing. A couple of heartbeats later their breathing became slow and rhythmic. Rosa didn’t know where the two of them were, but they weren’t in a room in Nightmare Hall.
Their muscles twitched like dreaming dogs. They were both struggling with something no one else could see—except Friesta Bauer. She sat with her eyes closed, frowning, watching what was happening inside their heads for a couple of minutes. Trevor mumbled, “I want to go home.”
“Stop it,” Ms. Bauer said, opening her eyes. There was an authority to her voice that made even Eddie want to obey. Dr. O’Donnell gave another injection and removed the Ping-Pong balls from their eyes. She caught Rosa’s and Eddie’s gaze and held a finger to her lips.
Brad and Trevor blinked and looked around the room, then at each other, and gradually came back to the room in Nightmare Hall.
“You kept taking them,” Trevor said. It was an accusation.
“They were mine,” Brad said. “It was a private beach and you shouldn’t have been there.”
“They didn’t sync consistently,” Friesta Bauer said flatly. “They saw each other, but neither gave up his version of what was happening.”
“Any better than the last attempt?” Dr. O’Donnell said.
“Definitely, in terms of picture clarity and lack of bleed through. Sensory was perfect, but their minds wouldn’t cooperate.”
“What did you see, Trevor?” Dr. O’Donnell asked.
“There was a pile of yellow bricks, and I tried to make a road with them so I could get out of there. There was a witch on a bicycle and a tornado, and a flying monkey beat my head with its wings.”
“Are you freaking kidding?” Brad said, laughing. “You were in The Wizard of Oz?”
Trevor flushed.
“That’s why you were wearing those shoes!” Brad turned to them. “He had on Chuck Taylors, but they were covered in red sequins!” He barked a laugh and Trevor’s flush deepened. “Your flying monkey was just a stuffed animal I threw at you so you’d stop stealing from me.”
“It felt like it was flying around my head,” Trevor mumbled. “It was actually kind of disturbing.” Rosa looked at Eddie. This was real—Trevor had been trying to build a road to get himself out of there, and a monkey had been flapping around his head, harassing him. For Trevor, it had been a real experience.
“What did you see, Brad?” Dr. O’Donnell said.
“I was on a private beach building a sand castle. I found a pile of gold bricks and I tried to stack them, but he came along and kept carrying them away. I guess to build his stupid road.” Brad crossed his arms and sat stonily on the bed. “He threw a bucket of sand at me.”
“It was a bucket of water!” Trevor said. “I was trying to make you melt.”
Eddie pushed his fist against his mouth and stared at the floor.
Ms. Bauer sighed. “The picture was great, but they couldn’t agree on what they were seeing.”
Dr. O’Donnell nodded.
“Probably you don’t need to send us, then,” Rosa said. “Since you got the data you need.”
“They need to run a scenario with a different pair,” Reg said. “This is an important experiment. And I like Brad’s idea of having one of you wired up as the voice.”
Dr. O’Donnell turned her back and began to prepare syringes.
“But we already know the scenario,” Eddie said. He grinned at Rosa. “The sequined shoes are all yours.”
Trevor scowled.
“This will be a different situation,” Reg said. “In every way.”
There was something in his tone that seemed off to Rosa, an undercurrent like a riptide. Something more dangerous than whatever the simulation would do to them.
Eddie caught it, too, and he knew what it was. There’d been a break-in at the office and they thought he’d done it. People always thought he’d done it. And they were going to give him drugs and put him in a stressful situation and try to trick him into confessing. That’s what Brad was for—a second witness. Eddie would be drugged, paralyzed, and without representation. And he couldn’t refuse to do the sim. That would be an admission of guilt, and guys like him didn’t get a second chance.
And then Dr. O’Donnell turned around, syringes raised.
“Time to go,” she said.