Mind Games

by Teri Terry

  Everyone is looking at the list, fiddling with which ones they think they will admit they suffer from to see if there is a common element between us all. My eyes wander around the room, at the bent heads and heated discussions going on around us.

  ‘Maybe it’d be more rational to pick one that is easier to test for than the others,’ I say. ‘Since it is a test we’re supposed to—’

  The lights go out, and I don’t finish my sentence. They don’t flicker or stage down – the room goes from brightly lit to pitch dark in an instant.

  ‘Who didn’t pay the electrics?’ someone calls out from another table. A few boys start making ghost noises, and there is nervous laughter.

  ‘Has anyone got a torch?’ another voice says. No one answers.

  The switches are by the doors we came in through. ‘I’ll try the switches,’ I say, get up and with hands in front of me, reach out blindly until I hit the wall, then follow it around to the doors.

  It is so dark I keep opening my eyes wider and wider as if that’ll help, but can see nothing. I reach the door, and flick the switches up and down. ‘The switches aren’t working,’ I call out. I grasp the door handle, thinking I’ll see if the power is cut outside the hall as well, but it doesn’t turn. A sense of disquiet strengthens inside. The doors are locked? We’re locked in here, in the dark?

  ‘Luna?’ a voice says softly, close by. Gecko’s voice.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I thought that was you.’

  ‘We’re locked in,’ I say, making my voice low. Shouting that one out might cause panic.

  ‘What?’ I hear a rattling noise – his hands trying the doors? ‘That’s weird. I don’t like this.’

  Across the room a voice calls out, ‘We had candles at dinner the other night. I’ll see if they’re in the serving area.’ There are footsteps, a thud, and muffled curses. More footsteps.

  ‘I wonder if the doors upstairs to the balcony are open?’ I say.

  ‘Good thought.’ Gecko takes my hand and we feel our way along the wall until we find the stairs. I grip the handrail and start up them just as some candles are lit below; there are a few bobbing lights, then the light level goes up as some candelabras on the walls are lit, and tea lights passed around.

  Gecko tries the first set of doors at the top: locked. We exchange a glance.

  ‘Try the others?’ I say, and walk along to the next set of doors. ‘Locked,’ I call out, and head for the doors at the end. I glance back; Gecko is leaning over the waist-high parapet, looking down at the ground floor of the hall. Has he given up, deciding that if someone has decided to lock us in they’ll all be locked? I’m too stubborn not to try each of them. I reach for the last door handle.

  ‘Locked,’ I say, just as the night is split by an ear-piercing scream.

  13

  ‘Get down!’ Gecko says, and we both duck below the parapet. There is more screaming, shouting, running footsteps. Crashes and cries.

  ‘What the hell is going on?’ I say.

  ‘There are two men below, shooting into the crowd, and – and – people. Bleeding, on the floor, not moving.’

  I shrink down even more, horrified, shocked, freaked out, and… listening. There’s mass hysteria – that I can hear. But no gunshots.

  ‘Are they shooting at people? Right now?’

  But he is peeking over the top of the parapet, and doesn’t answer. ‘Stay here, keep out of sight. I’m going down the stairs; they shouldn’t see me if I go down low, under the height of the handrail. We have to get everyone to put out the candles, then we can tackle them in the dark.’ He slips away, down the stairs.

  Once he is gone I cautiously peer over the parapet.

  People are running, screaming. Some are sprawled awkwardly on the ground. The light is dim, true, but there isn’t any blood I can see. No gunmen, either. No sound of gunshots. I shake my head, stand up and look properly. It’s chaos and hysteria, but I can’t see a cause for any of it.

  Then it hits me, and I sag back down on the floor.

  Don’t say anything you perceive with your senses – my instruction. I’m the only one here without an Implant. This is all fake, is that it? Like the wall Gecko could see and I couldn’t. And I’m not supposed to tell anyone?

  Thinking you’ve been shot might not make you bleed, but it’s a bloody rotten thing to do to somebody, just the same. I’m gripped with fury. If I can’t tell them it isn’t real, I’ll show them.

  I head down the stairs.

  Jezzamine stands at the bottom of the stairs; she turns when she hears my footsteps.

  ‘It’s finally happened,’ she says. ‘Your crazy has rubbed off on me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve gone mad, haven’t I?’ She stares back at me, eyes round and uncertain, and very un-Jezzamine-like. Is she in some kind of shock?

  ‘It’s OK, Jezzamine; this isn’t real. It’ll be over soon and everybody will be fine,’ I say, pausing to reassure even though it is her, but trying to choose my words so I’m not breaching my instructions.

  ‘Of course it isn’t real.’

  ‘You can tell?’

  Her face is puzzled. ‘I can see Implant images – obviously superimposed, not real. But everyone else thinks they’re real. I thought I was going nuts, but you can tell they’re fake, too?’

  ‘Jezzamine, I haven’t got an Implant.’

  Realisation strikes her eyes. ‘So they really are just Implant images, like how I see them. But why does everyone else seem to see things different from me?’ She is horrified; she’s not the sort to like different anything.

  ‘Look,’ I say, and I point to the shadows along the wall. There is a boy there, not hiding or trying to get away. Instead he stands there, puzzled shock on his face. We walk across.

  ‘You just see what is happening as Implant images, right?’ Jezzamine says to him. He nods. Relief floods her face; she’s not the only one.

  ‘We have to put a stop to this,’ the boy says.

  I nod. ‘Right. I’m going to knock the guns out of the fake gunmen’s hands, but I can’t see where they are. Give me directions?’

  ‘We’ll do it together,’ he says. ‘Come on.’

  The candles have started going out one by one, darkness beginning to return. Gecko’s picking the wrong moment: we need everyone to see what we do.

  We walk hurriedly across the room. There are students huddled behind upturned tables, others lying on the floor, eyes closed.

  ‘They think they’re dead?’ I say.

  ‘They’ve got fake blood all over them,’ the boy says. ‘Looks fake to me, anyhow.’

  ‘Where are the gunmen?’

  ‘There are two of them, in the centre. I’ll guide you,’ he says.

  We start to walk forward, but then there is an anguished cry: Gecko? And then I’m knocked off my feet, and pulled away.

  ‘Luna, Luna,’ he says, running his hands over me.

  ‘Stop it!’ I snap. ‘This isn’t real. I’m not shot. Stop it!’ I slap him across the face.

  ‘Ouch!’

  By telling Jezzamine and that boy I couldn’t see what they could I’ve so broken the tell-no-one-what-you-can-perceive rule now, it seems pointless to hold back any longer. ‘Listen to me, Gecko. It’s like the wall you could see, but I couldn’t.’

  ‘What? But you’re bleeding, covered in blood—’

  ‘Implant images: there is no blood.’

  Understanding – and relief – start to cross his face. ‘But why—’

  ‘Listen up, everybody, and listen good!’ It’s Jezzamine? ‘This is all total bullshit. Stop screaming, stop bleeding, stop whatever you’re doing. This is like a virtual game. It isn’t real, it isn’t happening. You’re fine.’ She shakes someone who is lying
still on the floor, a girl from her group of friends who always does exactly what she says when she says it. The girl sits up, a dazed look on her face, and looks around her.

  ‘See?’ Jezzamine says. ‘It’s not real. Stop being a bunch of follow-the-crowd cognitively-biased sissies. You’re all right. Be rational.’

  Everyone looks at each other, then back to Jezzamine. By sheer force of her dominant will – and the threat of being labelled irrational, and all that goes with that – they are overcoming what they can see and hear. One by one the crying, the hiding and the dead stand up, and face her.

  The lights come back on; the doors click unlocked.

  ‘The gunmen have vanished,’ Gecko says.

  There are no gunshot wounds, but there are a few injuries. A sprained ankle; cuts and bruises from all the hysteria, but nothing serious. There could have been, though, couldn’t there? Why’d they do something so cruel, so crazy?

  Everyone is looking at Jezzamine, me, and the other boy who helped – Danny, he introduces himself as – in some kind of awe that we were the only ones rational enough to see through the Implant simulation. But it wasn’t superior brainpower, was it? Just me not having an Implant, and them, for whatever reason, being able to see Implant images for what they were when the others couldn’t.

  What was the whole point of it? I can’t grasp why they’d do something that awful.

  But no matter the reason, when I told Jezzamine and Gecko what I could see, I broke the only rule they gave me. Consequence? I’ve failed the RQ test. Dysrationalia, here I come.

  Gecko sticks close to my side, so close that when I turn I walk straight into him.

  ‘What’s with the puppy dog impression?’

  He looks abashed. ‘Sorry. It’s just…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I know it wasn’t real. But I saw it. I saw you walk up to that guy – he shot you point blank in front of me. I saw it all, and I can’t shake it off.’ He slips his arms around me in a tight hug, then abruptly leaves to help lift tables back to their places.

  Well.

  ‘Looks like you’ve made a conquest.’ It’s Jezzamine, and she’s not even sneering.

  ‘Still talking to me?’

  ‘Don’t worry, I won’t make a habit of it.’ She looks uncomfortable. ‘Thanks for before. I owe you one, and I don’t like it. So I’m paying you back now.’

  ‘With what?’

  ‘Melrose didn’t tell me about your nutzoid grandmother, all right? It was my brother. He goes to school with your brother.’

  I stare at her, shocked. Jason is the one who told?

  ‘Are we even?’ she says.

  ‘Sure. Whatever.’

  And she turns, walks off. People have started trickling out, back to their rooms; I scan faces, but can’t see Melrose. I sigh. Something else I’ve got wrong. Was that my negativity bias again – expecting the worst of people? I deserve to fail.

  14

  I stand in the door to the hall, not sure I can bring myself to go in. They want us to work in here today, after what happened last night? I can’t stop myself: I wedge a chair in the door.

  I sit with my group. Anne raises an eyebrow. ‘Feeling a bit claustrophobic today, are you, Luna? That’s not very rational.’

  I stare back at her. ‘Are you serious? After last night I didn’t want to risk getting locked in here again.’

  They all turn and give me odd looks; no one answers.

  ‘Locked in here again?’ Anne finally says. ‘What are you talking about?’

  There are footsteps behind, and I turn. Danny?

  ‘Can I borrow Luna for a sec?’ he says, and I get up, walk with him away from the others.

  ‘Do you remember what happened last night?’ he asks.

  ‘You mean lights out, locked in, panic and fake gunmen? Yep. You too?’

  ‘Yes. So does Jezzamine. She denies it, but she’s lying.’

  ‘She kind of likes going with the crowd. From the front, of course.’

  ‘The others just remember it as if it were a proposed test of a crowd bias that we all talked through. They don’t think it actually happened. What does it mean?’

  ‘No idea,’ I say, but then there is a noise by the door – the chair stuck in the door is being pulled out of the way, and in steps Dr Rafferty. He looks at the table where I should be, then around until he spots me. Gestures for me to come to him. ‘But somehow I think I’m about to find out.’

  ‘I’ve been asked to interview you about last night.’ Dr Rafferty gestures at a chair opposite his desk. I sit down.

  ‘That sounds serious.’

  ‘It is. Serious. Very serious, actually, Luna.’ His face is grave. ‘First I need you to tell me exactly what happened.’

  I consider giving him the fake version that Danny alluded to, the one everyone except us and Jezzamine believes to be true. But what is the point? They’ll know it all. So I do; I tell him the whole story.

  ‘So you were given a direct instruction to not tell anyone what you could perceive with your senses. You were told that breaching this instruction would result in automatic failure of the RQ test, yet you did it, anyhow. A very irrational decision in view of your instructions and the consequences specified. Can you explain why?’

  ‘You weren’t there. It was horrible! Everyone was scared. People thought they were dead or dying.’

  ‘So, would you say it was compassion for others that made you act as you did?’

  I nod. It was that, and fury at what was being done to everyone. But I don’t say that out loud.

  ‘I’ll make a case for you, Luna. But I’m not sure they’ll listen.’ He sighs. ‘You can go. Back to your group.’

  ‘I have a question, too. Why’d they do it? It was cruel.’

  He tilts his head. ‘The testing means are within the purview of PareCo under their contract. But whatever you may think of their methods, Luna, they are designed to filter the rational from the dysrational. This is of vital importance to the safety and future of this country and everyone else around the world. It isn’t taken lightly.’ He smiles. ‘Go. Try not to worry too much. Remember what I told you the last time: what happens to you if you fail the RQ?’

  ‘Nothing happens to me. I’ll be monitored, an appropriate job chosen.’ But now this doesn’t feel reassuring like it did the other day: a job where I can’t make decisions that could harm anyone. One where I’ll always be watched, to make sure my dysrationalia doesn’t manifest. My skin crawls.

  I step out of his office, back across the quad. I start to walk towards the hall but then think, stuff it. There is no doubt this is a do not pass go, do not collect two thousand pounds moment. I’m not going back in there.

  First: rattle the chains of my prison. I head down one of the passageways between two buildings: is the force field on this time of day? A shimmering light in the air greets me. I try again to push through it, but like the last time I get a bit of the way in and then it’s like it pushes me back out again. There is no escape.

  I slip back to the side of the hall, look around: no one is in sight. Climb up to the balcony, curl up on the bench where Gecko and I sat in darkness the night we were both trying to escape. Where I saw the silver swirls in his skin, so like Astra’s that the rush of memory made me run. Does he remember what really happened last night? How upset he was when he thought I was shot? That he put his arms around me.

  Somehow it is important that he remembers.

  Late that night I return to the balcony. Just as I’m starting to wonder if Gecko ignored the note I slipped him at dinner, I hear quiet steps, below. He climbs up.

  ‘Heh. You came.’

  ‘How could I resist?’ He smiles in the moonlight, and moves with more of the swagger he had that first night, when he thought I wa
s staring at him because he was so gorgeous. I flush. I was, then, but this is now, and there is something more important to deal with.

  ‘Shut up, sit down, and listen.’

  He’s startled. Sits down. ‘OK. What is it? I’m listening.’

  ‘Right. You remember the wall you can see but I can’t – the force field?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘It is a false image. Put there by Implants. Right?’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘So how do you know you aren’t seeing false images from your Implant all the time?’

  He shrugs, uneasy. ‘I don’t know. Though there’d need to be a good reason for doing it on a large scale – the force field being a wall is a simple, static image that serves a definite purpose. I don’t know that they even can do more complex images convincingly.’

  ‘They can, and they do.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  So, I do. All of it: the lights out, the screaming, people being shot. The instructions I breached. How Gecko thought I was shot in front of him; how Jezzamine could see through the Implant images, and got everyone to overcome them. How only those who could see through the images seemed to remember it as it actually happened the next day. He gets me to describe it over and over again, every detail I can remember, to see if it brings any of it back, but then gets a terribly pained look on his face.

  ‘Dammit. This is freaky. Who knows when they use our Implants to make us see what they want, when they want? Or even if they don’t, worse: to change what we remember about things that happened, afterwards. The really weird thing is that if I try to remember what really happened last night, it’s like my head hurts, my thoughts slide away from it. I can’t. But I can think about what you told me about it.’ He shakes his head. ‘And what was the point of that whole thing?’

  ‘I don’t know. I was thinking it was some sort of rationality test, but it was so random and violent. I can’t see how it tests anything useful.’ I pull my arms in tight around myself. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Why are you apologising?’