The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 17

by Gardner Dozois

  “Yes!” said Graham the redhead. “That’s exactly why Reich would lie about it. ‘Take it easy, make good money,’ he says. But I’ll bet that if we don’t finish today, he’ll screw us into losing the weekend.”

  He glared at Dixie Mae. She glared back. Graham was going to find out just what stubborn and willful really meant. There was a moment of silence and then –

  “I’ll talk to them, Graham.” It was the woman at the far end of the tables.

  “Argh. Okay, but not here!”

  “Sure, we’ll go out on the porch.” She beckoned Dixie Mae and Victor to follow her out the side door.

  “And hey,” called Graham as they walked out, “don’t take all day, Ellen. We need you here.”

  The porch on 0999 had a bigger junk-food machine than back at Customer Support. Dixie Mae didn’t think that made up for no cafeteria, but Ellen Garcia didn’t seem to mind. “We’re only going to be here this one day. I’m not coming back on Saturday.”

  Dixie Mae bought herself a sandwich and soda and they all sat down on some beat-up lawn furniture.

  “So what do you want to know?” said Ellen.

  “See, Mouse, we’re following up on the weirdest – ”

  Ellen waved Victor silent, her expression pretty much the same as all Victor’s female acquaintances. She looked expectantly at Dixie Mae.

  “Well, my name is Dixie Mae Leigh. This morning we got this email at our customer support address. It looks like a fake. And there are things about it that – ” she handed over the hard copy.

  Ellen’s gaze scanned down. “Kind of fishy dates,” she said to herself. Then she stopped, seeing the “To:” header. She glanced up at Dixie Mae. “Yeah, this is abuse. I used to see this kind of thing when I was a Teaching Assistant. Some guy would start hitting on a girl in my class.” She eyed Victor speculatively.

  “Why does everybody suspect me?” he said.

  “You should be proud, Victor. You have such a reliable reputation.” She shrugged. “But actually, this isn’t quite your style.” She read on. “The rest is smirky lascivious, but otherwise it doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  “It means a lot to me,” said Dixie Mae. “This guy is talking about things that nobody should know.”

  “Oh?” She went back to the beginning and stared at the printout some more. “I don’t know about secrets in the message body, but one of my hobbies is rfc9822 headers. You’re right that this is all scammed up. The message number and ident strings are too long; I think they may carry added content.”

  She handed back the email. “There’s not much more I can tell you. If you want to give me a copy, I could crunch on those header strings over the weekend.”

  “Oh . . . Okay, thanks.” It was more solid help than anyone had offered so far, but – “Look Ellen, the main thing I was hoping for was some clues here in Building 0999. The letter pointed me here. I run into . . . abusers sometimes, myself. I don’t let them get away with it! I’d bet money that whoever this is, he’s one of those graders.” And he’s probably laughing at us right now.

  Ellen thought a second and then shook her head. “I’m sorry, Dixie Mae. I know these people pretty well. Some of them are a little strange, but they’re not bent like this. Besides, we didn’t know we’d be here till yesterday afternoon. And today we haven’t had time for mischief.”

  “Okay,” Dixie Mae forced a smile. “I appreciate your help.” She would give Ellen a copy of the letter and go back to Customer Support, just slightly better off than if she had behaved sensibly in the first place.

  Dixie Mae started to get up, but Victor leaned forward and set his notepad on the table between them. “That email had to come from somewhere. Has anyone here been acting strange, Mousy?”

  Ellen glared at him, and after a second he said, “I mean ‘Ellen.’ You know I’m just trying to help out Dixie Mae here. Oh yeah, and maybe get a good story for the Bruin.”

  Ellen shrugged. “Graham told you; we’re grading on the side for Gerry Reich.”

  “Huh.” Victor leaned back. “Ever since I’ve been at UCLA, Reich has had a reputation for being an operator. He’s got big government contracts and all this consulting at LotsaTech. He tries to come across as a one-man supergenius, but actually it’s just money, um, buying lots and lots of peons. So what do you think he’s up to?”

  Ellen shrugged. “Technically, I bet Gerry is misusing his contacts with LotsaTech. But I doubt if they care; they really like him.” She brightened. “And I approve of what Prof. Reich is doing with this grading project. When I was a TA, I wished there was some way that I could make a day-long project out of reading each student’s exam. That was an impossible wish; there was just never enough time. But with his contacts here at LotsaTech, Gerry Reich has come close to doing it. He’s paying some pretty sharp grad students very good money to grade and comment on every single essay question. Time is no object, he’s telling us. The students in these classes are going to get really great feedback.”

  “This guy Reich keeps popping up,” said Dixie Mae. “He was behind the testing program that selected Victor and me and the others for customer support.”

  “Well, Victor’s right about him. Reich is a manipulator. I know he’s been running tests all this week. He grabbed all of Olson Hall for the operation. We didn’t know what it was for until afterwards. He nailed Graham and the rest of our gang for this one-day grading job. It looks like he has all sorts of projects.”

  “Yeah, we took our tests at Olson Hall, too.” There had been a small up-front payment, and hints of job prospects . . . And Dixie Mae had ended up with maybe the best job offer she’d ever had. “But we did that last week.”

  “It can’t be the same place. Olson Hall is a gym.”

  “Yes, that’s what it looked like to me.”

  “It was used for the NCAA eliminations last week.”

  Victor reached for his notepad. “Whatever. We gotta be going, Mouse.”

  “Don’t ‘Mouse’ me, Victor! The NCAA elims were the week of 4 June. I did Gerry’s questionnaire yesterday, which was Thursday, 14 June.”

  “I’m sorry, Ellen,” said Dixie Mae. “Yesterday was Thursday, but it was the 21st of June.”

  Victor made a calming gesture. “It’s not a big deal.”

  Ellen frowned, but suddenly she wasn’t arguing. She glanced at her watch. “Let’s see your notepad, Victor. What date does it say?”

  “It says, June . . . huh. It says June 15.”

  Dixie Mae looked at her own watch. The digits were so precise, and a week wrong: Fri Jun 15 12:31:18 PDT 2012. “Ellen, I looked at my watch before we walked over here. It said June 22nd.”

  Ellen leaned on the table and took a close look at Victor’s notepad. “I’ll bet it did. But both your watch and the notepad get their time off the building utilities. Here you’re getting set by our local clock – and you’re getting the truth.”

  Now Dixie Mae was getting mad. “Look, Ellen. Whatever the time service says, I would not have made up a whole extra week of my life.” All those product-familiarization classes.

  “No, you wouldn’t.” Ellen brought her heels back on the edge of her chair. For a long moment, she didn’t say anything, just stared through the haze at the city below.

  Finally she said: “You know, Victor, you should be pleased.”

  “Why is that?” suspiciously.

  “You may have stumbled into a real, world-class news story. Tell me. During this extra week of life you’ve enjoyed, how often have you used your phone?”

  Dixie Mae said, “Not at all. Mr. Johnson – he’s our instructor – said that we’re deadzoned till we get through the first week.”

  Ellen nodded. “So I guess they didn’t expect the scam to last more than a week. See, we are not deadzoned here. LotsaTech has a pretty broad embargo on web access, but I made a couple of phone calls this morning.”

  Victor gave her a sharp look. “So where do you think the extra week came from?” />
  Ellen hesitated. “I think Gerry Reich has gone beyond where the UCLA human subjects committee would ever let him go. You guys probably spent one night in drugged sleep, being pumped chock full of LotsaTech product trivia.”

  “Oh! You mean . . . Just-in-Time Training?” Victor tapped away at his notepad. “I thought that was years away.”

  “It is if you play by the FDA’s rules. But there are meds and treatments that can speed up learning. Just read the journals and you’ll see that in another year or two, they’ll be a scandal as big as sports drugs ever were. I think Gerry has just jumped the gun with something that is very, very effective. You have no side-effects. You have all sorts of new, specialized knowledge – even if it’s about a throwaway topic. And apparently you have detailed memories of life experience that never happened.”

  Dixie Mae thought back over the last week. There had been no strangeness about her experience at Olson Hall: the exams, the job interview. True the johns were fantastically clean – like a hospital, now that she thought about it. She had only visited them once, right after she accepted the job offer. And then she had . . . done what? Taken a bus directly out to LotsaTech . . . without even going back to her apartment? After that, everything was clear again. She could remember jokes in the Voxalot classes. She could remember meals, and late night talks with Ulysse about what they might do with this great opportunity. “It’s brainwashing,” she finally said.

  Ellen nodded. “It looks like Gerry has gone way, way too far on this one.”

  “And he’s stupid, too. Our team is going to a party tonight, downtown. All of a sudden, there’ll be sixteen people who’ll know what’s been done to them. We’ll be mad as – ” Dixie Mae noticed Ellen’s pitying look.

  “Oh.” So tonight instead of partying, their customer support team would be in a drugged stupor, unremembering the week that never was. “We won’t remember a thing, will we?”

  Ellen nodded. “My guess is you’ll be well-paid, with memories of some one-day temp job here at LotsaTech.”

  “Well, that’s not going to happen,” said Victor. “I’ve got a story and I’ve got a grudge. I’m not going back.”

  “We have to warn the others.”

  Victor shook his head. “Too risky.”

  Dixie Mae gave him a glare.

  Ellen Garcia hugged her knees for a moment. “If this were just you, Victor, I’d be sure you were putting me on.” She looked at Dixie Mae for a second. “Let me see that email again.”

  She spread it out on the table. “LotsaTech has its share of defense and security contracts. I’d hate to think that they might try to shut us up if they knew we were onto them.” She whistled an ominous tune. “Paranoia rages . . . Have you thought that this email might be someone trying to tip you off about what’s going on?”

  Victor frowned. “Who, Ellen?” When she didn’t answer, he said, “So what do you think we should do?”

  Ellen didn’t look up from the printout. “Mainly, try not to act like idiots. All we really know is that someone has played serious games with your heads. Our first priority is to get us all out of LotsaTech, with you guys free of medical side effects. Our second priority is to blow the whistle on Gerry or . . .” She was reading the mail headers again, “. . . or whoever is behind this.”

  Dixie Mae said, “I don’t think we know enough not to act like idiots.”

  “Good point. Okay, I’ll make a phone call, an innocuous message that should mean something to the police if things go really bad. Then I’ll talk to the others in our grading team. We won’t say anything while we’re still at LotsaTech, but once away from here we’ll scream long and loud. You two . . . it might be safest if you just lie low till after dark and we graders get back into town.”

  Victor was nodding.

  Dixie Mae pointed at the mystery email. “What was it you just noticed, Ellen?”

  “Just a coincidence, I think. Without a large sample, you start seeing phantoms.”

  “Speak.”

  “Well, the mailing address, ‘lusting925@freemail.sg’. Building 0925 is on the hill crest thataway.”

  “You can’t see that from where we started.”

  “Right. It’s like ‘Lusting’ had to get you here first. And that’s the other thing. Prof. Reich has a senior graduate student named Rob Lusk.”

  Lusk? Lusting? The connection seemed weak to Dixie Mae. “What kind of a guy is he?”

  “Rob’s not a particularly friendly fellow, but he’s about two sigmas smarter than the average grad student. He’s the reason Gerry has the big reputation for hardware. Gerry has been using him for five or six years now, and I bet Rob is getting desperate to graduate.” She broke off. “Look. I’m going to go inside and tell Graham and the others about this. Then we’ll find a place for you to hide for the rest of the day.”

  She started toward the door.

  “I’m not going to hide out,” said Dixie Mae.

  Ellen hesitated. “Just till closing time. You’ve seen the rent-a-cops at the main gate. This is not a place you can simply stroll out of. But my group will have no trouble going home this evening. As soon as we’re off-site, we’ll raise such a stink that the press and police will be back here. You’ll be safe at home in no time.”

  Victor was nodding. “Ellen’s right. In fact, it would be even better if we don’t spread the story to the other graders. There’s no telling – ”

  “I’m not going to hide out!” Dixie Mae looked up the hill. “I’m going to check out 0925.”

  “That’s crazy, Dixie Mae! You’re guaranteed safe if you just hide till the end of the work day – and then the cops can do better investigating than anything you could manage. You do what Ellen says!”

  “No one tells me what to do, Victor!” said Dixie Mae, while inside she was thinking, Yeah, what I’m doing is a little bit like the plot of a cheap game: teenagers enter haunted house, and then split up to be murdered in pieces . . .

  But Ellen Garcia was making assumptions, too. Dixie Mae glared at both of them. “I’m following up on this email.”

  Ellen gave her a long look. Whether it was contemptuous or thoughtful wasn’t clear. “Just wait for me to tell Graham, okay?”

  Twenty minutes later, the three of them were outdoors again, walking up the long grade toward Building 0925.

  Graham the Red might be a smart guy, but he turned out to be a fool, too. He was sure that the calendar mystery was just a scam cooked up by Dixie Mae and Victor. Ellen wasn’t that good at talking to him – and the two customer support winkies were beneath his contempt. Fortunately, most of the other graders had been willing to listen. One of them also poked an unpleasant hole in all their assumptions: “So if it’s that serious, wouldn’t Gerry have these two under surveillance? You know, the Conspiracy Gestapo could arrive any second.” There’d been a moment of apprehensive silence as everyone waited the arrival of bad guys with clubs.

  In the end, everyone including Graham had agreed to keep their mouths shut till after work. Several of them had friends they made cryptic phone calls to, just in case. Dixie Mae could tell that most of them tilted toward Ellen’s point of view, but however smart they were, they really didn’t want to cross Graham.

  Ellen, on the other hand, was persona non grata for trying to mess up Graham’s schedule. She finally lost her temper with the redheaded jerk.

  So now Ellen, Victor, and Dixie Mae were on the yellow brick road – in this case, the asphalt econo-cart walkway – leading to Building 0925.

  The LotsaTech campus was new and underpopulated, but there were other people around. Just outside of 0999, they ran into a trio of big guys wearing gray blazers like the cops at the main entrance. Victor grabbed Dixie Mae’s arm. “Just act natural,” he whispered.

  They ambled past, Victor giving a gracious nod. The three hardly seemed to notice.

  Victor released Dixie Mae’s arm. “See? You just have to be cool.”

  Ellen had been walking ahead. She dropped
back so they were three abreast. “Either we’re being toyed with,” she said, “or they haven’t caught on to us.”

  Dixie Mae touched the email in her pocket. “Well, somebody is toying with us.”

  “You know, that’s the biggest clue we have. I still think it could be somebody trying to – ”

  Ellen fell silent as a couple of management types came walking the other way. These paid them even less attention than the company cops had.

  “ – it could be somebody trying to help us.”

  “I guess,” said Dixie Mae. “More likely it’s some sadist using stuff they learned while I was drugged up.”

  “Ug. Yeah.” They batted around the possibilities. It was strange. Ellen Garcia was as much fun to talk to as Ulysse, even though she had to be about five times smarter than either Ulysse or Dixie Mae.

  Now they were close enough to see the lower windows of 0925. This place was a double-sized version of 0999 or 0994. There was a catering truck pulled up at the ground level. Beyond a green-tinted windbreak they could see couples playing tennis on the courts south of the building.

  Victor squinted. “Strange. They’ve got some kind of blackout on the windows.”

  “Yeah. We should at least be able to see the strip lights in the ceiling.”

  They drifted off the main path and walked around to where they wouldn’t be seen from the catering truck. Even up close, down under the overhang, the windows looked just like those on the other buildings. But it wasn’t just dark inside. There was nothing but blackness. The inside of the glass was covered with black plastic like they put on closed storefronts.

  Victor whipped out his notepad.

  “No phone calls, Victor.”

  “I want to send out a live report, just in case someone gets really mad about us being here.”

  “I told you, they’ve got web access embargoed. Besides, just calling from here would trigger 911 locator logic.”

  “Just a short call, to – ”

  He looked up and saw that the two women were standing close. “ – ah, okay. I’ll just use it as a local cam.”