by P. W. Child
Sam forced himself to keep his eyes shut. He kept perfectly still, refusing to give in to the desire to open his mouth, to spit out the intruding fingers—if indeed they were fingers—or to gag. One of the fingers ran down the inside of his cheek, pushing it out—then, just as suddenly as they had arrived, they were gone. Through his closed eyes he could feel the change as the soft lights came back on.
That wasn't so bad, he thought, and followed the sound of the sweet music out of the corridor and through the far door.
☼
Chapter Nineteen
"You're seriously telling me that no one else saw anything but darkness?" Nina raised a skeptical eyebrow. She had expected that there would be at least a couple of other people joining them in Cody's stuffy little teepee.
"What can I tell you, Nina?" Cody shrugged. "People see what they see. Though I have to say, we've had an unusually good crop of initiates here. They are some really receptive people. Sara and I both feel blessed to be working with them, with you."
It was a strange little tent, much smaller than the one that Nina shared with the others. As far as she could tell from the visible belongings, Cody occupied it alone. Where does Sara sleep? she wondered. I thought they were in here together. The air felt closer, staler, as if the tent flap was tied shut most of the time, trapping the stagnant air inside.
"So, go on then," Nina prompted. "Tell me about how disconnected I am and what I'm meant to do to fix it."
Cody made no immediate reply. He sat opposite her for a long time, legs crossed, hands folded in his lap, scrutinizing her. She tried not to give him the satisfaction of squirming in discomfort but stared straight back at him. He sported the beginnings of a wispy beard across his thin face, and for some reason this annoyed Nina. He reminded her of many of her students—arrogant, aggressively liberal, with all the assurance that came with a life of privilege.
She wondered if she was reading Cody correctly. Was he one of those trust-fund brats who had decided to make a career out of the buzzwords he had learned as a "bohemian" undergrad? She had always hated his type. The ones who had grown up in large cities and gone to fancy schools, where they had learned that the world belonged to them; the ones who had never doubted a damn thing in their lives. She disliked him all the more for passing his carefully cultivated certainty off as a spiritual journey.
All of a sudden she felt homesick—not for Edinburgh, but for the West Highlands where she had grown up. There had been few people like Cody there. Perhaps if I'd known that there were so many of them in the world, I wouldn't have been so keen to work my way out of Oban, she thought. Perhaps I should just have stayed there. That way I wouldn't be sitting here today, in this tent with this idiot.
"Nina," Cody drew a long, deep breath and slowly blew it out. "I'm getting the sense that you are . . . how should I put this? That you're not entirely cooperative, you know? I'm getting the impression that you don't take all this entirely seriously."
"It's not really my cup of tea," Nina admitted, "but I'm doing the best I can. I'm joining in. I shared when you asked me to, and I sat all night on the hill. I haven't refused to do anything."
"You don't eat our food. You smuggled in cigarettes." The tone of Cody's voice was not one of accusation, but of pitying disappointment. It was perfectly calculated to push Nina's buttons.
"Yes, that's right," she said, forcing herself to smile. "I don't eat your food. It's not to my taste, so I'm eating supplies that we brought instead. It's not intended as a slight. And I was never informed that cigarettes were banned, or phones, for that matter. I'd have thought twice about coming here if I'd known."
Cody held up his hands in a placatory gesture. "It's true," he conceded. "We never made it explicit that you can't bring cigarettes here. I guess we should! We just kind of expect people to have done this kind of thing before and to know that it's not the kind of place where we welcome toxins. Although, if you need an alternative . . . " he turned away and picked up an ornately carved box.
Nina expected him to open it and offer her twigs to chew on or some kind of calming herb or homeopathic nonsense that she would have to accept politely and pretend to use. Instead, he lifted the lid to reveal a fat plastic pouch filled with high-quality marijuana. A small box of matches and rolling papers lay next to the bag. "This stuff doesn't have any of that tar and nicotine and all the other crap that makes normal cigs so bad for you. And it's just great for expanding your mind! Do you want one?"
Nina wanted to say no. She had always been too much of a control freak—and frankly, too much of a small-town good girl—to experiment with even the mildest of drugs. Cigarettes and alcohol were as far as she went. Yet as she looked at the rolling papers, her fingers twitched involuntarily. She could feel the headache beginning to ease off as she imagined the sweet swirls of smoke filling her mouth and her nostrils, circling around her tongue as she prepared to blow a smoke ring. She knew her hand would only feel complete again when the thin stick was poised between her fingers . . .
Before she could complete the thought, her hand was out and she was accepting the packet of papers. Cody passed her a tiny bag of filters and watched approvingly as she constructed a joint. I don't know if this is meant to be just the same as making an ordinary roll-up, she thought. Oh, you know what—I don't care. Just as long as it takes the edge off of this bloody headache, it'll do.
"I'll join you," Cody offered, beginning to roll one for himself. "Technically I'm not supposed to, seeing as how I'm working, but nobody likes to smoke alone, right? It can be our peace pipe. We can hail a new beginning!"
Yeah, yeah, whatever you say, Nina thought, as long as it gets me a cigarette.
She lifted the joint to her lips, struck a match, and then took a long, luxurious drag as it caught light. Nothing in her life, she was sure, had ever felt quite so good.
"True story," Cody said solemnly. He was lying stretched out on his blanket, drawing lazy smoke circles in the air as he talked. For the past half an hour he had been telling Nina exactly how he came to be involved with FireStorm. She had heard about his youth in Seattle, his studies in Vermont, and the life he had begun to build after college. He had set up a marketing company with his girlfriend, and within two years of graduation they had expanded and were both pulling in six-figure incomes. Two years after that, the girlfriend had left. Cody had been screwed out of his share of the company and left a brokenhearted wreck, embittered and discompassionate, until he attended a motivational talk given by Sara. His life had been changed, his attitude completely altered, and now he was barely recognizable as the same person. How orthodox, Nina thought. I wonder if they had a training montage.
"So you see," Cody insisted, "I know what it's like to be disconnected. I know. I was compartmentalized. There was Cody, the business man; Cody, the team leader; Cody, the boyfriend; Cody, the son—I thought they were all separate things and I tried to live that way. It was so stupid! People don't work that way. I couldn't see then that I was just one Cody, one complete, complex person. We only struggle with the boundaries of our various personalities because we create boundaries. And we don't have to! But we do—everyone does, Nina, at least until they learn not to. Look at you—how many Ninas are there?"
She thought about it. I don't know. Half a dozen? A dozen? The failed academic. The daughter who doesn't see her mum often. The secret romantic. The clichéd thirty-something fucking up her love life. The girl who got amazing exam results and was meant to go on to do great things. The over-qualified woman who doesn't have any kind of sensible future. But all of these things seem to fit together just fine. I can't say that I feel any kind of disconnect among them. They're just . . . me. She shrugged. "Several and just the one," she said. "Simultaneously, which is fine."
"Ok, let's try a different approach," said Cody. Nina thought she saw him suppressing a sigh. Under the slight buzz of the weed she had smoked, it made her want to giggle. "What are the qualities you prize most in yourself?"
This was much easier. She knew how to answer this one. "Intelligence," she said decisively. "Definitely intelligence and hard work, and tenacity. Loyalty, too—I stick by the people I care about."
"Great," Cody rewarded her with a wide smile. She rewarded herself with another puff. "That's really great, Nina. So you're intelligent, hardworking, tenacious, and loyal. But those aren't all that you are, right?"
"I suppose."
"When we find our strongest positive qualities, we can flip them over and find our strongest negative ones. For instance, you're highly intelligent but you're also capable of making some really stupid decisions—no, don't look at me like that. This isn't a judgment, it's an analysis. Stick with it. I promise you'll see where this is going. You're hardworking, but that makes you resentful toward anyone who hasn't worked as hard, and it means that when you decide not to work hard at something, you slack off completely. You're tenacious, but when you break, you really break. And you're loyal, but when someone does something to lose your loyalty, you cut yourself off from them completely, as you did with Steven."
Nina froze. "What did you say?"
"Relax, Nina." Cody sat up and laid a hand on her arm. She shook it off, nearly burning him with her joint.
"Don't touch me. How the fuck do you know about—"
"About the fact that you had a really long fling with a married man? And he wasn't just any married man, was he? He was a married man whose best friend happened to run an international arms ring, the same ring that killed Sam's fiancée and that nearly killed you, Sam, and Dave just two or so years ago?"
Nina was scrambling to her feet now, ripping open the tent flap and stumbling out onto the hot sand. In a split second Cody was up and after her. He grabbed her by the arms and turned her to face him. "Hey, what's the problem, Nina? We do our homework on everyone who comes out here, didn't you know that? The death of privacy is the most important step on the road to true connection, Nina! We want to know you! We want to help you to know yourself. Isn't that great? Isn't it an amazing thing? But you're never going to have this amazing thing, this unity, this contact with yourself, if you don't work through this—come on. Come back inside. Let us help you to get out of this darkness, Nina!"
Cody's face was alight with the righteousness of his cause. Certain that he had won her over, he relaxed his grasp a little. She stared at him, indignant and confused. "Fuck off," she spat.
"You need more help than I thought," he said, shaking his head sadly. He began to pull her back toward the tent. The beatific expression on his face was completely at odds with his forceful grip on her arms. Nina struggled furiously, but she was no match for Cody. He was far taller and his muscles were firm and well developed. He was easily capable of lifting her off the ground and dragging her back into the tent against her will. Suddenly she felt that she was in real danger. I wish I had lied, she thought. I should have just pretended I'd seen the hunt and gone with all the others.
Sure enough, Cody lunged forward and wrapped an arm around her waist, hauling her upward. She screamed, but he only laughed. "Nobody can hear you, Nina!" he yelled. "Nobody's close enough!"
She felt the sickening drop in her stomach as she realized that what Cody said was true. She could not see or hear anyone else. The flaps of the connection tent were wide open and she could see that there was no one inside. As far as she could tell, the campsite was now deserted apart from Cody and her.
In desperation she slammed her knee into Cody's groin. He dropped her, doubling over and roaring in pain. She ran.
☼
Chapter Twenty
The white room was worlds away from the beaten earth and gnarled wood of the corridor that Sam had just left. For a moment he thought he was back in the Verbena hotel, with all its clean lines and highly polished surfaces. It was a large room, circular, like sitting inside a drum. The door blended into the wall when Sam closed it behind him.
A bank of seats formed another circle in the center of the room, and the initiates who had already passed the corridor of challenges were sitting quietly, scattered across the seating bank. The chairs themselves were little circles with low backs, capable of spinning like bar stools, and there was no screen or podium, nothing to indicate which direction the initiates should face. Sam selected a seat at random and could not resist giving it a quick spin around. He caught the eye of Sakura Ito as he spun and was pleased to see that he had made her laugh.
One by one, the other initiates completed the challenges and filed in. Sam counted the ones he knew. Christopher Slack, the British MP, who had recently been caught in a minor scandal concerning data protection and the sale of people's tax records to private companies, but had emerged almost unscathed after a more junior minister took the fall. Dylan Thoreau, whose star was rising rapidly as his social media network, KNCT, looked set to overtake Facebook. Ethan McCluskey, whom Sam had met previously, the man reputed to be the unsung hero behind microblogging.
Sam racked his brain for the details of the Chinese politician who entered next. He knew his name was Xiang Ma, and that he was a member of the National People's Congress, perhaps even the standing council, but Sam could not recall the exact nature of the political office he held. I'm slipping, he thought. There was a time when I'd have had all of these details at my fingertips. He remembered Seth Spencer well enough, though—the senator from Nebraska who had recently caused controversy by suggesting that everyone's full medical records should be available to their employers, freely and with no need to seek permission.
There were several others who were not familiar to Sam, except as faces he had seen around the campsite. He wondered whether they were also important people. He knew from talking to Purdue that there were other chief executives here, other powerful people in search of some kind of enlightenment. What are they experiencing? Sam pondered. I'd love a chance to interview a few of them, maybe compare their experiences to Jefferson's. I should speak to Paige and Henley too, find out how they've been doing—ah, speak of the devil.
Henley appeared in the doorway, looking a little shaken. She scanned the room, clearly looking for a friendly face. Sam gave her a little wave, and she rushed over and took a seat beside him. "Hey, Sam," she said, smiling faintly, determined to conceal her nerves.
"Hiya, Henley. How did you get on with the corridor?"
She replied with a one-shouldered shrug. "I don't know. It was kinda dumb, I guess. Like a crappy haunted house or something. Did you have something try to poke into your mouth at the end? That was just gross. I really hope they sterilized whatever that was. I kind of wish I would have been here when my mom did this, though. She must have pitched a fit. She hates anything unsanitary."
"I can imagine. So she's been down here before?"
"I guess. She and my dad talked about stuff that happened in the inner sanctum. It's cooler than I expected down here. I thought it was just going to be more sand and crap, but it's clean, at least. You know, when we—"
She was interrupted by another door sliding open, revealing Sara, now dressed in a sharply tailored linen suit. She strode in, followed by the acolytes. The door slid silently shut behind them. They took up a position to Sam's left, prompting a moment of shuffling as everyone repositioned their seats to face Sara.
"Welcome, initiates!" She threw her arms wide as if to embrace them all. "Congratulations on passing your challenges! I am so happy to see you all here—not a single one of you balked at the things you were asked to do. I applaud your bravery. Before we progress any further, we have to break the spell for a moment and attend to a few minor housekeeping matters." She slid one of the wall panels aside and produced a sheaf of papers. "First, if you have decided that you wish to proceed to initiation, we will need to get you to sign one of these forms. Just stay where you are and we'll bring them to you. Second, despite the fact that it's cooler down here—air conditioned, even!—it is still important to keep yourselves hydrated. So we will bring around some water for everyone, along with the forms."
Sara did not move, but the two acolytes wove through the seating bank, one handing out papers and pens, the other carrying a tray laden with small cups of water laced with the familiar sweet herbs. Once they had collected all the signed forms and empty cups, they spirited everything away, allowing Sara to command everyone's attention once more.
"Initiates," she began, "you have begun to understand the principles behind FireStorm. You know the mythology that underpins our ideology. You know that we believe in connection—complete, limitless, and absolute connection. We dream of bringing the whole world together so that no one ever has to experience isolation or loneliness, that crushing sensation of being on one's own in an unfriendly world. We believe that connection is the key to the end of war, of poverty, of all humankind's suffering. To know that nameless, faceless masses on the other side of the world are starving and dying is one thing. To know that individuals with whom you are connected are suffering is quite another.
"Could you look a man in the face and tell him that you are sorry, but there's nothing you can do about his pain? That you can do nothing about the fact that you have plenty and he has nothing? Most of us could not—not if we knew the man, not if we were aware of his name, his age, his place of birth, his education, his family, his likes and dislikes, the suffering he has already endured, and the triumphs that have defined his life. If we knew the things that defined him as an individual, we could not help but see him as a real, live human being just like us, rather than as part of an amorphous mass. We would feel compelled to end his misery, because connection would bring us to a point where we believed we shared it.
"Imagine also the potential for our own growth! You are all educated people who have seen something of the world. You know the vastness of human experience and intelligence. You have all traveled and experienced other cultures, and I have no doubt that you have learned from them. But I am sure that you are also aware that there are many who have not been afforded that opportunity. There are people whose worlds are small, whose parameters are limited, whose minds have never been expanded the way ours have been.
