by Susan Juby
Bright managed to get Slater turned around so he was pointed into the small storeroom. She loosened her grip on his shoulders and he crawled determinedly toward it. As soon as his legs were inside, Bright slammed the door after him and looked around the room. Cirque, Jane-Smith, and Bluefoam hadn’t stirred.
Voices sounded outside in the hallway. Bright and Fon exchanged a glance, then ran for their chairs. Bright had just gotten into hers when she realized the helmet still lay on the floor where Slater had dropped it. She couldn’t leave it there. She tried to leap out of her chair, but it clung to her like a needy client. She wrestled free, scrambled over to the helmet, grabbed it, and threw herself back into the chair just as the door opened.
“In here,” said the room tender. “These are the only other favours visiting Smooth at this time.”
Bright heard the muffled thud of boots marching into the carpeted room and realized that the pipe wasn’t in her mouth. She reached for the ribbed plastic tube and ever so slowly brought it up near her lips. She didn’t breathe in, though she was tempted. The last thing she needed was to get more altered.
“Everything looks normal,” said a flat male voice, unmistakably that of a PS officer.
Bright considered this. The PS officers were making their rounds, which was usual, but they’d actually come into a mind alter room, which was definitely not. PS officers were so boring that they could negatively affect a person’s alteration experience, so they, like bots, typically stayed out of alter rooms.
Why were they talking? Personal support staff usually said nothing while making people feel special and valuable.
Bright suddenly heard a loud thumping noise and realized it was coming from the storage closet. Slater must be trying to head-butt his way through the wall! She heard the PS officers react to the noise.
“Discretion means not checking the feed,” a second office said. “Discretion means acting on our own, based on what we see. Or hear.”
Another dull thump sounded in the closet.
“This is a suspicious situation,” the PS officer continued. “I am going to make a decision based on the facts at hand. I’m telling you this because I wish to ensure that the lines of communication are open between us.”
Bright was holding her breath. Tension rippled through her body and made it difficult to keep still. Would they open the closet? Find Slater? Release him?
“This entire room needs to be contained,” the PS officer said.
“Contained?” said the tender in her soft voice. “What does that mean?”
“By order of the Deciders, you have been released from your contract. We thank you for your service and congratulate you in advance on coming back better than ever at some point in the future.”
Bright heard a heavy thud and slowly twisted her head so she could see what was happening.
The room tender lay in a white heap at the feet of the two officers.
“Release the others, then we will investigate the strange noise,” said one.
“All of them?” asked his partner.
“My discretion tells me it’s the right thing to do.”
“Oh, okay.” And with that, the second PS officer stepped over to where Bluefoam, bundled among her cozy towels, was enjoying some relief from her constant sinus infection. He held his releaser to her neck. Her cry was muffled by the large towel turban that slipped over her face.
Bright held back a scream. She knew release was natural and right, but seeing someone get released was still terrifying, especially when it happened up close.
The other officer used his releaser on Jane-Smith, whose body jerked to the side as though she’d borrowed Bright’s malfunctioning jetpack. Her stapler clattered to the ground and paper clips spilled out of her dress shirt pocket.
“Stop,” whispered Bright, but her body refused to move.
The second PS officer hit Cirque. True to form, her body twisted into an impossible shape before she slumped gracefully to the floor like a dress falling from a hook.
As the officer straightened up, Bright saw that Fon was up and out of her chair. Bright watched in open-mouthed amazement as her dressing-mate ran straight up to the man and grabbed his releaser.
“Excuse me! We are just trying to get to the House of It!” Fon announced in a voice that was dangerously close to shrill. “And you are interfering! Plus, you aren’t even supposed to be in here!” Fon jabbed the releaser into the officer’s chest and pressed the button. His knees buckled, his head snapped back, before he timbered forward directly on top of Fon.
The other PS officer ran toward the tangle of Fon and his partner. Bright used her dance training to launch herself out of her chair. She planted her right foot and drove the left straight into the small of the officer’s back.
He went down. Hard. Bright was still holding the helmet and, without thinking, she raised it and slammed it against his head. It made a hollow noise on impact. As the officer got up, Bright seized his releaser. If there was one thing a favour from the House of Gear could do well, it was take things away from grabby people. She gave the device a quick twist and yanked it free. Then she held it to his back and hit the button.
He collapsed on top of Fon and his partner.
It took Bright a full two minutes to heave the PS officers’ bodies off her dressing-mate, who lay sprawled and winded beneath them. They were as lumpy and unwieldy as ProWrestle Bags.
Fon’s halo had come loose and was twisted over her head.
Bright reached out a hand.
“Come on,” she said. “We better get Slater out of here.”
12.00
It took approximately thirty seconds for Grassly to ditch his partner. He changed the readout from his chip and sent the man in to check a noise in the relief centre, then he slipped away.
Figuring out where leisure unit 7 had gone took slightly longer than normal because the feed was processing information requests slowly. He knew that leisure unit meetings usually ended up at a Mind Alter house. This made little sense to him because the ancestors were almost always under the influence of some sort of intoxicant already, but they never seemed to get enough of the things they liked.
When Grassly finally tracked them down at the House of Smooth and located the VIP room, he discovered Bright and Fon trying to hold onto a blond boy who kept trying to crawl away from them. The boy’s shirt had been ripped almost off his body, and his muscles rippled and gleamed in the soft lights.
“Not cool,” said Fon.
“Make him go this way,” gasped Bright.
Grassly stepped inside and closed the door quietly behind him. He assessed the bodies—so many!—and the crawling, nearly naked favour and again wondered if his enlightenment strategy had been such a good idea. Sally Lancaster hadn’t said anything about enlightened people developing a propensity to crawl blindly into walls before migrating to the promised land. Shouldn’t they at least be crawling toward doorways or light fixtures? Perhaps his light needed a bit of fine-tuning. Well, too bad. There was no time for that.
Noticing him at last, the favours froze in guilty surprise and let go of the boy, who began to move with surprising speed across the floor.
“Get him,” said Grassly.
The favours didn’t move and Grassly realized they were afraid, maybe because they were with a favour who was behaving aberrantly or because they had clearly used the light when he’d told them not to or because they were responsible for the releasings. They had a lot of reasons to be scared. He tried smiling to allay their fears.
The favours gasped and Grassly realized his mistake. He was not good at smiling.
He tried a new tack. “Hello,” he said. “How are you?”
The ancestors loved graceless expressions of greeting almost as much as Grassly’s Mother loved giving advice.
The favours exchanged a glance.
Meanwhile, the yellow-haired male had crawled up and over the bodies of two officers. He was nearly clear of them, but one foot
had become trapped between the downed officers’ limbs and halted his progress.
“I am here to help,” Grassly said.
The favour called Bright surprised him. “That light,” she said. “What exactly is it doing to people?”
“That’s a very direct question,” he said, hoping to distract her.
It didn’t work. She waited for an answer with her hands balled at her sides.
“Well,” he said. Long pause. “The light … the light is …” He glanced at the blond boy. “The light makes ancesto—people intoxicated.”
“Intoxicated by fuuuuun!” sang the favour called Fon, almost involuntarily.
“Essentially. That’s the general idea,” said Grassly. “The light is next-generation alteration. It’s being developed specifically by the House of It for the House of It.”
Bright’s face showed signs of deep concentration. “But it doesn’t work on me or Fon,” she said.
“No. It doesn’t,” he agreed.
“Intoxicaaaatiiiinnnggg!” sang Fon.
Grassly was pleased with his newly discovered talent for improvisation. “Yes. The House of It has just created this new style of light-induced alteration. Very …” He searched his mind for words they might appreciate: “next-level.”
The boy on the floor still struggled to free himself from the tangle of bodies.
“Our light alteration is so new and so radically improved that most of the PS staff don’t know about it yet. As a result, there have been some misunderstandings with regard to the behaviour of clients and favours during the testing process.” Grassly spread his arm to take in the room. “As you can see.”
“They don’t usually care if we get altered. I mean, we’re always kind of—” Bright waggled her head and stiffly flailed her arms from side to side as though trying to dislodge her brain.
“Yes, well, this light alteration doesn’t look like anything most PS staff have seen before. They are confused about what’s happening. Some of them have gotten the wrong idea.”
“So shouldn’t you and the other people from It just tell them?” she asked.
Grassly was taken aback by how reasonable her questions were and by the orderliness of her logic, particularly given the situation around her.
“Well,” he said. “We are very exclusive. So elite, you might say, that we can’t share our, ah, secret light alteration formula with anyone at the wrong level. The Deciders aren’t ready for this to become general knowledge.” He dropped his voice to an exclusive whisper. ”At the lower levels.“
“Hello!” said Fon. “It’s a House of It thing! He can’t go telling low-credit people about it. It’s all part of the test. We need to get with the program. We need to go along to get along.”
Grassly nodded. That was the sort of unquestioning acceptance he’d been looking for.
“Exactly,” he said. “Go along to get along. I like that. Please do exactly that.”
“Yes, but …” said Bright, gesturing at Slater, who was still trying to free himself from the pile of bodies.
Smart, critical beings were trickier than unintelligent, unquestioning ones, Grassly reflected, and for the thousandth time he wished he’d chosen to rescue slaks or something else in the space slug family.
“He will sober up when he gets to the Natural Experience. After a time. We think.”
Both favours gasped, clasped both hands to their mouths, and gave simultaneous shudders of distaste.
“The Natural Experience!” said Bright.
“How’s he going to get there?” asked Fon.
“You will have to take him.”
“But I can’t!” Fon wailed. “It’s awful there. I think it might be bad for my skin!”
He pretended not to hear her. “When you transport him, you cannot allow yourselves to be seen by any PS officers. In particular, no one can know that you two worked the third shift at the House of Gear today. The uninformed have some wrong ideas about that shift.”
“Do you know how many PS officers usually support me?” said Fon, posing with her fist under her chin to indicate how serious she was. The piece of wire crusted with lights hung in front of her chest in a way that looked quite unsafe from an electrical standpoint. “I mean, I am at the very top of the credit scale. Way high value. Who else are they going to watch?”
She cast a guilty glance at Bright, whose lips tightened.
He had to move this along before they all got released from their contracts. He needed them out of the way while he figured out what to do. “Just don’t be how you are,” he said to Fon. “Non-elite people often have trouble understanding how things work in super-elite situations. All you need to know is that you three must get to the Natural Experience because the House of It has something amazing planned there. Very fun. Once you get there, go along the main path until you reach the skinny tree. Then turn left and go straight. You’ll come to the right place.”
The two favours still shifted uncertainly, lips parted in vacuous expressions of dismay.
“You are being timed,” he said. “I’m timing you.”
“Timed!” Fon gasped. “That’s so hard-core.”
“The House of It is, uh, watching. Waiting. Let me repeat my instructions: Do not let anyone know you’re from the House of Gear. Do not let anyone know that you worked the third shift. That’s also part of the test.” Grassly looked around at the bodies of the PS officers and the fallen members of leisure unit 7. “I’ll take care of all this once you’re on your way. Just remember to turn left at the skinny tree.”
Fon nodded and a look of steely determination came over her face, as though she’d just spotted a patch of rough skin and was about to go after it with a sander. She strode over to the shirtless crawling boy. Using some sort of wrestling/dance technique Grassly hadn’t seen before and liked very much, she flipped the boy onto his side, then hauled him to his feet.
“Come on, Bright!” Fon yelled. “The House of It is waiting and we can’t be late! We’re coming and we’re bringing a light-altered favour, which is, like, proprietary to the House of It! Don’t worry about them.” She jerked a thumb at the bodies strewn about the room. “They’ll all be back better than ever at some point!”
Suddenly, the girl was practically as strong as a badak, the sturdily built horned creatures famous on H51 for using the Mothers’ pyramids to test the astonishing strength of their shoulders. The constant ramming of the leathery grey brutes into the pyramids made them the bane of many a Mother’s existence.
Bright grabbed the helmet and turned to stare at Grassly, as though waiting for him to ask for it again. He decided she might need it.
“Briiiiight,” came Fon’s voice from the hallway. “I can’t do this on my own forever!”
“Go ahead,” he said. “Be safe.”
“So there’s no chance the light in the helmet will alter us?” Bright said at last.
“You appear to be immune.”
She made a noise that sounded like pffft. But she stuffed the helmet into her parachute bag and rushed out of the room. Music crawled out of the speakers, and the fun pipes hung uselessly from the walls, emitting faint hissing noises and giving off intermittent whiffs of mind-altering gases.
Grassly looked around at the carnage. Sleek, slender favours lay half in and half out of their settle chairs. The pair of PS officers sprawled on the floor like a single black-limbed creature. At this rate, there wouldn’t be any ancestors left to save, enlightened or otherwise.
13.00
“So awesome!” said Bright as they carried Slater past the greeter at the door. She was a different girl than the one who’d welcomed them on arrival.
“Best time!” added Fon, unwilling to let Bright sound more positive.
“Thanks!” they said together as they pushed through the door without slowing.
The greeter took two steps toward them, but they were gone before she could say anything.
Outside, Bright gulped the soft, quiet air. She was
n’t high anymore. Too bad. High was quite a bit better than scared and grossed out. Not to mention worried. She was pretty sure she was worried, too.
Worst mind alter ever. If their room wasn’t so full of bodies, she might have been tempted to ask for her credits back.
She was distracted from those unhappy thoughts by other unhappy thoughts about her cart. It was small. Slater was not. He was as broad across the shoulders as Bright and Fon combined. His legs were long and sculpted. His feet, clad in bright blue flip-flops, appeared too big to fit in the available space in the floor well of the cart. Though he seemed increasingly able to stand on his own, she didn’t see how they were going to get him inside. “He won’t fit,” said Bright.
Fon craned her head around Slater’s broad chest to look at her. “We haven’t even tried.”
“Fine. You get him in there, then.” Bright was aware that she sounded unpleasant, but she wasn’t sorry.
“Rude,” grumbled Fon.
Favours were trained to compete with each other, but they were also trained to appear to get along. Bright was surprised by how good it felt to snipe openly.
Slater’s head lolled, but Bright could feel his arm, warm and heavy across her back, and his fingers wrapped around her shoulder.
“Slater?” she said, pushing herself out from under him so she could look into his face.
“No time for talk,” said Fon. She ducked out from under Slater’s other arm. He swayed on the sidewalk. Before he could fall, Fon used her excellent client management skills to get the cart door open and began shoving him inside, headfirst, like an overstuffed prize from Gaming.
“Not so hard!” said Bright. “You’ll hurt him. He’ll hit his head.”
“As if that would make a difference,” said Fon. She pushed Slater’s shoulder past the spot where he’d gotten stuck between the two rounded seats.
Some instinct made Bright look down the street. Two PS officers marched toward them. The turtlenecked figures were about a block and a half away and moving fast. Both had their releasers out.
“More PS officers are coming!” Bright yelled.
