Prologue

The List

xxx

"... and hence it can be deduced that within curvature lies linearity, and vice-versa. Mathematically, this may not seem logical, but the equations as shown here prove the last statement's validity. While apparently self-contradictory and pointlessly confounding, this iterative formula does provide a means of methodically analysing variable-geometry systems such as time."

Professor Tee P.S., PhD (Mathematics), University of Beijing.

xxx

"The subconscious mind theoretically has greater capacity for focused thinking compared to the conscious mind. However, it is the conscious mind which possesses the actual manipulative capacity and facility for memory. Thus, if one was to attempt to optimise the quality of thinking, a balance between the subconscious and conscious minds should be obtained. Presently, this is not possibly accomplished through any voluntary means – the closest one could come to that state of mind would probably be a waking dream."

Professor Loren Kronkite, MBBS, MS (Psychiatry), FRCPsych.

xxx

"The existence of spirits is something that has been proven, time and again. Nonetheless, there exist those who doubt this. One only has to look at the world around us, and ample proof of spiritual presence can be seen, provided of course one knew the right way to go about looking for them. It won't be a case of believing in order to see, as much as the uninitiated may insist; on the contrary, if you wanted to see into the spirit realm, it really would be a case where seeing equates to belief."

Bridget O' Hara, PhD (Antropology), University of Dublin.

xxx

"It is nothing new, criminals getting away with lying during an interrogation. All known methods for detecting lies, such as body language, polygraphs, or even magnetic resonance imaging are all borderline reliable at best. And of course, the reliability of the so-called truth serums such as sodium penthanol is even more questionable. These uncertainties end today, with the launch of TriNex Pharmaceuticals' newest product – the Morphodex sedative."

Mishima Watanabe, PhD (Pharmacology), Kyoto University.

2: Chapter 1 - Early

I still can't stand the sight of a glass of beer, with all those bubbles streaming upwards.

Soda is fine, though. At least the bubbles fizzle out in those after some time.

xxx

Someone once told me that growing up sometimes feels like drowning. I suppose their intentions were good, but then again, few of them probably knew what it felt like to actually drown. And whoever that person was, he or she was wrong, because drowning is quite the unique experience.

I would know – I nearly drowned once.

Everything wasn't dark and gloomy, as you might expect. No, it was all actually quite bright, given that I wasn't even six feet beneath the water's surface. Heck, I probably could have read a book at that depth, if not for the lack of that annoyingly important gas called oxygen.

And then there were the bubbles.

They would rise, sluggishly moving towards the rippling image of the sun. Slowly, I could see them growing larger, and one by one, they would breach the surface. Time always seemed to slow down as I watched them streaming upwards, decreasing in number as I stopped flailing about.

No breathing, no bubbles. It's simple enough to comprehend, really.

Some moments after the last of the bubbles had gone would come the splash as a dark shape broke through the surface and made its way down to me. By that point in time, my vision was so blurry that I couldn't even recognise who it was. I recall being gripped by what felt like a pair of strong hands, but everything that took place immediately after that remains a blur.

There are days, though, when I can remember a face coming into the picture sometimes during my little brush with death. It – the face - like the rest of my memories after the bubbles, is little more than a grainy image. Nothing much to work with as far as identifying my saviour goes, though.

Two things are for certain. Firstly, that I owe the owner of that face my life. And secondly, that the nameless, debatably faceless person killed my brother.

Confused? Well, don't be – it's all quite straightforward, if you'll let me explain the entire situation.

You see, the only reason I ended up nearly meeting a watery demise was because I was trying to rescue my younger brother. He had taken a dive into the lake, and hadn't surfaced for some time. Worried, I had jumped into the water, and saw that his feet had apparently gotten tangled in some waterweeds growing at the bottom of the lake.

It was when I tried to free him that I almost drowned, see. Make no mistake, I was a capable swimmer, but in trying to save him, I almost ended up drowning, myself. Whoever it was that pulled me out of the water should have saved him instead. One glance would have revealed that he was the one who really needed saving.

When the swirling fog of me drowning got interrupted by a muffled ringing sound, things would slowly blur out of focus, and the dream would end.

xxx

Every morning when I woke up, it always felt as if I had drawn a deep breath of air by surfacing after a long dive. The drowning nightmares were frequent, but even on those few nights when I had the good fortune of having dreamless sleep I tended to wake up gasping for air, anyway.

Perhaps it was some kind of karmic curse or something; my brother had never known what it felt like to nearly drown, and then draw that lifesaving breath. He had just drowned, instead.

The world around me gradually became clearer as my freshly-opened eyes adapted to the dim light shining in through my room's window. It wasn't even sunlight – whenever I woke up, it was too early for that, and probably would always be – but rather, the light of a streetlamp with a dying bulb that stood several meters away from my window. As I reached out to shut off my alarm clock, I looked groggily out of the window.

No stars were out tonight, it seemed. Morning, technically, but stars in the morning just sounded wrong.

I sat up in bed and slid out from under my blanket, grimacing as I noticed the time, as I did every day when I woke up. Three a.m., and there I was, getting up for work. Call me crazy, but if there's one thing I'm sure of besides my hatred for beer and phobia of drowning, it's that I'll definitely oversleep if I sleep past three in the morning. Don't ask me why my body does that, though – I'm about as informed as a retarded kitten on that subject.

So are the doctors, for the matter. Uninformed, that is. Three sleep specialists since the nightmares started, and none of them could figure out what my problem was. Melatonin did the trick for a while, but then it stopped working. That's why I continued to go to bed at eleven, and waking up at three. It was a daily thing for me after the last twelve years, really.

As I started stretching out and hearing several soft popping sounds coming from my back, I started going through my mental checklist for the morning.

Wake up and disable alarm. Done.

Stretching. Done.

Turn on lights. On the way.

Crossing the room, I flipped the light switch and the aged fluorescent bulb in the middle of the ceiling starting its flickering warm-up routine, turning piss-orange at both ends. When it finally burst to life, I just stood there for a moment, blinking like an owl in the sudden brightness. Then it was off to the bathroom to wash up and get changed for the day's work, as per normal morning routine.

Once I was dressed for work, I grabbed my glasses from the top of my dresser table, and put them on. Going over to my bed and sitting on the rumpled blanket, I picked up the deck of stained, worn-out cards that was always by my bedside. Ten seconds was all it took for me to get a game of Patience started, and within minutes I was completely into the game. My alarm clock rang again at five, and when it did, I scooped up the cards and put them away.

It was time to leave for work.

xxx

The train station was nearly deserted, as it normally was at five thirty in the morning. A few other commuters were there, and they were also a bunch of dawn regulars like yours truly. Not all of them were afflicted with sleep disorders, though – some were just workers on the late shift or early shift, depending on which platform they were headed to. However, there were a couple of them who did suffer from the same problem which I had. They weren't too willing to talk about it, but then again, I suppose no one's really that chatty at the crack of dawn.

As the trains pulled into the station – one from each side, in opposing directions, and perfectly synchronised, as always – I observed my fellow commuters boarding. There was the Indian woman with the shawl and billowing saree, and there was the lanky dude in his customary sleeveless turtleneck. Boarding the train on the second coach was the normal trio of silent men in overalls which suggested employment in one of the plants at the edge of town. And then there were the group of four people, two men and two women, who were dressed in black business suits, who boarded the train at the third coach and who somehow sat in the fourth coach – weird as always, they were.

I sat down at my usual place next to the door, where the plexiglass partition was still intact. Content in the fact that I could easily get off the train when it reached my stop and that my wallet was secure from any scum and villainy who might decide to go on a morning run, I leaned back, and stared at the advertisements on the ceiling as the train started to move. Shout-outs for discounted books, free upgrades to my personal computer, and premium membership at Jake's Gym over at the Central Business District were all I could get a good look at before the train left the station and headed out onto the suspended rails, where the dimmed lights of a city yet to awaken made it difficult to see the small wordings carefully.

On one hand, the people who made those advertisements should have made the print bigger. On the other hand, they hadn't changed the advertisements in the last one month, anyway; I suppose the Transport Ministry sold advertising space on a monthly basis.

xxx

The train journey was mostly silent, which suited me just fine. Much like the other commuters who weren't very inclined to have idle conversations early in the morning, I was too occupied with staying awake to even make an attempt at intelligent thought. It could have been the train ride, I suppose. After a couple of years on the dawn train, you sort of get used to its mind-numbing nature.

In my state of partial-awareness, I very nearly got off the train at the wrong stop. My left foot was already on the platform before my mind caught up with the rest of my body, and I stepped back into the train before the sensors on the door could register me as having disembarked. Fortunately, one leg out of the door didn't qualify as boarding or getting off the train, or else I'd be obliged to pay for a second fare.

A ride on the train wasn't expensive, but it wouldn't be cheap, either. Screw you, Transport Ministry and your ridiculous administrative charges.

Within a couple of seconds, I was back in my seat, and was squinting at the railway map that was on the train's wall, between the windows. So I still had two stops to go, it seemed.

"First day on the job, I take it?" asked someone with a vaguely familiar voice from somewhere on my left.

I jumped a little as I turned to face the man in the sleeveless turtleneck, matching the voice to his face as I did so. Much like me, he tended to go for the same seat on his way to wherever he went in the mornings.

"I beg your pardon?" I asked him, unsure if I'd hear him right the first time.

He smiled, and shook his head. "No one goes to the Institute this early except for the people who work there, right? Since you nearly got out, I guess this is your first day?"

Blinking slowly as I processed his words, I nodded. "Well, yes..."

"Cool!" he replied happily, practically springing out of his seat and over to the one opposite mine. With one smooth manoeuvre, he had deposited himself directly in front of me. "So, what department did they assign you to? I heard that pathology had an opening-"

"I'll be in applied neurology," I said, cutting him off before he could get on a roll – he certainly seemed like the type of energetic bastard who'd be perfectly capable of singlehandedly wrecking an otherwise uneventful morning. "Mathematician, in case you were going to ask that next."

His face split into a wide grin. "Whoa! You're the new guy they were talking about?"

"Wait, you-" I started, as I realised a possible implication of what he had just said.

"Got it in one," he laughed. "Zachary Harding, at your service. And yes, I do work in applied neurology."

All I could do was to gape at him. Was this guy for real? He still looked like a hyperactive bastard, and had, on a closer glance, a rather strange appearance considering what he claimed to work as. His hair was a thick, unruly mess, his jeans were as faded as Senator Quimbley's memory, and he wore one of his turtlenecks from what was a seemingly bottomless collection. Today, it was the blue one with a red band around the neck.

Seriously, would they even allow him in the Institute dressed like that? Apparently, they did, or he was a madman. I slipped a hand into my pocket and grasped at my switchblade – hey, I might not have been the best at handling one of those things, but in a pinch, it would suffice.

With a nervous smile, I said, "And what is it that you do in applied neurology, Mister Harding?"

"Mister? Who do you think I am, your grandfather?" he made a face. "Call me Zack, man!

"To answer your question, I work as a... what do they call that, again? Ah, to hell with it, let's just call me a neurologist of sorts. Started as a pharmacologist, and then branched out into neurology after a couple of years in the Institute."

Before either of us could say anything further, the train smoothly came to a stop. And it was our stop, too – the Institute of Medical Research.

"Great timing!" chirped my partner as he leaped out of his seat, and heading out of the door. Could the door's sensors really tag him as he got off at that speed? Apparently they could, I suppose, or he would've been paying the maximum fare twice a day.

I was just stepping onto the platform before his voice once again jolted me out of my morning daze.

"Come on, dude! Time's a wasting, and you've got a lot of ground to cover on day one, aha!"

Wait.

Did that... psychopath just call me a dude? What the fuck was his problem, anyway, being so crazy in the morning?

Shaking my head slowly and making a face at the idea of me working in the same faculty as that oversized ball of manic insanity, I made my way towards the metal detectors, where three burly guards stood eyeballing me.

"Identification?" one of them asked, casually toying with his baton as I walked up to the barrier. Mentally, I designated him as Moe, thanks to the black fuzz that covered his head.

Wordlessly, I held out my palm, and another guard – he could be Curly, I think – produced a handheld scanning wand, which he waved over it. A green light flashed at the device's tip, and the turnstiles unlocked with an audible click.

"Go on up to the doctors, then," Moe said gruffly. "They told us to send you right up when you got here."

"Thanks," I passed through the rotating turnstile and nodded. "How do I get to applied neurology, would you know?"

The third guard, who had been silent right until that moment in time, pointed over my shoulder. "Just go with him."

Oh my gods. Please no.

"What the hell are you waiting for? Let's go already!" called out the ever-insane Zachary Harding, beaming at me from the top of the stairs that led to the platform.

Bloody hell, it was going to be a long first day on the job. That was for sure.

3: Chapter 2 - Orientation

Chapter 2 – Orientation

It didn't take long for Zachary Harding to lead me to the applied neurology department. And by that, of course, I mean that the maniac moved so fast through the maze of white-walled corridors and unmarked doors that I was soon hopelessly lost. Seriously, the man seemed to be capable of walking through walls, at the rate he was going!

"Excuse me?" I knocked on one of the doors along a corridor with a sign declaring it to be the endocrinology department. "Excuse me, is anyone there?"

Apparently, most of the endocrinologists must have kept saner working hours, as I had yet to get any responses from the last three doors I'd knocked on. Just as I was about to turn around and walk off down the corridor, the last door along the corridor opened, and a tall, thin man in a rumpled white coat walked out past it.

"Excuse me, mister-"

He turned his head about to squint at me, his jerky movements giving him an eerie resemblance to an exceptionally well-dressed scarecrow. "Oh, so you're the one making that infernal racket at this unholy hour! Just what are you looking for, anyway?"

I walked up to him, and almost immediately got assaulted by a blast of cold air that blew out of his room. The freezing draft gave me goosebumps. "I was looking for applied neurology, and the person guiding me there... lost me."

"What are you, retarded?" he gave a disdainful sniff. "You must have passed neurology to get here, and applied neurology's obviously within that department!"

"I did?" I asked him sheepishly. "If it isn't too much of a bother, could you please tell me how to get back there, then?"

"Go straight down the corridor, and take the first left turning. From there, there should be a sign leading you to neurology," he said, pointing back the way I'd come from. "Now if you'll excuse me, some I've got work to do."

"Thank you, sir," I called out, even as he went back into that sub-zero room of his.

"And you tell that lunatic Zachary Harding to not lose people down here again, you hear?" a waspish reply came from behind the room's closed door. "Damn fool thinks everyone's got ADHD just like him, it seems."

Smirking a little at the idea of people in other departments knowing about the madman who I'd met on the train, I walked back down the way I'd came from and soon enough found the left corridor the man had mentioned. Sure enough, there was a small, neatly-lettered sign stuck to an otherwise blank notice board on the wall which had directions to various departments on it. After a brief glance at it to get my bearings, I headed off towards the neurology department.

xxx

Neurology turned out to be just a short walk away from endocrinology, but the tall man had been wrong – I clearly did not recall walking past those corridors. The doors in neurology were all labelled with metal plaques detailing the rooms' occupants, unlike those I'd seen in endocrinology.

I had walked about halfway down the neurology corridor when one of the doors near the end of it slammed open, and none other than Zachary Harding himself sprang out of the room. Almost immediately, he caught sight of me, and before I could even open my mouth to berate him, he had already bounded up to me and gotten behind me.

"Well, someone got lost, it seems!" he said cheerfully, as he pushed me towards the end of the corridor. "Never mind, it happens all the time to new staff!"

"And you couldn't walk just a little bit slower?" I deadpanned, as we arrived at the door he had opened – it was labelled as 'Prof. Dr. I.B. Elias – Chief Neurologist'.

"Please, dude," he scoffed, "you've got to move faster than that if you're going to keep up with me, hah!"

We entered the room, and it turned out to be a cross between a clinic and an office. There was a desk, two chairs, and three filing cabinets on one side of the room, while a metal-framed gurney, a sink, and a wooden cupboard occupied the other half of the room.

It was the man behind the desk who caught my attention, though. He was completely bald, and had several nasty-looking scars crisscrossing the pale skin of his scalp. One of his eyes was blue, and when I got closer to the desk, I realised that it was a prosthetic – as he looked up, the eye rolled about lifelessly in its socket.

"So, you're the kid Zachary lost," he said, sounding surprisingly warm despite his appearance. "How'd you find your way here?"

"Umm," I hesitated, unsure about how to address him. Professor? Doctor? Sir? "Well, there was this man at endocrinology-"

"Ichabod Crane?" Zachary Harding asked, grinning widely as he took a seat in front of the desk. "Relax and take a seat, would you? Dr. Elias doesn't bite."

"For you, Zachary, I might make an exception," the man – whom my hyperactive guide of sorts had just identified as the head of the neurology department – said, sounding somewhat amused. "So, the man you met at endocrinology... was he a tall and thin man, as Zachary quite unkindly described him?"

I nodded and sat down in the second chair in front of the desk, stifling the laugh that almost made its way out of me when I had first realised who Zachary Harding had been referring to. "Yes, he was. And his room was cold, too – how does he stand it in there?"

Dr. Elias shrugged, even as he opened a file that lay on his desk. "Dr. Koch is our leading expert on hyperthyroidism, and he's got a bad case of it, himself. Not the friendliest researcher down here, but he's good at what he does.

"Anyway, moving on with business; it says here that you hold a master's degree in applied mathematics. Care to elaborate?"

I leaned back in my seat. "Well, for my bachelor's degree, I graduated with honours in mathematics, and got a scholarship to do my master's degree. I chose applied mathematics, and eventually did my thesis on optimisation of variables in parallel-processing systems."

He nodded, as he drummed his fingers on the tabletop. "Hmm. It also says here that your thesis involved several industrial chemical processes. How did chemistry get into the mix?"

"I was a maths major for my bachelor's, but took chemistry as my minor," I replied. "Selecting chemical processes for my master's was a matter of interest, really; the combinatorics I worked on could apply to most industrial processes if you supplied me with the right variables."

"Interesting, interesting," Dr. Elias murmured, as he continued reading my file, his prosthetic eye still looking straight at me. "You were transferred here by the powers that be, I'll have you know. I don't exactly pay much attention to mathematics, if you'll pardon me, but I simply lack the interest to do so.

"There's really nothing else I've got to ask you, though. So just follow him, and he'll show you around."

"I'm sorry, who?" I asked him with a sinking feeling in my gut as I realised just who he might be referring to. Pharmacology, damn it!

Sure enough, Zachary Harding slapped me on the back hard enough to make me feel like coughing up a lung. "Looks like I'm going to be your guide for today, then!"

Oh my goodness, why?

xxx

Despite his manic nature, Zachary 'call me Zack' Harding proved to be a capable guide. As we went about the Institute's maze of identical-looking corridors, I decided that it wouldn't be fair to brand him as a lunatic – he was just being friendly.

Well, maybe he went a little too far for that, but still, he seemed to be genuinely interested in helping me learn my way around the Institute.

"And now that we're done with the basic layout of the place, what's the mnemonic, again?" he asked me, as we returned to the neurology corridor. Apparently, while the various departments were located based on their relatedness to each other, the staff there used a mnemonic to recall the corridor layout.

"Naughty hookers, cops, and perverts never ever get herpes," I recited, feeling a smile tugging at the corners of my mouth. It was a quite neat, really – the mnemonic reminded me that the corridors basically were built in a large square. Starting from nephrology, haematology was the next department, followed by cardiology, pulmonology, neurology, endocrinology, gastroenterology, and hepatology.

He nodded, and pointed back towards Dr. Elias' office. "Now, the toilet next to Dr. Elias' office is one of the few which consistently has toilet paper, so always keep that in mind if you get the runs. However, we're one floor below this, so you might want to run up the stairs if you feel your butt starting to have contractions."

My mind was still processing the ludicrous bit about anal contractions when it finally caught to the rest of what Zachary had just said. "Wait, one floor below? I thought this was the lowest floor?"

Zachary smiled, and leaned in towards me with a mischievous look in his eyes. "Technically, applied neurology doesn't exist, either. Why do you think we come to work so obscenely early?"

"You're joking, right?" I asked him, dumbfounded, as he walked up to the only blank door in neurology. Whistling innocently, he opened the door, and gestured for me to enter the room.

The room looked like a small laboratory, with a tiled bench in the middle of it and a shelf of what looked like preserved brains occupying one wall. Several of the overhead lights were switched on even though there wasn't anyone else in the room aside from us.

Come to think of it, I hadn't seen Zachary touching any switches or control panels when he'd entered. Were the lights controlled by a sensor?

He walked right up to one of the lab benches, and hopped up to sit on its edge. "Well, this is applied neurology!"

I frowned at him, wondering if he was trying to pull a fast one on me. He was still wearing that shit-eating grin that his face seemed to be stuck with, but his eyes suggested that something else was going on here. They just looked... curious.

"Is this a joke, Zachary?" I asked, narrowing my eyes at him.

"Not at all," he hummed, trying his best to look innocent – rather convincingly, too. "Just look around, and you'll see what I mean."

Casting a quick glance at the room's contents, I realised that it did look like a normal laboratory. The lab bench seemed genuine, and so did the two sinks at the sides of the room. I noticed a small figurine carved out of some sort of black stone sitting in a corner, but dismissed it as being too obvious – black stone against a white floor, really?

A small metal cabinet next to the bench drew my attention for a while, before I noticed something else. When I walked closer to get a better look at the suspicious object, I couldn't help but feel slightly pleased with myself.

The shelf of preserved brains – yes, they were brains, all in jars of what looked to be some rather ancient formaldehyde – was deeper than its edges would have suggested. While it only stuck out of the wall by about ten centimetres, the depth of the shelves was easily double that length.

"A hidden doorway behind the shelf of brains, isn't it?" I asked, feeling a little surprised at the whole idea of it. "Why hide the department, though?"

He merely shrugged. "You signed the non-disclosure documents, didn't you? And saw the seal at the bottom?"

I paused for a while to try and recall what he was talking about. When I did remember what the employment contract had contained, I felt a wave of cold washing over me like Dr. Koch's escaped air-conditioning.

"Military?"

"Keep going," he winked at me, while making a shooing gesture.

Turning back to face the bookshelf, I started paying closer attention to the supposed doorway to applied neurology. It all sounded unlikely, but since the military had been involved in the contract...

And there it was.

I squatted down to get a closer look at it, and sure enough, one jar had its label turned slightly off to one side. All of the others had their labels facing towards me in neat rows, but that one jar was oh-so-slightly out of alignment. Reaching out for the jar, I tried to lift it up, and heard something clicking into place behind the shelf.

The shelf suddenly moved backwards, sliding back without a sound. Startled, I jumped back a little, and stood up. Fluid sloshed about sluggishly in the jars as the shelf stopped moving, revealing stairs going down on either side of it.

All I could was to stare at the revealed passageway – I had been expecting it, but still! – while Zachary applauded softly behind me.

"Very good," he said, sounding impressed. "That's got to be one of the fastest we've seen, and given the triplets, that's saying something!"

"It..." I muttered, still in a mild state of shock. "It's a hidden passageway!"

He laughed, "And you were expecting a little hidden railway, or something? Nice try, but nope. So, are you going to go down the stairs, or what?"

I walked closer to the stairs, and looked down both flights – they both seemed to end in landings with closed doors. "Which one should I take?"

"Oh, just follow me!" Zachary said happily, as he hopped off the bench and walked up to the stairs. "Both of them lead to the annex, anyway."

With him leading the way, we went down the left flight of stairs and reached the landing at the bottom. A soft bumping noise made me turn around, and I saw that the shelf of brains was sliding back to cover the way we'd come in. Interestingly enough, the back of the shelf had been fit with a large foam pad, which I realised would prevent anyone from deducing its true function if they tapped on its front.

Back at the landing, we had come to a closed door that looked like the door to a bank's safe, with massive rivets studding its polished surface and thick metal bands framing its edges. On the wall to the right of the door was a small screen, not unlike those pad devices made by Apple that people used to be so crazy about. Zachary stepped up to the screen, and tapped it several times with a fast little rhythm. It came to life with a dim yellow light, and he moved a finger over the screen in a complicated-looking pattern.

The pad's yellow light gave way to a bright green light, and the massive door started sliding upwards. As it moved, I could hear the rumbling of various mechanical components in the walls around us, along with the hissing of hydraulics.

"Shocking, I suppose," Zachary remarked, upon seeing my face. "You'll get over it in due time, haha!"

"It is," I murmured, still a little numb over the whole idea of a concealed passageway. Everyone knows that the government does stuff like this, really, but seeing it in person was... different.

I was too awestruck to even move even when Zachary walked through the doorway, into the brightly-lit room beyond it. Two ladies were sitting on a green sofa not three metres away from us, and they gave friendly waves to him as he approached them.

"Morning, Zachary!" said one of the ladies, with what sounded like traces of a British accent. "Is that the new guy?"

"That's him," Zachary nodded, as the lady stood up and gave him a hug. "How was last night's gig?"

"Tiring," she replied, as she stood up and stretched. "We're just waiting for the triplets, and then we'll head back topside for some breakfast and sleep."

"And what the hell are you looking at?!" her companion snapped at me, causing me to jump and let out a terrified squeak. Unlike the possibly British lady who seemed nice enough, this one just looked plain mean. Her hair was cut into a shoulder-length bob that reminded me of that harridan nurse's from that old movie with Jack Nicholson, and she sounded like those dykes you saw on wrestling shows.

"Oh stow it, you cunt!" snapped Zachary, startling me with his sudden use of profanity. "That fine gentleman over there may end in my department, I'll have you know!"

"And I'm supposed to care about that, why?"

I watched with wide eyes as the two of them began hurling progressively more colourful insults at each other, and soon enough, the argument had turned into an all-out catfight. They were just started with slapping at each other, when the more docile of the two women carefully walked around them and make her way towards me.

She gave me a quick once-over, and smiled. "And here's to a good morning to you."

"Good morning, miss," I said meekly, watching as Zachary started to get beaten upside the head by the bob cut lady with her handbag. "Err, are they always like this?"

"They usually are," she nodded, as she nudged me on the shoulder. "Here, why not let me take you to get registered, while those two duke it out? Looks like today they'll be occupied for a while."

We slowly edged around the fight – Zachary had pinned one of the lady's arms behind her back – and headed towards a counter with a sleepy-looking man behind it. The sign on the counter said 'Reception', but just why they had that sign given the hidden location was beyond me.

"Morning, Jane," the man yawned, as he stirred a mug of what looked like coffee. His eyes were bloodshot, his hair was all on end as if he had just been electrocuted, and he could have done with a shave. "Is this the new kid on the block?"

"Does everyone know about me?" I wondered, as the haggard man fished out a form and slide it to me over the counter.

"We don't often get new personnel down here," he said, sounding bored. "Except for the occasional accident, I suppose. That poor sap never knew what hit him."

Those last few words of his barely registered with me as I picked up the form, and looked it over. It was a simple form for me to get a nametag or so it seemed, and as I filled it up with a nearly dried-out ballpoint pen, I couldn't help but overhear the conversation between Jane and the receptionist.

"Karoly did him in, didn't he?"

"Well, Norris knew what he was getting into, so you can't really blame Karoly."

"Just look at what he did to Ariel!"

"True, that..."

"I'm done," I said brightly, pushing the completed form back towards the receptionist, who blinked owlishly at me as I did so. "And what happened, anyway?"

"Sick-" the receptionist began, only to be interrupted by a loud cry from somewhere behind me. The three of us started a bit, and turned as one to look in the sound's direction. Zachary had managed to pin bob cut lady on the floor in what looked like some kind of judo lock, causing her to curse the air blue.

"You win for today, you overgrown turd!" snarled bob cut lady, as Zachary triumphantly twisted her arms into an even tighter tangle. "Now let me go!"

"Only if you say please," he said sweetly, causing her to let out a loud sigh. "Pretty, pretty please?"

"Alright, alright," she grumbled. "Pretty, pretty please?"

He let go of her, and she threw him off like a dog shaking itself. She got to her feet and brushed herself off as he landed deftly on his feet, and offered him a handshake.

"Great stuff as always, Zack!" she beamed at him, looking surprisingly happy despite the sheen of sweat on her forehead. "Another round tomorrow, then?"

"You're on," he replied with a mock salute, as he walked past her and slapped her butt. "See you tomorrow, Marie!"

"Come on, Jane!" said Marie. "Time for breakfast!"

"A shower would be in order first," Jane sighed. "Can't you two work out in the gym like normal people?"

"Where's the fun in that?" grumbled Marie, as they opened the blast door and walked out onto the concealed stairs.

The reception annex was once again silent, with only Zachary, the receptionist, and yours truly left in it. Now that I didn't have the strange sight of two people brawling on the floor to distract me, I managed to get a good look at the room itself while Zachary discussed something with the receptionist.

We were right in the middle of the room, and it looked as if the stairs had come down close to its centre. The room was perfectly circular as far as I could tell, and around us were what appeared to be numerous elevators with mirror-like doors. For some reason, that alone managed to catch my attention – for a short while, I was slightly taken aback by just how polished the elevator doors were, what with dozens of reflections looking back at me.

"Hello?" I was startled out of my reverie by Zachary's voice and a hand waving in front of my face. "Anyone home?"

"Sorry, got distracted a bit," I said, feeling embarrassed – they were only elevator doors, for goodness sakes!"

He just smiled upon hearing that, and shook his head. "You're a funny guy, you know that? Anyway, we've still got your tour of this place, so let's go!"

"Just how do you know which elevator to go to?" I asked him, even as he walked up to one, seemingly at random.

"This isn't like endocrinology with their missing plaques," he laughed. "Just hop into any one of them, and they'll take you wherever you want to go in here."

As if on cue, the doors slid open, and we got into the elevator. It was quite roomy inside, and looked as if it could have comfortably fit maybe a dozen people. When the doors slid shut, I could see that a control panel had been built into the insides of the doors. It looked something like the panel which Zachary had used to open the blast door earlier, but this time, when he touched it, a glowing sphere of light about the size of a melon materialised in the middle of the elevator.

"Whoa!" I cried, jumping backwards into the elevator's wall as the light-sphere hovered in the middle of the elevator and pulsated slowly. "Is that... a hologram?"

Zachary nodded and stuck his hand into the sphere, tapping at several suspended shapes within it using his fingers. "Correct again. All the elevators down here are completely under hologram control."

"Wow," I said, marvelling at the holographic sphere, even as the elevator started to move with only the slightest jolt. The sphere disappeared, and suddenly, the elevator was flooded with a soft, greenish light. Startled, I looked away from where the sphere had been, and saw something that made me go slack-jawed with wonder.

The light which had entered the elevator was not from within it, but rather, was from the space surrounding us. Now that we had left the reception area I realised that the elevator's walls were actually transparent, and that we were moving through a massive underground cavern that had various buildings within it. And the sights were nothing short of amazing.

Several other elevators were also moving about in the cavern, suspended above the rocky ground by nothing save for a few flimsy-looking cables. I could see people in them and the chambers built into the cavern's wall, floors, and even ceiling, going about their daily work.

As I looked up to see where the light was coming from, and blinked like an idiot when I realised what I was seeing.

The cavern's ceiling was covered in large patches of what looked like phosphorescent moss, and there were even several people moving about on contraptions resembling a window cleaner's elevator, busy spraying the moss with something from tanks strapped to their backs. Wherever they sprayed it, the moss would start to glow even brighter, and the light would begin to ripple almost as if the moss was responding directly to the spraying.

If I had already been awestruck by the hidden entrance to applied neurology, the strange cavern that the elevator brought us into probably left me looking as if I'd suffered from a stroke.

We went along towards one of the chambers, and only a small part of me was still thinking clearly enough to note that we were now travelling horizontally instead of vertically as a normal elevator would. Eventually, we came to a stop at the chamber, and the elevator's doors slid open.

A group of people were standing outside the elevator, looking suspiciously like they had been waiting for our arrival. When they saw me and started clapping their hands, though, my suspicions were confirmed.

I also felt awkward as ever, standing there like a clueless mute.

"Now, this is what they meant by applied neurology!" said Zachary, beaming at me as he walked out of the elevator. "Welcome aboard!"

4: Chapter 3 - Occupational

Chapter 3 – Occupational

We stepped out of the elevator, and were approached by a tall woman who stepped out of the crowd surrounding it. She offered us a smile and a wink, before turning around and addressing the others.

"Alright, so who bet on the minimum time? Less than fifteen minutes, I believe it was," she said, drawing several laughs from the people and a few raised hands. "Well, looks like it's time you guys paid up – security's just analysed the footage, and minimum time wins!"

Cheers and groans were heard as the crowd slowly started to disperse, and I turned to Zachary for an explanation, eyebrows raised out of curiosity. He just shrugged and gave me a smirk, and it was the tall lady who ended up explaining things to me.

"Oh, don't worry about it," she said cheerfully, clapping me on my back. "We bet on how long it takes the new people to figure out how to work the bookshelf, that's all. And you were certainly a fast one, too."

"Less than fifteen minutes, right?" I asked, realising what it was that the crowd had been betting on. "So, did you win the bet?"

She made a face, and sighed. "As observant as you were back there, you cost me ten bucks."

"Alright, Tammy, back off from the new kid," laughed Zachary. "He's got quite a lot of ground to cover today."

She raised an eyebrow at that. "Oh, so you're his mentor? May the gods have mercy on his soul, then."

"Come on, then," he said, "you're just jealous because I won the bet!"

"Looks like your faith in mathematical logic won after all, Zack," she said, smiling a little. "Anyway, I've got to get back to work. See you two around."

Turning to me and giving me a nod and a smile, she said, "Don't worry about him, really. He may be a bastard, but he's the best sort of bad example you could follow."

With that, she spun on her heel and walked off, practically gliding down the corridor, leaving me to wonder just how crazy my supposed mentor could be. Zachary grabbed me by the shoulder, startling me a little.

"Alright, it's time to familiarise you with this place. It's not quite as complicated as being topside, trust me!" he declared happily.

I was starting to wonder if the man was completely sane, and some of the shock that had initially thrown me when I had seen the outside of the elevator was beginning to make its presence felt again. "This. This place. How?"

He merely walked down the corridor, and gestured for me to follow him. I jogged a little to catch up with him, and he started to speak again.

"Just how current are you with technology?" he asked, as we walked past several glass-walled offices containing people working at computers. "Military stuff, that is."

I thought about for a brief moment, and replied, "Not that current on military stuff. I know the government authorised the purchase of those bombers-"

"No, no," he cut me off, shaking his head and smiling slightly. "Not weapons, my dear. I'm talking about intelligence. Do you think we've got spy satellites, teleportation devices, mind-reading machines, maybe? Intelligence-related stuff."

An article I recalled seeing on one of the journal databases flashed past my mind's eye. "Wait, you said you were a pharmacologist before this?"

"Uh-huh," he nodded, as we turned away from the main corridor and headed down a narrower one with fewer doors along it. "And what does that have to do with the question?"

"You could have asked me about any of the fictitious devices the military is supposed to have, but you mentioned mind-reading machines," I answered, feeling slightly suspicious as to just what applied neurology was all about. "And there was that drug they patented a while back. Morphodex, I think it was called - supposedly a tool to prevent prisoners from lying during questioning."

Zachary stopped dead in his tracks, looking distinctly uncomfortable. "How did you find out about the Morphodex?"

"I specialised in industrial chemical processes for my thesis," I reminded him, my mind working overtime on the side to piece together all the clues that I had been given thus far. If the current clues were any indication, there was definitely hell of a lot more going on down here than mere neurological research. "It was one of those things floating about in the journal archives."

He started walking again, and started speaking again, disbelief evident in his voice. "Looks like someone's ahead of the learning curve, then... They must have pulled your computer's records from surveillance... Anyway, where was I?"

"Something about manipulating someone's consciousness, I would think. And what's this about my computer being under surveillance?"

"Just a security thing – they probe into everyone's history before hiring anyone," he said dismissively with a wave of his hand. "But yes, what you said was correct. Here at applied neurology, we focus on the subconscious and how it can be controlled. You're aware that the subconscious theoretically has greater capacity for intelligent thoughts than the conscious mind, right?"

I nodded, and he went on.

"You see, that's one of the reasons why they said Einstein was such a great thinker; he had managed to harness the power of his subconscious by daydreaming all the time, or something like that," Zachary said, stopping in front of a closed door. He started digging around in his pockets. "Now, just where are those keys?

"So, with the invention of that lovely little sedative you mentioned, neurologists had very fine control over how unconscious a person could be. By administering the right dosage, they could even induce a shift from conscious thought to the subconscious. Do you get where I'm going with this? Gotcha, you sneaky bastards!"

"I guess," I replied, feeling that something was still amiss. "And why are you using keys, anyway? Doesn't this place operate using the chip implants?"

Even I had had an identification chip implanted in my right hand, and I was a new employee. It stood to reason that all the other people employed by the Institute would have one of them as well, but then again, there was a lot which they kept hidden, as I had just realised.

"Down here, everything's got tighter security. Since they invented key implants, everyone's forgotten how to pick these old-fashioned locks, it seems. With the sensors built into this lock, it's not likely for security not to catch an intruder, anyway," Zachary said, as he got the door - to what I presumed was his office – open. "And what was I just saying? You need to stop distracting me, hah!"

I followed him into the room, whose lights were off. "Sorry about that. You were saying something about inducing subconscious thinking?"

"Oh, right, that," he muttered, as he flipped a switch and turned on the lights. "Take a seat, kid. It's going to be a long bit of explaining."

The office was neat, and was comfortably roomy. A desk, a filing cabinet, two chairs, and a small sofa were all it contained, and the only things keeping its walls from being completely featureless were a couple of framed photographs.

I sat down in front of the desk, and Zachary took the seat behind it. "Getting back on topic here, what we do is play with the human subconscious to solve humanity's problems. Hmm, you're a mathematician, so I suppose you're familiar with Fermat's last theorem?"

"Fermat's last theorem, you say?" I echoed, trying to remember what exactly the theorem entailed. "Didn't a team of mathematicians solve it just about five years ago?"

"Indeed they did," he nodded. "Well, if you wanted proof of how powerful the human subconscious is, there it is. The British version of this department put a group of mathematicians under, and when they woke up, there it was; the solved proof. And that's why applied neurology – I think that may be the international nickname for this field – is so hushed up."

That got me thinking, and I didn't exactly like the thoughts which came to my mind. "And just why am I needed here, then? The sedative isn't that difficult to manufacture, and it's a controlled item, anyway."

Zachary leaned back in his seat, and scratched the back of his head. "Well... you see, it's really not as simple as putting someone under and letting them wake up with the keys to the universe. During the sedation, we need to keep someone on hand to chronicle their thoughts, like a spotter for weightlifting. And our last mathematician... well, she won't be doing any more deep thinking for a while."

"What happened to her?" I asked, my interest piqued. "And how do you chronicle someone's thoughts?"

"Patience, grasshopper!" he laughed. "She took her leave of us, and that's all I'm allowed to say. As for how we chronicle thoughts, it's a long, tedious process involving electrodes and advanced computers."

"I find it doubtful that a computer could tap into someone's thoughts," I said, frowning as a thought struck me. "And why do you need to chronicle the thoughts, anyway? Can't they remember their own thoughts?"

He gaped at me for a short while, before offering me a handshake. "Damn you guys and your logical thinking. Well, that's basically the root of the problem; the division between the conscious and subconscious mind.

"As much as the subconscious is a powerful thought processor, only the conscious mind possesses the ability for direct thought and memory. So when we put them under, they retain just enough consciousness to control their thoughts, and yet can tap into their subconscious for the actual thinking. But it seems that memory is a higher function of consciousness or some good shit like that, so they won't retain any of their thoughts."

"That is just... whoa," I said, feeling a little overwhelmed by everything. "Give me a moment, could you?"

"Take five," he nodded, as he opened a drawer on his desk and dug out some papers. "It's a bit much, but we need you debriefed as soon as possible, if you know what I mean."

I just sat there for a while, thinking things over. Things were radically different from what I had expected, and frankly, I doubted anyone would have expected whatever Zachary had just told me. So it seemed that the government had found ways to get into human minds, but were yet to be able to control them. That was a slightly comforting thought.

Whatever comfort I had disappeared rapidly when I realised that secrets were now a thing of the past. There would be no lying to a mind probe, now would there? And if it was possible to sedate a person with such fine-grained control as Zachary had claimed, then sedation to completely prevent any resistance to someone glimpsing into a mind probe would be inevitable.

But, my ever-cynical mind argued, a mind probe was logically not possible. In fact, it was the sole problem with the entire scenario. The human brain did not broadcast thoughts like radio waves, as far as I knew. Even if they stuck electrodes in to measure the electrical impulses which travelled along the brain's neurones, there wouldn't be a way to distinguish the specific impulses for thought from physiological impulses.

Or was there?

As I continued to mull over the feasibility of a mind probe, I glanced about the room, and saw that it was, as I had initially thought, rather bland and tidy. The photographs on the wall showed Zachary with several other people, and one of the pictures showed him standing with a bunch of other people in white laboratory coats, all holding up flasks of brightly-coloured liquids and hamming it up for the camera.

It was when I looked away from the pictures that I noticed the little black statue.

Just like the one I had seen back in the decoy lab which was the entrance to the applied neurology department – briefly, I wondered what its true name would be, if not for the euphemism of applied neurology – the statue in the corner was made of polished stone, and sat in the corner of Zachary's office.

"What's that?" I turned back to Zachary and asked, causing him to look up from his paperwork with a look of mild surprise. "That statue – it was in the lab where we entered this place. What is it?"

He took a second to look where I was pointing, and replied, "That's part of our security system. Surveillance tool of some sort, I think."

Now, I might have been the new kid on the block, but I wasn't a complete idiot. Or so I hoped. Even he didn't sound convinced by the claim that the tiny statue was a surveillance device. "I highly doubt that, Zachary."

"That's what is," he shrugged. "We don't have very many rules down here, but if there's one thing everyone goes by, it's this; don't mess with security. You could come to work dressed like a stripper, you could screw a colleague over your desk, you could run a weekly Poker night down at the cafeteria, or whatever. But you definitely do not want to mess with security. Is that clear?"

"I see," I said, going back to my thoughts on the mechanics of a mind probe. After a short while, I decided to mentally file it away for later scrutiny. "So, what am I supposed to do now?"

"Eh?"

"You've debriefed me, I think. So what exactly am I supposed to do down here?"

He picked up the paperwork he had been doing, and shoved it back into the drawer which he had taken it out of. "I suppose you'll have to start some stimulator training for a mind probe. Sort of a test of whether you've got the mental fortitude to survive inside someone else's head."

There it was again, the suggestion that you could actually get inside another person's mind. Something was definitely not right here. "I'll just take your word for it."

"Alright," he said, sounding as chirpy as he had been when we'd first gotten down into the reception area. "Let's get to it, then!"

xxx

The stimulators turned out to be located in a separate chamber, at the other side of the large cavern which housed applied neurology. Unlike the one that we had just left, with its corridors and offices, this chamber was basically one large compartment filled with machinery. Metal catwalks, ladders, and stairs occupied the bulk of the chamber, with large, egg-like pods and computers located seemingly haphazardly all around it.

When I looked up, I saw that the pods and computers were there even near the ceiling of the chamber, nearly ten meters above us. Somehow, that sight alone made chills run down my spine. The place felt like a tomb of some sort, especially since we seemed to be the only people in it.

Seeing another one of the tiny black statues by the door didn't help to soothe my nerves one bit. It was creepy, to think that such a small item was apparently capable of being utilised as a surveillance device.

"Hey, Timmy!" Zachary called out, causing a man to let out a loud curse from somewhere amidst the tangle of machinery which filled the room. "I've got the new guy here for some practice!"

"Just a minute, damn it!" came a frustrated-sounding voice, muffled a little by the humming of the machinery all around us. "Ah, gotcha! Pod seven should be primed and ready, so try that one first."

"That's our cue," Zachary said, gesturing for me to follow him. "Come on, then – seven's somewhere... there, I think."

We made our way up a past a few levels of the pods, and eventually stopped at the second-highest level. There were four pods there, and three of them seemed to be sealed – the fourth had a visible seam running along its entire length, looking very much like a large, metallic seed pod that had split open. As we got closer to it, I could see that the computer next to it seemed to be running a screensaver, with the number seven floating about on its monitor. On taking a closer look at the screen, I realised that I could see the faint outlines of the cables behind the monitor through the screensaver.

Just as Zachary had stepped up to the monitor, I realised just how advanced the whole getup was. "Wait, that's a framework monitor, isn't it?"

"Indeed it is," he said, nodding absently as he tapped at several keys on a keyboard that had slid out of a slot beneath the computer monitor. "Hey, we're on the government's payroll here. Don't you think we'd be having the best equipment money could legally buy?"

He was certainly right about that, if the elevator we'd taken earlier was any indication. Framework monitors were supposed to still be at the prototype stage, due to the holographic technology required for them to function – they were basically a rectangular frame which projected a hologram across the empty space in the middle of the frame. Compared to the technology behind them, plasma and LCD screens were as clunky and obsolete as a cathode ray tube.

I was just beginning to wonder about any other supposedly nonexistent things which I might run into at work in the near future, when a loud hissing noise started right next to me. As expected, it was from the pod sliding open.

"Get in, then," Zachary said, nudging me towards the pod as he continued to work with the computer. "Just lie down in the pod, and remain very still."

"What about the electrodes, or whatever you mentioned earlier?" I asked him, as I looked under the pod's raised upper half. The inside of the pod was cushioned with a foam-like material, which had a strange stain on it towards the far end of the pod. "And what's that stain?"

"Eh?" he asked me, glancing over at the stain. "Oh, don't worry about it. That was probably someone's lunch. Not brain matter or blood, that's for sure."

"It's... clean, right?" I hesitantly stepped into the pod, ducking under the top half. "And should I worry about anything?"

"Unless you've got a tendency to get motion sickness easily, nothing at all," he said, tapping one last key with relish and turning to face me. "In you go! Just lie very still, and don't worry about the vomit – we disinfect all the pods after use."

Lying down the in the pod felt really comfortable. The foam-like padding in it seemed to mould itself around my body, and felt as if it was vibrating mildly. When I was lying straight on my back, there was a loud hiss, and the top half came down above me, sealing me in. For a few seconds, I was lying there in complete darkness, until a dim green light came on inside the pod.

"Now just remain still, so the electrodes can be placed properly," Zachary's voice spoke through a speaker. "When the stimulation starts, if everything around you starts having a reddish tint, just concentrate hard on wanting to get out, understood? It's the thoughts about getting out that manually override the stimulation."

"Got it," I said, even as a tickling sensation started along my back, running all the way up to the back of my head. Suddenly, the tickling gave way to a cold sensation that felt as if a finger dipped in cold water was being dragged along my back.

In a second or so, the coldness was replaced by what felt like pins and needles, and I realised that the strange sensations were probably being caused by the electrodes inserting themselves through my skin and into my spine. The coldness was probably a local anaesthetic of sorts, and it was little wonder that Zachary had instructed me to remain still.

And then, just when I thought I was up to speed with everything, my vision blacked out completely.

"Zachary?" I reflexively called out, trying my best to remain still. "Hello?"

My voice sounded hollow, almost as though it was echoing back at me from a cave or canyon. There was a mild tingling in my fingertips and toes, and a soft buzzing started in my ears. Everything remained dark, and I briefly wondered if something had gone wrong with the stimulation.

Suddenly, a bright seemed to flash right in front of my eyes, temporarily making me see stars. When my eyes had recovered from the flash, I found that I was no longer in the pod. It took me a second to realise just where I was, and all I could do was stare when my mind processed that little bit of information.

I was back at the university again. Or at least, the stimulation had brought me there, back to the desk in front of Professor Wang's usual lecture hall.

Looking around me, I saw that the stimulation was a damned good one, indeed. The environment had been recreated down to the finest details, such as the threads on the lecture hall curtains and the creases on the paper in the wastepaper basket next to the lecturer's desk. Heck, the fact that there was even paper in the basket, or a basket to begin with, was highly impressive.

When something in the basket caught my eye, I bent down over it to get a closer look, and was surprised to see my own handwriting on the crumpled paper.

A sense of being watched boiled up in my gut as I looked around uneasily. I knew that all the universities nowadays were practically loaded with surveillance thanks to those students going campus all those years ago, but would someone be watching the security camera footage here, in the stimulation? Zachary had mentioned going into people's thoughts during the actual mind probing process, after all.

Or had the stimulation tapped into my own memories to fill in the finer details on wherever it happened to place me? That would have explained the crumpled paper with my writing on it. Nonetheless, there was just that lingering feeling of doubt within me as to whether I was being watched.

Just then, the doors to the lecture hall opened, and a janitor walked in, pushing his standard-issue cart of cleaning supplies. I could only gape at him as he proceeded to empty the wastepaper basket into the portable incinerator built into his cart, and cleaned the board – which I had just realised was covered in more of my own writing, from what seemed to be a tutorial on eigenvalues and eigenvectors that I remembered giving to some undergraduates just before I had submitted my thesis. Even the janitor's face was familiar to me, as I had seen him about campus frequently during my six years spent as a student there.

"You have got to be kidding me," I muttered, causing the janitor to look in my direction disinterestedly.

"If you've got no business being here, clear off," he said gruffly, sounding just as I recalled. "Some people have a lecture hall to clean."

"I was just... leaving," I said weakly, slowly heading for the lecture hall's back exit. "Thanks."

The back exit opened up into a corridor that was eerily identical to the one which I had walked through during my time at university, and finally, something seemed amiss.

Next to the back exit was a notice board, which was often used by the lecturers to post announcements. However, this one was not empty, nor was it filled with notices. It simply appeared to be a messy meshwork of brown corkboard and white papers, almost like what you might see if pieces of a notice board - and the notices on it - were stuck in a blender.

There was a fragment of the usual timetable, and there was a piece of Professor Wang's announcements regarding the upcoming exams from three years ago. Many, many more shredded notices were stuck to the board, making it look like a bizarre collage of sorts.

I considered the strange sight for a few moments, and finally, a possible reason for the strange sight dawned on me. Had I been correct about the stimulator drawing on my memories to supply environmental details, then complex or incomplete memories would have resulted in faulty portions of the environment, as was the case with the notice board. But it was just a theory – I made a mental note to myself to ask Zachary about it later.

Everything still led to my first and foremost question, though. Just how were the thoughts being extracted by the people in applied neurology? Hell, how had the stimulator managed to pluck these details from my mind to recreate the entire lecture hall, complete with the tutorial notes on the board?

Just as I started to walk down the corridor, the temperature around me dropped suddenly, and the lights all went out. When they came back on, flickering faintly, I realised that they were all red.

A scuttling sound came from somewhere behind me, causing the hairs on the back of my neck to stand on end. I whipped about to see what was causing the sound, and saw... nothing.

Frantically, I tried to remember what Zachary had told me to do. Think, think... out! He hadn't mentioned the consequences of the red light, but I was willing to wager that they weren't pleasant.

"Get out, get out, get out," I feverishly chanted in my thoughts – or were they thoughts within thoughts? – just as the scuttling sounds started again. "I want to get out!"

The scuttling sounds stopped.

And then they started again, right behind me.

"Out!" I half-thought, half-shouted, and the entire corridor started spinning around me. Everything started to move in and out of focus, and I could make out flashes of red light amidst the chaotic mess of images. There was a loud rumbling sound, and everything went black for me once again, even while the scuttling sounds continued.

Somewhere in the darkness, I heard the scuttling sound fading, and soon enough, I was left in silence. Just then, I felt a strange, squeezing sensation around my head, and the darkness cleared, revealing the insides of the pod.

Instead of the green glow which had illuminated its interior earlier, I was being bathed in a harsh, red light.

5: Chapter 4 - Fallacy

Chapter 4 – Fallacy

With a hiss, the stimulation pod slid open, and the red light was abruptly switched off. Light from the outside of the pod made it through the split between the pod's two halves. I could feel a tingling sensation as the electrodes withdrew from my spine and neck, and when they were all finally out, I was left with a strange itchiness in place of the rows of filaments.

Shaking a little from the unnerving end to my first stimulation – what exactly to call it, I wasn't sure – I propped myself up on my elbows, and saw Zachary looking into the pod with an concerned expression on his face.

"Looks like someone learned one of the first lessons in mind probing today," he said, offering me a hand. "Aside from the red lights, how was everything?"

I took his hand and slowly got myself out of the pod. "Everything was... interesting. Curious, but interesting, really."

"You don't sound too excited," he remarked, as he tapped several keys and reactivated the computer's screen saver. "Tell you what, why not we go and grab some breakfast, and then I'll explain everything."

"Sounds good," I nodded, as we headed back towards the ladders and stairs that would take us down to the stimulation chamber's entrance.

As we descended a flight of stairs, carefully holding the railings bolted to the wall to avoid tripping and falling down the ten metres that were between us and the ground, I happened to catch a glance at a nearby wall clock. The stimulation chamber was practically overloaded with clocks, I realised, with one next to each pod and some placed near the junctions between catwalks. When I saw the time on the clock, I blinked several times, not believing my eyes.

If the clock was correct, I had only been in the pod for five minutes, but the actual stimulation had felt much longer than that. Time may have been relative and all that, but the clock which I had briefly glimpsed in the lecture hall couldn't lie, could it? Or was the flow of time in the stimulation just as synthetic as the rest of the construct, bound by the thoughts of the person who was in it?

For a brief moment, I imagined the potentially horrible scenario of someone ending up in a time loop within their own thoughts. That certainly was an unsettling thought, being stuck in your own mind since you'd turned it into a form of intellectual Mobius strip.

"Are you coming down, or what?" Zachary's voice came from somewhere below me, effectively snapping me out of my dazed state. Shaking my head to clear my thoughts a little, I continued heading down the stairs.

He was in for a thorough bout of questioning, he was.

xxx

It didn't take us long to find the cafeteria, which turned out to be located in the central chamber, along with administration. Apparently, the people down here valued their food as much as they valued the personnel who ran the place, and the variety of food in the cafeteria was surprisingly large. Various other staff members were already there by the time we got into the queue for food at the counter, which was manned by a burly lady with a moustache and two scrawny-looking guys in hairnets who worked the stoves.

There was some discomfort as I sat down and the back of the chair pressed against my back where the electrodes had penetrated my skin, but Zachary assured me that the filaments were too fine to cause any bleeding, and that the cafeteria chairs were just that little bit harder than the office chairs.

He also claimed that the actual mind probes didn't require any electrodes at all, which certainly caught my attention.

"Do they use a helmet, then?" I questioned him as we stood in line at the counter. "How else would they insert an observer into the thoughts of the subject?"

"We've got our means of doing so," he answered dismissively. "Highly classified, and I myself don't know the full details. So you'll just have to remain content with whatever I've told you so far."

I narrowed my eyes, glaring daggers at the back of his head. "Why do I get the feeling that you're hiding something from me?"

He turned around and offered me a bright smile. "Of course I'm hiding something from you! Surely you wouldn't expect me to reveal all the tricks of out trade in just one day, do you? And you'd probably forget half of it by tomorrow, anyway."

"My memory isn't that faulty," I muttered, as he ordered his food from the serving lady.

"I heard that. And it must have been, or the red lights wouldn't have come that fast."

That shut me up. How did he know that? I was supposedly running a stimulation session just now, for crying out loud! It wouldn't have surprised me if the whole session had been recorded for paranoia's sake, but the fact that he had in effect blamed my memory for the red light... something was amiss.

When it was my turn to place an order, I got a sandwich despite not feeling hungry at all. On the – surprisingly sultry-sounding - serving lady's advice, I got a tuna sandwich, which seemed rather ordinary a food item in comparison to all the other things I'd seen and experienced within the last few hours.

The two of us sat down at a small table meant for four, and unwrapped our meals. Zachary had ordered some kind of drink that let off steam when he opened the cup, and what looked like a plate of slimy organs, but which actually turned out to be some rather greasy noodles.

"So, I'm sure you've got a lot of questions for me," he said, as he sipped from his cup of black coffee. "Let's have at it, then."

My sandwich suddenly seemed a lot more interesting than the thought of questioning him about my experience in the stimulation. I just had a bad feeling about the whole idea. "Well... why don't you start explaining things from the beginning? Starting with the electrodes in the pod, for one."

He raised an eyebrow, and placed his cup on the table. "Looks like someone figured out the electrodes quite fast. What about them?"

"I know that they were concealed in the padding, and that the pod had some sort of local anaesthetic application mechanism before inserting them," I replied, as I took a small bite of my sandwich – not too bad at all. "Was that the Morphodex, by any chance?"

"A highly diluted dose, really," he said dismissively, "and it was mixed with a little lidocaine. Nothing harmful, except if you've got a heart problem or something like that."

"So you put me on that sedative for the stimulation," I deadpanned, not amused at all. "I could have been allergic to it!"

"Oh, please," he scoffed. "We run blood tests on all the potential staff here. Do you think that we're idiots or something? I think that jaunt in the pod must have seriously rattled your logic processor."

Taking a few deep breaths to try and calm myself down, I said, "Alright. What about the stimulated environment? It was detailed, if you know what I mean. Too detailed to be a mere stimulation. In fact, it looked as if some of my own memories were extracted to construct the stimulation."

Zachary picked up his fork, and started eating his noodles. "Looks like I'll have to take back that bit about your logic being shaky, eh? Settle down for a bit, because this is going to take some explaining.

"When they made the system, they first tried to run stimulations using pre-rendered environments. Famous landmarks, buildings, a beach, stuff like that. But then they started encountering what you ran into, yourself – the red lights. Scuttling noises, too, right?"

I nodded, feeling some chills as I recalled the unnatural sounds.

"You see, it took them a while to figure out what the cause of the red lights was. And they wouldn't have figured it out, had they not started experimenting on death row inmates. Couldn't exactly go on finishing off too many of their own workers, now, could they?" he said, as he added some pepper to his noodles. "Naturally, when they experimented on the convicts, they reconstructed the prison where they had been incarcerated as the environment.

"And then, they started observing something interesting; the red lights took much longer to appear for the prison stimulation. So they hooked up the prototype mind probes to the stimulators, and sent a few observers in. The old prototypes weren't anywhere near as good as our current systems, but they worked fine for spying in on the prisoners' stimulations."

He paused to draw a breath, and shoved another forkful of noodles into his mouth. "Once they went in, everything went to hell. The red lights appeared, the scuttling noises started, the whole works. Prisoners always instinctively want to flee when things go wrong, so they accidentally wound up discovering the way to beat the red lights and leave the stimulation."

"What are the red lights, actually?" I asked him, as I nibbled on the surprisingly tasty mixture of tuna and pickles in my sandwich. "And why did they appear just as the observers went in?"

"The red lights," Zachary replied, taking a sip of coffee, "were discovered to be the results of what we now refer to as mental fallacies. Sort of like a fallacy of logic, but in terms of mental perception against actual memory, if you get what I mean."

I stared at him. "In the stimulation, I saw a notice board. It was-"

"Messy thing, wasn't it? And all the notices were in a jumble?" he said in a voice that suggested he had been expecting that answer. "Yup, notice boards. Damn things are one of the most frequent triggers for the red lights, or should I say, mental fallacies.

"Mental fallacies occur when something you perceive in a stimulation or mind probe is completely different from something you remember. They are sort of a discrepancy between the constructed items and your memories, if you find that to be a simpler explanation."

He stopped to think for a moment, and shrugged. "Ever heard someone claiming to be allergic to bullshit? Well, as it turned out, everyone's allergic to bullshit as far as mind probes are concerned. Once the mind detects an anomaly, the fallacy is triggered and everything goes straight to Hell in a broken handbasket."

That got me thinking for a bit. So the red lights indicated a clash between the mind and the system. For most computers, such an incident would probably cause a feedback loop in the code, or a system stall. "What happens if you don't leave once the fallacy starts?"

Zachary shrugged, looking slightly uneasy. "Well, everyone who didn't make it out ended up in a permanent vegetative state. Their brains were still functioning, but attempts at probing the brains were all futile. It was almost as if they had vanished into some corner of their subconscious where no one could find them."

Now, that was a creepy thought. "They got locked in some part of their own minds?"

"That's the current theory," he answered, polishing off the last of his noodles. "We'd ask them if they ever woke up, though some of them have been vegetables for the last eight years or thereabouts, so the likelihood of them waking up is... small, to say the least."

We just sat there for a while after he'd made that cheerful little statement, with me mulling over his words and him stirring his coffee. I had half a mind to berate him for sending me into the stimulation without warning me about the mental fallacies and their potential dangers, but something stopped me from really giving him the blasting he probably deserved. He had probably just been trying to keep me from panicking, and I guess most sane people would have fled from the fallacies, anyway – they were certainly unnerving enough.

Or maybe I was just making excuses for other people again. I'd certainly received lots of flak over that in the past.

"Why red, though?" I asked him, trying to keep my thoughts on track. "I mean, the light in the pod was red during the fallacy... or was that just a coincidence?"

"Initially, they just had the scuttling noises to go by, which weren't too helpful," he said, as he used a piece of tissue to wipe up some flecks of oil on the table. "Since your eyes were at least partially open during the stimulation, anyway, they rigged the pod lights to go red during a fallacy. Turns out the retinas could still perceive colours during stimulation, so everything worked out on that front."

A fresh thought struck me. "And how do the fallacies occur in the actual mind probes?"

He leaned back, and crumpled up the tissue paper he'd been using, placing it on his plate. "Well... they rarely occur, since an actual mind probe is a more dynamic construct. You could deliberately attempt to induce a fallacy, but if the main thinker's memories override the fallacies, the construct remains stable.

"It helps that we usually get deep thinkers who focus so hard on the problems they're trying to solve that it's nearly impossible to trigger a fallacy, unless you walked up to them in their thoughts and completely derailed their trains of thought."

"Was that metaphorically or literally speaking?" I said drily, feeling a tinge of irritation. The way the man was going on about these things was certainly a tad frustrating, given how he was speaking of things that challenged the very logic behind thought processes. Heck, the fallacies, I could believe in, or the red lights, but the trains of thought?

Zachary smirked at me, raising an eyebrow. "What do you think? Here we are discussing something which can be best described as a dream feeling so surreal that you wake up thanks to you knowing it couldn't possibly be a dream, and you're asking me if I'm speaking in terms of metaphors?"

Brushing aside any irrelevant thoughts to focus on other things I might want to question Zachary about, I realised that there was also the issue of the clocks. The clock in the lecture hall had shown me spending at least ten minutes in the stimulation, but in real life, only five minutes had passed, apparently.

"Time," I said, causing him to look up from his cup of coffee. "What about the time in stimulations?"

He blinked for a moment, looking lost, before finally understanding what I meant. "Oh, don't worry too much about that. Time goes faster in the stimulations, since you're utilising your subconscious. More thinking power gets to work, so there's a faster time stream.

"Theoretically," he paused, looking as though he was doubtful of his next words, "it could be that a person could be sent into even deeper layers of the subconscious, where perceived time flows even faster. But that is, of course, assuming that the subconscious is layered to begin with, and that we could break past the first layer while still retaining conscious thought processes at all. I think they even made a movie about it sometime back - was a brilliant thing, that movie."

"Hmm, that does... make some sense," I nodded slowly, as I digested his words. "And what if a person tries to stop time while they are in a probe? Could that be dangerous?"

"Perceived time is tied to the flow of thoughts, I think," he answered, before letting out a loud burp. "Excuse me! Anyway, as I was saying, it you tried to stop time in a mind probe, you'd probably stop your own thoughts dead in their tracks. No one's tried it to date, and I wouldn't advise you to start getting any ideas."

"Duly noted... So just how fast can time go in a mind probe?"

Zachary thought about it for a few moments, scratching his head. "Not too sure on that. I think the fastest may have been in the case of those evolutionary biologists a couple of years back. Something about them observing insects reproducing for ten years, while only ten hours had passed in the real world, or was it eight hours? Maybe it's fractal, with hours correlating with years, but they haven't found any formulas or fixed relationships yet.

"Any other questions?"

I shook my head, troubled by two things. The first was that he had managed to avoid giving me any explanations on how the stimulator had managed to extract my memories to construct that little episode in the pod to begin with. While the concept of the mental fallacy was something I could appreciate easily enough, the uncertainty over how my thoughts had been used by that machine still made me distinctly uncomfortable.

And then, there was the little stone statue in the corner of the cafeteria. I had caught a glimpse of it as we walked towards our table, and for all I could see, it was the same as those I'd seen earlier. Not knowing just how they were used for surveillance was proving to be just as persistent a query as that of the memories.

By the time I was done with my musings on the statue's possible functions and the memory manipulation, I saw that Zachary had already collected our plates and deposited them in the bucket next to the counter. He waved at me, and headed for the cafeteria doors, which slid open as soon as he got within range of their sensors.

I got out of my seat and walked to the entrance, stopping in the middle of the cafeteria when I realised that the statue in the corner seemed to have been moving of its own accord. Deciding that a moving stone statue was worth investigating, I went over to it, and squatted down next to it.

Up close, the little statue wasn't very impressive. It was black and made out of a single piece of stone, as the others appeared to have been. The workmanship on the statue was quite crude, giving me the impression that whoever it was that had made them had done so with minimal tools and skills.

Rough cuts aside, the little piece of stone looked as if it had been deliberately shaped to resemble something I could quite identify. The shape seemed familiar to me, but at the same time, alien, much like the faces of passers-by on the streets.

"Crazy bugger," Zachary said from right behind me, causing me to spring back up onto my feet. "What did I tell you about those?"

"Surveillance devices, supposedly," I replied, following him back towards the cafeteria doors. "I'm wondering just how they work, though."

"Oh, they work as recording devices," he said with a shrug. "Like those pinhole cameras or maybe one of those tiny microphones people used to screw up their asses. Not very discreet, but everyone here avoids them... as you should, too. Our security teams here have never failed to apprehend and deal with any intruders, and you'd be wise to avid tangling with them."

As we boarded one of the elevators which were waiting at the edge of the chamber, I swallowed the feeling of unease that had arisen when I realised the veiled threat Zachary had just made.

 

6: Chapter 5 - Probing

Chapter 5 – Probing

Speaking in all honesty, it wasn't entirely difficult to stop a mental fallacy from occurring. All you needed to do was to avoid paying too much attention to the little things, really. Notices on walls, television screens in shop windows, plate numbers on cars going by on the streets, or even the clothing on passing people were things you'd want to avoid looking at, for instance.

Come to think of it, that was probably the first lesson I'd learned during my first few days on the job at the applied neurology department. Well, there were others, of course, such as which toilets tended to get blocked more often, which cafeteria seats had loose screws, whose offices you could nick stationery from without getting caught, and not sticking your nose into security's business.

Somehow, despite everyone stressing the importance of not messing with the security department down under – as the staff tended to refer to applied neurology – I did not even run into a single security officer after a week of working there. It was almost as if all of the security staff had the ability to turn invisible or were otherwise hidden very well, with the only signs of their alleged existence being those odd little stone statues and the glossy fisheye lenses of their wide-angle cameras that were all over the ceiling.

When everyone clocked out for the day – even the caffeine junkie named Carl who we called our receptionist, whose role in the daily operations of applied neurology were questionable at best – there never were any people going around locking the place up. Blast doors sealed themselves, and lights switched themselves off. Frankly, the whole scenario made me wonder if the place was run by an advanced supercomputer; topside technology was certainly behind that which was just about taken for granted down under, after all.

After several hours of trying to figure out the mystery of applied neurology's security department, I finally decided to let it be. Just like the thinly-veiled threat which Zachary Harding had made when I went poking about the security statue in the cafeteria. I just let it be, and that was it.

With those thoughts out of the way, at least temporarily, I ended up focusing my attention on what my job now was; junior mind prober and assistant to none other than that hyperactive bastard, Zachary Harding.

Yes, he ended up being my immediate superior. Don't ask me how or why, thank you very much.

xxx

Mathematics was a beautiful subject, it you really sat down and thought about it. Everything could be expressed in terms of variables if you got down to the heart of things, and so in that sense, mathematics was not merely the door and key to the sciences, as some scientists were fond of saying, but rather, could be labelled as the key to explaining life itself.

Naturally, time was something we mathematicians had always appreciated for its mysterious and abstract nature. Some called time the fourth dimension, and when you considered that the three dimensions which defined matter could actually bend time around themselves, it wasn't too bad a nickname for the one force which physics has yet to master. Heck, just look at relativity and you'll get what I mean.

And that is why I was hardly surprised when one day, Zachary walked into the office that we shared and gave me some rather unexpected good news. Of course, he couldn't pass news along like normal people did, too – he had to nearly dismantle his office door and get crushed by a filing cabinet in order to get the message through.

He had practically slid into the room, shaking the door on its hinges, and crashed into his filing cabinet. The metal cabinet swayed about for a few moments, but did not fall over – very fortunate, considering that the only direction it could have fallen was on to where he was lying on the floor.

"I take it there's been a big announcement of some sort?" I asked him drily as I offered him a hand. "And can't you, just maybe, use the door like normal people?"

"Now that is an absolute load of bollocks!" he sniffed, as he bounced to his feet and dusted himself off. "This is all the custodial staff's fault, I'll have you know. Those bastards and their excessive amounts of floor polish are what caused me to slip!"

"The news, then?" I asked him, as I took my usual seat in front of his desk and turned my attention back to the manual on mind probing that I had been reading prior to his rocketing into the office.

"Aha, yes! You, my dear assistant, are going on your first mind probe tomorrow!" he declared, crashing into his poor, battered swivel-chair. "I'll be escorting you in, of course, so it'll mostly be observation work for you."

I stopped my reading, and looked up at him over my glasses, only half-believing my ears. "Pardon me?"

"What, are you British now, like Jane?" he huffed, running a hand through his hair and opening a file that had been waiting for him on his desk since the day before. "Yes, you heard me right. We'll be going mind probing tomorrow, and it'll be your first trip into someone else's mind. Since you're a newbie at this gig, someone senior – namely yours truly – will have to accompany you in to make sure everything goes smoothly."

He beamed at me, despite the fact that the expression of disbelief on my face probably made me look like a goldfish or any other goggle-eyed animal.

"Cat got your tongue?"

I blinked a few times, having a little difficulty in getting my response straight. Sure, I knew that my progress during the last week of stimulations was better than anyone had expected, but they deciding to send me into an actual mind probe this soon felt... just a little sudden.

Finally, I didn't answer, as Zachary, being the loud bugger that he was, made it unnecessary for me to say anything. "So, be here on time for work tomorrow, but wait for me at reception. You haven't been cleared for elevator usage yet, right?"

"No, I haven't," I mumbled, still trying to clear my thoughts. "See you tomorrow at reception?"

"You got it, dude."

Seriously, what was it with him and calling me a dude?

xxx

The reception area looked just as bland as ever, with Carl the pseudo-fixture looking at the world over the rim of his coffee mug and the numerous, closed elevator doors. Zachary and I got there at the same time – completely expected, given that we took the same train to work every day – and proceeded to use one of the elevators that we had yet to use in my brief period of employment. It also had a unique locking mechanism, which required a retinal scan, as compared to the others, which could be opened with a mere touch of a finger.

"Are they all different?" I asked Zachary, as the elevator's doors slid shut.

"Some are, and some are not," he replied, humming the tune to one of those obsolete television series which he was so fond of illegally downloading and watching in his spare time. "Depends on where you want to go, it does."

Now that made no sense whatsoever. "How can the elevators be unique if our destination is a factor? They can't think, can they?"

He merely bobbed his head to a tune that only he could hear, and said, "Ask security."

Damn these people and their vague answers! I was just about to attempt thinking up an explanation for the problem of the elevators, when I noticed something odd; we weren't moving through the brightly-lit cavern that housed applied neurology. Instead, the elevator had descended into a dark tunnel, and was silently speeding along its rails.

"Where are we going, Zachary?" I asked him, watching what looked like solid walls of stone whizzing past through the elevator's transparent sides. "This isn't the usual place, that's for sure."

"Observant, you are," he drawled. "Mind probing has a more secure facility, one level below us. They built applied neurology in a natural cavern, and dug down deeper for the probing labs."

I let out a bemused snort at that. "If applied neurology is already down under, than what do the folks here call the probing place?"

"The basement," he replied nonchalantly, almost making me roll my eyes out of sheer disbelief. Clearly, the people who ran things here had a few connections loose up in those undoubtedly brilliant heads of theirs.

After a few more minutes of moving along in the darkness, the elevator stopped, and its lights went out. Understandably, I was hardly amused.

"Is this some kind of weird joke, Zachary?"

"Of course not - standard operating procedure, that's what it is, man. Just wait until they're done screening the elevator."

"Who?" I asked, just as he decided to go all childish and poke me in the back. "Hey, stop that!"

"That wasn't me," he said, sounding unusually serious, for once. "Just... remain still, and let security check the elevator, alright?"

I felt my blood run cold as my mind caught up with what he had just said. The elevator doors hadn't opened, and yet there apparently was someone in it with us? Right there in the pitch black, deep underground. A cool breeze blew past my face, startling me, just as the lights came back on. Just then, I didn't know what made the whole situation worse; the fact that even Zachary looked slightly uncomfortable, or that I could see the elevator's surroundings.

We were suspended in the middle of a small, spherical chamber, held in place by nothing save for the elevator's rails, and there wasn't a soul in sight. There wasn't anything I could see outside the elevator that indicated anyone having approached the elevator to check its contents, or even any signs of life in the near-complete darkness.

The elevator started moving again with a small jolt, and the two of us made the rest of the trip in utter silence. When it pulled up at a small, brightly-lit station with a lone man sitting there, you could probably have heard the tension in the enclosed space of the elevator relaxing.

"Security got on your case?" asked the man, looking perfectly bored as he flipped through a comic. "They've been excitable of late."

"My assistant here felt one of them poking him," Zachary said, as we headed past the man and towards a flight of stairs that led, unbelievably, downwards. "She's all yours."

"About damn time, too," grumbled the man, as he got up and stretched. "See you around, Zachary."

"Hell with you too, Don," Zachary called out, as the man stepped into the elevator, and we walked down the stairs. "Everything alright with you, then?"

"Not exactly," I deadpanned. "What the Hell was that about? Security couldn't have gotten into the elevator, Zachary – the doors were shut the whole time! Just what went on back there?"

He gave me a pointed look, and spoke, slowly. "Like I said, you don't want to question security. There are some things you'd be best of not knowing, trust me."

Trust him on the matter? As we reached a corridor which ended in a circular, iris-like door, I decided that something was definitely wrong with the whole picture. Something was very wrong indeed.

When the doorway opened up like a gigantic flower in bloom, however, I nearly ended up dropping all my thoughts on the matter of the security check.

It looked very much like the stimulation chamber upstairs, but minus what looked like half of the clutter. Everything was clean, brightly-lit, and neatly labelled, without even a single stray wire leaving a wall outlet. The pods were all built into the walls like stasis chambers in those old space exploration movies, and most of them were already occupied by the time we entered the chamber.

Several technicians moved about, with some of them being dressed in white coats and others in mechanic's overalls. I even saw a couple of people moving around in black suits, but I couldn't be too sure – they seemed to be moving about very quickly, almost like they were in a big rush even down here, in this eerily silent facility.

Zachary led me towards a pod with a man sleeping in it, and called a technician over. "Right, so this is our man, okay? He's a chemist, and today he's trying to do something with organic polymers. Something like that software they used years ago to let video gamers help in stimulated protein folding.

"Our job is to observe how he assembles the polymers, and to tell him exactly how when he wakes up. Is that understood?"

"Got it," I nodded, still with a slight tremor to my movements. "Do we go in right here?"

"Eh? No, no, no," he replied, shaking his head, just as the technician tapped a few keys on a handheld control console and caused a concealed drawer next to the pod to slide open. "Take two of the helmets in there, and follow me."

I peeked into the open drawer, and saw that there were indeed helmets in it, as he had said – six of them, to be precise. Picking up two of them at random, I followed him towards the far end of the chamber, not missing the barely-audible sound of the drawer sliding shut behind me.

The other end of the chamber turned out to lack pods, and instead bore a strong resemblance to a karaoke bar, oddly enough. Several unmanned desks were there, each next to a door with a clear porthole in the middle of it at about eye-level. Glancing into those that we walked past, I could see people lying in recliners, all wearing the same helmets like the ones I was holding. None of them seemed to be moving.

"Are they all... probing?" I asked Zachary, as he opened one of the doors, and went into the room.

"Got it in one," he said, sitting down in one of the six recliners in the room. "Here, shut the door, sit down, and pass me one of those."

I did as I was told, and within seconds, the two of us were seated next to each other, and were putting on the helmets. As I put the strange contraption on, I could feel the telltale coldness of several electrodes on its inside coming into contact with my scalp. Grimacing a little, I tried to ignore the tingling sensation that started as the hair-like electrodes pierced into my skull and made their way to my brain.

"Lie back and enjoy the ride, dude," Zachary said, sounding strangely... sleepy? "When you see me, just wave, but keep things quiet, alright?"

His words had barely made it through the fog that was rapidly clouding my mind, before everything blurred together...

... before coming back into sharp focus, just like that.

I was standing next to him in a large, white room, which had no doors or windows. The room's walls arched over our heads to form a large dome, and met the floor at rounded junctions. Somehow, it made me feel like we were stuck inside either a colossal pebble, or an oversized bun.

And then, on the other side of the room, there was the chemist we had seen earlier. He was dressed exactly as he had been in the pod, but this time, he appeared to be very much awake, and was focused on what seemed to be a massive, pretzel-like solid floating in the air right in front of him.

I waved to Zachary, who nodded, and he gestured for me to get closer to him. When I walked right up to him, he leaned over, and whispered, "Good that you made it in here. Now, we're going to go right next to him and listen to his thoughts. Don't ask."

Silently, I followed him until we were practically flanking the chemist. He didn't seem to notice us standing almost directly adjacent to him, and instead reached out to touch the floating thing he was so fixated on. Giving the strange object a closer look, I realised that it was an extremely complex space-filling model of some macromolecular structure.

Right then, his finger touched the molecule, and a voice spoke up in my mind, barely above a whisper.

Catalytic bond formation... higher pressure required?

That certainly made me freeze on the spot. I just stood rooted there, watching in awe as the molecule untangled itself from the pretzel shape and formed an even more complicated tangle. It started to pulsate like a heart made of coiled wires, and eventually uncoiled, going static once again.

Multiple coils unstable... quartenary structures necessary?

Haemoglobin.

Hold that thought – a monkey's fist configuration could possibly be more stable.

As I watched the molecule loop itself into a lattice-like sphere, I finally realised what exactly Zachary had meant by 'listening' to the chemist's thoughts. Very clearly, he had meant doing so quite literally.

I sneaked a glance at Zachary out of the corner of my eye, and saw that he was staring quite intently at the polymer as it continued looping and coiling itself into a neat little ball. The chemist had withdrawn his hand and was now just looking at the polymer as it began vibrating vigorously, before disappearing in a puff of smoke with the muffled sound of an explosion. Almost immediately, a fresh polymer chain materialised in front of him, the smoke from the disappearance of the previous one dissipating as quick as thought.

A simpler configuration, then...

Spirals or pleats, maybe?

Cyclic? Furanose or pyranose rings? Porphyrin?

Even as the chemist started running through a myriad of possible configurations for the polymer molecule, more copies of it started materialising all over the room and assuming the various shapes he was thinking up for them. I flinched as one exploded not a meter away from my right ear, and the others started pulsating, vibrating, or otherwise moving where they had formed.

Within seconds, half of the new molecules had exploded, leaving just a handful which pulsated steadily or just floated around, apparently frozen in space. Things came to a standstill then, as we just stood there, watching the chemist and his molecules doing their thing.

Timing decent on furanose...

Bonding stable...

Increasing stress tests, higher modulus?

Flexion, flexion.

For some time, the molecules were shaken, squeezed, and deformed by invisible forces as they got subjected to what I imagined were probably some very vigorous tests of their structural robustness. A clock had most conveniently appeared next to each of them once the chemist apparently decided to time the stress tests or whatever it was he was doing, and based on those, I could tell that the testing itself went on for nothing less than four hours.

The chemist must have been particularly interested in those resembling hexagons, because they slowly started coming closer to him, as though he was generating his own gravity and drawing them in. He started to scrutinise them one by one, finally settling on a configuration that reminded me strongly of benzene's Kekule ring. All the other molecules flew off to one side of the room and arranged themselves in neat rows, almost as if they were soldiers who had been instructed to file into their ranks. Once that part had been sorted out, the clocks which had been accompanying the molecules all vanished just abruptly as they had appeared.

Given that they had all been analog clocks with actual hands and not digital displays, the room's sudden silence did feel quite strange.

Kekule seems stable.

I nearly jumped out of my skin when a massive sheet of what appeared to be human skin – complete with blood vessels and glistening fat deposits attached to it - popped into existence right in front of the chemist. While I was busy trying to calm myself down so as to not draw his attention to me, the hexagonal molecules started multiplying themselves and flying all over the large sheet of skin, attaching themselves to its edges like little magnets.

Adhesion acceptable...

Grafting.

Another sheet of skin – discoloured and apparently unhealthy - materialised next to the first, and was promptly... attacked by it, for lack of a better word. The skin with the polymer molecules attached to it latched onto the fresh sheet, anchoring itself using the molecules like suction cups, and looking like a grotesque, oversized slug as it did so. More and more molecules started materialising and adhering to the edges of the skin sheet, smoothly binding it to the other. The line of polymer even started resembling the stitches made by a sewing machine, as they aggregated and arranged themselves into neat lines.

By the time a double-line of polymer was formed all along the edge of the skin graft – the chemist had thought of it as such, so why not call it that? – the excess skin beyond the polymer lines was already disintegrating.

Decay rate...

Healing period, assume normal...

Burn cases?

No burns!

And there it was. Even I, a mathematician who dabbled in chemistry, could recognise the end result of the chemist's work.

It was a perfect skin graft. The polymers had somehow acted like an army of self-adhesive sutures to secure the healthy skin to the diseased skin, and had grafted it over. Even as the three of us watched the completed graft rotating in mid-air before us, looking like a substantially fleshier version of a holographic projection.

Greyish trails of what appeared to be smoke lagged behind the rotating skin, making me wonder if the graft was starting to fail. As the seconds passed, however, I saw that the wispy trails were actually streams of disintegrating polymer molecules, which left a faint, groove-like scar in their wake.

Minimal scarring.

Too deep, dermal rooting.

Minimised dosage.

Just like that, the entire grafting assemblage flickered like an image distorted by static and reappeared looking just as it had been right before the polymer molecules started breaking down. This time, though, the double lines at the edge of the graft seemed fainter.

Another few seconds went by, and there it was, a perfectly healed skin graft, without any scarring to show for it.

Optimal result. Manufacturing acceptable, dosage requires individual calibration.

Melanin and pigment-related retention?

Shut up, you moron!

I was so absorbed in my wonder for what I had just seen, that I barely noticed when the chemist himself vanished from my sight along with the skin graft and his leftover polymer molecules. When Zachary tapped me on the shoulder and told me that it was time to leave, I numbly nodded, and went along with him towards a door that had appeared on the other side of the room.

The door opened of its own accord, revealing what seemed to be a window. Not a window like the ones in houses, though, but rather, those that they built into surgical theatres for the onlookers during surgery.

Looking through the windows, I was dumfounded to see nothing other than an aerial view of myself and Zachary Harding, lying back with our helmets on. It was almost like those doppelganger things, really.

"Alright, just jump through the window," Zachary told me, causing me to notice that what I had thought to be a window was actually little more than an empty frame without a pane. "Aim for your seat, and alright? Goodness knows you wouldn't want to end up in my head, of all places."

Wait. What?

Before I could even open my mouth to ask him just what he meant by that strange statement – I seemed to be hearing a lot of those, of late – he had vaulted over the edge of the frame and was hurtling down towards the image of his apparently unconscious self.

"Get out of there, now!" his voice snapped in my mind, sounding mildly alarmed. "Move it!"

"Alright, already!" I grumbled, as I hopped over the frame's edge and threw myself down towards myself – as odd as that may sound, it's what I did.

Just as I was about to crash into my motionless doppelganger, I felt rather than saw the lights flickering all around me, and everything around me started swirling into a messy blur. There were strange murmuring sounds all around me, and I got a strange feeling as though my skin was too tight all of a sudden...

... and then I woke up, sitting bolt upright in my seat and gasping for air as though I'd just let out a long-held breath.

I looked over to Zachary's seat, where he was languidly stretching out, looking like a puppy that had just woken up.

"And a good morning to you too, Sleeping Beauty," he yawned, as he took off his helmet. "How was it?"

Despite everything that had happened on the way to the laboratory, I found myself smiling as I answered his question.

"It was awesome."

7: Chapter 6 - Drinks

Chapter 6 – Drinks

Paperwork is evil. It truly is. And as much of a novelty as the mind probe proved to be, everything descended into a messy tangle of paperwork once the dream ended.

If you thought that we'd have finished the mind probe when we'd woken up, you'd be sadly mistaken. There was, of course, the issue of briefing the chemist on just what he'd dreamed about. And then there was the question of helping him to interpret the dream's contents – there couldn't possibly be such a thing as a Kekule structure for a complex polymer, for instance, and so the ring-shaped molecule he'd toyed with in his dream was clearly something to do with the concept of resonance, but which was somehow applicable to polymers.

Confused already? Good, then you know exactly what I had to go through right after the mind probe.

And there was the paperwork which I'd mentioned earlier, of course. We were given a stack of documents to fill out and sign, some of which were quite bizarre. Fortunately, Zachary handled most of it, and guided me through the parts which I needed to finish.

By the time we were done with the interpretation of the probe's results and the paperwork, it was already sometime past four in the afternoon. Mercifully, we were given the rest of the day – just under an hour, really – off.

xxx

"... And why are we going to the industrial district, again?" I asked Zachary sleepily, as we got off the train a few stops before getting home. "I don't know about you, but I could really use a nap right now."

"Nonsense!" he huffed, waving a hand dismissively at me. "Today was your first complete mind probe, and you did admirably in it. Frankly, I was surprised at how much you could tell him when we were interpreting the dream – most newbies forget half their shit by the time they exit the dreamscape."

Dreamscape. Now that was a pleasant enough term for the imaginary realm in which we'd seen the chemist doing his thing. "I'm sure it's just beginner's luck."

"Modest, too. The ladies will love you, that's for sure!"

"Oh, put a lid on it, would you? Where are we going, anyway?"

Zachary blinked in confusion for a moment without even stopping in his tracks, and replied, "Ah, that. We, my dear, are going for a drink!"

I frowned at him. "At five in the evening?"

"Well, it's happy hour in our usual bar!" he declared happily. "And of course, in the great tradition of all workplaces, the first job well done always calls for a drink!"

"You," I shook my head, "are insane."

"Very incredibly, awesomely, and sexily so. Now, there's the bar! Hopefully the others will be here soon," Zachary all but sang, gesturing towards a shady-looking bar tucked into an alley between two ancient apartment blocks. Seriously, those buildings looked like they'd been built a century ago, if the complete absence of paint and solid red bricks were any indication.

We walked up to the bar's front door, which was made of what looked like bulletproof glass, tinted completely black. Smart of the proprietor, if you stopped to think of it, really – he would be able to see whoever it was that was at the door, and yet they'd be unable to see into the bar. There could have been a shotgun aimed at the door for all a visitor knew, since all they'd see as they approached the door was their own reflection.

Zachary pushed the door open – causing a bell to chime cheerfully somewhere else in the bar – and sauntered into the bar. I followed him into the dimly-lit establishment, noticing how all of its patrons had looked up as we'd entered the place. Just for a second, though – they had all returned to whatever it was they had been doing within a blink of an eye of us crossing the threshold.

I was a little startled when I saw that there actually was a shotgun mounted on the ceiling and aimed at the door. Looks like I wasn't the only paranoid person around town, these days.

"Oi, Pops!" Zachary called out as he hopped onto one of the bar stools. "The usual for me!"

"Is that you, Zachary?" a nasally voice sounded out from behind a towering rack of liquor bottles. "Or am I hearing things again?"

"Damn it, Pops, just give me my usual!" he hollered back, grinning all the while. "Pick your poison, dude."

"Hmm, I think I'll just have a cranberry juice," I told him, feeling a little out of place – drinking had never really been a favourite pastime of mine.

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?" Zachary scoffed, before turning back towards where the bartender's voice had come from. "Pops, make that two of the usual!"

"I don't think I should be drinking, now –"

"Can it, dude! Neither of us is driving, and the beds in the detention cells aren't too bad for sleeping off a hangover, really. No probes are scheduled for tomorrow, so all's cool."

I just sat there on my bar stool, feeling a tad overwhelmed by his over-the-top behaviour, as I had been for the last couple of weeks. Really, how did you handle someone like Zachary Harding?

The bell connected to the door chimed again, and I briefly turned around to see who the bar's newest visitors were. As it turned out, they were none other than the triplets from applied neurology – three men with pageboy haircuts who were identical save for their neckties, which were black, white, and absent, respectively. To my knowledge, they were also employees at applied neurology, though their specific jobs were still a mystery to me.

"Zachary," nodded Black Tie, as the three of them came to a stop right behind us, standing in a perfectly straight line.

"Good to see you here," added White Tie, taking off his sunglasses and keeping them in the pocket of his blue suit.

"How did the rookie's probe go?" asked No Tie, as he looked around the bar. "Shall we get a table?"

Zachary had apparently not noticed their entry or approach, and so their voices caused him to jump a little. "Yan, Yin, and Yun! Always a pleasure to meet you three here!"

"Stow it," White Tie said curtly.

"There is a table there," pointed out No Tie.

"Why don't we all take it, then?" asked Black Tie, as he ran a comb through his hair.

Zachary got up, and I followed suit. We went with the triplets to the table No Tie had spotted, which turned out to be near the jukebox, just as the hulking machine starting playing an oddly catchy version of that Romanian song everyone had been so crazy about in the twenty-first century. The five of us took our seats at the table, and the triplets almost immediately rounded on me.

"First probe today, we heard," White Tie said pleasantly, giving me a flat stare.

"And someone's apparently good at his job," continued Black Tie, as he drummed his fingers on the tabletop.

"And we're not talking about Zachary," finished No Tie, as he raised a hand to flag down a waitress.

The three of them gave me curious looks, all at the same time. It had an eerie effect, to say the least, what with three pairs of emotionless eyes all pointing in my direction simultaneously. Finding myself quite unable to articulate a proper response, I settled for returning their stares, one at a time – as much as I would have liked to stare down all three of them at once, I lacked compound eyes, alas. Luckily, the bartender came up to the table with our drinks just as the handicap staring match was about to enter its second round.

"Alright, lads!" he drawled, as he started unloading his tray onto the table. "Here we go... two Screwdrivers, one Black Russian, a White Russian, and an Irish Coffee. Anything else I can get you?"

Black Tie offered him a jaunty salute. "No thanks, Pops."

"Maybe a bowl of peanuts, though?" No Tie asked politely.

"And a second would be good," White Tie added.

"You guys," said Pops the bartender, shuddering a little, "need to stop doing that mind-reading shit. It's creepy as fuck."

"Apologies."

"It's just the way we are."

"Have a nice day, Pops."

As soon as Pops headed back to the bar, the three of them turned back to staring at me. The most I could do was to give them a bewildered look, before settling for a loss in the great stare-off and reaching for my Screwdriver – why Zachary had chosen that for me, I didn't know. At least it didn't have any bubbles in it, nor did any of the other drinks at the table, for the matter.

"And...," said No Tie softly.

"It appears that...," Black Tie continued.

"We win," finished White Tie triumphantly.

As one, they turned to face Zachary, and smirked at him. "You lose, my good man."

"All right, all right," he grumbled, making a shooing gesture at them. "First round's on me today, then."

He thumped me on the back, and sighed dramatically. "Did you really have to lose? At this rate, no one's going to beat them at a staring match."

"They've got six eyes between them," I said, even as I rolled my own eyes. "And you never said anything about a staring match!"

"Peanuts!" announced Pops as he reappeared at our table with two bowls of the fried treats. "Have a good time, lads!"

If there was one thing that seemed to be for sure thus far, it was that Pops had excellent timing.

xxx

We ended up having dinner at the bar, which was surprisingly good despite the place's rundown appearance. The drinks were just as good – don't take my word for it, though – and the music was relaxing in an outdated, cheery sort of way. Somehow, the jukebox seemed to have been stocked only with tunes dating up until somewhere about twenty-ten, and so some really old stuff ended up being played during our meal.

The company I had for dinner wasn't too bad, either. For all their apparent creepiness, the triplets turned out to be a source of good conversation, their solid demeanours balancing out Zachary's hyperactive nature. As it turned out, Black Tie was Yan, White Tie was Yin, and No Tie was Yun, although they admitted to occasionally switching the neckties around to get around their timetables.

Inevitably, I suppose, the topic of discussion went back to our work.

"So why were you so eager to get out at the end, Zachary?" I asked him as I skewered a fish ball with my fork.

"Eh?" he asked, halfway through twirling some noodles around his fork. "Say what say where say when?"

"In the mind probe just now," I reminded him, as I bit into the fish ball. "Near the end, you were all bothered about me not getting out of it fast enough."

Yun answered, "Mental fallacy."

"Not something you want to get stuck in," Yan said, nodding.

"Some very nasty stuff," agreed Yin.

Zachary cocked his head in their general direction. "What they said. Getting into a mind is a little easier than getting out, so if you linger while exiting, it could catch on to your presence and trigger the red lights. No biggie, really."

"Sudden coma's a biggie," deadpanned the triplets in unison. "Didn't you warn him about it?"

"Oh, alright," Zachary said, shrugging. "So perhaps he might have ended up going into a coma, or maybe I forgot to mention some things. No point in panicking him before his first trip into the dreamscape, anyway."

"You," I said, pointing my fork at him threateningly, "are a sick, sick bastard."

"That he is!" chorused the triplets, nodding in agreement.

"I could have gone into a coma!" I said, torn between awe and horror.

Zachary merely raised an eyebrow, and stuck his tongue out at us. "Sucks to be you."

"How juvenile," I remarked, causing the triplets to let out identical snorts into their food.

"We like this one," they said, nodding in a perfectly synchronised manner that sent shivers down my spine.

I leaned in and whispered into Zachary's ear, even as the triplets started eating again. "Are they always like that? It's freaky."

"Beats me how they do it, but they do," he shrugged. "Must be some triplet telepathy, or something like that."

"... You seriously expect me to believe that?" I huffed disdainfully. "Mind probing with electrodes is questionable enough, but telepathy's pushing it, Zachary."

He offered me a smirk. "Believe what you will, but this world's a much more interesting place than you give it credit for being, dude."

"Stop calling me that!"

"What, dude?"

"That!"

"... Just what is your problem, anyway?"

The triplets gave me a pointed look, and shook their heads. "Weirdo."

For some reason, their declaration of me being weird served as a cue for silence at our table. We turned back to our respective meals, and ate in peace for a short while. This was helped by Pops' bar being a rather peaceful for a place that served liquor.

It was not helped, though, by the fact that Yan's meal seemed to be moving on his plate.

"What is that?" I asked him, feeling a mixture of curiosity and disgust as I watched him cutting up the pulsating red mass of flesh on his plate.

"Eh?" he looked up, and noticed what had drawn my attention. "Oh, this."

"Supposed to be a fresh heart," commented Yin.

"From a cow, though how they keep it beating is beyond us," added Yun.

I must have made a face, because the three of them broke out into laughter, even as Yan started nibbling on the oozing red meat. Mildly desperate to divert my attention towards something less disturbing than the thought of Yan devouring some long-dead animal's heart, I ended up turning to Zachary for a distraction.

"You said it was easier to enter a mind than to leave it," I said, recalling something he had just mentioned. "Care to elaborate?"

He leaned back in his seat, and sipped his drink. "Well... the mind's not really a book that you can read, you know? So trying to pull things out of it is quite difficult."

"But planting stuff is easy," said Yan, dabbing at his mouth with a piece of tissue paper.

"Like a seed, really," mused Yin.

"Just get an idea into someone's head, and it'll propagate a chain reaction on its own," added Yun with a nod. "Whether it sets in and takes hold... now that's a different story altogether."

That made sense, at least. "I see..."

Zachary squinted into his glass. "You'll get used to all this abstract shit soon enough. Now, is it me, or is there a lipstick stain on my glass?"

xxx

If there was one thing I learned that evening, it was that bar food could be surprisingly tasty if you knew where to look. Of course, the possibility of me getting food poisoning from said food was also very real, but as the old saying went, you could always close one eye. And at least the bar looked clean enough, if you didn't make the grave mistake of using its toilets.

Pops the bartender also seemed friendly enough. However, the fact that he had mounted an actual, loaded shotgun on the ceiling and pointed it at his front door made me have second thoughts about whether he was actually a homicidal maniac in disguise. It also made me wonder if he was quietly poisoning customers who irritated him.

Yes, my mind tends to go to dangerous places if left unwatched while under the influence of alcohol. Put the blame on Zachary for that, would you? That bastard and his Screwdrivers made sure that I was barely capable of making it onto the train without stumbling off the platform.

At least he'd had the decency to help me get back to my apartment.

"I don't think I'll be going drinking again anytime soon," I muttered, as I stumbled up to the door of my apartment, with Zachary propping me up from the side. "This headache just sucks."

"We'll need to work on that alcohol tolerance of yours, then!" the bugger cheerfully replied, as he slapped me on the back, nearly sending me head-first into my own front door. "Trust me when I say that you can always beat alcohol, be it in terms of addiction, allergies, or intolerance!"

All I could do was to nod numbly as I unlocked my front door and stepped into the darkness of my apartment. The darkness was soothing, particularly given that my head felt like a gang of bull elephants were having a rowdy bachelor party in it, strippers and techno music included. Then there was the fact that I was usually asleep by eleven, and that the time was presently somewhere past midnight.

"Goodnight, Zachary," I mumbled, as I leaned on my door and decided to not switch the lights on. "See you tomorrow, alright?"

"See you around, then!" he said happily, in a voice that was probably loud enough to have woken up half of the residents on the floor. Instead of heading for the elevator that would take him down to the lobby, though, he opted for the stairs which led to the railway station, instead.

As much as I had a throbbing headache, seeing him going off in that direction was enough to pique my interest.

"Going somewhere, Zachary?"

"Eh?" he turned around, and waved at me. "Nah, just going for a stroll for a while. Got to love taking walks at night, when the world's half asleep!"

"You," I said slowly, blinking my heavy-feeling eyes, "are nuts."

"The best sort, dude! Go to sleep!" he chirped, as he spun about on his heel and practically pranced through the doorway and down the stairs to the train station.

I just stood there for a few minutes, feeling completely and utterly lost. Only after a particularly nasty throbbing sensation started in my head did I finally retreat into the calming darkness of my apartment and shut the door.

For the first time in years, I slept without dreaming.