Lexicon (22 page)

“Nope.”

“Holy cripes. Where have you been?” She shook her head before Emily could answer. “Don’t answer. Stupid question. Wow. Look at you. You’re so different.” Emily smiled awkwardly. She wasn’t sure that was a good thing. “What on earth did you do to earn that name?”

“I don’t know.”

Sashona looked at her and Emily realized she did not believe this at all. “You look great.”

“You, too.”

“Patty Smith,” said Sashona. “That’s my name now. Smith.”

“Oh, Smith’s good,” said Emily.

“Ah, fuck off,” said Sashona, smiling. For a second it was like being back at school.

•   •   •

She was reminded how much she disliked neurolinguistics. She had forgotten that, since school. At first, it was fascinating; it was all Amazonian tribes using recognizably Latin words and how saying
guh
could make you hungry. Then came syntax and semantic violations and synaptic coupling. It required enormous amounts of rote memorization—all of which she’d lost over the past four years—and the ability to juggle symbols in her head. At school, students didn’t talk much about what they thought of specific subjects, but when she had mentioned she was studying neurolinguistics to Jeremy Lattern, he had looked sympathetic. This was like those classes again, only now she was expected to know everything.

Rosenberg and Raine taught her how to use the computer. There was a ticket system: When people wanted her to do something, they logged a ticket. And when she was finished, she plugged her work into the ticket and closed it. Mostly, the people who wanted Emily to do something were from Labs, which she gathered was located somewhere else in the building, although it was clear that other people were reading the tickets, too, because they sometimes requested clarifications. Those people, she thought, were higher-ups. Organization people like Eliot. But there were no names in the ticket system, only numbers. Sometimes she would read a ticket over and over, wondering if there was anything of Eliot’s mannerisms in it, but she could never tell for sure. After a while, she stopped expecting to see Eliot. Apparently she was to be left alone. To do what, exactly, she didn’t know. Maybe they really did want her to relearn NL. Maybe they were secretly observing her. But if this was the case, what they were observing was nothing very interesting.

She was assigned an apartment, a bank account, and a cell phone. All this was arranged. Her apartment balcony overlooked the meatpacking district and sometimes she stood out there with a bottle of wine, wrapped in a jacket that never really kept out the cold, watching the city breathe.

Every few days, she did something stupid. She stayed up late, or set the alarm early, and left the apartment in the freezing dark. She walked in a random direction for a random amount of time and found a pay phone and plugged coins into it. As it rang, she reminded herself to modulate her voice, avoid identifiable phrases, and end the call as soon as possible. She told herself,
This is the last time for at least a week
. Because if she was caught, she had no doubt that the consequences would be terrible. But then the line would connect, and Harry’s voice would fill her, and she would forget about that.

•   •   •

She got to visit Labs. It turned out to be in the bowels of the building, underground. It was brightly lit and full of techs in white coats and had two plastic, keypad-protected doors between her and anyone more senior than a receptionist. They interviewed people down here, she knew: attached them to probes and ran them through fMRIs to record what happened when they heard words. Then they sent the data upstairs to NL for analysis. Where these test subjects came from, she didn’t know. Although once while looking for a pay phone near George Washington University, she had seen a paper stapled to a light pole offering fifty dollars for volunteers for a psychology experiment, so maybe that. When the data came through the ticketing system, sometimes under OBERVABLE EFFECTS it said
psychotic break
, or
loss of function
, or
coma
. She tried not to think about this too much. But it was obvious that people got hurt down there.

•   •   •

Sashona—
Smith
, as Emily would never feel comfortable calling her—had changed a lot. She laughed, which she had never done at school, and found everything
amazing
. This struck Emily as unlikely behavior, since Sashona should have been guarding her personality to prevent segmentation. She decided it was feigned: a behavioral smoke screen. The higher levels didn’t do this; Emily had talked with Eliot plenty and had no idea of his segment simply because he gave nothing away. But it made sense for a newer poet. It made her wonder if she should be doing the same thing, and if Sashona thought Emily was trying to figure out her segment, and if Sashona was trying to figure out hers.

One day, as a tall, handsome barista delivered coffees to their café table, Sashona opened her mouth and a snarl of unintelligible words tripped out. “Love me,” Sashona said, and the barista spilled the coffee and went away and came back to ask for Sashona’s phone number. This was how Emily discovered that in the four years she had been selling blouses in the desert, Sashona had been learning words. Emily murmured her appreciation, but the truth was she was shocked. She hadn’t realized how far behind she was. How was she supposed to catch up? She had no one to ask but Sashona, and although they were friendly, she was afraid to expose her ignorance.

She decided to hope that one day somebody would appear to educate her. In the meantime, she read data and tried to pound it into thoughtful conclusions. The organization was interested in refining its psychographic model, in finding ever-better ways to classify people more accurately into fewer segments. She looked for responses in graphs that shouldn’t be there, tiny bumps in blue lines, and wrote reports on possible psychographic overlaps, and segment boundary blurring, and possible new avenues for segmentation. She had access to a vast database of shopping habits, Internet usage patterns, traffic flows, and more; if she wanted, she could drill right down to an individual and look up where they went last Tuesday and what they bought and did. But that was not very useful. No one was interested in individuals. She was supposed to look for connections between them: neurological commonalities that allowed them to be grouped together and targeted by a common word. Whether anybody acted on her work, or even read it, she had no idea.

It became harder to find a pay phone she hadn’t used to call Harry before. Every night, as she walked the streets, she half-expected Eliot or Yeats or maybe that kid in the airy suit to step out of the darkness. And then everything would be over. But that never happened, so she kept doing it.

•   •   •

One day she got a corrupted data set from a ticket, so she picked up the phone and dialed Labs. She was not supposed to do this. At least, she was supposed to do it as little as possible. Techs were isolated from analysts for security reasons, since techs were not poets and were therefore vulnerable to compromise. Why an analyst might want to compromise a tech, she had no idea. It seemed pretty pointless. But that was the rule. It didn’t seem very effective, either, since although the techs were supposed to be anonymous, they gave themselves away in their writing styles: one overused
evidently
, one had never heard of apostrophes, that kind of thing. So she did not have a great deal of respect for the rule.

“Hello,” she said when Labs picked up. “This is Analyst three-one-nine. I need a validation check on a data set, please.”

“Open a ticket,” said a male voice. She had seen no evidence of women in Labs.

“I did open a ticket, and it came back the same. I want it done again.”

“What’s your ticket number?” She told him. There was a pause. “That data set has been recompiled.”

“I know it’s been recompiled. But I want it re-recompiled, because it’s still wrong.”

“The data set is accurate.”

“Guy,” she said, “I’m looking at it right now. The p-graph is blank. I don’t know if you’ve got a format error, missing data, or what, but the graph cannot be blank.”

“It’s not blank.”

She opened her mouth, because that was preposterous. She had seen thousands of p-graphs and knew what they were supposed to look like: mountain ranges. Sometimes they had many peaks, sometimes just one, but the point was they were jagged. The lines went up and down. But as she looked at it again, she realized Labs was right. There was a line. She hadn’t noticed because it ran along the very top of the grid and was dead straight.

“Clear?” said Labs.

“Yes,” she said. “Thank you.” She put down the phone. She looked at the graph awhile.

•   •   •

She walked to Sashona’s desk. “Hey,” she said. “What’s synapsis?”

“What’s the context?”

“It’s in a new ticket. After ‘subject response,’ instead of a rating, it says ‘synapsis.’”

“Well,
synapsis
is just compromise,” said Sashona. “But they shouldn’t use that term. That’s sloppy.”

“Why?”

“It’s the ideal. The theoretical state of perfect compromise. Doesn’t exist in real life.”

“Oh,” Emily said. “I see.”

“Tell them to say what they mean,” Sashona said, returning to her work. “Probably someone new.”

“Right,” she said.

•   •   •

She did her best to write a meaningful report about the oddly flat graph and dutifully submitted it to the ticket system. Another ticket was waiting, but she felt distracted, and gazed at passing clouds instead. She had the feeling something was going to happen.

Six minutes later, the power went out. She rolled her chair back from her dead monitor. Heads poked up from cubicles. “I thought we had a backup generator,” said Sashona. Her voice sounded loud. Emily hadn’t noticed the hum of the air-conditioning until it was gone.

An alarm began to jangle. People’s voices rose. Rosenberg speculated about fire in Labs, which would be a problem, because a lot of those doors were time-locked. They made for the stairwells but Emily didn’t follow. Sashona hung in the doorway. “Woolf?”

She shook her head. She was feeling stupid. She had waited too long. She should have walked out of this building six minutes ago. She should have done it the moment she saw that graph.

“Woolf! It’s not optional. Time to go.”

She ran through floor plans in her head. There was no fire escape. She hadn’t realized that before. No glass cases saying
IN CASE OF EMERGENCY
. No one had ever gathered them in a conference room and explained where to go in an orderly fashion in the event that they needed to evacuate.

Sashona gave up on her and disappeared. Emily could go up or down. Those were her only options. She reached the stairwell and started climbing. She heard disembodied voices rising around her like departed spirits. A door boomed and there was silence but for her own breathing. She didn’t hear anyone else going down, she realized: no one from other floors. She stopped to kick off her shoes, which were helping no one. She climbed and climbed and finally saw daylight. She even jogged up the last few steps but found herself at a scuffed steel door that was chained and padlocked. She tried it anyway. She sat on the concrete and tried to figure out what next.

Somewhere far below, a door clacked open, then slammed. This happened eight or nine times. She listened but couldn’t hear anything more. “Fuck,” she said. She was pissed at herself. She had spent too long in Broken Hill, not needing an escape route. She balled her hands into fists.
Think.
There was a skylight. It was secured, but how well? She went back to the door and put one foot into a loop of chain and pulled herself up, searching for fingerholds. Balancing, she reached for the skylight, but it was too far away. She heard a rasping. What the fuck that was, she did not know, but it was coming from below and getting closer. She managed to inch her way up until she was standing on the bar of the door. The chain swung and clanked like a bell. Like she was deliberately trying to attract attention. Her fingertips brushed the skylight but that was the best she could do. If she released her grip on the door frame, she could possibly grab this thing and pull it out of the ceiling as she fell. There was a very slim chance of that happening. She heard footsteps. Boots on concrete. The rasping punctuated the air at regular intervals, like breathing but not. She should have learned words. She should not have waited for someone to teach her. She should have found them somehow. She leaped at the skylight and her fingers skidded uselessly over the plastic and she fell to the concrete and banged her knee. “
Suck
,” she said. A man came up the stairs. A kind of man. He was wearing black from head to toe and his eyes were black, bulky goggles, like night vision gear, set into a fighter pilot’s helmet, with bulging plastic hemispheres over the ears. He looked like he could walk through fire. The rasping was his air regulator.

“
Shakaf veeha mannigh danoe!
” she said. This was a mess of attention words for random segments. The chances of it having any effect were about a thousand to one. “Lie down!”

He extended a gloved hand. “Come with me.” These words came out flat and computer-modulated. She didn’t move. If he came closer, she could jump him. She didn’t see a gun. She would go for those goggles. If she could even dislodge them, it would make it hard for him to chase her.

“Hurry.” The man gestured to the stairs. “There’s a fire.”

“There isn’t,” she said. “Is there.” He didn’t answer. She’d figured out by now that he couldn’t hear her. She began to walk down the steps.

•   •   •

The lobby had been converted to a makeshift hospital, full of white cloth screens. The windows were blacked out with plastic sheeting. Black-suited spacemen moved between them, respirators hissing. She saw no one’s face she didn’t know from level five. She glimpsed Sashona on a trolley bed but then lost her behind a screen. She was told to stay where she was. Nobody spoke to her. Or to each other, at least that she could hear. An hour later, a spaceman drew back her curtain. He wasn’t wearing his helmet and she was surprised at his youth. He had a mustache, thin and fluffy. She wondered if this was the guy who had fetched her from the top of the stairs. If so, she should have gone with
narratak
.