Chapter 1The Empty Pod

Marc had found the future, and it came in a paper bag with a grease stain.

“Six bakeries,” Tessa said. “Six. We could have graduated again.”

“Five bakeries and an establishment making false claims.” Marc broke the loaf along its scored middle. Melted cheese stretched between his hands. “Look at that edge.”

Kai looked. Through the car window, New Baltimore was unrolling in bands of white towers and green roofs. A delivery train moved between buildings thirty floors above the street. Beneath it, someone had put a three-story advertisement for a better attention span across an entire junction.

“The edge,” Marc repeated.

“It appears to be attached to the bread,” Kai said.

“Sauce all the way out. Browned cheese. No inch of dry crust where the baker lost interest.” He gave Kai half, then began picking mushrooms from the other half onto Tessa's napkin.

She took the napkin away. “If you ever become rich, I'm paying someone to put those back.”

“Too late. He'll hire the bakeries,” Kai said.

Marc considered this seriously enough to worry both of them.

They had known one another since the year Kai discovered he could climb the school fence but could not get back down without help. Marc had climbed over to demonstrate, become stuck beside him, and argued that Tessa should fetch a ladder because neither of them had technically failed. Tessa had brought a teacher. Their friendship had survived worse solutions since.

Today she checked their appointments while Marc checked the food. Kai had checked his twice before the car arrived. The invitation still had his name, the Immersion emblem, and compensation large enough to make his education debt briefly resemble somebody else's problem.

“Sedric says there's a kitchen upstairs,” Tessa said.

“Good. We can warm this.”

“We're meeting the woman who built a machine that might give you ten years in a month,” Kai said. “You could try being interested.”

“Ten years.” Marc gazed at the bread. “Think how many shops we'll get through.”

Immersion would not let them bring lunch into the assessment suite.

“It isn't lunch,” Marc told the guard. “We had lunch.”

“Visitors' refrigerator,” the guard said, reading their appointments. “I'll have it sent upstairs after the demonstration.”

“Do you have to refrigerate it?”

“It's that or my desk.”

Marc handed over the bag. “I'll remember this.”

“Good or bad?”

“Depends how much comes upstairs.”

The guard laughed and waved them through.

The assessment floor had a mug under a chair and tape across a loose section of flooring. Kai liked it better than the enormous atrium below. Somebody worked here. Somebody had also put a chair where it would hide a mug, which suggested a level of practical ingenuity he could appreciate.

Sedric came out to meet them with a pencil behind his ear. At Winner's Circle he usually carried a towel and knew which customers could be trusted to carry full glasses. Kai had first met him while helping Marc argue that the bar counter blocked the screen during matches. The counter had moved six inches. Marc still considered this a public service.

“My cousin's finishing a test,” Sedric said. “Come in.”

Relanis sat beside the windows with the study booklet open across his knees. He shifted his bag to make room for Kai.

“Have you read the duration section?”

“Twice.”

“Did you understand it the second time?”

“I became familiar with the words.”

“That helps.”

Kai looked at the white capsules on the other side of the glass. Eight appointments, he counted. Ten machines.

At a wall terminal, a silver-blond woman was arranging three screws by length. Helena stood beside her with a loose circuit board.

“I'm telling you, it said Thursday before you touched it,” Helena said.

“It is Thursday,” the woman said.

“Yes. Exactly.”

“The repair log says you replaced this part tomorrow.”

Helena considered the board. “I work quickly.”

“Put that down. The contacts are exposed.”

Sedric introduced Sylvia as a field engineer. Helena added, “And my oldest friend. The person you send when the equipment is too far away to be embarrassed into working.”

“Usually it needs cleaning.” Sylvia closed the terminal. “Sometimes it needs whoever designed it to stand in the rain for a few hours.”

“I studied why people press the button after you put a sign over it,” Kai said.

“Have you found out?”

“Occasionally the sign is hiding a better button.”

Sylvia almost smiled. He decided not to follow the joke with a worse one.

Kira arrived carrying a cup and speaking to a technician who had evidently been trying to leave the conversation for some time.

“Then label it as an estimate. I don't care whether the approved wording fits. Make room for it.”

Helena intercepted the cup. “You promised.”

“It's yogurt.”

“In the equipment room?”

Kira looked into it, then left it beside the booklets. Kai had seen her face on university screens and one enormous advertisement suggesting that a longer life might improve the shape of your jaw. In person, one sleeve was rolled higher than the other. She saw the advertisement reproduced on Marc's booklet and sighed.

“I recommend the technical pages.”

“What about the cheekbones?” Marc asked.

“Not a guaranteed outcome.”

She brought a diagram onto the wall. Eight reclining figures surrounded a machine labeled POLARIS.

“We want to put you into the same dreamlike world,” she said. “You can meet one another there, learn things, come back. The promise is more experienced time than passes in this room. Today we're only checking that the pods recognize the right people.”

Sylvia turned her booklet toward her. “This promises ten years in one month.”

“It's a projection.”

“From a month-long test?”

“No.” Kira took Helena's pen and crossed out the number. “That should never have been printed as a promise. You'll receive the actual results before you're asked to join the trial.”

Kai liked that she answered. He also wished the answer had been different. He had a psychology degree and a collection of rejected applications asking for experience he did not possess. He wanted time to learn without another few years of rent to pay.

“Today you stay awake,” Kira continued. “Lids open. No drugs, no immersion. Imagine moving your hand; the equipment tells us whether it understood you. If it does anything else, we stop.”

A technician fitted a band around Kai's wrist. He imagined opening his hand. An outline on the display opened with it.

“Now think of something unrelated.”

He thought about Friday's loan payment. The outline closed into a fist.

The technician made a note.

“Don't give it ideas,” Kai said.

The pods had washable padding, folded blankets and a physical release inside each lid. Relanis tested his from the bed as well as from outside. Kira made everyone do the same.

Kai's name appeared on number six.

“Spelled correctly,” Marc said. “Now you have to stay.”

“I'm not sitting down until yours can pronounce Rigel.”

“People have been getting that wrong for years. I don't expect better from furniture.”

Eight squares on the central display held their names. Number nine showed a test pattern. Ten was gray.

“The first version,” Kira said when Kai pointed. “Some of its circuitry still carries the test signals. Each message gets a different label. We check the label when it comes back, like sending yourself a parcel.”

The prototype's hinges had been replaced. Kai found this reassuring. Whatever else the future required, somebody had once needed better hinges.

The technician started the test.

Eight squares turned green. Kai watched his pulse rise because he was watching his pulse.

The empty pod made a descending tone.

A latch clicked inside it. Its gray square filled with unfamiliar characters, a time and a return arrow.

“An old test,” the technician said, reaching for the reset.

“Wait.”

Kai said it sharply enough to stop the man's hand.

“Look at the label.”

“The prototype clock drifts.”

“Not the time. The label.”

The reply carried the label of the message they had just sent. According to its time stamp, the reply had been sent three seconds earlier.

Sylvia crossed to the console. “Could the machine have reused a label?”

The technician opened a record and brought up the outgoing message's label beside the reply. They matched.

“Generated when I pressed send,” he said.

“Save both records,” Sylvia told him. “Don't run another test over them.”

Kira stared at the unfamiliar characters.

“Ilnor.”

Kai looked at the translation field. It was empty. Then a cursor moved and supplied the word she had already spoken.

ILNOR.

Helena put down her pen.

“Cut the signal to the pods,” Kira said.

The technician pressed a control. The tone sounded again.

“It's only showing the last—”

“Pull the cable. Now.”

He opened the panel below the console. Sylvia took Helena by the elbow and moved her behind the neighboring pod. The guard held the room's door open.

The connector came free. The prototype went dark.

Its message remained on the separate display.

Relanis peeled off his wrist band. “Is somebody in there?”

Kira raised the prototype's lid all the way. A blanket lay folded on the bed beside a diagnostic pad. Nothing moved beneath either.

“Back to the lounge, please. We're ending the assessment.”

“Was that part of your test?” Sylvia asked.

Kira kept a hand on the open lid.

“I don't know what it was.”

Nobody argued about leaving.

Their bread returned forty minutes later with Marc's name, the date and NO CLINICAL USE printed on a white label.

“Finally,” he said, “a scientific opinion.”

Tessa made room among the abandoned booklets and gave Relanis the piece with the most browned cheese. Sylvia sat opposite Kai, studying a copy of the machine record.

“She knew the location,” he said.

“She knew a name.”

“Before it translated.”

“Yes.”

That was all Sylvia would give him. Kai was already imagining someone calling from an impossible place. She was still checking what the record actually showed.

Kira came in while Marc was transferring mushrooms to Tessa's napkin. He offered her bread. She accepted without seeming to notice what it was.

“What does the arrow mean?” Kai asked.

“A request to end a visit. To wake up.”

“From someone inside?”

“Or from the software ending a visit. The message doesn't tell us which.”

“Was there a visit to end?”

“There shouldn't have been.”

Sauce reached her thumb. She looked down at it, then set the bread on its paper.

“I went in two years ago,” she said. “I experienced nine days. There was a village called Ilnor.”

“You built the village?” Kai asked.

“I didn't design a village. The engine coordinates the experience. Our working explanation is that people shape more of the world than they realize.”

“Working,” Sylvia repeated.

Kira nodded. “There are things I still can't explain. You'll get the full account before there's another invitation.”

Outside, the scheduled rain began exactly on time.

In the car, Tessa waited until the doors closed.

“We can still see each other without borrowing ten years.”

“I know,” Kai said.

“There are bakeries we haven't visited,” Marc said.

“Possibly on other continents,” Kai said.

“We can be thorough.”

Kai looked up at the assessment floor until rain hid it. That morning he had imagined returning home with something impressive to tell his family. Now he kept seeing a blanket on an empty bed.

“I want to hear her answer.”

“So do I,” Tessa said.

Marc passed him the last piece, browned edge intact. For once, he had left the mushrooms alone.

Three weeks later, the prototype stood disconnected behind a locked service partition.

Kai had read Kira's account of Ilnor twice. A healer, a craftsman, a village attacked by things that should not have existed outside a nightmare. She had made a mistake with a device she did not understand. She had returned without knowing who else survived.

He had expected an explanation to make the empty pod less interesting. It had done the opposite.

The follow-up tests had found a damaged timing circuit. Replacing it stopped the early replies. It did not explain the place-name. With the prototype isolated, independent volunteers had entered a plain blue room, met one another and returned on request. Today the eight of them would try the wider environment Kira remembered.

Six hours here. Roughly thirty days inside. Forty thousand dollars if he completed the study, with payment for the portion completed if he withdrew.

“You can still change your mind,” Tessa said.

“You've been saying that for three weeks.”

“You've been looking increasingly pleased for three weeks. I consider it relevant.”

Marc passed them each a small cloth packet.

Kai opened his. Dried bread, cheese, a folded napkin.

“Metal doesn't always go through,” Marc said. “Food might. We're doing science.”

“That isn't how you packed it at breakfast,” Tessa said.

“Science developed.”

Kira checked their names. Sylvia checked the emergency cable and then Kira. Relanis was still asking a technician about the physical release when Helena settled into her pod beside him. Sedric put his pencil away.

Eight people. This time eight machines.

“One withdrawal request ends the shared trial,” Kira reminded them. “You do not have to persuade anybody else. The return control should be available from inside.”

“Should,” Relanis said.

“It worked in the independent tests. The larger environment is why this is a trial.”

Kai put his journal beside the food packet. He wanted the time. He wanted to meet the people in Kira's account. Most of all, he wanted to learn something nobody could put on a job application before he did.

Sylvia caught him looking toward the service partition.

“If it asks you to press a better button,” she said, “tell someone first.”

“What if it's a very good button?”

“Kai.”

He smiled. “I'll tell someone.”

She did not smile until he had looked away from the prototype.

He lay back. The lid closed. A voice asked him to confirm his name, and he did.

For a moment he could hear only his own breathing.

Then a cold drop struck his cheek.

Kai opened his eyes beneath a tree. Sunlight came through its leaves, and something with too many legs walked off his shoe.

A panel opened in front of him.

[WELCOME TO HULEA]

Name: Kai Arzeil

Class: Scholar

Somewhere to his left, Marc started laughing.