"But we did that last week."
"It can’t be the same place. Olson Hall is a gym."
"Yes, that’s what it looked like to me."
"It was used for the NCAA eliminations last week."
Victor reached for his notepad. "Whatever. We gotta be going, Mouse."
"Don’t ‘Mouse’ me, Victor! The NCAA elims were the week of 4 June. I did Gerry’s questionnaire yesterday, which was Thursday, 14 June."
"I’m sorry, Ellen," said Dixie Mae. "Yesterday was Thursday, but it was the 21st of June."
Victor made a calming gesture. "It’s not a big deal."
Ellen frowned, but suddenly she wasn’t arguing. She glanced at her watch. "Let’s see your notepad, Victor. What date does it say?"
"It says, June ... huh. It says June 15."
Dixie Mae looked at her own watch. The digits were so precise, and a week wrong: Fri Jun 15
12:31:18 PDT 2012. "Ellen, I looked at my watch before we walked over here. It said June 22nd."
Ellen leaned on the table and took a close look at Victor’s notepad. "I’ll bet it did. But both your watch and the notepad get their time off the building utilities. Here you’re getting set by our local clock–and you’re getting the truth."
Now Dixie Mae was getting mad. "Look, Ellen. Whatever the time service says, I would not have made up a whole extra week of my life." All those product-familiarization classes.
"No, you wouldn’t." Ellen brought her heels back on the edge of her chair. For a long moment, she didn’t say anything, just stared through the haze at the city below.
Finally she said: "You know, Victor, you should be pleased."
"Why is that?" suspiciously.
"You may have stumbled into a real, world-class news story. Tell me. During this extra week of life you’ve enjoyed, how often have you used your phone?"
Dixie Mae said, "Not at all. Mr. Johnson–he’s our instructor–said that we’re deadzoned till we get through the first week."
Ellen nodded. "So I guess they didn’t expect the scam to last more than a week. See, we are not deadzoned here. LotsaTech has a pretty broad embargo on web access, but I made a couple of phone calls this morning."
Victor gave her a sharp look. "So where do you think the extra week came from?"
Ellen hesitated. "I think Gerry Reich has gone beyond where the UCLA human subjects committee would ever let him go. You guys probably spent one night in drugged sleep, being pumped chock full of LotsaTech product trivia."
"Oh! You mean ... Just-in-Time Training?" Victor tapped away at his notepad. "I thought that was years away."
"It is if you play by the FDA’s rules. But there are meds and treatments that can speed up learning. Just read the journals and you’ll see that in another year or two, they’ll be a scandal as big as sports drugs ever were. I think Gerry has just jumped the gun with something that is very, very effective. You have no side-effects. You have all sorts of new, specialized knowledge–even if it’s about a throwaway topic. And apparently you have detailed memories of life experience that never happened."
Dixie Mae thought back over the last week. There had been no strangeness about her experience at Olson Halclass="underline" the exams, the job interview. True, the johns were fantastically clean–like a hospital, now that she thought about it. She had only visited them once, right after she accepted the job offer. And then she had ... done what? Taken a bus directly out to LotsaTech ...
without even going back to her apartment? After that, everything was clear again. She could remember jokes in the Voxalot classes. She could remember meals, and late night talks with Ulysse about what they might do with this great opportunity. "It’s brainwashing," she finally said.
Ellen nodded. "It looks like Gerry has gone way, way too far on this one."
"And he’s stupid, too. Our team is going to a party tonight, downtown. All of a sudden, there’ll be sixteen people who’ll know what’s been done to them. We’ll be mad as–" Dixie Mae noticed Ellen’s pitying look.
"Oh." So tonight instead of partying, their customer support team would be in a drugged stupor, unremembering the week that never was. "We won’t remember a thing, will we?"
Ellen nodded. "My guess is you’ll be well-paid, with memories of some one-day temp job here at LotsaTech."
"Well, that’s not going to happen," said Victor. "I’ve got a story and I’ve got a grudge. I’m not going back."
"We have to warn the others."
Victor shook his head. "Too risky."
Dixie Mae gave him a glare.
Ellen Garcia hugged her knees for a moment. "If this were just you, Victor, I’d be sure you were putting me on." She looked at Dixie Mae for a second. "Let me see that email again."
She spread it out on the table. "LotsaTech has its share of defense and security contracts. I’d hate to think that they might try to shut us up if they knew we were onto them." She whistled an ominous tune. "Paranoia rages... . Have you thought that this email might be someone trying to tip you off about what’s going on?"
Victor frowned. "Who, Ellen?" When she didn’t answer, he said, "So what do you think we should do?"
Ellen didn’t look up from the printout. "Mainly, try not to act like idiots. All we really know is that someone has played serious games with your heads. Our first priority is to get us all out of LotsaTech, with you guys free of medical side effects. Our second priority is to blow the whistle on Gerry or ..." She was reading the mail headers again, "... or whoever is behind this."
Dixie Mae said, "I don’t think we know enough not to act like idiots."
"Good point. Okay, I’ll make a phone call, an innocuous message that should mean something to the police if things go really bad. Then I’ll talk to the others in our grading team. We won’t say anything while we’re still at LotsaTech, but once away from here we’ll scream long and loud. You two ... it might be safest if you just lie low till after dark and we graders get back into town."
Victor was nodding.
Dixie Mae pointed at the mystery email. "What was it you just noticed, Ellen?"
"Just a coincidence, I think. Without a large sample, you start seeing phantoms."
"Speak."
"Well, the mailing address, ‘lusting925@freemail.sg’. Building 0925 is on the hill crest thataway."
"You can’t see that from where we started."
"Right. It’s like ‘Lusting’ had to get you here first. And that’s the other thing. Prof. Reich has a senior graduate student named Rob Lusk."
Lusk? Lusting? The connection seemed weak to Dixie Mae. "What kind of a guy is he?"
"Rob’s not a particularly friendly fellow, but he’s about two sigmas smarter than the average grad student. He’s the reason Gerry has the big reputation for hardware. Gerry has been using him for five or six years now, and I bet Rob is getting desperate to graduate." She broke off. "Look. I’m going to go inside and tell Graham and the others about this. Then we’ll find a place for you to hide for the rest of the day."
She started toward the door.
"I’m not going to hide out," said Dixie Mae.
Ellen hesitated. "Just till closing time. You’ve seen the rent-a-cops at the main gate. This is not a place you can simply stroll out of. But my group will have no trouble going home this evening. As soon as we’re off-site, we’ll raise such a stink that the press and police will be back here. You’ll be safe at home in no time."
Victor was nodding. "Ellen’s right. In fact, it would be even better if we don’t spread the story to the other graders. There’s no telling–"
"I’m not going to hide out!" Dixie Mae looked up the hill. "I’m going to check out 0925."
"That’s crazy, Dixie Mae! You’re guaranteed safe if you just hide till the end of the work day–and then the cops can do better investigating than anything you could manage. You do what Ellen says!"
"No one tells me what to do, Victor!" said Dixie Mae, while inside she was thinking, Yeah, what I’m doing is a little bit like the plot of a cheap game: teenagers enter haunted house, and then split up to be murdered in pieces ...