According to the history books, the man who invented the technique that became mind control was a short doctor from New Zealand. The history books differ on other descriptions of his appearance, but they maintain very strongly that he was only five feet tall.

According to the history books, the short doctor was distressed when he found out that his techniques were being used for something as egregious as mind control. He had only been trying to cure headaches. In a way, he had cured headaches, because after the procedure you could just tell someone that their head didn't hurt and it wouldn't-- but the short doctor would get very angry if you pointed that out to him.

He made a lot of noise protesting the use of his procedure for that purpose. He did television interviews, newspaper interviews, even wrote a book about the misuse of it and what it might mean for the future of the human race. One night some men came to his house, dragged him out of bed, and hung him from a high beam in the family room, making it look like a suicide.

The short doctor didn't make any more noise about it after that.

That part is not included in any history books. According to them, he took his own life in a fit of depression when his favorite character was voted off of something called American Idol.

When the elevator doors opened they kicked up dust everywhere. A cloud billowed out in a wave across the floor, and the people inside waited for it to settle before walking out. Some of them held handkerchiefs over their mouths and noses. There were eight of them: five young men and three young women. They looked like kids on a field trip. They were kids on a field trip, almost: they were college interns.

They all had flashlights because outside the elevator it was pitch black. It was pitch black because they were about two hundred feet underground, and even if there had been windows, dirt would have come through them instead of sunlight.

They paused for a long time on the threshold, shining their lights all around the room. They did that to make sure there were no bodies or other surprises in there. The upper floors had been littered with bones, piles of them everywhere, and especially around the exits, because the people they had once belonged to had been trying to get out of the building when they died. But down here there was just the dust, and an expression of relief flicked over their faces, except for the two young men in front, who were pretending it didn't bother them for the benefit of the young women in back.

They split up and went in different directions, in groups of two or alone. Two of the girls paired up and went off, walking close together and making faces at the dark.

The third girl, who had the plainish name of Heather, went the other way. She looked a lot like a hiker from the 20th century: khaki shorts, boots, backpack, tank top, hair back in a ponytail. She looked that way because boots, shorts and a backpack were still practical. Ponytails still kept one's hair out of one's face. She was pretty in a plain way, as girls of that age are prone to be, even when they're not trying to be.

She paused in front of the large reception desk that dominated the lobby. There was an old-fashioned calendar on it, the kind where you would tear off a page each day to show the date, for the benefit of people who had once signed in and out there. It said January 19th, 2092. The girl approached it, but the paper was so old and dry that half of the page disintegrated and blew away just from the tiny air currents she brought with her.

The history books were all very clear on that date and what had happened on it, but it was interesting to see proof. She wished she had taken a picture.

"Check it out!"

The two young men-- the ones who had left the elevator first-- were shining their lights behind the desk. One of them held something up. It was a skull, still wearing a security guard hat. Of course the guards had stayed: they were programmed to.

That wasn't what he was excited about, though. The skull had a gold tooth.

"I am so keeping this." He pulled the tooth out.

"Anything valuable belongs to the museum," the other one said.

"That's only jewelry and shit. We get to keep anything that used to be inside someone."

"Is that really a rule?"

Those aren't the words they used. They were speaking English, but being the 23rd century, dialects had changed. The only two words that were the same as English at the time of this writing were museum and, less surprisingly, shit.

Heather decided to go the other way.

According to the history books, the people who had been brainwashed didn't act much differently than the people who hadn't been. Before it got serious, a lot of people thought that that was a funny and wry comment about society, and almost everyone thought that they were the first to make it.

Actually, the first to make it had been a child of one of the scientists.

There had been many hundreds of clinical tests and the procedure had been proven to be both safe and effective. It hadn't been made public yet and was still making its way through red tape when the scientist decided to try it on his wife.

His last name was Jones. His wife's last name was Jones, too, though she wasn't sure she wanted it to be Jones anymore, and that was his dilemma. Older than time. We won't go into his problems here because they were boring and common. His solution was less boring and less common, although it was really the same solution people had been arriving at for centuries, done with better tools.

He tricked her into coming into the lab with him one night, used an ether-soaked cloth to knock her unconscious, and strapped her into the machine.

It had been designed to alter the mind in specific ways, all of which were geared towards making a person healthier: it could remove a phobia, improve confidence or memory, cure drug addiction. But since Jones had been one of the designers, he knew that what it did in the mind was really make brute force alterations, and the change could be anything.

Although he was a brilliant scientist and an adult he was also human, which is to say that he was just a child with bills to pay, and what he did was the same thing a teenager might have done: he made her like him more, not want to leave him, and obey any command of his as long as it was phrased as a direct order. It couldn't be anything too drastic or people might notice.

A few days later, Mr. Jones asked his son if he'd noticed anything different about Mrs. Jones lately.

His son said no, his mother wasn't any different.

And that's how a child was the first to make the observation that so many adults thought they were smart for making.

The poor security guard with the golden tooth had been like that too, and was mostly the same except that he would never leave his post during work hours. He was still a nice fellow, and had stood there smiling and waving as everyone ran screaming for the doors. It was for the best though, because he was one of the only people in the building who had peace and quiet at the end when the gas was pumped in.

Heather passed through a set of airtight doors into a different world.

The lights came on, and after four hours of darkness they almost blinded her. She squeezed her eyes shut for a few moments then squinted, blinking.

The hall was pristine. No dust, no debris, nothing. It looked like a janitor had passed through five minutes ago. The floor was polished and reflected the lights in neat lines down the center. From above she heard the hum of fans: fresh air was circulating. She talked into her radio:

"Hey, I've got lights in the south hall. Actual working light bulbs. And ventilation, I think."

"Yeah, we do too," a male voice came back. "Electricity works, everything. I just plugged my phone charger into a wall socket, I hope it doesn't fry it-- did they use the same voltage and shit back then? Anyway we're in some kind of cafeteria or mess hall. I'm gonna see if the ovens still work."

"How?"

"I'm just gonna turn it to 400 and see if it heats up."

"I mean how do we have power?"

"Atomic battery or something, I guess."

They were not engineering students; they were archeology students. 'Atomic battery' sounded reasonable enough to Heather, whose last name isn't important, even though she had no idea what that was. And even though the man on the radio had made up the term on the spot, he was right: it was an atomic battery of sorts that was giving them light.

She moved from room to room taking pictures. The doors opened in front of her and closed behind her with little hisses. Every surface was spotless; there was even the faint smell of disinfectant on the air. She reasoned correctly that some kind of robot must have been maintaining the place, coming by once a day for over a hundred years, even maintaining itself to make sure its machinery didn't break down.

The rooms seemed to be offices. Many of them had nice couches and a small coffee table in the middle, the way a psychiatrist's office might. In one she found actual books that had not disintegrated, and she reasoned correctly that the climate control must have been maintaining the proper humidity, too.

Towards the end of a hall was a room that was not an office.

It was enormous and cavernous, twice the width of the other rooms and the length of a football field. Lining each wall were what appeared to be stainless steel hospital beds. Beside each bed was a small stainless steel cabinet (on the left) and a panel set into the wall (on the right). That was it: the room was empty except for the beds and the cabinets.

Heather and her camera went in.

According to the history books, the procedure was originally marketed as a sort of cosmetic surgery for the mind. Besides curing mental ailments (which insurance might or might not cover), it could also be used for more frivolous things like improving confidence, gaining photographic memory, learning Italian, or being better in bed.

No matter what it was used for, it was incredibly expensive. The amount of research and development alone that had gone into it was enough to buy a medium-sized country. Specifically, it was enough to buy Zimbabwe.

Even though the very rich flocked to it, and some of the upper middle class too when their insurance helped pay for it (those policies changed very quickly once the insurance companies started getting the bills), it was not nearly enough to break even, much less turn a profit, and the people in accounting pointed out that this was equivalent to losing money.

So the marketing people got involved, and that's when things started to go bad for planet Earth.

The marketing people had an ingenious idea: what if someone could be programmed to prefer only products that were produced by them, or by other companies in the same corporation? As corporations in the 21st century were quite large and diverse, it was not uncommon for one to own a piece of nearly everything that could be bought. How much money would that add up to over a consumer's lifetime?

The people in accounting calculated that that would be quite a lot of money.

So it was written into the contracts people signed before the procedure, presented as a discount. For example, you could get a 2% discount if you agreed to have a preference for their beverages programmed into you. Not only would you prefer them, but other brands would taste bad. Specifically, they would taste like an unwashed sock.

For larger things you could get a larger discount. For example, if you agreed to only buy cars built by them, that was a 15% discount.

That increased business a bit, but not enough for the accountants. So the marketing people had another ingenious idea.

They created a package that had a 100% discount. It was free.

For the 100% package, you agreed to have the preference for all of their products programmed into you. And since they owned a piece of nearly everything, that would dictate nearly everything that you could buy.

The people in accounting calculated that this would not only break even, but over the lifetime of a consumer would turn quite a profit. One of the accountants, a normally shy and reserved man named Terry, described the potential profit per consumer as a 'metric fuckton' over drinks that night.

In exchange you could have anything in the catalogue. You could be the smartest person on the planet. You could never make a mistake at your job again, never say anything embarrassing in front of a girl again, never be plagued by doubt again, never need to eat that last Twinkie again, never need your drug of choice again, always know what to do, the funny thing to say, the right move to make.

For all of that, all you had to do was agree to drink Coke instead of Pepsi (for example) for the rest of your life, or buy cars made by Chevrolet instead of Ford (for example) for the rest of your life.

It was a bargain a lot of people were willing to make.

Those were just the first of the marketing people's good ideas for the 100% package. They had more.

Heather took some pictures of the room, then went over to examine one of the beds. She walked around the right side of the bed, the side with the panel in the wall. If she had walked around the left side, what happened to her would not have happened to her.

The panel was about three feet square, set into a depression in the wall. On the upper right there was a computer screen, which was blank. Below it was a bank of buttons and some strangely-shaped outlets, and more of the outlets were on the bottom left.

On the upper left was what looked like a metal octopus with the body of a Word War I gas mask.

That was exactly what it looked like. At the center was the mask itself, with a large, clear plastic window in it that was about the size of a face. Around it was a rubber seal, and around that, four flexible, jointed metal legs hung on each side. There were little rubber pads on the inside of each leg. The contraption was set back into the wall in an oval-shaped depression.

Heather walked up with her camera and snapped a couple of pictures, then took out her radio. Just as she was about to speak, the computer screen came to life.

She lowered the radio and cocked her head at it.

What it said was in modern English (Old English, to Heather), so she could read it, but it was phrased oddly compared to how she spoke. It said: CAUCASION FEMALE and below that 126 LBS and below that 5 FT, 6.17 INCHES and below that CONTRACT: DEFAULT (100%).

She had just enough time to realize that the words referred to her and to think do I really weight that much? before the metal octopus shot out of the wall and latched onto her face.

It happened so fast she didn't have time to throw her arms up, didn't even have time to turn her head. It streaked through the air in a silver blur, the legs splaying out as it flew, and wrapped around her head as the mask touched her face. At the same time, a protective metal covering slid down over the computer screen.

She shrieked, pinwheeling backwards. Her radio skittered across the floor and under the bed on the opposite wall. She kept pinwheeling backwards until she reached the foot of the bed, and then was brought to an abrupt halt. As she was busy screaming and flailing, it took her a moment to understand why she wasn't getting away, and she kept trying to yank her head away and kept being stopped.

The reason was that the mask was attached to the wall with a many-jointed, flexible metal arm, which was about six feet long, and she had reached that limit.

She stopped trying to back away and tore at the mask. The metal octopus arms had encircled her head, gentle but deadly firm at the same time, and the rubber mask in front had formed a perfect seal over her face. The seal was so perfect and the plastic so thick that her shouts were going almost nowhere, so she stopped, and stopping let her hear something.

It was a small sound, almost not there.

The front of the mask was hissing.

Then she smelled something that seemed very out of place in the ancient, sterile facility. She smelled vanilla. It was blowing against her lips, a gentle breeze.

Beside her left ear, a tiny speaker crackled to life.

"You are being sedated," a woman's voice said from it. "Please remain calm and take deep breaths."

Sedated.

Heather screamed at the top of her lungs. She looked around for her radio, saw how far away it was, gave up on it. She punched at the plastic window, trying to break it. When that didn't work she turned to the metal bed and tried banging the plastic window against the edge. It bounced. When that didn't work she grabbed the metal arm with both hands, braced her feet against the wall, and tried to tear it out.

The pleasant-smelling gas continued to hiss.

In a blind panic she kicked at the metal covering that had come down over the computer screen, hoping to damage the computer underneath. She didn't even dent it. It was designed to be kicked, punched, even shot at.

She might have gone on trying different things all day, but just then, Heather found that she could no longer close her hands.

It was that feeling of trying to make a fist first thing in the morning: a numb weakness where the body isn't ready to do what you want it to yet.

It came on fast after that, spreading all over her body, taking away her control over her muscles. It turned her limbs into warm nothing.

Her arms became too heavy to lift. Her legs turned to Jello and she forgot how to work them. She fell to her knees.

That was as far as she fell though, because unnoticed while she struggled, four more metal arms had come out from under the bed, attached to some machinery beneath it. They waited patiently for the gas to take effect, then took hold of her gently when she started to go limp: two gripping her by the upper arms, two gripping her by the legs, just above her knees.

Heather was lifted through the air as her vision dissolved. She was unconscious before her body touched the table.

According to the history books, all of the machines had been destroyed in the war that was eventually fought to determine the sovereignty of people's minds, so Heather can be forgiven for not knowing what she was looking at. No images or even descriptions of them existed outside of government archives.

The history books were frequently wrong.

Often this is intentional: the winners write history. But in this case it was unintentional. No one knew that brainwashing had ever been done here. According to records these floors were owned by an unrelated accounting company. So when everything above ground was vaporized, everyone below ground was poison gassed, and then the top few floors were filled with concrete to seal it off, that was thought to be that. There had been other, more important things to blow up that day.

Actually it's a small miracle that it was the only facility remaining, because while war is a messy thing, that one had been especially messy. The best way to describe it in current terms is to call it a Civil World War.

The machine was very gentle with her. That was because almost as many lawyers as scientists had been involved in its design. It was more gentle than a human could ever be. Its gentleness was measured to the micron.

It stripped her clothes off, starting with her tank top, sitting her up and raising her arms above her head to get it off (the mask detached briefly while this was accomplished). Then her bra, using small mechanical fingers at the end of the mechanical arms to undo the clasp, then she was laid back down. Then her boots, socks, shorts and finally her underwear, which turned out to be sensible cotton. It put all of her clothes into a narrow metal bin attached to the foot of the bed.

It even removed the rubber band that held her hair in a ponytail, because no outside objects were allowed in the procedure room. It replaced it with its own rubber band, pulling her hair back in almost exactly the same way.

When it was finished the mask detached for good and went back to its place in the wall. It was replaced by another, smaller mask that was more akin to what might be seen in an operating room, which covered just her mouth and nose. The tube attached to it disappeared into the wall at the head of the bed.

She was strapped down with four large straps like seat belts. They weren't meant to restrain her; she didn't need restraining at the moment. They were to keep her still for her journey.

Behind the bed the wall opened up, and the bed slid into it.

A few moments later it was replaced by another, identical bed, and the wall closed again.

What the machine (or more accurately, the computer that controlled the machine) did was simple. The hard part had been figuring out what all of those different chemicals in the human brain did, how they interacted, and how to affect them in precise ways. That was what all of those many billions of dollars of research had gone into.

But now that that was known, doing it was simple, and not very different than following the steps of a recipe.

First, the human was rendered unconscious. There were many reasons for this, the first of which being that humans were very unpredictable. Even the ones who had the procedure willingly were unpredictable. They might do any one of a million things. But an unconscious person only ever did one thing: they lay there while the machine did its job.

Reducing something to that kind of mathematic simplicity was the best way to automate something. Humans tended to get offended if they were told they were being reduced to a mathematic simplicity, and that was why the machine didn't ask their opinion, the same way a human doesn't ask the opinion of the grass in the front yard before watering it.

Another reason was that the conscious mind was a chaotic and messy place. The unconscious mind (the type of drugged unconsciousness that Heather was now experiencing) was placid and predictable. In that deep, forced sleep, all people were equal. It provided a common point that the machine could start from.

The bed slid into the procedure room with its human passenger.

The straps were removed and she was transferred to a new, oddly-shaped bed. It had separate, movable sections for each of her limbs. She was strapped into these: her arms at the wrist and shoulder, her legs at the ankle and just above the knee. A fifth strap was placed across her forehead. These straps looked more like restraints than seatbelts, because they were.

If the machine had a sense of aesthetics, it might have thought she looked quite beautiful, lying there while her limbs were arranged.

But it didn't.

It only thought about her height and weight, which it was going to use to determine the exact dose of drugs to give her.

The machine began to adjust the level of the gas it was using to keep Heather asleep, reducing it just slightly. It began to monitor her breathing, heart rate and brain waves very closely. It didn't want her to wake up-- not all the way, anyway. It was trying to wake her up just a little.

On a scale of 0 to 10, with 10 being totally awake and 0 being totally unconscious, the machine was bringing Heather to a 2..

At the same time it began to mix in another gas, a different kind.

Heather's eyes rolled beneath the lids.

There were two monitors by the bed-- not for the machine's benefit, but for any human doctors that might be observing-- and on them were different lines that corresponded to Heather's different bodily statistics. One of the monitors was dedicated wholly to her brain waves. The lines on it were turning spiky, jumping all over the place, because her body was under the impression that it was waking up. It was mistaken. The second gas took care of that.

After a minute the spikes rounded off, changing from jagged peaks to rolling hills. The hills became low waves, which became a wavering line that was nearly flat. Her mind stopped trying to wake up. It had forgotten how to do that.

In layman's terms, her mind began to lie still.

Heather's eyes stopped rolling beneath the lids.

One of the mechanical arms reached up and, gentle as a kitten, nudged her eyelids open. Her eyes were hazel, and they focused when the light touched them. It made her appear to be awake, but it was just a trick of the muscles: real consciousness didn't begin until somewhere between 6 and 7 on the scale. At 2 her senses were awake but she herself was not.

From the ceiling, a contraption began to lower itself towards her head. It looked something like a silver motorcycle helmet. It fit snugly over her head, adjusting itself slightly before settling, and two small glass windows positioned themselves over her eyes. They looked not unlike spectacles, but moved independently of one another.

They adjusted to be an exact distance over each eye, then a short series of images flashed across them to make her eyes focus on them: the glasses were like little movie screens.

By her ears, the helmet played a few musical tones to test her hearing. One of the metal arms tickled the bottom of her foot to test her sense of touch. The mask was flooded with the smell of lilacs to test her sense of smell. A thin, flexible metal tube slid up her chin, over her lower lip, and into her mouth, and it sprayed something that tasted like strawberries onto her tongue to test her sense of taste. Small blips in her brain waves let the machine know that each of the sensations had the desired effect.

Once it was satisfied that she was ready, the odd silver helmet began to flood her senses with a barrage of images, sounds, tastes and smells. Her brain waves spiked again, and the machine adjusted the levels of the drugs until they smoothed back out.

According to the history books, the marketing people had another brilliant idea after that. They thought: what if someone could be programmed to only mate with other people who were loyal to the corporation? Then not only would the current generation be profitable, but future generations as well.

They thought this because several other large corporations had gotten their hands on the technology and were starting to use it to make people loyal to their products instead. And they were doing it without having spent the many billion dollars on research first.

This created a rather interesting climate in society, where brand affiliation became more important than race, religion or nationality.

In the end TopCorp turned it to their advantage (TopCorp was the name of the corporation, the one with the marketing and accounting departments we've been talking about).

The mating clause was a huge hit for TopCorp because they happened to own a huge number of products that catered to women. Not only that, but their products were more successful because their advertising made women feel worse about their bodies than anyone else's. Their customer base was approximately 65% women, 35% men. Therefore when the mating clause went into effect, there was a shortage of male TopCorp customers to have sex with, and therefore a huge demand.

If you were a TopCorp man, TopCorp women would (sometimes literally) throw themselves at you. It was a powerful advertisement. They didn't even need to pay for ads: it spread by word of mouth.

TopCorp was the top corp once again.

With the barrage of sights and sounds and smells and tastes, the machine was doing two things to Heather at the same time:

One, it was stimulating whatever area of her brain it was working on at the moment. This made the area light up like a Christmas tree on the brain scan, so the computer knew where to go. Two, it was sometimes using the sensory input itself to write things into her mind. For example, it could replace the memory of her most recent tax return with the image of a rubber ducky, if it wanted to.

At the same time, microwave beams from the helmet were physically changing connections within her brain. The microwave beams were precise enough to move individual molecules, using a technique called triangulation.

The machine did all of these things with the speed and precision of writing to a hard drive.

Outwardly there had been no change in Heather except that the goosebumps she'd gotten when the machine had taken off her clothes were gone (unlike the rest of the facility, the machine kept this room at a comfortable 74 degrees). Her eyes stayed focused on the strange spectacles and her body had not even twitched. This was because the machine had given her something to paralyze most of her muscles.

Then there was a change. Her heart rate and breathing began to speed up. Instead of subduing her like it had before, the machine let it happen. In fact the machine was causing it, because it was now stimulating the sexual areas of her brain.

Musks and pheromones filled her nose. The tastes of certain bodily fluids filled her mouth.

Sexual images began to flash on the spectacles, images of both men and women. Normally a customer would fill out a form before the procedure, detailing their sexual preferences among other things, but Heather hadn't filled out the form, so she got both. TopCorp was an equal opportunity company. TopCorp discriminated against no nation, race or sexual preference. It gave her both because the lawyers that had helped design it said it had to.

The purpose of the strangely-shaped bed then became apparent as the sections that her legs were strapped to began to raise and bend, until her legs were in exactly the position they would have been had she been in stirrups. From under the bed came another metal arm, and this one, unlike the rest, had two protrusions at the end that looked very much like flexible metal fingers. They looked that way because they had been modeled after the human hand. They were lubricated.

The metal hand did exactly what you think it was going to do to her, but at least it was gentle about it.

The fingers searched until they located her clitoris. One of them had a tiny hole at the end, and from that, a thin jet of liquid sprayed. Her skin reacted by turning red; blood was rushing to the surface. Gently-- very gently-- the metal fingers began to touch her, to massage. They had to be gentle because the substance they had just sprayed onto her was something that would make her nerves in that area much more sensitive, and it would be easy to cause her pain instead of pleasure if the machine wasn't careful.

All of this was to light up certain areas of her brain so that the machine could find the exact right spot to open new connections. Once the fingers began to rub it found them quickly, and began doing that.

Heather's chest hitched, then rose and fell faster.

What the machine was doing was giving her an orgasm. Not in the sense that it was turning her on so much that she had one-- she'd have to be conscious to be turned on, and she wasn't-- but literally opening the connections in her brain that were an orgasm and making it happen. This is something that a lot of human men wished they could do, but to date, none of them had ever tried using microwave beams.

Sweat broke out on her skin, and here and there, a patchy blush. The machine was holding the connection open, effectively keeping her in a state of constant ecstasy while it worked. The computer wasn't a perv-- that just happened to be the area of the brain to write new sexual behavior to.

It kept it up for one minute, two, longer. A conscious person might have eventually passed out, but Heather wasn't, so she couldn't. Her brain was firing instructions to her body to do different things-- arch her back, shiver-- but since the machine had paralyzed her, her body wasn't able to respond.

Then, just as quickly as it had started, the sights and smells changed and the machine let it end. It moved on to the next thing: her preference for fabric softeners.

Heather sighed and her vitals smoothed out. The sweat began to dry on her skin.

When it was finished making changes to Heather's brain, the machine stopped the barrage of sensory input and did one final scan to make sure everything had gone as it was supposed to. The spectacles and the metal tube that had been in her mouth (which resembled a silver worm) withdrew into the helmet, and then the helmet itself withdrew. The levels of the various gasses dropped to zero, all except for the sedative.

The metal hand came out from under the bed again, this time with a different attachment. It resembled a metallic dildo. It wasn't a dildo; that just happened to be the shape that best fit into a human female.

It had a hollow tip, and inside that was Heather's implant. The implant would monitor her vitals and contained various drugs that it could release into her body to respond to different emergencies. For example, if her heart ever stopped, it would release a drug that would attempt to jump start it and (hopefully) keep her alive until she got medical attention.

For another example, if she were ever raped by a non-TopCorp man, it would release a chemical that would kill the offending sperm and dye the attacker's penis purple so he could be identified by police.

If she were raped by a TopCorp man, the implant would do nothing.

The metal cylinder eased into her, and Heather's body suddenly came alive. Her back arched and her limbs pulled at the restraints. Her brain was able to tell her body to do that because it was no longer paralyzed.

This wasn't the result the machine was looking for, though. It was just trying to give her her implant. It increased the sedative and put her into a deep sleep, dreamless and feeling nothing, and went about its work.

According to the history books, people were not allowed to remember the procedure. Besides being a trade secret, the memory could interfere with the procedure itself. Instead, as part of the application, they would describe a dream they might like to have. When they woke up they would only remember having had that dream.

If you skipped that part of the application, you remembered seeing the movie Footloose.

Heather was having a nightmare about men dancing to strange music.

What eventually awoke her was the sound of her radio. The voices on it sounded tense and panicked, and were occasionally saying her name.

"I don't know, I'll go back up and check 16 again."

"Ted already looked there."

"Ted's an idiot, I'm going to check myself."

"I can hear you, you know." That was Ted.

Heather felt groggy and logey. Sitting up was a struggle, and when she managed to, spots danced before her eyes. Her limbs felt weak.

She was on a metal bed in a large room full of other metal beds. Her radio was under the bed across from her. The sounds from it echoed off of the walls.

"Someone go up to the surface and try calling her again. Maybe she went home."

"I just--"

"Do it again."

The last thing she remembered was walking into this room. She'd turned the corner, seen the beds, and then--

Nothing. Then she'd been on one.

"Sure, I'll go to the surface, then I'm going home. I'm not staying down here all day just because Ted likes her."

"That's not it. If we lose contact with someone, we're supposed to--"

"--Ted, just admit it--"

She swung her legs over the edge and tried to stand up. They turned to rubber and threatened to buckle and she clung to the edge, looking at the radio. It seemed impossibly far away. After a minute she stumbled towards it and sat against the far wall, breathing. She wanted to go back to sleep. She picked it up, her hands feeling not quite real.

"I'm here, guys."

"Heather? That you?"

"Yeah. I'm all right."

"Where the hell are you? We've been looking for you for hours. Dave called the police."

A thought came to her: Tell them you took a nap.

"I took a nap."

"What the fuck?"

Another: Tell them you were tired and you lay down for just a second and fell asleep. Don't tell them what room you're in. The thoughts seemed to be her own.

"I'm really sorry, I don't know what happened. I was bored and tired and I laid down for just a second on a couch in one of the offices. I must have fallen asleep."

"What floor?"

"16."

"I knew it. Ted."

"--I checked 16, I swear--"

"--whatever. Heather, can you wait by the elevator? We'll be right up."

"Yeah. Sorry guys."

"It's all right. The freshman just got their panties in a bunch. I knew you were fine." That was Brad, the unofficial leader of the group, the one who had taken the security guard's gold tooth.

Her clothes felt crooked. She tugged at her bra.

The backpack was sitting by the foot of the bed she'd been on. It was open. She looked in before picking it up.

There was rectangular silver device sitting on top of her other things. It was thin, about two inches wide by three inches long. It looked a lot like a PDA, because it was. It contained her helper program. Among other things, it would help her locate stores where TopCorp products were sold, which was very important because she would be dependent on them from now on.

The device gave no indication of anything being wrong, but inside, the helper program was having some problems. It was trying to download its list of TopCorp suppliers and coming up with nothing.

Heather zipped up the backpack and put it on. It didn't seem strange that there was a 150-year-old device in it that she had never seen. As far as she was concerned it had always been there, like her hands or belly button.

She sat in the back of the van on the ride back to their dorms, dozing. Her strength was coming back but she still wanted to get into bed and not get back out of it. She thought she was coming down with the flu.

"Hey." She tapped the shoulder of the girl in front of her, Chloe. "Got anything to drink? I'm dying." Heather was parched, which she also attributed to the flu (even though the flu had never made her especially thirsty before).

The girl handed back a bottle of water. Heather took a sip and spat it out all over the seat in front of her. It tasted like dirty socks.

"What brand is this?"

"Does it matter? It's water." Chloe was looking at her like she was crazy.

It did matter.

Heather began to wonder very much about her missing hours.

From the front of the van, Ted glanced back at her. She saw it and knew what it meant just like she'd heard the conversation on the radio and had seen his looks before, ever since the beginning of the semester when they'd both taken the same archeology class.

Poor Ted didn't have a chance with her. He wasn't a TopCorp man.