THEY BROUGHT HIM a blue jumpsuit and a pair of flimsy white shoes. He told the soldiers watching him, “It’s a lie. What he’s told you. He’s like me. He’s using you to murder your own kind.”
The boys said nothing. They nervously caressed the triggers of their guns.
“The war you’re about to wage isn’t real. You’ll be killing innocent people, survivors like you, until the last one falls and then we will kill you. You’re participating in your own genocide.”
“Yeah, well, you’re a fucking piece of infested horseshit,” the younger boy blurted out. “And when the commander’s done with you, he’s giving you to us.”
Evan sighed. There was no breaking through the lie because accepting the truth would break them.
Vices are virtues now, and virtues vices.
Out of the room, down a long corridor, then descending three flights of stairs to the lowest level. Another long corridor, turning right into a third that spanned the length of the base, passing door after unmarked door, walls of gray cinder block and the sterile glow of fluorescent bulbs. Here night never fell; here the light was everlasting.
They came to the last door at the end of the gray tunnel. The hundreds of doors he had passed had been white; this door was green. It swung open as they approached.
Inside the room was a reclining chair with straps on the arms and the footrest. An array of monitors and a keyboard. A technician was waiting for him, blank-faced, standing at attention.
And Vosch.
“You know what this is,” he said.
Evan nodded. “Wonderland.”
“And what might I expect to find there?”
“Very little that you don’t already know.”
“If I knew what I needed to know, I wouldn’t have gone to so much trouble to bring you here.”
The technician strapped him into the chair. Evan closed his eyes. He knew the uploading of his memories would be physically painless. He also knew it could be psychologically devastating. The human brain has a marvelous capacity to screen and sort experience, protecting itself against the unbearable. Wonderland laid bare experience without the brain’s interference, extracting life’s record with no interpretation of the data. Nothing in context, no cause and effect, life unfiltered, without the brain’s gift of rationalization, denial, and creating convenient gaps.
We remember our lives. Wonderland forces us to relive them.
It lasted two minutes. Two very long minutes.
From the disaster of silence and light that followed, Vosch’s voice: “There is a flaw in you. You know this. Something has gone awry and it’s important that we understand the reason.”
His legs ached. His wrists were worn raw from pulling against the straps. “You will never understand.”
“You may be right. But it is my human imperative to try.”
On the monitors columns of numbers flowed, his life organized into sequences of qubits, what he saw, felt, heard, said, tasted, and thought, and the most complex packets of information in the universe: human emotion.
“It will take some time to run the diagnostics,” Vosch said. “Come with me. I want to show you something.”
He almost fell coming out of the chair. Vosch caught him and gently pulled him upright.
“What has happened to you?” he asked Evan. “Why are you so weak?”
“Ask them.” With a nod toward the monitors.
“The 12th System crashed? When did it crash?”
He’d made a promise. He had to find her before Grace did. Running down the highway, running until the gift within him collapsed. Because nothing mattered but the promise, nothing mattered but her.
Evan looked into Vosch’s bright blue, birdlike eyes and said, “What are you going to show me?”
Vosch smiled. “Come and see.”
66
TURNING LEFT off the stairs brought you down the mile-long hallway to Wonderland’s green door. Turning right brought you to a dead end, a blank wall.
Vosch pressed his thumb against the wall. Gears whined, a seam appeared, and the wall split down the middle, the two halves pulling back to reveal a narrow corridor that faded past the sterile glow of fluorescents into utter black.
A recording sprang from a hidden speaker: “Warning! You are entering an area restricted to authorized personnel pursuant to Special Order Eleven. All unauthorized persons found in this area will be subject to immediate disciplinary action. Warning! You are entering an area restricted to authorized personnel . . .”
The voice followed them into the dark. Warning! A smudge of sickly green light bathed the end of the narrow corridor. They stopped there, at a door with no handle. Vosch pressed his thumb against the middle of the door and it swung silently open. He turned to Evan.