Black collapses inward, and you are nowhere.
You come to in a white room. Even this feeblest of lights overwhelms you. When your eyes adjust, you make out where you are. Nothing to make out. A squalid plaster box. The room is maybe ten feet wide and twelve feet long. You could stand up fully, if you could stand up.
Here and there, the otherwise featureless walls bear greasy black fingerpainted smudges. Near the corner of one long wall, a five-foot slab of boiler plate barricades the lone doorway. Light dusts the room, seeping around the edges of a wall-sized sheet of corrugated steel nailed over the remnants of French windows.
The planked floor hasn't been swept anytime during your adulthood. The room is devoid of finishing except for a balding mattress and a metal radiator bolted to the filthy floor. Attached to the radiator, a short steel chain. Attached to the chain, your left ankle.
"Hey," you call. Your voice is dry, broken. "Hello?" Louder.
The door rumbles and jerks outward. A young man, no more than twenty-five, stands in the frame. He is tawny, thin, medium height, black-eyed, black-haired, sleek-bearded, hang-nosed, white-shirted, blue-jeaned, and glaring. You've seen whole armies of him, waving small arms, hanging out of car windows patrolling both sides of the Green Line. He's young enough to be one of your English students. He looks, in the second that you are given to scan him, lamentably like your internal clip-art stereotype of an Arab terrorist.
"What are you doing?" he screams. "Cover your eyes! Don't look!"
You scramble on the floor near the mattress, searching for the blindfold that has chosen the wrong moment to go AWOL. Screaming, the guard rushes you and yanks down the rag that has been riding, this whole while, on your numbed head.
You fix it so that you are blind.
The boy does not retreat. He hovers by your head. His breath condenses on your neck. He presses something hard and cold and metal up into your ear.
"You hear me, you cover your eyes. You understand?" You nod your head. Again. Harder. "You look, you die."
12
The moment he glimpsed America's pet project, Ronan O'Reilly was addicted. He'd come to Ecotopia determined to loathe its insular, insulating Gore-Tex righteousness, and he ended up marrying it and moving in. One look at the Cavern and he knew he'd never work on any other project ever again.
He toured it first on a junket to the Northwest, a whirlwind dog-and-pony show up the Pacific Coast, peddling a set of economic modeling tools to American statistical package resellers. No vendor in the U.K. — leave off the Republic or the Continent—could go to market against the kind of distribution that the Ecotopians were just then ramping up. He hoped to make a few quick quid by licensing his algorithms before North American brute force rendered the whole idea quaintly obsolete. He planned to return with whatever modest profit a sale might net and use the proceeds to rescue the Queen's University's School of Social Sciences from hardware decrepitude. With a new generation of decent iron, O'Reilly might hand-roll a new generation of future-modeling tools. Remind his countrymen that there still was a future.
Ronan landed in Washington armed with a solid prediction package and an accent that the tone-deaf locals mistook for some Public Television Edwardian English monstrosity. He ran a tight slide show, with enough reheated Bernard Shaw cracks to keep the audiences entertained. American venture capitalists seemed ready to throw money at anything that ran on silicon. And the Erse slant on visual econometrics was just different enough to frighten his American competitors into interest. Only after he entered the glass palace of TeraSys, the Solution Builders, did O'Reilly get his first significant offer —a bid outstripping his most reckless projections. TeraSys had little interest in the goods he peddled. They were after the peddler himself.
It took just a glance to see that the
You come to in a white room. Even this feeblest of lights overwhelms you. When your eyes adjust, you make out where you are. Nothing to make out. A squalid plaster box. The room is maybe ten feet wide and twelve feet long. You could stand up fully, if you could stand up.
Here and there, the otherwise featureless walls bear greasy black fingerpainted smudges. Near the corner of one long wall, a five-foot slab of boiler plate barricades the lone doorway. Light dusts the room, seeping around the edges of a wall-sized sheet of corrugated steel nailed over the remnants of French windows.
The planked floor hasn't been swept anytime during your adulthood. The room is devoid of finishing except for a balding mattress and a metal radiator bolted to the filthy floor. Attached to the radiator, a short steel chain. Attached to the chain, your left ankle.
"Hey," you call. Your voice is dry, broken. "Hello?" Louder.
The door rumbles and jerks outward. A young man, no more than twenty-five, stands in the frame. He is tawny, thin, medium height, black-eyed, black-haired, sleek-bearded, hang-nosed, white-shirted, blue-jeaned, and glaring. You've seen whole armies of him, waving small arms, hanging out of car windows patrolling both sides of the Green Line. He's young enough to be one of your English students. He looks, in the second that you are given to scan him, lamentably like your internal clip-art stereotype of an Arab terrorist.
"What are you doing?" he screams. "Cover your eyes! Don't look!"
You scramble on the floor near the mattress, searching for the blindfold that has chosen the wrong moment to go AWOL. Screaming, the guard rushes you and yanks down the rag that has been riding, this whole while, on your numbed head.
You fix it so that you are blind.
The boy does not retreat. He hovers by your head. His breath condenses on your neck. He presses something hard and cold and metal up into your ear.
"You hear me, you cover your eyes. You understand?" You nod your head. Again. Harder. "You look, you die."
12
The moment he glimpsed America's pet project, Ronan O'Reilly was addicted. He'd come to Ecotopia determined to loathe its insular, insulating Gore-Tex righteousness, and he ended up marrying it and moving in. One look at the Cavern and he knew he'd never work on any other project ever again.
He toured it first on a junket to the Northwest, a whirlwind dog-and-pony show up the Pacific Coast, peddling a set of economic modeling tools to American statistical package resellers. No vendor in the U.K. — leave off the Republic or the Continent—could go to market against the kind of distribution that the Ecotopians were just then ramping up. He hoped to make a few quick quid by licensing his algorithms before North American brute force rendered the whole idea quaintly obsolete. He planned to return with whatever modest profit a sale might net and use the proceeds to rescue the Queen's University's School of Social Sciences from hardware decrepitude. With a new generation of decent iron, O'Reilly might hand-roll a new generation of future-modeling tools. Remind his countrymen that there still was a future.
Ronan landed in Washington armed with a solid prediction package and an accent that the tone-deaf locals mistook for some Public Television Edwardian English monstrosity. He ran a tight slide show, with enough reheated Bernard Shaw cracks to keep the audiences entertained. American venture capitalists seemed ready to throw money at anything that ran on silicon. And the Erse slant on visual econometrics was just different enough to frighten his American competitors into interest. Only after he entered the glass palace of TeraSys, the Solution Builders, did O'Reilly get his first significant offer —a bid outstripping his most reckless projections. TeraSys had little interest in the goods he peddled. They were after the peddler himself.
It took just a glance to see that the
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