Lexicon

they’d taken her to a small, bright room with a forest of video cameras. They attached electrodes to her skull and showed her TV ads. These were kind of funny, because they were not ads at all, or at least not for real products. They were excuses to broadcast words. After forty or fifty, she blacked out, and when she woke up everyone pretended she had just fallen asleep. She didn’t know what they had done to her until the report bubbled through the ticketing system. When she’d seen SUBJECT SEGMENT: 220, she’d scanned it anxiously, but there was no mention of permanent damage. She’d been pretty sure that Labs wouldn’t do destructive testing on a walk-in, but it would have been a bad thing to get wrong.
    A few days later, the prepaid cell phone she kept to answer as Jessica Hendry rang, and a man chatted with her about whether she would be interested in coming in again. She said yes if there was money in it and he asked why she hadn’t put down a home address and she explained about it being a tough time and just needing to catch a break and would she get paid or not, what did it matter where she lived. Once she’d established that no one would notice one way or the other what happened to Jessica Hendry, the man said to come in anytime, they would love to see her. And here she was.
    “Jessica,” the receptionist said. Emily looked up from her magazine. “You’re up.” The door buzzed.
    • • •
    She followed a white-coated man with no chin through corridors lined with steel-caged lamps. “So I get a hundred dollars for this,” she said. “Right?”
    “Right,” he said.
    “Last time I fell asleep.” She was trying to engage him, to figure out if he was anyone she knew through the ticket system. “I hope the ads are more interesting this time.”
    They reached a double set of elevators. “We won’t be showing you ads today.”
    “No? What, then?”
    An elevator arrived. The man gestured for her to enter. “It’s a product.”
    The doors closed and despite herself, her chest tightened. It was a small elevator. It felt like a very small elevator. “What kind of product?”
    He scanned his clipboard. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you that without potentially polluting your reaction.”
    “‘Polluting your reaction.’ You guys are weird.” The elevator numbers ticked down. “Is it, like, a bottle of shampoo, or a car, or what?”
    “It’s strongly important for our tests that you don’t have any preformed expectations.”
    “Oh, okay. No problem.”
Strongly important.
That was an odd phrase. She had seen that one in the ticketing system.
    The doors parted. The corridor walls were pale blue. A calming color. The tech started walking and she followed him to a set of plastic doors, where he had to swipe his ID tag and tap a code into a keypad. Fifty yards later, the same thing happened again. During this process, she eyed ceiling-mounted video cameras. There was a second elevator and when this one stopped the walls were bare concrete, no more psychological blue. She didn’t like this much. The corridor ended at a perfectly round steel door that was twice as tall as she was. It looked like a bank vault. The door stood open and beyond it she could see a small concrete room with a single orange plastic chair. By the vault door stood another white-coated man and a gray-uniformed guy who looked like maybe security.
    Her chinless tech said, “Verifying, I have prototype nine double-zero double-one eight six.”
    The other man said, “Confirming prototype nine zero zero one one eight six.”
    “Verifying subject, Hendry, Jessica, identifying number three one one seven zero.”
    “Confirming subject, time is eight-fifty-eight, time lock has released and chamber is open.”
    “What is all this?” she said. She tried to grin.
    “Security,” said her tech, not looking at her. “The product is very valuable.” He entered the concrete room, which required stepping over a thick metal rim. “Follow me, please.”
    She did so. The air was freezing. The walls were featureless concrete but for six bulbous yellow lights in wire cages. Four tripod-mounted video cameras were aimed at the plastic chair. In the middle of the room was a box. A huge, steel, coffin-shaped box.
    “Please sit.”
    “Mmm,” she said. “Mmm, mmm.”
    “It’s all right, Jessica. It’ll be just like last time. Only this time we’re showing you a product instead of ads. I’m going to fit you with the helmet so