Weighing Shadows Read online

  “Yes?” Another sound of impatience.

  Ann had dozens of questions, and no idea which one to ask first. The tests could start at any minute, though; she had to hurry.

  “It’s just that I never heard of a company that gave classes before. I mean, I thought you were supposed to just go in and do your work.”

  “Ah. That’s the difference between us and other corporations. We believe in skill-building, in staying on the cutting edge.”

  Could you fit any more clichés into that sentence? she thought. Still, she had to admit she liked the idea of being paid to study.

  “Also, well, you never told me exactly what your company does,” she said.

  “That’s proprietary information. We can’t tell you that, not until we’re sure we want to hire you.”

  For a brief moment Ann thought about backing out. She was already annoyed with the games the other woman played, with all the secrecy. Then she remembered something a teacher had once said. “It’s like you want to fail sometimes, Ann. Like you’re your own worst enemy.”

  The teacher had been wrong, though. The truth was that she didn’t care whether she failed or not, that she didn’t want to care. The worst thing was hope, was wanting something so badly that you’d be destroyed if you didn’t get it. Because you didn’t get most of the things that you wanted, so why go to all that effort?

  But she wanted this job, she realized. Funny, since she didn’t even know what it was. She went into the classroom and sat down at one of the desks.

  The rest of the day passed in an anxious blur. A company employee appeared with stacks of forms for the candidates to fill out and sign, and then the computers booted up and a multiple choice test appeared on the screen. She skimmed easily through the first part, math and computer programming problems. The second part, history and foreign languages, was harder; she’d stopped paying attention in those classes a long time before she graduated high school. Still, she discovered that she’d read enough historical novels to answer a lot of the questions, and even the mysteries and science fiction she read were sometimes set in other times.

  Then she was herded into another room, where a live interviewer posed a series of logic questions. Another room held another interviewer, this one asking about her personal life.

  The logic questions were easy, the biographical information much harder. “Why didn’t you go to college?” the interviewer asked, looking down at an open folder on his desk.

  They had to know the answer to this. Probably it was in that folder he was staring at. “Well, my grades weren’t good enough,” she said.

  “Yes, but why not? You’re obviously intelligent.”

  She never talked about herself if she could help it, but sometimes, especially when she wanted to get someone on her side, she trotted out the story she called Pity the Poor Orphan Girl. She’d studied hard in grade school, she told the interviewer, but then, around the time she’d started high school, she had been placed in a new foster home, one with seven children and one computer. “The teachers gave us homework you could only do on the computer, but the boys— there were five of them, and only two of us girls—they never let me use it, they stayed on for hours, watching porn and playing video games. I tried talking to the foster parents, but they weren’t home very much.”

  “Why didn’t you go to the library?”

  Why didn’t you? she thought. They all had advice for her, these people with their easy lives, they all knew what they would have done in her place. But would they really have taken the bus to the library, waited in line for their turn at the computer, and then managed to finish their homework in a half an hour, which was all the time the library allotted them? Wouldn’t they have done exactly what she did, skipping classes and daydreaming through the ones she did go to?

  She told him a little of this, trying not to sound as if she felt sorry for herself. And she didn’t, not really. She’d managed on her own, she’d gotten free of that foster home, which had been far worse than she’d let the interviewer know. The parents were never around, leaving the kids to fend for themselves. The oldest boy had attacked her once, and thrown her to the floor of the room she’d shared with the other girl; she’d managed to stab him with a pen and he’d run away.

  “How did you get hired at Computer Solutions?” the interviewer asked.

  He would like this part, she thought; it showed initiative. “I worked at a fast-food place and saved up the money to buy my own computer, and then I got books from the library and taught myself how to program.”

  She was starting to get hungry; it had to be nearly noon. But when they finished the interviewer sent her on to another room, this one filled with only women. Another woman came through a door and told them all to strip and put on medical gowns for their physical.

  She nearly backed out then, nearly turned around and just walked away. “This is the last thing on the schedule, and then you’ll be free to go,” the woman said.

  Well, she’d come this far—she might as well get it over with. She took off her blouse and bra as quickly as she could, revealing the puckered scars on her torso for a few bare seconds, then shrugged into her gown. No one seemed to have noticed anything. Not that they would have mentioned it if they had: adults had mostly grown out of the cruelty of her high school gym classes, or at least they pretended that they had.

  They lined up at a bathroom for a urine sample, and then a woman sitting at a table took her blood and temperature and peered into her mouth and ears. After that she was ushered into an examining room; it smelled astringent, like rubbing alcohol, with an undertone of an earlier woman’s flowery perfume. A woman in a white coat came in, asked her to lie down on an examining table, and parted the front of her gown.

  Ann held her breath and waited for the inevitable questions. Usually she said that she had fallen into barbed wire when she was a child. She had learned early on that if she told the truth, if she said she didn’t know how or where she’d gotten the scars, the questioner would laugh or stare incredulously and then ask more questions she couldn’t answer.

  She’d tried to find out what had happened to her, but that information was gone, irretrievable. She’d gone through official channels and learned that her birth mother hadn’t wanted to be contacted, then had tried unofficial channels, breaking into records for hospitals and foster homes. She’d already had the scars when she’d arrived at her first foster home; no one knew how she had gotten them. Someone somewhere along the way had given her the name Ann Decker; she didn’t know why.

  The doctor said nothing about the scars, though. She palpated her breast and stomach, then sat her back up and listened to her lungs through an icy-cold stethoscope. “Breathe,” the doctor said. “No, deeper.”

  The doctor took away the stethoscope and fitted a blood pressure cuff around her arm. Her blood pressure must be through the roof, she thought. She breathed deeply, trying to calm herself.

  “Okay,” the doctor said. “We’re done here.”

  “Now what?” Ann said.

  “Now you find your contact person and go home,” the doctor said. “We’ll get in touch with you soon.”

  She’d expected something more ceremonial at the end, maybe even someone saying that she’d passed with flying colors and could start work tomorrow. Whoever these people were, they seemed terrible at social interactions. She left the examining room and found Emra Walker waiting for her in the room outside.

  She tried pressing the other woman for information on the drive home, but Walker would only say that no one knew the results yet, that she would have to wait to be contacted. A week later she logged onto her computer and found email from Transformations Incorporated, with a heading that said “Congratulations.” She made a fist and punched it, and shouted into the empty air.

  07302014

  108375

  Strengths and Weaknesses of Cohort 15, With Some Recommendations Emra Walker

  The 12 members of Cohort 15 were recruited in a
ccordance with the guidelines set forth in Directive 24. All of them are outsiders in some way, with compelling reasons to leave their employment and/or domestic arrangements, making them eager to join our shell company, Transformations Incorporated. All are of superior intelligence, with either excellent grades or a good reason for poor performances in their places of education. All achieved high scores on our tests for creativity, problem solving, information retention, and flexible thinking …

  There is one statistical anomaly regarding this group, however. Of these 12 members, a full 5 of them tried to break through the firewall on our computers while taking their tests, though none of them succeeded. These members are Francine Craig, Ann Decker, Maya Isaacs, Harry Leung, and Zachery Shaye. (See Table 3, attached, for the complete test scores of all 5. See also Table 4, attached, for a comparison with other cohorts, and note that previously only one or two members per cohort attempted this break-in during their testing period.)

  Attempting to hack a computer is considered evidence of creativity and flexible thinking, and adds 5 points to the overall test score. I would like to go on record as disagreeing with this idea. To my mind breaking into a computer is a strong marker for antisocial behavior, and I would recommend that we stop rewarding these efforts. In fact, I would go further and subtract 5 points rather than add them.

  Secondly, I would recommend that none of the members listed in Table 3 be sent together on any assignments, as their antisocial tendencies may combine and even intensify, causing unforeseen problems …

  AFTER A WEEK AT Transformations Ann had learned very little more about the company. She had to take two buses, early in the morning, to the campus, where she spent a full day studying everything from particle physics to ancient history.

  She discussed it, of course, with the other people in her classes, but they had come to no firm conclusion. “Maybe it’s some kind of experiment,” Franny said. She had long pale crinkly hair and she laughed a lot; her mouth seemed wider than most people’s. She was another person with an easy life, Ann had thought, and at first she was prepared to dislike her because of it, but Franny seemed so friendly with everybody that she couldn’t keep it up.

  They were eating lunch on the long green lawn, in the shade of one of the trees. The lunches were available in the cafeteria, and, Ann had been startled to learn, were free to all the employees. She usually took as much advantage of these meals as she could, and today she was eating a fish she had never tried before, tilapia.

  “What kind of experiment?” Ann asked. “What do they want to prove?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe they want to see how long we go without asking any questions.”

  “Well, for God’s sake don’t ask any, then. I’ve never been paid to study before.”

  “Oh, the bill’s going to come due sooner or later,” a man named Jerry said. He was thin, intense, with long blond hair that flopped over his black-framed glasses. “It’s all being funded by the CIA, or some secret organization we never heard of. They’ll give us government jobs when we graduate.”

  “They’re secretive, all right, but why does it have to be the CIA?” Ann asked. “Maybe it’s something boring and obvious, like designing bombs.”

  “You’re no fun,” Franny said. “Anyway, I wouldn’t do it. I’d never make bombs.”

  “You might have to. They made us sign those forms, remember? Did you read all of them?”

  “Aliens,” Zachery said suddenly, a man with a long thin face and a fuzzy beard. “Has to be. They’re training us to colonize some distant planet.”

  Jerry turned to him. “You can’t possibly believe—”

  Zach laughed. Ann had already noticed that he didn’t take very much seriously. “Well, Franny said she wanted something fun.”

  Franny ignored him. “And as long as we’re asking questions, what’s up with those mirrors they have in all the classrooms?” she said. “Do you think they’re two-way mirrors?”

  “Don’t you mean one-way?” Ann said. “I mean, if you could see through it both ways it would just be a window, right?”

  Franny laughed. “Yeah, I guess. But my question is, why would they bother looking at us through a mirror? They probably have cameras and microphones and whatnot.”

  “You think so? You really think they’re watching us that closely?”

  “Yeah, I do. At the interview they seemed to know things—well, they knew a lot about me.”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean,” Ann said.

  The others nodded. She waited, wondering if anyone would open up, confide their secrets, but no one said anything.

  Chimes rang out over the lawn: lunch was over. As she cleaned up and headed to class with the others she felt a strange lightness building under her breastbone. It took her a while to figure out what it was, and then she realized: it was happiness.

  “ALL RIGHT,” PROFESSOR DAS said in their physics class that afternoon, with no preamble. “We’re going to try an experiment.”

  He set a small wire cage on his desk. It looked like a hamster cage she’d seen in one of her high school classes, though there was no hamster inside it, or anything else. Instead it had a control panel on the side, with several buttons and a small LED display. Another table had been placed next to the desk, with a ragged baseball sitting on top.

  “Now,” he said. He looked out over the class. “You, Jerry. Come up here, please.”

  He took out another baseball, just as scruffy as the first one, and handed it to Jerry. “Write something on it, please,” the professor said. “Anything you like.”

  Jerry thought a while, then scribbled something. He turned to go back to his seat.

  “No, wait a moment,” Das said. “I’ll need you again.” He looked at the ball, then showed it to the class. “He’s written his name here—does everybody see it?”

  The class nodded. Das put the ball in the cage and pressed some buttons. There was a high, nearly inaudible sound, a painful flash of light, and the ball vanished.

  Everyone started talking at once, a murmur of soft voices. “So, what do you think happened to it?” Das asked, speaking over the various conversations.

  “Well, it’s a magic trick, isn’t it?” Ann said. Even as she spoke, she felt amazed at herself. She had never volunteered first for anything in her life.

  “A magic trick,” Das said. “Anyone else? How would I have done the trick, anyone want to guess?”

  “Mirrors,” Franny said.

  “Jerry?” Das said. “Do you see any mirrors here?”

  He shook his head. He looked a little embarrassed up there, not sure what to do with himself.

  “Could you go over to that ball there on the table?” Das said. “Okay, now pick it up. What does it say?”

  “It—it says my name,” Jerry said.

  “Does it look like the ball I put in the cage?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, exactly like it.”

  “Okay, so how did I do that? I mean, that ball was sitting there for a while, before I put the other one in the cage. Before Jerry wrote anything on his ball. Right? Did everyone see it?”

  “Well, but it can’t be the same ball,” Zach said. “You and Jerry are working together—you told him what to say. He’s your stooge.”

  Das laughed. “Stooge, is it? Jerry, did I tell you what to say?”

  “No, sir.”

  “That’s just what a stooge would say, though, isn’t it?” Zach said.

  “But if Jerry’s right, if they are the same ball, how could that work?”

  “Oh, no,” Ann said. “No, no, no. I don’t believe it.”

  “Yes?” Das said. “Ann?”

  “No. It’s impossible.”

  “What’s impossible?”

  “You sent the ball back in time.”

  Everyone started speaking at once.

  “That’s ridiculous—”

  “Everyone knows you can’t—”

  “It’s a magic trick, like she said—”

 
“Ann?” Das said. “Do you think I sent that ball back in time?”

  “No,” she said. Jerry had called Das “sir,” she remembered. Was that what people did in college? “Sir,” she added.

  “Why not?”

  “Well, because it’s impossible. Things can’t go back in time. Occam’s Razor says …”

  “Yes? What does Occam’s Razor say?”

  “It says not to multiply entities needlessly. That the simplest explanation is usually the truth. And the simplest explanation is, well, a magic trick. Sleight of hand.”

  “What would it take for you to believe that that ball went back in time?”

  “I don’t know. Well, if you sent me back. If I could experience it for myself.”

  “And we’ll be doing that, eventually. But—”

  “What?”

  “We’ll be sending you back in time. But there’s a good many things you’ll have to learn first, before we can do that.”

  Ann had barely heard him. “You’ll be—you’ll be sending us back in time?”

  Das grinned. “That’s right.”

  SHE SPENT THE EVENING in a daze, not even booting up her computer. This is either the biggest hoax ever, she thought, or they really do have a time machine.

  But suppose it was true. Not that she believed it, but just suppose, just let Occam’s Razor cut through all her disbelief. Where would she go? She couldn’t think, could only imagine herself in one of those ridiculous costume dramas on late-night television, wearing a bodice and corset and curtsying to a king. She didn’t know how to curtsy. No, the whole thing was insane. It had to be a joke, a test to see how much they would believe. But on the other hand …

  The next day they were divided up into smaller groups in their history and language classes. Ann and Franny found themselves in one group, along with another employee named Gregory Nichols. Gregory had been working at the company for a year, and he told them that he had already made several trips back in time—told them this with a straight face, yet another piece of evidence on the side of the company. Together they began to study ancient Crete, which Professor Strickland, their history teacher, called Kaphtor.