it was the first time she had driven a car in an ExEx, and it was exhilarating. Two impressions predominated. The first was a feeling of complete safety: the car could not crash, she could not be hurt, because she could not act alone and could not make her own decisions. The scenario was laid out for her to follow. She had taken the right into University because that was the way she had to go; she shortly came to the large intersection with Wabash Boulevard, and here she took a left, driving on to the highway and accelerating to keep up with the rest of the traffic. The sun was shafting in through the driver's window, making her arm and face tingle. She wound up the window, and pulled the visor over to help shade herself This action, this decision, was part of the second and contradictory impression: that she could defy the scenario and act independently of it. She could put her foot down on the gas pedal and just drive, keep on going, head east or north out of the town, drive for ever across the great virtual America that lay out there, just beyond her immediate view of the simulation, letting it piece itself together, shaping seamlessly about her, unfolding endlessly for her.
Instead, she reached into the glove compartment and took out the automatic pistol that was there.
While she drove she checked it was loaded, then laid it on the seat beside her. She switched on the radio: the Duke Ellington Orchestra was playing an instrumental number called
'Newport Up'. How did she know that? She'd never listened closely to Duke Ellington in her life, and would hardly be able to identify the sound of the orchestra let alone any individual tracks.
She stretched back in the seat, drove with her arms straight and her head lying back on the rest, the radio on, the sun blazing in on her, and the wonderful rumbling slow traffic of 1950 gliding past and around her.
Moments later she saw diversion lights ahead, and a police roadblock. Most of the traffic was peeling off to the left, going around the diversion, but she slowed and signalled to the right, heading straight for the police line. She came to a halt, and pulled on the parking brake with long, solid vibration from the ratchet. An officer walked towards her, leaning down to see into the car.
Suddenly, she was no longer sure of what she was doing. Had she decided of her own will to drive up to the police line? Or was this what the woman driving the car would have done?
The police officer was just a few feet away from the car, a hand extended to indicate she should not drive off again.
Teresa made an instant judgement: that she had decided on her own initiative not to follow the diversion. She was in control. From long habit she fished into her pocket for her Bureau ID, but it was missing!
She looked down at herself, realizing for the first time that she was wearing some other woman's clothes. She was fat! She was wearing terrible clothes! She had runs in her stockings!
She grappled at her belt, where she kept her badge, but down there, under the copious folds of her overweight body, sagging down into her lap, there was just a thin plastic belt.
She glanced up into the rearview mirror, leaning across to see herself; an elderly black woman's face, full of mild concern, looked back at her.
'Ma'am, this is a restricted area,' said the cop, now leaning down by the window. Teresa noticed that it had reopened itself somehow, while she was driving, while she was distracted from the simulation. 'Would you reverse up, please, and rejoin the main flow of traffic.'
'I'm Federal Agent Simons, attached to Richmond
station,' Teresa said, but by now the cop had seen the automatic lying on the seat beside her.
He said, 'Ma'am, would you raise both your hands slowly and leave the car'
But then, maddeningly, the ExEx ended, and Teresa's mind's eye was filled with white crystalline light, and her ears roared with static.
Teresa returned to her own semblance of reality: a small, cool room, painted white, with an overhead strip light. She was lying on a narrow bench, on a creamcoloured paper sheet which rustled as she stirred. There was a distant mumiur of airconditioning, the voices of other people close by in another room or corridor. From the moment she left the scenario Teresa was aware of her surroundings and what she had been doing; this was a major improvement on the traumatic period of recovery that followed a terminal event in the FBI's training scenarios.
A technician was standing by the open door to the cubicle. As soon as she saw Teresa stirring, she came fully into the cubicle and stood next to her.
'How are you feeling, Mrs Simons?' she said, her gaze flicking professionally over her.
' I'm fine.'
'No problems, then?'
She helped Teresa sit up straight, and immediately attended to the nanochip valve on the back of her neck. Teresa, who had rarely been conscious for this procedure, tried to see what the woman was doing. The angle was wrong: she glimpsed a syringelike instrument being deployed, felt a significant pressure on her neck, a twinge of pain, then a slight and not unpleasant vibration. The technician's name badge was just about all she could see: her nan-le was Patricia Tarrant, Customer Liaison. As Ms
Tarrant removed the syringe, Teresa felt the valve move against a sore spot, somewhere there, under the skin or around the valve itself She put a hand up, and touched it gingerly.
Teresa watched as the contents of the syringe the nanochips suspended in a pale liquid were transferred to a glass tube, which Patricia Tarrant then placed inside a cabinet at the foot of the bench. She activated some mechanism, and warning lights briefly showed.
'Fine. When you're ready, if you'd like to come outside we can complete the paperwork.'
Teresa's mind was still swimming with the images of San Diego, the hot wind, the open road.
Before the technician could leave the cubicle she said to her, 'That Cook scenario. 1'd never come across it before.'
'Cook?'
'William Cook,' Teresa said, trying to remember. Images of extreme reality still dazzled her memory, tending to confuse false memory with real. '1950, San Diego. Something about a fugitive with a hostage.'
