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"I have to be honest with you here," Isaac said. "'The Creature' is not a name that inspires confidence."
They were standing in front of the doors labeled PRIVATE. Dr. Rider, striding ahead of him, labcoat flapping, had one hand pressed to the doors. She paused and looked back at him.
"It's a college tradition," she said. "Any large and sufficiently complex device must have a monstrous and frightening name. Don't ask me why. I think it's like the theatre thing of suggesting actors break a leg just before a performance. Or maybe we're all just weird. I know theatre people are." She pointed at the doors. "If it wasn't called The Creature, it'd be The Coffin, or The Mangler, or some other thing. We could be assembling plush toys in there, and they'd still call it The Juggernaut or whatever. I swear."
She pushed open the doors.
The room beyond was white. Completely white- walls, floor, ceiling. It was also a perfect square, thirty feet on a side. In the center of the room was an opaque sphere about ten feet in diameter. It hovered in the empty air above a bowl-shaped jumble of machinery on the floor. Cables snaked from the sphere to the machinery and from the machinery to the wall, where they dissapeared through rough holes in the white plaster. The lighting seemed to come from everywhere.
Zaldania gestured toward the sphere. "The Creature, Isaac. Isaac, The Creature. I'm sure you'll get along fine."
"Am I seeing this right?" Isaac said. "It's just hanging in the air over there?"
"Magnetism," Zaldania said. "All that junk beneath it is generating a powerful magnetic field. We can't do antigrav yet." She frowned. "We'd need a separate building just for that, and even with the best technology...well, it's not quite like putting in a swimming pool, you know? It doesn't look good for our department if we blow something up or scramble someone's insides. Anyway, what you're looking at-" She raised her voice. "Interface on."
The jumble of machinery below the sphere lit up and began to hum. Zaldania put both hands together as though praying, tilted them outward so the fingertips pointed toward the sphere, and parted them in a book-opening gesture.
A crack opened in the sphere and widened, splitting it into two parts. They were not perfect halves; one side was much larger, the smaller side swinging open from the base of the globe like a hatch. Isaac craned his head, trying to see inside. The sphere was hollow, the inside taken up by a webwork of straps, tubes, buckles, and wires, all of which held in place a vaguely human-shaped contraption.
Isaac stared at it, not certain what he was seeing. Then understanding dawned.
"That," he said, pointing to the deflated thing. "Is some kind of suit, isn't it?"
"Yep." Dr. Rider seemed pleased. "Once we get you in, we'll pump in the solution- it's a sort of thick liquid stuff- and close the sphere. You'll be on oxygen through a facemask, and-"
Isaac held up a hand. He had gone slightly pale. "I think we really need to talk about this," he said, looking from Zaldania to the sphere and back again. "You said you wanted to...what? Test me? Is that what all this is supposed to be for?" He gestured at The Creature.
Zaldania crossed her arms over her chest and regarded him for a moment. "Yes," she said at last. "We'll be running some tests. But that's not really what we're getting at here. The Jittlov Center is for Consciousness research, and- to some degree- Consciousness expansion and therapy. What you'd be doing here would be for you, as much as it would be for us." She saw his uncomprehending expression. "Look, I'm sorry, I'm going too fast. I have a bad habit of assuming everyone knows everything I do about a project. Let's go back to my office. I'll make us some coffee and try to explain what's going on and why."
Isaac glanced at the dangling suit in its webwork of straps. "Sure. That sounds good."
Dr. Rider's office was an unoccupied corner in the basement storage area. Discarded science fiction hardware stood in dusty stacks nearby, giving off a faint odor of oil. Zaldania made coffee from a tiny machine which held its own reserves of cream and sugar, and poured the resulting concoction into two mismatched coffee mugs. She passed one to him.
"What you have to understand," she said. "Is that a lot of the time I find myself stepping back and saying 'what the hell do I think I'm doing?'. The College isn't like anywhere else. I mean, it's more not like anywhere else than anywhere I've ever been. Does that make any sense?"
"I'm not sure..." Isaac sipped at his coffee, scalded his tongue, and winced.
"There are different...I don't want to say rules, exactly." She waved her hands, searching for the right words. "Things operate differently. You took the courses here, you know what I'm talking about."
"Sort of." Isaac set down the cup. "To be honest, I don't remember much from my time here. It's all kind of blurred together. Information just pops out from time to time."
"That's what I mean," Zaldania said. "Things work differently for us. Even time and memory. You have to admit, though, you probably took some pretty weird courses here, right?"
"From what I can tell," Isaac said. "Yeah, I did. In between just getting acclimated to the whole..." He spread his arms. "The whole Multiverse thing. I seem to remember some really strange lectures." He paused, his eyebrows knitting together. "Though they seemed normal at the time, I think. Weird."
"That's the word. Just like how this place seems to be connected to everywhere but isn't a part of anywhere. How long have you been back?"
"I don't know," Isaac said. "An hour or two, maybe."
"Starting to feel at home again?"
Isaac sighed. "Since the moment I crossed over, yeah. It's like being on drugs or something, it really is."
"I know. And guess what?" She grinned, turning her face up to him. "I want to put you on more drugs. And stick you in an isolation tank. How's that for funny?"
"Very," Isaac said. "Do you know, yesterday at this time I was killing someone?"
Zaldania's eyebrows went up.
"They were trying to kill me, but still. And do you know?" He picked up his coffee again. "I feel more nervous right now?"
"Why, if you don't mind my asking?"
"I don't know." Isaac sipped, not minding the too-hot coffee this time. "Ever since I stepped in that white room. Ever since I saw The Creature. Maybe since I walked in this morning, I don't know. I feel like I'm on the edge of something."
Zaldania met his eyes. "One of my fellow researchers," she said. "Calls it echoing. Resonance from upcoming events bouncing back, making shadows in our minds. Very poetic, if you like that sort of thing."
"What does it mean?"
She took a deep breath. "Isaac-" she started, then paused as the overhead light flickered. "I swear." She made a face. "I ought to just hire someone with a cello to follow me around playing eerie music."
"Go on."
"What we do here is about consciousness expansion. Therapy by means of personal journeys- what my colleague calls the Inner Cinema. Not in a 'Hey, wow, man' kind of way, like the hippies used to do, but with a scientific and systematic approach. Like the way Raja Yoga is supposed to work. Do you remember your final essay for your Consciousness class?"
"No," Isaac said. "I hardly even remember the class."
"You talked about Raja Yoga. You even mentioned Crowley's little pamphlet on the subject."
"I did?"
"You did. You talked about the concept of experience being a merging between the Seer and the Seen, rather than a static, exterior thing. This is part of why I wanted you specifically."
Isaac rubbed at his eyes with his palms. He felt suddenly tired. "I'm sorry to disappoint you, then. It all sounds familiar, like something I might've dreamed about, but I can't really remember any of it. This is all so weird."
"That word again."
"Yeah."
"All the more reason for us to go through with this," Zaldania said. "The experience might dislodge memories of your classes. You're not the first graduate I've talked to who had memory gaps. I think it's maybe a safety thing, to keep the system shock to a minimum when you go back out into the world."
"Maybe." Isaac looked away, distracted. "I seriously can't remember much of anything. Snatches of lectures. Passages from books. Images of rooms, people, buildings. Images I can't place at all. It's like I had a high fever the whole time, and I've only recently come out of it." His expression changed to one of dread. "If I have come out of it. Oh god..."
Zaldania took his hand. Her own hands seemed tiny in comparison to his. "Relax. Just relax. You're okay. You're all right."
"I seem to be a verb," Isaac whispered.
"What?"
"Nothing. I'm okay." He scrubbed both hands down his face, took a deep breath, and let it out. He sat back in his chair. "All right." He picked up his coffee. His hand shook only a little. "Tell me about what we're going to do here, Dr. Rider."
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"Quit this world, quit the next world, quit quitting!" -Sufi proverb.
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Take Me Back to the Garden of Love - 14
