"I've never seen him before in my life," you said, willing your voice as even as you possibly could. The man in the suit sighed, closing his file, looking honestly disappointed.
"Very well. Officer, cuff him. Mister Lovelace, you're under arrest for felony drug position and harbouring a fugitive," he said, standing up from the table with a weariness clinging to him.
"I want my lawyer," you repeated uselessly as the cuffs came out.
---
After a ride in the back of a cop car, you spent the next eternity in a small, windowless, overheating room somewhere in the depths of a police station, handcuffed to a steel table staring at puke-green walls. The halogen overhead sang its best rendition of tinnitus. There were no clocks, no way to see out, they'd taken your watch and pager and the two pills you had forgotten to take out of your jacket pocket. You were hungry and your mouth was dry and were so desperately exhausted it was hard to stay upright.
You'd asked for a phone call, to call a lawyer. The cop who'd shoved you in here had said you'd get your call in a minute. You couldn't tell how long ago that was. You didn't even have the energy to cry. You called out for help, but nobody came. You could hear no sound from outside the door, nothing but the light overhead and your own ragged breathing.
At some point, you think you fell asleep, not because you had any memory of it and not because you felt any better rested, but because there was a crick in your neck and your face felt sore from lying half-on your arm. You were fairly sure that this was in violation of your constitutional rights, but who was going to enforce that? The cops?
You were just starting to accept that you were going to die in this room when the door opened. A policeman stepped inside, holding the door open, and then in came a young Black woman in a purple suit who gave you a cheerful smile.
"Excuse me, officer. Attorney–client privilege," she said. She had a clear British accent and her voice was sunny and friendly. The officer rolled his eyes at the inconvenience of following the
fucking law and closed the door behind him. Exhaling, she sat down and pulled up a briefcase.
"Do you have anything to drink?" you asked. She nodded and pulled out a water bottle, then paused halfway through handing it over, noticing how short the chain on your cuffs were. For some absurd reason, you felt a pang of guilt, like it was your fault you'd asked for something impossible. "Fuck… I'm sorry."
"Don't be. You did the right thing," she said. You looked at her strangely as she smiled and pulled something else out of her briefcase, a laptop in bluish steel. She clicked a few buttons, and you felt a static snap against your cuffs.
"What are you doing?"
"Right, that should do it. Hello Alice," she said cheerfully. "Or, would you prefer Coda?"
Unsure what to do, you just shrugged. You couldn't decide, and you didn't have the energy to argue.
"Miss Lovelace, then," she said. "I'll say, you really won us over back there, lying to an Agent. Not a lot of people we can count on to do something like that. Cache was onto something after all."
No part of that statement really parsed, even if all the words were familiar.
"What time is it?" you asked.
"The date is April 3rd, 1999," she said. "Saturday. It's seven AM." You'd been in here for almost fifteen hours.
"You're not my lawyer," you accused, and she nodded.
"No, I'm not, though I am here to get you out. You went and made that a lot more complicated for us, but you did us a good turn, and now we're going to do an awful one." She retrieved another thing from her briefcase. "I'm Page."
"Paige… what?" you asked.
"Just Page." She clicked open a small steel case in her hands and took something out. "I know you have a lot of questions, but we're on a short schedule here."
"Um… do you know the man who came to my apartment?" you asked.
"I do. That was Cache. He'd come here himself, but he's on their radar now. Don't worry, he can hear you."
You weren't sure how that would be reassuring. She transferred something to her other hand, then held both out in front of her.
"Miss Lovelace, I'm going to give you a choice now, and it is going to seem incredibly obvious what to pick. I still want you to think about it carefully, okay?"
"Okay," you agreed. You'd agree to anything at this point.
"Now, there's no physical mechanism we can understand in the human brain from which
choice originates. It's all procedural, and there's evidence that we never make choices at all, that our brain makes decisions instantly and without conscious thought, and what we think of as reasoning occurs afterward, retroactively," she explained. "And yet…"
You blinked, and in place of the woman who was speaking to you, there was a man. They looked quite a bit alike, as though they could be siblings, but the distinction was clear. You couldn't tell the moment when the change had happened. You almost felt as though this man had been the one to walk through the door.
"And yet there is nothing we resent so much as not having a
choice. We can justify anything to ourselves if we are given the illusion of choice," he said. "Even if the choice is no choice at all, even if the choice was never truly ours to make, if we can tell ourselves our circumstances are of our own making, we feel we have power."
"I thought you… she… you said we didn't have a lot of time," you said. He nodded.
"That was taking into account how longwinded I'd be. I want you to understand, when I give you this choice, it is not because the answer is in question. It is because you need the choice, Miss Lovelace. You need to feel control over what happens next."
He opened his left hand. Resting on his palm was a small blue pill, translucent, the light from above refracting onto his skin.
"If you take the blue pill, then the next thing you will recall is waking up in your own bed. The case will be thrown out on procedural grounds: Nobody will care. You are and will remain a nobody. You will return to work on Monday as Eugene Lovelace."
You nodded. You were so scared and exhausted right now that that sounded like paradise.
"Okay. Give me the pill. Please," you said, and he stopped.
"Hold on there, Miss," he cautioned.
"I…" you stammered.
"Tell me, Miss Lovelace. What's wrong with the world?" he asked. You shook your head, the question too big for you. "Take your time."
"W-what isn't?" you asked, staring down at your manicled wrists, at the scratched steel table. "I know I'm lucky, I know it could be so much worse, but I feel like I'm being ground to pieces, like… like a poison in the air and on the screens and under my own skin, like it feels like I wasn't… I wasn't made for this. For offices and managers and hunting typos. For ties and suits, for…" You stopped, the shackles at your wrist clacking as you trembled with it. "It feels like I'm trapped. It feels like I've always been in this little room."
You looked back to his face, and once again the woman was there, smiling.
"I know exactly what you mean."
She opened her right hand. Resting on her palm was a small red pill, translucent, the light from above refracting onto her skin.
"If you take the red pill, I will show you what's beyond the walls of this… little room. With that truth may come understanding, freedom, and power over yourself that you've never had. But it will also come with pain, fear, and struggle. Truth reveals, but revelation is destructive."
The two pills sat before you.
"Is this it? Just these two choices?" you asked, and that's when her eyes lit up.
"Oh, of course not," she said. "But I do only have two pills."
---
[ ] Take the red pill.
[ ] Take the blue pill.
