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In the two weeks since I’d been taken, I’d pretty much stopped arguing. Every time I even made a sour face, Meed waved her little shock wand at me and I’d fall right into line. I’d gotten used to my see-through cell and my daily smoothie. I’d even gotten used to needles. I had no choice. Every day started out with an injection of Cerebrolysin, taurine, glycine, and B6. At least, those were the ingredients Meed was willing to tell me about. For all I knew, I might have been getting steroids and hallucinogens, too. It was obvious that I was being biohacked. I just couldn’t figure out why. Every time I asked, I got the same answer: “Wrong question.”
After twenty minutes on the trampoline, the exhalation resister had me feeling light-headed. I spit it out onto the floor. Meed glared at me.
“Time for some capillary stimulation,” she said.
I had no idea what she was talking about. But I got a twinge in my gut. When she brought up something new, it usually involved pain.
“This way,” she said.
All I knew about the layout of the loft was what I could see from my cell or from the kitchen and workout area. And without my glasses, I couldn’t see much. We never went into the living room on the far side of the space. Every night, Meed disappeared behind a door next to the kitchen. Now she was leading me to an alcove I’d never seen, tucked on the far side of the elevator shaft. As we rounded the corner, I saw a semicircular ribbed wooden door. She pulled it open.
“Step into my chamber, Doctor,” she said.
I didn’t like the sound of that. I got nervous in tight spaces. A dim light behind the door showed a small room, no bigger than a closet. The sweat was cooling on my back and shoulders. I felt clammy and sick to my stomach. It was getting to be a familiar feeling.
Meed nudged me inside the tiny space and stepped in beside me. She closed the door and pressed a button on the wall. A motor hummed. Two large panels in the floor moved apart, revealing a tank of water below, lit from underneath. I could feel freezing cold wafting against my ankles. It was ice water.
“Hop in, Doctor,” she said. “Does wonders for the circulation.”
I tried to back away. She raised her shock wand. The message was clear. I could either jump in on my own, or get prodded like a cow in a slaughterhouse. I inhaled once and jumped in, feetfirst. The instant the water covered my head, I felt my blood vessels constrict. My brain felt like it was about to explode. I could see the blur of an eerie blue light illuminating the tank from underneath. When the ringing in my ears stopped, I heard another sound, so loud it actually pulsed the water against my body. Underwater speakers were playing Kanye West. The song was “Stronger.”
CHAPTER 12
AFTER I’D SPENT ten minutes in the ice bath, my lips were turning blue. Meed was sitting in a lotus position a couple feet back from the edge of the tank. She didn’t take her eyes off me the whole time.
“How much longer?” I asked. My teeth were chattering.
“I’ll let you know,” she said.
I knew this was some kind of endurance test. I just didn’t know how much more I could endure. But she did. She knewexactlyhow much. At the point where I stopped feeling my limbs, she stood up.
“Out you go,” she said. I put one numb foot on a narrow ledge inside the tank and pushed myself out and onto the small deck. I was trembling all over. Meed reached into a wooden bin and tossed me a towel.
I was still shaking as I shuffled across the floor to my cell. I dropped my wet clothes on the floor and stepped into the shower. The hot water felt like it was searing my skin, and my numbed hands and feet ached as blood and oxygen flowed back into them. I closed my eyes, breathed in the steam, and eventually began to feel human again.
Then I heard tapping on the shower wall. I reached over and wiped a small patch of condensation off the enclosure. Meed’s face was peering through from the other side. Jesus! This woman had absolutely no sense of personal space.
“Enough,” she called out. “I don’t want you pruning up on me.”
I turned off the tap. When I opened the shower door, she was gone. I reached for a towel and patted myself dry. I got dressed. My cell door was open. I stepped outside and immediately smelled something wonderful.
Meed reappeared. She was holding two bowls of freshly made popcorn. Was this a reward for good behavior, or some kind of trick? Popcorn did not seem like something Meed would allow on a strict training diet. She handed me a bowl.
“Organic, gluten-free, and non-GMO,” she said. “Also excellent roughage.” She headed across the loft toward the living room area. “Follow me, Doctor,” she said. “We’re going to the movies.”
I followed and sat down next to her on the thick leather sofa across from a massive flat-screen TV. I started to relax a little. I took a handful of popcorn. It tasted amazing. I thought maybe she was actually giving me a break. I thought maybe, for once, we were actually about to do something normal.
“What are we watching?” I asked.
“You,” she said.
Meed clicked Play on the remote, and the screen lit up. Sure enough, there I was. The footage was a little shaky, like it was taken with an iPhone. The first scene zoomed in on me walking across campus in the middle of winter. I looked gawky and awkward. I could tell I was trying not to slip on the sidewalk. The first scene dissolved into a shot of me in the aisle of Shop & Save. I was wheeling a mini-cart down the cereal aisle, picking out oatmeal.
Next came a long scene of me sitting at Starbucks before class. Then a shot of me buying a magazine and a pack of gum at a newsstand. There was a hard cut and then I was sitting at a long table in the university library. I had a thick comparative cultures text in front of me. The shot was so close I could read the title on the spine of the book. She must have been shooting from the next table. About ten feet away.
“You were following me?” I asked.
“Surveillingyou,” she said. “Every minute. For months.”
