I can’t have been meant for this. Oh God, please let me get away, just for a little while.

Now that I’m writing it down maybe I can think again. I’ve been hiding for two days and sometimes, for a few minutes, I’m not afraid. I wish I could just remember my old name.

Two years ago I had a really, really, really great life. It was just the kind of thing that I’d always wanted. I worked for Robertson Consulting, one of the biggest in the world. I loved the money; I loved the job even more. We would go into someplace and review the place top to bottom. I did process redesign, which meant that I looked into every nook and cranny of company after company, going over the books, tracking stuff down in every little bitty department. And wherever I went, the weight of Robertson went with me. Now you’ve got to understand, this was the kind of job that people spend years, even decades, trying to get. Great admin support, the latest gear. I needed a rental car, I got a Lexus. I needed a report printed out, cooperative little staffers appeared to get it all done just so. My laptop? The latest. My cell phone? Not even supposed to be on the market yet.

Of course, half the point of all this was to keep the paying customers in line. My boss used to say that we should always be the best dressed people wherever we went. Kept the clients from forgetting that we were the best. They should always look at us and think “if that guy weren’t here, he’d be at the White House”. Or something like that. I just got the best suits, used the tools the firm gave me, and kept the clients at a distance.

The only problems in our world tended to come from two things and this latest assignment has both of them: working with another firm, and clients who wouldn’t tell us what the problem was.

If you’ve been in the business you know what I mean. Clients saying they’ve got an “efficiency problem” or want to “optimize processes” and the moment you walk in the door you feel something wrong in the air.

They’re in a panic, something’s gone seriously bad, and some VP somewhere is stalling off his very early retirement by calling us in and feeding both us and their bosses some fantabulous little story while they scramble for a fix.

The other problem, that was worse. You see, when the clients are truly going down for the count they bring in firms like Robertson in clusters, hand out little parts of the job to each of us, and leave us to fight it out. Make the big kill, get the bigger contract next time and some fat billables now. So this time they had me teamed off with some bunch from some new tech firm. Impossible to work with and keeping even more secrets than the folks paying the bills.

That’s the truly fun part. You see, this whole thing was at a defense contractor. Those guys are seriously paranoid about bad news getting out and they use that classified stuff to hide behind. So I’m teamed off with this crew and my boss tells me to track down the problems wherever that meant going. Until then, speak to nobody but the techies I’m teamed with. I’m not even supposed to report in until I’ve got a solution. It was looking like there must be some unreal amount of money at stake because what else could have everybody looking for cover like this?

Now I’m not from the West Coast, My family? Let’s just say that they’re K-Mart and I’m Hugo Boss; I sent them Christmas cards and left it at that. I like my dating casual. My friends disappear for months themselves. So when my boss says don’t talk, no problem. He send me off with some little coven of techno-freaks, why not? Not to say that I was exactly polite. Of course, I laughed at them a bit, but I wasn’t too hard on them. After all, under their hopeless clothes, some of the younger girls weren’t so bad to look at. But absolutely no sense of humor at all. I put my hand on the ass of this cute programmer goth type just once and she starts screaming harassment.

So it gets down to it and it’s pretty much me, some engineering type named Anne (looks like she just got out of graduate school and doesn’t get it yet), and this skinny guy (Jimmy or something) who seems to be able to get us into anywhere at all. We put in a few weeks trying to figure out what’s got everybody so spooked and start narrowing it down to this one facility way out past Stockton. I mean way out there.

Thing is, this place, even for a defense contractor, has a major case of the paranoids. To get in the front gate we have to get through ID scans, appointment checks, the whole James Bond bit. Getting out is O.K. This isn’t about theft; it’s about keeping anybody wrong very far away. Geek boy does some computer magic and makes us fake IDs so we don’t lose an hour a day just getting in. We never see the same guard twice and with no cameras, even video, it’s easy to fake our way through. This Jimmy’s looking pretty handy.

The contractor’s complex is pretty quiet most days; quieter then you’d think, so I drift around, flirt with the secretaries and pump them for info, a few times I even come by on the up and up, making appointments with one blockhead and wingnut after another, and none of ‘em ever tell me fuckall that I can use.

I start spending the rest of my time at geek guy’s condo, trying to make sense of the stuff that he’s finding. But it just doesn’t look real. Science fiction looking stuff. Tons of files about dimension shifting, metabolic rates, viral systems. Lots of stuff about something called scalar definition.

Freaky. I tell our computer wizard to take a few days to break into any damn system he can find. I even give him a few passwords I’d been holding back. We call up our engineer on conference call and she agrees that we should all meet at the condo in three days and review.

Last normal days of my life. If only I’d known.

Two days later I show up and she meets me in the parking lot looking just plain wigged. She insists that I not go upstairs, starts with this crazy story.

I figure that she just can’t take the pace, push past her (eight years of triathlons and ten inches on her) and head on up. I ring the bell and somebody I don’t know answers the door. In a bathrobe. The whole place looks different. Guy at the door insists that he’s lived there for five years and doesn’t know anything about some young tech boy.

I’m about to argue when I see something that changes my mind. Triathlon teaches you some odd stuff, especially when you travel a lot and practice where you can. So I had no doubt at all that I was seeing three gunshot holes in the wall behind the guy in the bathrobe. Just about head height for a geek and freshly patched. I’d been sounding a bit confused anyway so I act a bit drunk, say that I was just an old college friend in town and that I must have the address wrong. Then I book.

I find Anne at her place. I bring her back with me to the hotel. She’s pretty much calmed down. She didn’t notice the bullet holes and I’m sure as fuck not going to tell her. She says that she’s getting out, telling the world, going to NPR or something. Fuck that. All this has just upped the stakes. We pull this off, I’m looking at partner by thirty-five.

Anne gets upset and I get serious. I push her into a chair and start yelling. Right from the Vince Lombardi school of executive motivation, real hardcore.

“Whatever you’re fucking scared of out there, it’s nothing compared to me! Screw this up and you’ll fear me for the rest of your life! There’s not a resource you have that I can’t get pulled! Robertson is God and in this room and on this project I AM Robertson! The food you eat and the bed you sleep on are mine! How you spend your days is MINE! Get this done right, and you’ll be happier than you think possible. Get it wrong and nothing on this earth will protect you from me!” She looks up at me, shoulders pulled in and hands clutched, really pissed but she’ll do what she’s told.

We just needed the facts straight.

I look at what we’ve got and tell her that we’re there for the duration. Turns out she’s got a daughter and no husband. She complains about affording a sitter and I hand her my Platinum Amex and tell her the PIN. At this point she’s too afraid of me to do anything stupid. I send her out to buy a week’s clothes for herself and pay the sitter in advance. She gets back and we settle in.

After four solid days we find it. There’s one group that’s been eating money like crazy. Something like a hundred and thirty million dollars has gone into this building and nothing comes out. Not to mention dozens of the best staffers pulled from other projects and reassigned to this thing. Lots of vague reports. Some kind of tests. It looks like the whole thing was put in mothballs a few months back. There’s also signs that our tech Jimmy wasn’t the only person whacked to keep things quiet so I’ve got to get this done before my pet engineer puts the pieces together.

I tell Anne to sit tight, get some sleep, and I head out for a few beers and a chance to think things through. I also make a few calls to a few guys I know, looking for some angles, but none turn up. It looks like the only way that we’ll ever get this figured out is to go there one last time. We put on fresh clothes, clip on our bogus IDs, and head over in Anne’s econobox.

It’s a Saturday and it’s early summer so the area is pretty empty. We park right by the door to our mysterious building and walk in past a receptionist’s desk with dust on the chair. We find rooms and rooms of equipment and computers. Everything’s got this homemade look. Not so much Star Trek as homemade liquor still done up huge. Nothing’s been turned off, all humming in a hundred different tones, with these random vibrations and clicks little dinky sounds seeming to come from half the machines. There’s even a burnt smell that I finally figure out is because a few of the coffee machines were just left there turned on with the coffee, all long since boiled away, still in them. Most of the areas are neat, carefully shut down, with these dusty check sheets on the empty desks certifying that they’re ready for mothballing. A few are chaotic, cables dropped on the floor and half-finished coffee cups on the desks, looking like they just cleared out in a hurry, almost like they were running from something. The rooms have this smell, like machine oil mixed with something gone sour. All these printouts on the walls that I recognize as fractals but they don’t look right. They all seem like they’re half one picture stuck onto half of another.

We start looking around for somewhere to start. We’re both pretty wiped and not thinking clearly so I’m just looking for something that we can both understand some way to get us jazzed and awake. I start fooling around, looking for one of those big lightning things from the Frankenstein movies , but no luck. I settle for trying to get Anne to trip on the wires running on the floor.

We find a clinic, with X-ray machines, examination rooms, and what look to be a bunched-up mix of normal medical and veterinary stuff. It seems to make more sense than the rest of it so we head over there. I find this huge contraption like a souped-up MRI with things sloppily hand painted on the inside of the tube. They seem to have messed with it somehow and for once they’ve left notes I can read. I climb in to take a look and yell over to Anne to check out the big console while I scope the machine. She’s slow on the uptake so I give her a little verbal kick in the ass to get her back on track.

I lie down flat on my back in the thing to see if what look to be markings for “left hand” “right leg” and so on are just that. I figure what the fuck and put my arms and legs where they say, trying to figure out what this thing does. Anne’s muttering to herself yet again when I hear her give a clear “Got it!” and hear hear her type something in. The whole thing starts to vibrate and the platform with me on it rumbles all the way into the tube.

It’s all messed up from there. Some kind of sticky stuff spraying over my face; a terrible yowling screeching sound from all over. Pressure. Pain. Confusion. Noise everywhere, things creeping on my skin, in my bones. It’s all gone crazy.

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