Jillian gave me a little lick as I left and told me that it was good to see the professor and me together. It seems that it had been a while since the last time we'd enjoyed our company and that the professor had been missing me. She handed me my slate and I pulled my robe back on.
I asked her if she typically found the sight of two men engaged in that sort of thing so normal and her reply of "That sort of thing? You mean sex -
what's unusual about that? You two are always... or I should say were always at it like rabbits. I think it's what keeps the professor so young." Now she was giving me that "what's wrong with you... everyone knows this" sort of look and I quickly made my way out.
She stopped at the door and asked, "Look, the professor's a great guy and he really likes you. You will be back more often, won't you?" I promised her that I'd be back and to my surprise, I meant it.
Wearily, I asked the slate for my next appointment and a map to get me there. It was fairly close on the campus and I arrived with minutes to spare.
The slate had no information as to whom it was I was supposed to meet, and the building wasn't exactly small. I asked the slate if it had a summary of the building or records of my previous visits but my host seemed to have been all over the place and had past records of visits in several of the offices.
Running out of time and ideas, I tired something desperate. Questioning the slate, I found out that this device acted as a telephone by routing digital recordings of sound through the network and then back to sound at the receiver's end. Also, there was a log of calls outgoing and incoming.
I asked the slate to try and figure out if I'd made any calls to any people here. The slate went dead for almost a minute and returned and explained that calls weren't tracked by position, but by owner - but that it had managed to get ahold of the current positions of the receivers of all previous calls within the past month and of them, four were within the building.
I was amazed at both the intelligence and the initiative of this machine.
When I had more time I was going to have to find out more about what made this thing tick. I asked for a map to the four people and luckily three of them were in the same place. A quick walk and I was at the door to what seemed to be a laboratory of some sort. Through the glass plate of the door I could see the three the wolf-people, two males and a female, standing around what looked exactly like an EZ-Boy recliner surrounded with a ton of truly bizarre looking apparatus.
A knock brought the attention of the group and they waved me in. The door was unlocked and I stepped into the room and over to the group.
"Knocking, Alan? This is your office too." said the female. Damn. Well,
now I knew where I worked - whatever it was "I" did. I was praying it wasn't lab animal...
"Let's move to a meeting room and start the debriefing," said the older of the two males. I followed them out of the room and down the corridor to a rather pleasant meeting room with chairs clearly intended for comfort and for the anatomy of these beings. The central table was lower than I would have expected and at the front of the room was a large grey-glass wall-hanging. If that was art, then at least there was one thing we were ahead of them in.
Alas, it wasn't art. The older male, clearly the leader of this little pack, barked out a command and the screen brightened into the neutral network-logo I had seen on my own slate. I lifted my slate and whispered if it could record all this and it whispered back that all the data was already available on-line.
Sitting back in the chair, I watched as the large slate began recounting the previous night's events. I watched as "I" entered the room and removed my robe then climbed into the easy chair. I had a momentary fear that I would be watching some form of pornography, but instead the other three wolves came into the view and started applying a small headpiece to my head which seemed to sit over my skull and then around my temple and under my long jaw.
Along the bottom of the screen were all sorts of symbols and squiggles in their language and occasionally a chart or graph would overlay the image then quickly either fade away or reduce in size and march to a lesser position along the sides of the image. It was clear that I was falling asleep or being put into some form of sleep state. This was beginning to look frighteningly familiar.
A voice came from the slate and narrated the events and confirmed my suspicions about the experiment. "I" was being put into a special form of REM sleep. That was the first step of Riding. Still, it was possible that this was simply some form of sleep experimentation or some crackpot psychic experiment,
so I sit still.
As the video played, a set of symbols in the lower right seemed to go in cycles - my guess was that it was a clock of some sort and suddenly, it started running a lot faster. The leader-wolf stated that nothing significant happened from this point until the "event" about an hour later. The display slowed back to real time and a new chart which seemed to indicate EEG popped on the screen to join the others which I now realised were respiration,
temperature and possibly EKG.
A minute went by and then all three charts went nuts. The EEG chart, which had been showing the nice steady waves of pre-REM sleep and then an explosion of nearly random waves all over the chart. The form on the recliner suddenly began convulsing and thrashing about. The respiration chart was almost flat and the EKG sped up to clearly a dangerous level. One of the group and two other wolves rushed into the room and quickly started shutting down the experiment but before they had finished, "I" had one more, large convulsion and then collapsed into the chair. The graphs rapidly returned to their original state, and if it hadn't been recorded, there would be no way to tell anything had happened - my host hadn't even awakened.
The finished removing the equipment and then I was lifted onto a stretcher and removed. The playback ended there.
"That was two nights ago. You were taken to the hospital where you were kept overnight and except for some dizziness and confusion, you seemed all right." said the female wolf. "How do you feel today?"
"Dizzy and confused," I replied with a grin. "Mostly disorientation and I'm having trouble remembering things, but it comes and goes." There. That should help cover things up as long as I'm not expected to read anything. "I'd like to take some time and go over the notes for the experiment."
The other male and the female looked at each other and for a second I was afraid that I'd committed another, possibly fatal faux pas, but they seemed to shrug it off and the three agreed. We decided to meet again in four hours and then we left. I started back to the lab when the female grabbed me by the shoulder and spun be around the other way. "Your office is that way," she said. "Uh, right," I said.
As soon as I was more alone, I asked the slate for directions to my office. It was interesting that with all the questioning about this place,
the slate never thought to tell me that I worked here. Arriving at my office,
I entered to find a rather spartan room with a larger slate on one wall and what seemed like smoked glass on another.
I closed the door behind me and propped the slate up preparing to ask it some pointed questions. Before I could activate it, the wall screen lit up with the net-logo and the same voice as my slate asked if I needed anything.
"Are you the same as my slate?" I asked. "Of course," it replied. "Hey,
why didn't you tell me I worked in that building?" You guessed it... "You never requested that information." You didn't ask. Sheesh. At least some things don't change across alternate earths.
"Ok, my silicon friend, you and I are going to do some research."/pre