Full Immersion - chapter 1 (with images) (Patreon)

Deanna sets the Bricker letter on the corner of my desk and stands there with her pen out.

"How bad?" I say.

"It's an attorney letter. Bad faith language. She wants it to go to legal."

"Read me the part that matters."

She runs a finger down the page and reads a paragraph out loud. It's all adjectives. Negligent, systemic. I've seen the same paragraph off the same word processor maybe forty times, from six firms.

"Answer it at the desk. Copy legal with no response requested and diary it thirty days. If a court sends something, that changes it."

"Okay," she says, and writes it down, and takes the letter back with her.

It's late morning on the open floor and the light is doing what it does here. Half the tubes over the east pods have been dead since January and facilities has a ticket in. The sky through the blinds is the flat gray March keeps around here for weeks at a stretch, and the mat by the door is white with salt off everybody's boots. The plant by the window has been fake for six years and somebody still waters it. Three pods down a woman is walking a widow through a proof of loss in the same even voice, and the printer by the pillar is working through somebody's whole file, page at a time.

Since nine I've been closing out the Pelfrey claim. The letter went out Friday. Insufficient objective medical evidence. Ronald Pelfrey, fifty-four, fifteen years loading trucks out at Rickenbacker, pain and fatigue going on two years, and not one finding to pay on: three MRIs within normal limits, two EMGs unremarkable, labs run twice, an independent exam in December that supported none of the restrictions. I've read every page of it twice, because that's what a file gets before it gets my signature. The decision is right under the policy. What's left is the diary closure and the documentation, and I'm halfway through it when my line lights up with a Columbus number I don't know.

"Cardinal Mutual, this is Daniel."

"You Daniel Ashworth?"

"I am."

"You signed it." His voice is smoker-rough and there's a TV going behind him, daytime, a studio audience laughing at something taped. "You signed the letter that says there's nothing wrong with me."

"Is this Ron Pelfrey?"

"Yeah. Ron. You can call me Ron, since you know the rest of me."

"Ron, I want to talk about the file with you, but first I have to verify it's you. Give me your date of birth."

"You've got to be kidding me."

"It's thirty seconds and then the floor is yours."

He gives it after a pause. It matches the screen. I open the call log and get the headset sitting right.

"All right," I say. "I've got the whole file up. Where do you want to start?"

"I want to start with how you people sleep at night. Fifteen years I paid into this policy, out of every check. Now my back's gone, my hips are gone, I sleep two hours at a stretch, and I get two pages in the mail telling me nothing's wrong. Some doctor that never laid eyes on me -"

"The independent exam was in December," I say. "Dr. Feld, the office on Broad. His report says the exam ran ninety minutes."

"He touched me ten minutes. Ten."

"That may be. I read his report, and I read your own doctors' too, all of it, going back. Nobody anywhere in this file says you don't hurt. The policy doesn't pay on hurt, though. It pays on findings. Something a test can point to. And every test you've had has come back within limits for a man your age. Lumbar MRI twice, cervical once. November, February, last May. That's the decision, Ron. It's one sentence and I know it reads like an insult."

"You know what my night is? I'm up at two. I'm up at four. My wife sleeps in the other room now because I can't lay still. Fifteen years on that dock, I never missed a week. Five days, maybe."

"I'm not arguing your nights with you. I'm telling you what the policy pays on."

The audience laughs behind him, and then the TV cuts to nothing. He's found the mute.

"So that's it. I'm a liar."

"Nobody in that file calls you a liar."

"You believe me, right? You hear me and you believe me."

"What I believe doesn't pay a claim. Findings pay a claim."

"Put your boss on."

"He'd read you the same sentence. My name's at the bottom of the letter. This file is mine."

Neither of us says anything for a bit. Deanna comes past with a folder, sees I'm on a call, and keeps going.

"How old are you?" he says. "You sound young."

"Old enough to sign the letter."

"Listen." His voice comes down, closer to the phone. "Dan. Man to man. You sound like a fair guy. You and me both know how this works. There's always a way. Somebody at your level can push a thing through. Off the record. I'm not asking for the moon. I got a mortgage same as you."

"There's no off the record. The call gets logged either way."

"You're a real -" He stops himself. "Come on."

My coffee has gone lukewarm. I drink it anyway. It tastes burnt.

"There isn't a button on my desk, Ron. I'm telling you the same thing any reviewer would tell you. But you've got a hundred and eighty days to appeal, and the appeal is real. It's not a courtesy. Anything new your doctors send gets a fresh review, top to bottom, by somebody who's never seen this file and doesn't know me from a hole in the wall. That's built in on purpose."

"Appeal," he says, flat. Then: "What would you do? My shoes. Honest answer."

"I'd appeal. I'd sit down with my doctor and I'd ask him straight out, is there anything left to test. Whatever he'd order, I'd get it done and send it all in."

"And if there's nothing left to test?"

"Then the file stays as it is."

He breathes into the phone. Then he's off again. "You people deny everybody. You deny everybody and you wait us out. Give up or die, right? The ones can't afford a lawyer, those are the easy ones. I ought to call Channel 6. They do stories on companies like you. They eat that up."

Somewhere behind him, in his house, a furnace kicks on.

"You sit there in your office -"

"Ron. What did Dr. Abramson say at your last visit?"

It catches him sideways. "What?"

"February. Last note in the file. What did he tell you?"

A pause. "Told me to manage my stress." A longer pause. "Gave me a pamphlet."

"A pamphlet."

"Eight years I've been going to the man."

"Did he order anything? Any test at all?"

"No."

"Okay. If he does - if anybody does, a second opinion, anybody - and it comes back showing a cause, a number, an image, that's what moves this file. More of the same history won't. A finding will. And when you send it, it doesn't come back to me. It goes to the fresh reviewer."

He's quiet long enough that I check the screen to make sure the line is live.

"I'm fifty-four years old," he says.

"I know. It's on the first page."

A sound comes out of him, almost a laugh, with nothing in it.

"Here's what I'll do while I've got you," I say. "I'm resending the letter with the appeal form attached, to the email on file. It'll be there before we hang up instead of sometime next week. And I'm putting my direct extension in the message. You get a question, you call me. Not the 800 number."

"My wife does the email."

"Then she'll have it in about two minutes."

"You'd take my call again."

"I'm taking it now."

The quiet comes back, easier. "All right," he says. "All right. Send it. And -" He stops and starts over. "Thank you. I mean that. You're the first one over there ever talked to me like a person."

"The letter's bad at its job. It says the minimum. I'm allowed to say more on the phone."

"Well," he says. "Thank you."

"Extension 4170. Ask for me."

"Four one seven oh," he says, and I can hear him writing it down, probably on the back of my own letter.

He hangs up first.

I type the log while it's fresh. Claimant call regarding denial. Basis for determination reviewed. Appeal rights explained, letter and appeal form resent by email, direct extension provided. No new medical information received. I send the email, copy it to the file, and close the diary.

Then I go for fresh coffee. The break room machine is the one thing this office spent money on. Renee ordered the beans from some roaster in Grandview and defends the line item every year. A sheet cake sits open on the counter from a birthday in accounting, balloons on the box lid, down to the corner pieces, sweet enough to smell from the doorway. The dishwasher ran this morning and the room is warm off it.

Josh is waiting at the machine with his notepad out.

"Quick one," he says. "Acknowledgment deadline on a new claim, is it fifteen days or ten?"

"Fifteen calendar days. Ten if an attorney's already on it."

I'm mostly sure. He writes it down.

Josh taps the notepad against his palm. "You out Thursday?"

"Thursday through the week after."

"You'll miss the belt thing."

"There's another one in June."

"Tell Marco my shoulder's permanent," he says, and takes his coffee back to his desk.

Renee comes in with the cake knife. "Thursday's your last day, right?"

"Right."

"Where are you going again? Somewhere warm, I hope."

"Not exactly. It's one of those immersive places. Historical. You go and they put you in a whole scenario."

"A scenario."

"A period. You live in it for the trip."

"Like the murder mystery weekends?"

"Sure," I say. "Like that."

"Huh." She cuts herself a corner piece. "Erin going?"

"Just me."

She nods at the cake and doesn't push it. "Well. You've never taken two weeks in your life."

"Ten days."

"Ten days," she agrees, and goes back down the hall with her plate. "Bring me a mug."

Back at my desk the queue has repopulated. Two new files, a rotator cuff out of Dayton and a migraine claim from a school district up by Delaware. Around me the floor has shifted into the afternoon version of itself, somebody's lunch in the microwave down the row, garlic, the printer still going at the pillar. I open the rotator cuff and read the first page while the coffee is still hot. The man in Dayton is sixty-one and came off a ladder in his own garage. I turn to the medicals.

The bowl has been on the drying rack for three weeks, because dealing with it means deciding whose it is. It's wide and shallow, blue on the inside, with a chip on the foot that one of us put there years ago and both of us have been quietly blamed for since. Erin comes for the last of her stuff on a wet weeknight with a wine box from the carryout on the corner and a Target bag for the loose things, and she goes straight to the rack.

"I'm taking this," she says.

"It's mine."

"It's not yours. It's nobody's."

Rain has come through her hood and her coat is dark at the shoulders. She's brought a lime seltzer in from the car and the can sits sweating on a pizza flyer I was never going to use. She takes the bowl off the rack and stands in the middle of the kitchen holding it.

"It was your mother's," she says.

"My mother gives gift cards, not bowls."

"The flea market, then. Yellow Springs. We got it the same day as the lamp."

"The lamp was mine. I found the lamp."

"You carried the lamp. I found it, you carried it, you complained about carrying it for four years, and it's in my storage unit now."

"You can have the lamp's memory," I say. "Give me the bowl."

"It was the wedding," she says. "The one with the oyster bar."

"We didn't take anything from that wedding."

"That's what makes it suspicious."

She doesn't give me the bowl. She sets it on the counter and starts in on the bathroom, and I hear the cabinet doors and the shelf liner coming up, and when she comes back she has an armful of half-empty bottles and the good nail scissors and the heating pad I'd forgotten we owned. All of it goes into the Target bag. The couch is staying. We'd already agreed the couch was mine, since it wouldn't fit down the hallway of the new place in Clintonville, and she'd said keep it, it sheds anyway, which is true, it drops feathers like something that lived outside.

The mail on the counter is still mostly hers, catalogs from companies she bought one thing from years ago. I slide the pile toward her and she flips through it and puts the whole thing in the bag unopened, which saves us the conversation about the catalogs.

The drawer by the stove gives up a tangle of cables that neither of us can match to a device anymore. We split those by shrugging.

"How's work," she says.

"Renee made me promise to bring her a mug."

"From the thing?"

"From Rome. She wants a Rome mug."

"Get her two," Erin says. "In case one breaks."

The envelope from Providence is at the bottom of the mail pile, heavy cream paper with the name pressed into it, and she digs it out and weighs it in her hand.

"Is this it?"

"That's it. Travel documents. Vouchers."

She opens it anyway and reads the first page fast, flipping for the part that matters. "Transfer orientation," she says. "Daniel."

"It's a resort. The immersive kind. They put you into a body they grow and you live in the scenario. It's Roman. I did the charioteer package."

"A charioteer."

"There's a configurator. You spec the body out. Gold tier gets you the height, the build, the jaw."

"Gold."

"The tiers are metals, I didn't name them. You race in the Circus and you're the champion and the crowd goes - it's the whole thing. Ten days."

"Please tell me there are togas."

"There are togas."

"Thank God," she says. "Fourteen thousand."

"Where did you get that?"

"The confirmation was open on the laptop in January. You've been putting it aside since last spring."

She sets the envelope down and squares it with the edge of the pile, and I know that means she's deciding whether to say something.

"Okay," she says. "I'm going to say one thing, and then I'll go back to packing, and we never have to discuss it."

"That sounds fair."

"This is the most you thing you have ever done. This is exactly what you do. You buy the experience instead of having it."

"Oh, come on."

"The kayak," she says. "The tandem kayak that lives in a storage unit on Hudson Street, because buying the kayak was the part you wanted. The cabin weekend had a laminated itinerary, Daniel. Hour by hour. You laminated it. And now you're going to go be a cartoon gladiator -"

"Charioteer."

"- with a jaw you picked off a menu, and you did it with us, the whole time we were together, and I don't think you even know you're doing it."

She'd picked out the kayak. I let that go.

"And you financed the back half," she says. "Thirty-six months. They do financing, Daniel. On a body."

"It's a vacation. People take vacations. You went to Portugal."

"Portugal was me and Lisa getting lost and rained on. We didn't buy anything. That's the difference."

"It's cool, Erin. That's the entire reason. It's the coolest thing anybody's ever sold."

"Listen to yourself say that."

I put my hands flat on the counter and make my voice level.

"You're right about the itinerary," I say. "That was too much, I mean that. Take the bowl, it's yours, I should have said so when you walked in. And let's not do this tonight. You came for your stuff, I leave Thursday, and we're not fixing the kayak in my kitchen. So tell me what you want the rest of the night to look like and that's what we'll do."

She looks at me for a long moment, running her thumb over the chip on the bowl's foot.

"There it is," she says.

"There what is?"

"That. Your voice changed. You conceded the bowl so we'd stop talking about the trip. I've heard you on the phone with strangers, Daniel. I'm not a claim you're trying to close."

"I don't know what you want me to say," I say, and it comes out tired and unplanned, and we both hear the difference.

She doesn't answer that. The rain picks up against the window over the sink and then quits. Her thumb stays on the chip.

"When do you leave?"

"Thursday."

"Jesus." She laughs once, not really at anything. "This is so stupid."

"Yeah."

"This doesn't fix anything."

"I know."

"Okay," she says, and sets the bowl down.

She steps close, her coat carrying the damp chill of the early March rain. The nylon shell is slick under my wrists when I reach for her waist. I work the zipper down until it snags on a frayed thread near the hem, and we have to stop and pull the fabric taut to free the teeth. Underneath she's wearing a thick sweater. I get my hands under the wool and find the bare skin of her back. She puts her freezing hands under my shirt at the same time, and I hiss through my teeth, and she smiles against my jaw.

We leave the coat over a barstool and bump into the refrigerator door, the metal pressing a cool line along my shoulder while she kisses me. She tastes like the lime seltzer she's been drinking in the car, the sharp bite of it going flat into the ordinary salt of her. I'm hard already. I have been since she stepped closer, and it shows. There's no arranging it behind a zipper, so I don't try.

We back out of the kitchen. She pulls her sweater off over her head and drops it on the tile. My shirt comes off somewhere near the thermostat, and I kill the hall light with an elbow as we pass. Rushing makes us clumsy, our hips knocking the narrow walls. I step on the heel of my left shoe to pry it off and kick the right one into the baseboard. One sock goes with them. She grabs my belt and pulls me forward, and the other sock stays on.

She backs me into the bedroom doorframe, the wood casing digging a hard edge along my spine. She smooths her cold hands up my ribs and they warm by degrees. I gather her hair in one hand and unbutton her jeans with the other. She smells different. Floral detergent in the denim, a cheap one, from the new apartment. I put my nose in the crook of her neck and breathe past it until I find the smell of her own skin underneath.

I slide my hands inside her waistband and push the stiff denim down over her hips. She kicks free, socks and all, and tangles her feet in the pile. Her buckle clinks against my zipper. I get my own jeans down and hop once on the carpet to clear them, and then we stand in the draft from the floor vent, skin to skin. Her skin prickles under my palms when I pull her flush against me. I walk her backward out of the doorway and she goes where I put her. She's easy to move, I have forty pounds on her. I kiss the long slope of her throat and find the quick pulse under the skin, and when I bite down easy on her collarbone she gasps and runs her nails down my shoulder blades.

We move toward the mattress sideways in the dark. I bump my knee on the footboard and wince. She climbs in over the patchwork quilt. The left slat on the frame has been loose for two years.

"Mind the slat," she says, and we both laugh.

I crawl in after her and shove the quilt off the end of the bed with one foot. She rolls into me and throws her right leg over my hip. I get my arm under her waist and my elbow jams hard into the mattress, and the angle puts the point of her knee into my groin. We stop and fix it without a word. I slide back two inches. She lets her leg slip down my thigh. I flatten my arm along the sheet so she'll have something level to lie across.

Then I take her by the hips and lift her over me, one-armed, and set her down astride my waist. She reaches back and takes me in her hand and comes down onto me, slow. The heat of her is wet and tight, all of it in the one place, the first inch the sharpest of it. She braces her hands flat on my chest and digs the heels of her palms into my ribs.

She sets the pace, rising and sinking, slow, a hot drag across my skin. I grip her hips, my thumbs in the soft flesh above the bone. Her skin has shed the hallway chill. Everything I feel has collected in the few inches where she bears down on me, and it points one direction. It builds along a track with an end I can already see, and at any moment I could tell you how close I am.

"Lift up a little," she whispers.

I push my heels into the mattress and meet her. She goes faster, her hands up on my shoulders, nails in the skin, her head dropped forward so her hair hangs down and drags across my face, smelling of rain and the wrong detergent. Her breath catches and breaks into the laugh she makes when things get fast.

The streetlamp puts its orange glow on the ceiling fan. Sweat comes up on my forehead. She leans down and presses her breasts against my chest, her mouth at my ear, and drives her weight down faster, her feet sliding down my legs, the toes cold against my shins.

And then my right foot seizes. The arch pulls up tight and my toes go the wrong direction, and it hurts in the deep stupid way that doesn't let you keep any dignity at all.

"Rhubarb undergarments," I say. "Rhubarb undergarments, stop, stop, my foot -"

She stops. For a second she stares at me, and then she gets it, and she laughs so hard she has to lift off and sit back on her heels, and I sit up with my foot in both hands, bending my toes back toward my knee and saying ow, ow, ow, and she's no help at all.

"You used the word," she says. "For a cramp."

"It was an emergency."

"The word is for emergencies."

"My foot was sideways, Erin."

"It was the farm stand," she says. "The sign on the road outside Granville, rhubarb, and somebody painted undergarments underneath."

"It was the Christmas letter. Your aunt's."

"My aunt has never in her life said the word undergarments."

"She wrote it. It was the whole letter. You read it out loud in the car."

My foot lets go all at once. The cramp dissolves, leaving a dull ache along the arch. We sit there looking at each other, me still holding my toes, both of us breathing a little hard from laughing.

"Where were we," she says.

"Approximately here," I say, and pull her back down on top of me.

We don't get the slow back. She drops to her forearms and drives down hard.

She gets her hand down between us and touches herself, her knuckles hard against my stomach. Her shoulders lock. She presses her wet forehead into my neck, her thighs clamping my ribs, and her breath goes high in her chest and stays there while I wait on it. Then the exhale, and the laugh with almost no sound against my collarbone.

I follow four seconds behind her, all of it pulling down to one place and going narrow. I watch it come. It runs to the end of its track and stops. On the far side she's heavy on me, and the fan is still turning. The frame knocks the wall twice and then quits.

We lie there getting cold. She pulls the blanket up over both of us without getting out from under my arm, which takes some doing.

"Your feet are freezing," she says.

"That's my line."

"It's a true line."

We don't talk for a while. She draws one fingernail down my sternum and then stops and just leaves her hand there.

Then she gets up and goes to the bathroom, and I hear the water run, and she comes back dressed with her hair up and her damp jeans sticking to her shins, hunting for her other sock. I find it under the bed and throw it to her.

In the kitchen she wraps the bowl in the good towel and puts it in the wine box on top of the cables and the catalogs. She puts on her wet coat. She stands there with her key ring in her hand for a minute, and then she works my key off it and sets it on the counter by the stove and doesn't make a thing out of it, so I don't either.

"Mail still comes here," she says. "I'll just text you."

"Okay."

"Bring Renee her mug."

"Two of them."

"Have fun in Rome," she says, and picks up the box, and I get the door for her, and she goes down the hall and doesn't turn around at the elevator.

The door makes its usual sound. I stand in the kitchen with the light on over the stove, looking at the empty rack, and then I take the recycling down to the alley bin, because pickup is in the morning and somebody has already filled our bin halfway with Amazon boxes that aren't ours.

Providence has bought the whole terminal, or enough of it. The shuttle from the airport comes every fifteen minutes, and the driver loads bags like a guy loading a bus to a concert and not like anything medical is about to happen, and when it pulls up to the drop-off there's a line of us going up the ramp with roller bags and jackets tied around our waists and that look people get on the first day of anything.

The signage is everywhere. WELCOME TO PROVIDENCE in a font that cost somebody money, and under it YOUR JOURNEY BEGINS, and past that the wayfinding boards, Roman and Western and a third one that's just a compass rose with EXPERIENCE DEEP below it, which is the 1911 arctic thing, or the silk road, I can never keep the catalog straight. The lobby is glass and white stone and the air is colder than outside and smells like the inside of a nice car.

Sixty stations, soft blue everywhere, staff in gray and pale yellow, and the line moves at a steady rate because everybody in it has done the same thing I have, which is read the email twelve times and arrive early. A man two spots ahead has his phone out and is filming the ceiling and his own face. A woman in a Blue Jackets jacket is telling the person next to her that her sister did the Roman one twice.

"This is my retirement," the woman says. "I've been paying on it for two years. I don't even care."

"You get the senator's wife?" the other one asks.

"Senator's wife. I wanted the empress, but you have to book that a year out."

At the head of the line a little girl is crying near the elevator bank, the worn-out kind where you can tell it's been going a while, and her father is holding her jacket and crouched down at her level and not looking at the staff. Her brother is across the lobby at the gift shop, which sells the robes and the toy gladius and the resin cups that look like pewter, and a hoodie that says I RODE WITH SCIPIO across the front. The girl cries louder and a staffer comes over with a small stuffed horse and gives it to her without making it a thing.

I get called to a station and the guy who takes me has a name tag that says HENNING and the same build as a bouncer but he's wearing a sweater.

"Mr. Ashworth. Good to have you. You've done the online pre-clear, I see. This will take maybe ten minutes."

"Sure."

He has a tablet and a stack of paper. "We do the final confirmations on paper. It's the law, we didn't invent it. Initial each page and sign the last."

The forms are what I expect. I read them all twice at home and once on the plane. Emergency contact, Jo, phone and email. Medical history I don't have. A line about allergies I don't have. The standard language about the host body being a biological vehicle maintained for the duration, and the standard clause giving Verist, the company that owns Providence, authority over medical decisions on my original body while I'm under and unreachable, which is in every procedure consent I've ever signed. I initial them in order.

"Good," Henning says. "You're fast. Most people get stuck on the middle one."

"The one about the transfer?"

"Any of them. People like to read it again here." He slides the next sheet over. "You're going Roman."

"Charioteer."

"Nice. The Circus crowd's the loudest thing we run."

A woman comes past pushing a cart with more paper on it and he flags her down and hands her the signed set, and she feeds them through a slot in the cart that goes chnk with each page. He turns the tablet around and I get the preview render for the first time in a week.

I've been in the configurator for weeks. I know the numbers. Six foot two, which was a choice, since the base package was six foot and I paid extra for the two inches. The build is the one they call athletically lean, which on the render looks like a guy who could win a fight and not look like he was thinking about it. The jaw is better than mine, and the hair is dark and the skin is a shade darker than mine and the eyes are a warm brown that looks exactly right on a guy who's going to be cheered by a hundred thousand people. It's the face I picked out in January and then kept going back to and tweaking, a millimeter here, a different nose bridge there, until it looked like someone I could live with.

"That's him," I say.

"Okay." He swipes. "Your package has the chariot modifier, the arena voice, and the equine rapport. You've done the horse quiz."

"I did the horse quiz."

The horse quiz was four hundred questions and I did it in bed, twenty a night, for three weeks. Do you know how to hold a rein. Have you ever fallen off a horse. What is a bradoon. I know what a bradoon is now.

"You'll have a final orientation with a scenario officer in about twenty minutes," Henning says. "Then medical, then the pod."

"Medical?"

"Just a baseline. Two minutes."

The medical room is behind the lobby, quieter, and a nurse takes my pulse and my blood pressure and looks in my ears and tells me I'm fine and sends me back with a sticker on my collar that says CLEARED. The waiting room for orientation is the first place that looks like the lobby of a hotel and not an airport. Coffee, chairs in a semicircle, a screen with a countdown on it. About thirty of us. The woman from the line is there, Blue Jackets jacket off now, and she gives me a nod like we're in this together.

A staffer in the pale yellow uniform comes in with a clicker. "Hi, everyone. I'm Sharon. I'm going to do the short version, because you've all read the long version and I don't want to be here all day either."

A couple of people laugh.

"First: you're going to hear a lot about NPCs. That's non-player characters, which is just the people in the world who aren't guests. They're not robots. They're biological hosts running behavioral software, and from your side they'll feel like real people, because they are people, just not ones who chose to be there. You can talk to them, you can ask them questions, you can be rude to them, and they'll respond in character. What you can't do is get them to break character. They can't. There's no one home to break."

I'm looking at the countdown. Forty-two minutes.

"Second: guest safety. You have a panic word. It's not in the scenario vocabulary, so if you say it out loud the experience will pause and a human will be on with you in under a minute. We recommend you never use it, because nobody's ever needed it, but it's there. "Your panic word is -" She clicks. "- individual. It's whatever you put in the box at pre-clear, and it's in your final confirmation email. If you don't remember it, come see me after."

I remember mine. The form wanted something I'd never say by accident, and I sat there a minute and then typed the thing Erin and I used to say.

"Third: the first few minutes. You'll feel like you're dreaming, then you won't. You'll feel like you have the wrong body, then you won't. If you feel like you have the wrong body after the first hour, that's normal, and it fades. If it doesn't, say the word."

Someone asks about food. Sharon says it's all real. Someone asks about bathrooms. Sharon says the scenarios have them, and the Western one has the good kind, which gets a laugh. Someone asks what happens if you die.

"The scenario resets around you," Sharon says. "You're put back in your lodging and the day restarts. It's not a thing that happens to guests."

"What about NPCs," a man says.

"NPCs can be hurt," Sharon says. "They can also heal. The software keeps them within their narrative." She clicks again. "Any other questions?"

I raise my hand. "The horse," I say. "Do I actually get to drive the chariot?"

"You will be the only person on the chariot," Sharon says. "The horses are real."

She leaves and the countdown goes to thirty-five and then thirty and people start checking their phones one last time. I text Erin. At orientation, they said the horses are real. Then I put the phone in the locker they gave me and watch the seconds.

My name gets called and I go down a hall that gets quieter the further I go, past doors with numbers on them, to a room that's warm and dim and has a chair in the middle that's more like a dentist chair than anything else. A tech in scrubs is waiting, and she has me sit and then lie back, and she puts a thing on my finger and a cuff on my arm.

"This is not anesthesia," she says. "It's a sedative to make the transition easier. You'll be aware the whole time."

"Okay."

"The transfer isn't painful. It feels like falling asleep. Most people say it's the best nap they've ever had."

"Sure."

She fits a band across my forehead and another across my chest. "Count back from ten for me."

I count, and somewhere around seven I'm thinking about the noise a hundred thousand people make at the turn.

I get to four.

There is no tunnel and no light and no sense of going anywhere. One moment I'm looking at the acoustic tile on the ceiling and the tech is saying something I don't catch, and the next moment I am warm.

Warm up to my ribs. The water is moving and it's warm and it smells like olive oil and something herbal and the light is wrong, not electric, orange and flickering, and the ceiling above me is vaulted stone and there are oil lamps on a shelf and the flame is doing what flame does. There are voices, women's voices, and the water laps at the sides of a stone basin and I'm in it to my ribs.

A hand comes down on my shoulder, warm and firm, and a voice close to my ear says, "Domina."

I look down.

Everything is nearer than it should be. My knees, the rim of the basin, the surface of the water. The far wall is not far. The shelf with the lamps sits at eye level. I'm smaller and the room hasn't changed size. My shoulders are closer together than they were and my arms are shorter from armpit to wrist, and my forearms lie along the rim without my having to stretch. Elbows high against my ribs, without my putting them there. Knees up near my chest, and I haven't drawn them there either. My weight sits lower, in the hips. The water holds me up where it didn't hold me before and lets me settle where it didn't let me settle, higher at the chest, lower at the legs. Hair lies against my back, long and wet and heavy, and when I turn my head it moves over my skin and keeps moving after I stop. I've never had hair that does that. Something isn't there. My heart is going too fast. I can hear it over the water.

The water moves and the chest in the water moves with it and it isn't mine, it's smaller and the skin is a different color and there are breasts on me and they're in the water and the hand that comes up out of the water when I tell my hand to move is not my hand. It's smaller, and the fingers are longer, and there's a ring on one of them I've never seen before, and when I flex it the ring catches the lamplight and I watch it and I know I'm watching it with eyes that aren't mine either.