The Art of Adaptation by Aubrey Parker

Author:Aubrey Parker [Parker, Aubrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sterling & Stone

CHAPTER FIVE

Chloe’s grandfather, Amos, was still alive and living in old Brooklyn. He was 81 and looked it, having been born in 1979 and having never taken a single biological enhancement or rejuvenation treatment. Grandpa Amos loved an old broadcast show called Mission Impossible, so Chloe, who’d visited him often as a child, knew all the episodes.

Mostly she knew that a secret agent’s mission always began with the words, “Your mission, should you choose to accept it …”

As Chloe stood in the pitch-black room, unable to see even an inch in front of her, she wondered if she should point out that this voice was basically saying the same thing.

Even after a month at O, everything felt like a test. Her first session with the undercover O man was a test. Her trial with that asshole Falls was a test. The Orion experience had, of course, been a test — and, she suspected, the very oddity of her own reaction was a test.

Did Parker know she’d been neither pained nor pleasured by the machine? Or was her reaction to his (possibly feigned) ignorance another type of test? It had gone on from there; every encounter had nuances that felt more like assessment than work.

Even her time with Gregory Bordeaux felt in its way like a test: Could the new girl crack the shy, ideal customer? Maybe that was her wiring; maybe everything for her was a puzzle to solve.

Her loss of vision was so complete Chloe wondered if O had managed to reach into her brain and disrupt the nerve signals between her eyes and mind. It seemed possible. She’d been living in an O-owned apartment, and she’d seen enough to suggest that rumors of neural nano enhancement were true. Was it possible that, as she slept, nanobots had crawled in through her ears, perched on her optic nerves … and shut them off when asked?

“Can you repeat that?” Chloe asked the darkness. She made her voice somewhat nervous. This simple tactic (because of course, anything could be a test, and she had to perform her best) would handle both possibilities. If the man whose voice Chloe heard was issuing a command, he should hear her voice and assume the black was unsettling. But if he was making a random allusion to Grandpa Amos and her childhood, having him repeat it now should make it clear that it hadn’t passed her by.

Again, out of the darkness — like a thought in her mind — the deep, male voice said, “Your task, should you choose to participate, is to give yourself the optimum amount of pleasure you can in one hour.”

Chloe looked around and saw nothing. She’d met the O receptionist at the front, same as always, then sat and waited to be called. She’d walked down a long and unfamiliar hallway. Lights faded as she went, until they were dim. With no escort, Chloe followed the light-green, luminescent path. By the time she’d stepped through a sliding door that hissed open at her approach, the hallway had looked (and felt) like late evening in the woods.

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