Wilma was only at the experiment in the first place because it could fit in neatly between her lunchtimes job at the pizza place on campus, her afternoon lecture, and her evening job at the supermarket just off-campus, and because it paid money. If any one of those had been different, the path of her life ever after would have been changed too.

She settled the headphones into place and calculated, again, how much money she should have in her bank balance once she got the payment for this experiment into there. Her next payday from either job was a week and change away, and she’d have around $60…

It was manageable, but far from ideal. Not for the first time, Wilma wondered whether going for a degree had been the right choice. It should make a lot of things more affordable once done - it was just a question of whether she could break even until she graduated.

She definitely couldn’t afford for it to take a year longer. It was up in the air whether she could afford for a minimum time.

The screen in front of her went to countdown, and Wilma heard the pips playing in her ear alongside it. Finally, now that there was nothing else to do but participate, she wondered exactly how this was going to work. The designers had been very vague in their explanations, probably deliberately.

I bet this screen isn’t pink when they’re testing the men, she thought, but more as an afterthought than anything else. Unless maybe the colour is part of how we remember things? It seemed plausible.

The pastel yellow emerged from beneath the pink, swirling in and out of pink clouds. Wilma, her mind wandering, found herself picturing it as if she was looking down into a pink pool from above, with a yellow squid or something whirling its tentacle arms up toward her.

They didn’t quite move in a pattern, she decided; she’d wondered if that was the test, and she’d briefly tried to memorise the swirls, but they weren’t quite steady, and it gave them a living quality. Like a person trying to keep his revolution rate perfectly steady, and of course not quite succeeding.

There was something else in there, almost buried, glimpses rather than flashes of something white, and Wilma found she couldn’t focus on it, couldn’t focus at anything, was just regarding the screen passively, drinking in what was there.

Little by little, all the thoughts and the worries that were Wilma’s constant accompaniment faded out of her mind. She became absent and unaware as the pinks became purples and the yellows, in their turn, became pinks; but at the same time, the weight of her worries and her debts lifted from her shoulders, and she knew a peace she hadn’t known in years.

Her expression drained from her face, lips parting, eyes glazing, and there was peace to be seen in her emptiness. If anyone had been close enough to her they might have caught a pleasant sigh, and perhaps, if they had understood her life at the time, they might not even have been surprised.

*

As she put on her headphones, Xanthe looked across at Nadine for the third time since she’d showed up for the experiment. It was surprising to see her friend there - Nadine almost always dropped out of everything.

Hard to believe this was the exception, but Xanthe had seen some of their mutual friends question Nadine on this habit of dropping things and it hadn’t gone well for them. And yet Nadine made it. Xanthe made a note to herself to catch Nadine soon afterwards, at one of their mutual haunts, and find out what was going on.

She glanced across again as the pips were sounding, genuinely surprised, but when she looked back at the screen something seemed to catch her eye and then it vanished into the clouds. Xanthe watched the spot where it had been, wondering if it would come back.

It didn’t. Instead, things seemed to go away. A strange languor settled over her, slowly, and there seemed to be nothing in the world but the absence of her attention.

Xanthe didn’t think she would remember anything of the memory experiment.

An unknown amount of time passed.

“Name?” a voice asked.

“Xanthe Samaras.”

“Phone number?”

She’d had the same cellphone number since she was thirteen. The syllables spilled out of her in a sing-song without her needing to think, a rolling pattern that didn’t need her thought. Recall on a reflex level.

“So far, which word is uppermost in your mind?”

The question made no sense, but an answer spilled out from… something, buried deep in the centre of her mind, that Xanthe could not access but that responded to this man’s voice, and the word rose up and escaped her mouth.

“Obliging.”

“Favourite sex position?”

“Restrained.” She didn’t know she wasn’t blushing. She would have been glad to know she would soon forget admitting this. “Pinned up against the bed by my wrists, my legs trapped apart.”

There was quiet for a short time. Xanthe, her eyes still on the screen, had no idea how long, or why. It didn’t matter.

Almost nothing mattered.

“Address?”

Xanthe answered quickly and correctly. A thrill went through her; it was so good to be obliging. She’d always known that, but also she’d never known that. Those didn’t seem like incompatible facts at the time.

There was a tug from one side of her head, and the plugin to her headset was broken. Whoever had spoken moved on, and Xanthe remained exactly where she was, her eyes fixed on the screen, as the audio from the experiment faded back in. Everything faded away again, and she forgot the voice, forgot the questions, forgot her confessions, forgot even why it was so important to always be obliging.

When the experiment ended and she took off the headphones and filed out, her mind was sluggish, her thoughts slow and unfocused. She had completely forgotten that she wanted to talk to Nadine.

*

As soon as she’d shaken off the vague fuzziness that the experiment had produced, Wilma hurried off to the supermarket, bracing herself mentally for another evening of stacking shelves, carrying stock, and idiotic questions or even worse demands.

It wasn’t so much that the experiment slipped from her memory, as it had for some; it was more that Wilma’s mind was already filled with too, too many things that needed to be tracked and addressed and dealt with, a constant calendar of deadlines, things she had to do and places she had to be, and none of it about fun; the closest she got to fun was on Thursdays, when a quirk of her college schedule meant that once she finally got home from work around midnight, she had a couple of hours in which to cook herself something a little nicer than she usually had time for.

Even that was mostly a question of priorities, not of enjoyment; she watched what she ate not from fear of gaining weight (a supermarket job, especially a lowest-rank supermarket job, is the equal of any fad workout) but because she knew that if enough of the right things didn’t get into her body, even her young self wouldn’t be able to take it for long enough.

This was the way Wilma had had to learn to think; she had, too, had to coax her memory to function as effectively as possible in lecture theatres and in the brief moments she got to make progress with her textbooks. It wasn’t a photographic memory, but her recall otherwise was as good as it could be on a single exposure to what she was trying to remember.

There wasn’t room in Wilma’s day for revision, let alone for breaks from work and study; whenever something else needed to be done, it could only come out of sleeping or eating.

She had spent her freshers’ year realising this and had passed a year after that reminding herself of the payoff for completing her degree, getting into the career of her choice. She had high hopes that all the choices she’d made would pay out then - if she could just get there.

Two years to go, and at times she wasn’t sure she’d be able to power through just one. She’d found that the muzak the store played actually helped, a little, on evening shifts; it was just so drab that she could focus on the work and not track how long it was taking for stretches of time, and that was as close as she got to being able to skip past dull time and closer to the end of her college pddysey.

She had, accordingly, begun to really resent the occasional advertising reads that interrupted the music. They weren’t quite as hard to tune out as customers were, but there wasn’t much keeping them away from first place.

“…comes the new last word in ice cream. Make sure you leave our store tonight with a pint of Dulce Vita De Leche. It’s the most indulgent experience you can have on your own.”

A shiver ran down Wilma’s spine. Out of nowhere, all her senses were at their sharpest. It was like she was on high alert, except there was no fear, no doubt, no uncertainty.

There was also nobody else in the aisle she was in. She looked at what she was restocking, really looked at it, those sharpened senses dwelling on the label as she stared open-mouthed.

She was holding a bottle, thick glass, with a red label. The contents were a gorgeous golden amber and moved only slowly when tilted.

Wilma was suddenly very aware that in front of her was something people paid huge amounts for, something they would savour, take time over, even mark out time in their day especially to enjoy.

She’d broken the seal before she knew it. She leaned back against one of the upright stanchions supporting the shelves of the aisle and allowed herself to slowly slide down into a sitting position, and once there, she pulled the cap off the bottle and put it to her lips, closing her eyes.

God, it was so good to indulge herself…

She took her time over the bottle, savouring every moment of it. When she was done with it, she shoved the empty bottle into the back of the shelving, got up, and carried on with her job.

Wilma was now quite drunk, and she had to move much more slowly and much more carefully to complete the tasks in front of her, but she was quite happy to go slowly. If she hadn’t completed her duties by the end of the night, she thought, that wasn’t going to stop her from leaving the building, going home, and sleeping.

It was all very well to plan for the future, but if you never took time to indulge yourself, sooner or later you’d go mad.

The moment her shift was over, Wilma headed for the exit, smiling happily.

*

It was only three days before Xanthe remembered her intention to check up with Nadine and find out why she hadn’t dropped out of the experiment.

She went in search of her that evening and couldn’t find her, no matter where she hunted. Every bar, every club, even the late-night diners Nadine always called her guilty pleasures, she wasn’t in any of them any more than she’d been in her own rooms.

Xanthe was taken back enough that the following morning she dropped by the dean’s office and tried to confirm whether or not Nadine had taken her habit of dropping out to the extreme of leaving college entirely.

It turned out that discussing whether or not someone was still at college would be a violation of some law or other - Xanthe didn’t think the man she’d spoke to was clear on the details himself, because his explanation made no sense to her.

“Honestly, ma’am,” he’d said at one point, “missing three days of study isn’t exactly what we want to see happen, but it’s not exactly uncommon. She might have gone out of town for something and just not let you know yet. Have you tried messaging her?”

He’d been a lot less helpful after she failed to answer that question. Of course she’d tried messaging Nadine, but her messages hadn’t even been read. But if she said to this man that she’d sent messages the previous day and they hadn’t been read, he wouldn’t understand that for Nadine that was an impossibility.

There were movies, of course, where someone recognised something like this, but the authorities wouldn’t listen. Dozens. And they always turned out to be right.

On the other hand, if Xanthe thought of herself as anything, she thought of herself as a realist. And the reason those people always turned out to be right was that they were in a movie.

She snorted in disgust and went to her car to start checking the hospitals. She couldn’t put it past Nadine to break a bone or two while under the influence and take herself out of commission that way. And maybe nobody had lent her a phone charger…

*

“Joey, this is serious,” Nick said.

“Uh huh. Sure.”

“No, it really is.”

“You’re worried about something that could get made worse and you’re bringing it up to me? Come on, dude. I know you better than that.”

Down by his waist where his friend wouldn’t look, Nick clenched his hands into fists, bleeding out a little of the tension from his jaw.

“If that doesn’t tell you,” he forced out at least, choosing his words carefully with plenty of space between each one, “exactly how few options I have left right now, then I don’t know what will.”

Joey blinked three or four times, his eyes changing direction between each one. Nick, who had known Joey long enough that the mannerisms that frustrated others were just accepted parts of the person his friend had grown into, recognised that he was actually thinking something through for the first time.

“Shit,” he said finally. “OK, so this is… wait. Explain it to me again now I’m paying attention.”

Nick sighed, but he sat down and marshalled his thoughts anyway. Maintaining eye contact with Joey, he reached out to one side where he knew his friend’s copious stash of energy drinks could always be found. He took one and opened it.

Any observer would have made nothing of this, but Nick was watching for a slight nod and he saw it. A concession from Joey. The upper hand.

“So,” he said. “We don’t know where all of them are.”

“Right.” He nodded. “But they’ll be back for the second phase.” Joey said it with confidence, but then paused and hesitated. “They’ve responded to every other compulsion,” he said slowly.

“No, they haven’t,” Nick retorted irritably. “I get why the Colonel thinks that but I don’t know why you think that. You know what we did.”

“Right, we put them through the thing…”

“And during the initial programming, we could get any response we wanted,” he said. “But we’ve not used every compulsion we set up since, have we?”

“Yes we have, we-“ Joey stopped abruptly. His eyes still faced Nick, but he wasn’t seeing him.

He was seeing the mistake they’d all made.

“Oh, fucking hell.”

Nick nodded. “Right. After they got out, we tested exactly one compulsion each.”

“The one they reacted strongest to.”

Nick waited.

“So… if one of them doesn’t react well to the compulsion to return…”

“They might not.”

“And then you and I get in trouble. With the military. And they don’t like public trouble that’s their fault, do they?”

“This is why I was worrying when you started running your mouth for the Colonel.”

“Eh.” Joey shrugged, as if to say that was never going to be a problem. “What do we do about this?”

“That’s what I’m asking you, you little shit-“

&

Her phone was ringing.

Her phone almost never rang. When it did, it was only ever out of some surprise work emergency, the call that says We need you to come in, that says Someone got sick or Someone quit and we’re making it your problem because then it’s not ours.

Wilma didn’t want to answer her phone, but a little voice in her head was telling her she should, and she wasn’t awake enough to think about the fact she would be getting up in a half hour to be at the next shift at work anyway, so she snaked a hand out of bed and grabbed the phone under the covers.

“Hello?”

“Is this Wilma Miller?”

She didn’t recognise the voice. Didn’t sound like work but that made it more important, she realised. What if whoever this was had replaced her manager? Crazy shit sometimes just rolled downhill from corporate.

"You know it is, Max,” she mumbled sleepily. “What’s this-“

“Are you indulgent?”

It was like going through a door and realising you no longer remembered what you’d come in for, except with her self instead of her intent. It wasn’t quite an out of body experience, but she was suddenly still and quiet inside, nothing racing, no concerns, and no fears.

“Yes,” she said quietly. “I am.” And she waited indulgently to have some sense of direction given to her by the call.

“Would you like to tell me where you are?”

It wasn’t clear to her who this was; some part of her had managed to conclude that it wasn’t Max, her supervisor, but without any inclination to try to place the voice.

Whoever this was had no authority over her at all.

And yet, somehow, she found herself answering. “I’m at home,” she said. “In my bed.” She stretched out, something she almost never did, under the covers, writhing against them.

The cotton of her bedsheets had been washed too often and had worn threadbare, and it was dry and scratchy against her, and yet somehow at that moment they were a source of sheer, self-indulgent, wonderful pleasure.

“Your bed in your apartment?” the voice asked, and “Mm-hmmm,” she indulged him, coy, whoever he was. She waited to see if he would ask for an invitation, in which case she’d skip work, she’d indulge herself.

“Thank fuck for that,” he muttered, and the call rang off, and Wilma was left wondering what had happened - but not wondering too hard; there was too much enjoyment to be had in the warmth and comfort of her own bed.