“Drop your weapon.”

  The man’s face was concealed behind a balaclava mask under some kind of a helmet. The design seemed too elaborate to be standard riot gear. His voice, an unfamiliar baritone, was amplified through it. I could barely make out his brown eyes. He was tall, wearing a heavy vest with dark grey fabric underneath. His hands were in black leather gloves that held a handgun. It looked heavier than the one I was holding, but I couldn’t tell whether that was just an optical illusion from my adrenaline drunk mind.

  I was terrified. It was a standoff. And an unevenly matched one. His stance communicated that he was trained. Disciplined. Someone who did this as a living and wouldn’t hesitate to apply unremorseful force. I was a mathematician. A puny sardine in the way of an inescapable current. But I could hurt him. Perhaps even lethally. After all, he was wearing a vest not too dissimilar from mine that I doubted would protect him from a supersonic slug in some places. I am a threat, I tried to convince himself. I have bargaining power.

  “You first,” I said. Even I was surprised my voice didn’t waver.

  “That ain’t how this works,” he said. It was only then that I noticed his accent. It was a little east London. A little something else. “Your only option is to do as I say and put your gun down.”

  The barrel of my weapon was trained on his chest. At least some of the time. It moved as my hands shook. I was conscious of the less than one millimetre distance between my index finger and the trigger. The seconds stretched infinitely. My mind raced as I ran through the possible things I could say. I didn’t want to directly threaten him. Provoking the beast could be deadly. But I also didn’t want to seem harmless. “We don’t need to do this,” I said. “I just want to leave. I need to leave.”

  “No. You’re not leaving,” he said. “You’re going to slowly drop your gun and put your hands where I can see ‘em.”

  The man stood perfectly still. No nerves. Pure confidence. A brick wall of fatalism. He was an argument. And I didn’t want to be convinced.

  “What do you want from me?” I asked. “If it’s my cooperation you want, the least you could do is show some good will and not point a gun at my face.”

  “Funny you should say that. Put your gun down and then we can talk.”

  “Fuck that,” I spat. “I’ve been subjected to whatever this is for way too long. A little courtesy is the least you owe me.”

  “No,” the man said calmly. “You have no leverage here. You have no option but to put your gun down.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t want to hurt you. All I want is to leave. I really don’t think that’s too much to ask for.”

  “What do you think will happen if you went through me?” the man asked. “I can tell you right now that whatever you think will happen after you leave that door behind me, you’ll be disappointed.”

  A drop of sweat fell from my forehead down my neck. “Of course you’d say that.”

  “Of course I would,” he parrotted. “And of course I’ll also tell you that you really can’t leave.”

  “Bullshit!” I yelled. My voice reverberated hollowly throughout the empty complex.

  “It’s just the way it is. Your only hope of leaving is by dropping your gun and doing exactly as I say.”

  “You’re lying. You kidnapped me in the first place!”

  “It doesn’t matter if I’m lying or not,” he said. “You’re powerless here.”

  There was a bubbling panic, but it was overtaken by a flash of anger. For the first time since acquiring this gun, I felt the cool of the metallic trigger. As my finger pressed on it, it pressed back against my malleable flesh. My heart thumped against my chest like a jackhammer. It felt like I was no longer in control of myself. That I was trapped watching someone else about to cross a physical and metaphorical threshold. This was a kind of fear that I had never felt before. True powerlessness.

  And just like that, my finger slowly retreating from the trigger. I pointed the gun to the ground and flicked the safety on before slowly placing it onto the floor. As I returned back up, I felt shame. A castration. I didn’t know whether that was from surrendering the only power I had, or whether it was a delayed response ever since I had woken up in that tiny room. I held my hands near the sides of my head. I could barely look at the other man.

  “Good,” he said. I thought I could hear the muffled amusement in his voice. “Now kick the gun over.”

  I did so as asked. Or tried. I hadn’t played football since early high school, and so the weapon had gone off at an embarrassing angle. The man didn’t complain. He slowly walked to my gun while keeping his weapon and eyes on me. He bent a knee down to pick it up and pocketed the gun in his vest before returning to his previous position between me and the exit. He stood still. And in those agonising seconds, I wondered if he was going to shoot me. Maybe he decided I was too bothersome, or perhaps Bob had told him I wasn’t useful. I flinched under the gaze of his eyes and the barrel.

  I saw the shadows before they appeared behind the large frame of the man. Two figures approached from the direction of the building opposite to this one. I squinted to try to make out their outlines. In the dozens of seconds that their arrival took, the details became clearer. A balding man wearing thin glasses. He was round about the waist, but it wasn’t obvious at first due to the strange attire he wore; creamy draped robes made me wonder whether he came straight from a bath. Next to him was a slimmer but taller woman who wore a dark grey, long sleeve jacket and a pair of matching trousers. Her brunette hair was tied back. When they stopped, they were standing next to the guard half a dozen metres away.

  “Ah, Alex!” the shorter man greeted loudly. “So we finally meet.”

  His greeting felt facetious. I didn’t know what to make of the grin on his face. Is he mocking me? I thought. “Can I finally leave?” I asked.

  The boisterous laugh this man had let out grated my patience. “Oh but you’ve only just got here!” His accent was distinctly Scottish.

  I didn’t like the way he addressed me. He wasn’t entitled to familiarity. “Who are you and what is all this?” I asked severely.

  His smile never left him, as though I was silly for not recognising a friend. “My name’s Lennox. Lennox Muir. But you can call me Lenny.”

  I am not going to call this man Lenny, I thought defiantly.

  “As for everything else,” Lennox continued, “you can start by reading that envelope you’ve got in your vest.” He gestured at his own chest.

  Envelope? What—I suddenly remembered the white rectangle that was tucked near my heart. My awkward motions reflected my perplexity as I hesitantly reached into my vest and retrieved the now creased envelope. I looked at Lennox with an unsure expression and received an encouraging nod. “I was told I would die if I opened this,” I said, with a trailing intonation that made it sound like a question.

  “And I’m telling you, you won’t,” Lennox said. “I printed that letter you’re holding. And I had also told Greg to tell you that.” He chuckled heartily. “Not that it was serious. I just didn’t want to spoil everything for you.”

  I didn’t know what to make of how he was making light of the whole situation. I was glad that he didn’t seem threatening, but I also felt an indignance for his frivolity. Telling Bob—Greg—to threaten me was downright sadistic. After all, there was a gun pointed at me a moment ago. I was acutely aware of the fact that the tall man in gear was still holding his gun, even if it was aimed at the ground.

  I slipped my finger underneath the uppermost edge of the envelope and messily opened it. Inside was a single folded sheet of paper. At first I didn’t know what I was looking at. The sentences seemed to elude my comprehension. When I got to the end of the page, I felt faint. This doesn’t make sense, I thought. My eyes returned to the beginning of the page and read it again. And again. Until I looked up at the amused gaze on Lennox’s face.

  “What is this?” I asked. The edges of my vision shrank. “Some kind of a joke?”

  “Not at all,” Lennox replied. “Its very existence should assure you that it’s definitely not a hoax.”

  “Then what is this?” I asked impatiently.

  “It’s exactly what it is.”

  I looked down at the paper. Diagrams. Maps. Scripts. They came together like a blaring orchestra to produce an eerie symphony. A synopsis. Of me. Of everything that had happened since I had stepped foot outside of the confined room up to the moment I opened the envelope. The exact doors I opened. The rooms I peeked into. The second guessing that had led me to retrace my steps and turn down a different path. The words that had left my mouth. It was concise. Confident. And yet the only person who could have produced this accurate of an account of my experience was myself. And even I wouldn’t be able to do so, unless I had been writing as I walked. Yet, I had received the envelope containing this paper so long ago, preceding any of the prophecies it asserted. It had been with me the whole time. Untamperable. But this is impossible. No one could know exactly what I was going to do. Because I didn’t. Even the many doors I had opened had effectively acted as a random draw. Chaotic. Unpredictable. And yet, predicted by a small diagram within a paper of prophecies.

  “How?” I asked impatiently. I could hear a distinct inflection in my voice. It was denial. “How?”

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  “Well,” Lennox began, “maths. Data in, predictions out. I think you know it as machine learning.”

  “Yes, I know what forecasting is,” I said incredulously. “Statistical modelling. Machine learning. All that. But they’re not this—” I waved the sheet of paper in my hand, “—accurate! Even the most cutting edge models are never perfect for simple classification problems, much less for predicting every single random thing I’ve done. That’s bullshit.”

  “You assume we’re working under the same limitations as your world,” Lennox said. “No. Our progress is at an accelerated pace. Focus on machine learning had only started in the latter half of the twentieth century, yes? Well, we had several decades of a head start. We don’t even call our methods ‘machine learning’, because that term didn’t exist when our research began. Our scientists boast that they don’t rely on the primitive approaches that academia seems to have missed the forest for the trees for.” He chuckled. “I’m sure you of all people can understand how academia is. Anyway, I can’t tell you much more than that. I’m not a scientist.”

  “My world?” I parroted in bemusement. “Who are you?”

  “Well. We are Receiverists,” Lennox said nonchalantly, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

  ‘Receiverists’? My mind grinded to a halt. I’ve been kidnapped by the Receiverist research group this whole time?

  “I believe,” Lennox continued, “you’ve already met Irene.” He nodded to the woman next to him.

  For the first time since they walked in, my attention moved away from Lennox and to the taller woman beside him. Truthfully, I had completely forgotten she was there. But now that I was regarding her properly for the first time, I saw the resemblance that had initially escaped me. Her height. Medium skin. Clean ponytail hair. This was the first time I had seen her without sunglasses. Her eyes were grey. She was wearing the same boots that she had the couple of times I had seen her previously. Looking at her now, I finally realised why the boots had always looked so incongruous on her. They were military. They didn’t fit the dress that she had worn before. But whereas the dress had never quite fit her, the boots did. The expression on her face was blank. Unreadable. Not even amusement in the fact that I hadn’t recognised her. She was looking at me, but didn’t seem to acknowledge me. I felt betrayed. I was embarrassed by the genuine worry I had felt for this woman when I was locked up.

  My gaze returned to Lennox. “So you’re telling me I was kidnapped by a physics research group?”

  “We did what was necessary,” Lennox said apologetically. “I hope that in time you will come to understand. As for the second premise, no. The research group that has solicited your expertise is only a small group in our community. Your… extraction, shall we call it, was an effort conducted on the behalf of our wider society.”

  “So all you want is my help with your research project?”

  Lennox nodded.

  “Then why did you people abduct me?” I had hoped that I sounded louder, angrier, like an accusation. Instead my tone would have been consistent with addressing an awkward miscommunication.

  “A couple of reasons,” Lennox said. “Firstly, we’re in an undisclosed location. We couldn’t transport you here while you were conscious, and there was no way to convince you of that willingly. Our models concluded that with over ninety-five percent confidence.”

  I found that hard to believe.

  “And secondly,” he continued, “it was for our protection. We take our privacy very seriously, Alex. We can’t have you try anything rash that might hurt us. And you need to know that you won’t.”

  “So you showed your power by detaining me?” I asked incredulously. “That’s psychotic.”

  “No, Alex. You need to know that you really won’t do anything to hurt us. Because our models tell us so. The rather regrettable exercise was to prove to you their accuracy, which you now know. You’re holding irrefutable evidence of our predictive prowess. If there’s even a one percent chance that you could be troublesome, we wouldn’t have let you in. But you’re here. And that means you will behave.”

  A rebellious anger bubbled inside me. I wanted to call the man pejorative names. But something stopped me. It was easy to swallow the urge down. And that in itself felt familiar. Uncomfortably so. No, I denied with rising anxiety. This doesn’t prove what he’s saying. And I didn’t believe him. It was just all too impossible. The paper I held in my hand had perplexed me. Shook me to my core, even. But distilled to its fundamental components, the envelope trick was not unlike that of being shown something preposterous by a street magician. There was always another explanation. To accept Lennox’s words at face value would be to capitulate to his manipulation. Having kidnapped me in the first place certainly didn’t inspire credibility. But I didn’t know how far I should push them on this line of inquiry. Right now they were trying to convince me to cooperate. I didn’t want to substitute being convinced with being forced.

  “Do I have a choice in any of this?” I asked.

  “Of course you do,” Lennox said. “This is all about choice. Despite the unpleasant process in getting you here, we don’t want to coerce you into anything. If you don’t want to collaborate with our research, then that’s fine. We’ll take you back home. But what we do here is important, and the only way to truly allow you to make an informed decision is for you to be right here. In our city.”

  There were two things that bothered me about Lennox’s proposition. “Hold on. That doesn’t make any sense,” I responded. The tone of my voice was the same one I would use to point out a contradiction in an assignment when a haughty student demanded a regrading. “If you truly have a model that accurately predicts my actions, then you’d know what choice I will make anyway. If what you’re saying is true, then I don’t have a choice.”

  Irene seemed bored, but Lennox grinned. I couldn’t tell whether it was in affirmation of my reasoning or condescension against it. Regardless, his eyes communicated that he had all the knowledge. And knowledge was power. “Well, you’re right in some ways but not so right in others,” he said with a lightness of tone that was akin to a philosopher didactically quarrelling with a student. “We do indeed have an analysis of your likelihood to cooperate with us. It doesn’t consider the specific task at hand that we would like your help on—that’s too complex for the model to ingest—but I think it’s a good enough indicator. And no, I won’t give you the numbers.” He chuckled. “Not that I remember them. Because honestly, this really is about your choice. Even if you naturally lean towards a particular decision, you still have the right to exercise the other. It’s still your choice in the end. The numbers are irrelevant.”

  “Okay then,” I said warily. I didn’t know whether I agreed, but I wanted to inquire about my second curiosity. “You mentioned a city. Which city?”

  Lennox has said “our city”. Something about hearing the word city had brought me a subtle sense of security. It meant I wasn’t taken to some deserted, forgotten town in the middle of nowhere that was too secluded from the rest of society for me to find help. A city is a large collection of individuals living closely, densely together somewhere in some country. Cities are loose. The boundaries between clusters of cultures are fuzzy. A chaotic transfusion between individuals and their incompatible beliefs. If I was in a city, then so was hope. I could be saved.

  There was a flicker of amusement in Irene’s eyes at my question, but it was Lennox who responded with a toothy smile and a non-answer. “Try not to freak out.” He moved to the side and extended his arm towards the exit. The gap between his and Irene’s bodies provided, for the first time since they had arrived, an opening. I regarded it suspiciously, but there was no choice but to walk through the exit that I had sought. The guard didn’t have his gun trained on me. He looked relaxed, but he held a stance that warned me not to try anything funny.

  With a deep breath, I walked slowly towards the exit. Lennox only gave an encouraging nod as I walked past him. Irene only observed me blankly. Approaching the wide door, the outside world began to flood in at a reluctant rate. I could make out the building on the other side of the street. Except it wasn’t exactly a street, because streets didn’t have hip-high walls that bounded the path between buildings. A bridge? I wondered in confusion. The sunlight seeping from the outside made me raise my hand to shield my eyes. It was the smell that alerted me that something was off. A city was made up of its plethora of distinct aromas. Fast food and cheap fragrance, and occasionally the tinge of grass and pollen. Always accompanied with the constant undertone of smog, exhaust fumes and cigarette smoke. All of which were absent as I inched closer to the exit. Instead, there was only the pungent smell of sterilisation. Of sanitary regulation. It was wrong. The association my neurons had with this smell wasn’t of hospitals, but the confined room I had been locked in. It didn’t feel like leaving the complex at all, but rather merely entering an extension of it. A panic rose within me. It drove me to briskly close in the distance and force my eyes open to see where I was.

  My irises shrunk as my vision was overwhelmed from having not seen daylight in what had felt like weeks. When I had recovered, I wasn’t sure what to make of what was in front of me. Nothing seemed right. It looked like the incomplete, surreal setting that my mind would conjure in my dreams. The kind I would only realise was totally wrong after I woke up. The building in front of me was a grey monolith, towering over me. It wasn’t until I had looked from side to side that I had realised this was a forest, if a forest was populated by trees that were large grey monoliths that were spread in a perfect grid. I realised I wasn’t just in a bridge, but a tunnel. Aside from the ceramic that was beneath my feet and constituted the hip-high walls, the bridge was covered in a transparent screen that extended far above my head. The forest of monoliths was interconnected by a dizzyingly thick web of enclosed bridges. These buildings were indistinguishable, except by numbers. On the facade facing me, about a dozen metres above, were the numbers twelve and ten in a bulky font made up of panels of light. The building I had come out of looked exactly the same, except it had thirteen and ten on the facade facing me.

  I wasn’t on the ground. This fact brought me a nauseating wave of vertigo. It was difficult to judge, but I was over twenty metres above a white and yellow surface. What had tipped me over the edge was the realisation that there was no horizon. Looking into the distance, through the vast, monolithic forest, I saw the same colours. In a panic I looked above, and they were there too. But in front of them was a large grid of tubes that were so bright that I had to look away. There was no sun. There was no sky. There was no atmosphere. This place was perfectly enclosed. I had left a confined space only to find myself in another. And this one didn’t have a door that I could hope against.

  I didn’t realise I was hyperventilating until I heard Irene’s voice. “He’s freaking out,” Irene said as she took a step towards me.

  “Stay back,” I yelled maniacally. “Stay the fuck away from me!”

  I took several paces away from the group and towards the other building. Irene held her hands out placatingly.

  “I need to leave,” I muttered. I felt saliva pooling in my mouth. The nausea was overwhelming. I couldn’t hold onto a single thought. I only felt it. The pure white panic that blanketed over everything else. Despite the width of the bridge and the sizable headroom under the transparent ceiling, I felt an overpowering claustrophobia that I hadn’t in that tiny room. “I need to leave.”

  As I tried to run, the dam broke. My knees gave out and in a flash, I was vomiting onto the clean ceramic. The tightness around my head didn’t subside. A second wave of putrid contents poured out of my mouth. In my subdued state, I didn’t even register the footsteps walking towards me.

  “Yeah. Someone’s going to need to clean this up,” Lennox muttered in disgust. He sighed, before, “Sedate him.”

  Almost immediately, I felt strong arms holding the limbs above my waist in place. A prick in my neck followed. And then darkness.

  I saw Damien. I was sitting in the back while he was in the front, driving the ramshackle, second-hand car that mother had always yelled at him about. It had a yellow tint, but I couldn’t remember if that was real. Outside of the car was a blurred amalgamation of everything. We passed by my university campus. The dirty food court our family used to frequent every Sunday. The barely maintained high school we went to. Our old house. There was no horizon in the distance. We kept driving but it wasn’t the car that moved, but the images that passed by the windows like a soft stream. Damien looked back at me. He had that faraway look in his eyes. I asked him where we were going. I couldn’t hear my voice. He didn’t answer. He smiled ruefully at me as I saw the approaching truck behind him.