Chapter Four: Honesty, Almost

After twitching for a couple hours and rolling over a few times, I heard Rod come back. He asked if I really trusted them.

"You're the only one I've met.  I do trust you.  Maybe I'll trust more people as I meet them?'  I started worrying because of his question.  It seemed remarkably easy to hide that I was worried, but then I started worrying that things may not be the way they seem.

"Well, thanks," he said, "Did you sleep?"

I was trapped.  If they knew that the machine wouldn't twitch if I were asleep, then my plan would prove that I am willing to lie to them.  Since I was willing to lie and my best chance of getting away with it was not to ever let them have any idea that I was willing, I decided I better not lie.  Honesty turns out to be the best policy.

"I didn't.  I just don't feel tired at all."

"Do you know that you were twitching, as if you were asleep?" he asked.

"Yeah... I was wondering if pretending I was asleep would help me actually go to sleep.  It didn't work as far as I can tell."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, maybe I did sleep, but I don't think so."

"Okay.  I'm on my way home now, but I wanted to show you how to use your remote to see the video from the other four tries to bring you back."

I grabbed the remote and looked it over while he listed off the functions and pointed to the buttons.

"Tomorrow morning, Dr. Sloane will interview you.  While you didn't sleep, she interviewed your wife.  She has requested to interview the two of you together after your interview in the morning so that's scheduled too.  Do you have any questions?"

"A lot, but I want to try to find the answers myself.  I'm basically living in a machine and I'd like to know how the machine works.  Like you said new memories are formed in here," pointing to my chest, "so can I get blueprints, schematics, design docs... ?"

"I'll ask our night tech to set that up for you, and if you hit the menu button and he gets it set up, you'll have access to a lot of that material."

"Great.  Thanks!" I reached out to offer him my hand, we shook, and he left me alone.  I started watching the videos.

Chapter Three
Chapter Five