Chapter 63: A Very Faulty Measurement
The Central Measurement Hall took up the whole fourth floor, and it was white from the ceiling to the skirting, white enough that a man standing in the middle of it cast no useful shadow. A ring of instruments stood around a single steel plate like a small forest of grey machines, cabling taped down between them in flat black runs, every housing turned inward at the same spot on the floor.
Only five people watched the examination Aide Lance stood at the rail with his arms folded and his tie loose the way it always was by this hour, saying nothing.
Theo walked out onto the floor and had his plan ready, because he had been working on it since the bus.
’C-rank. That’s what I’m giving them.’
He had thought long and hard about everything. It was not his fault they had so many expectations. But he was going to try to bring their expectations down to C, and perhaps, also, to control the output and see whether he could deceive them.
Another reason was that Theo wanted to be as incognito as possible, though he suspected he had already worked against that very goal by asking for the machine in the first place.
So he was not going to let them know it. He would stand on the plate and he would not push, would not resist, would not do a single thing, and the machine would read a young man who was slightly better than average, and everybody would go home.
"Both feet in the ring, please. Hands at your sides."
Theo put both feet in the ring. The steel came up cold through his shoes, and there was a shallow groove worn into it where a few thousand people had stood before him.
"This measures baseline output. It does not hurt."
It did not hurt. It hummed. Something rose up around his ankles that he could not see, and pressed, patient and even, like water coming up a wall.
’Don’t.’
’Don’t you dare.’
The machine gave a number.
"F," the examiner said.
Theo let out a breath.
’Good. Perfect. Fantastic. Now let’s all have a nice quiet morning and—’
"Run it again," the examiner said. "I want a second baseline."
They ran it again.
The examiner looked at her screen for slightly too long. She read it, and then read it a second time, and the pen in her hand stopped moving.
"D."
Frank’s brows pulled together.
"What?"
Theo stood very still on the plate with his hands at his sides and did not move a muscle, and inside his own head he was shouting.
’Stop it.’
’Stop it right now. That is a machine. Nobody is fighting you. Nothing is attacking us, you absolute lunatic, that is a machine on a plate in a government building.’
[Adaptation in progress]
’I know! I can see! Stop!’
But he had known, actually. He had known on the way in, on the bus, with his forehead on the window and the rooftops going by, and had told himself he was being paranoid. The Limitless Body did not care what a thing was called. It cared that something was pressing on him, and something was pressing on him, and it had been doing this since a snake in a Gate and a wooden sword in a gymnasium and a road with birds over it.
His constitution had exactly one idea about the world, and it was a very simple one.
Push on me, and I will become the sort of thing you cannot push on.
"Run it a third time."
"Ma’am—"
"Run it."
"C," said the technician.
The examiner set down her pen.
***
By the fifth run they had stopped saying the numbers out loud, which Theo found much worse, because now he could only read them off the faces. The examiner’s was the readable one. She had a habit of touching the corner of her jaw when a number came up, and by the fifth run she was doing it every time.
They tried it the sixth time... and then the seventh time and the reading did not stop climbing higher.
Theo stood on the plate and tried, with everything he had, to be small.
He went slack. He let his shoulders drop. He breathed shallow and thought about laundry, about the ramp on the porch, about the nine forks and eleven knives in the drawer at home, about anything at all that was not a fight.
[Adaptation in progress]
’Please.’
[Adaptation in progress]
’I am begging you.’
"B," the technician said, and his voice cracked on it.
The examiner turned around to the gallery.
"Sir, I’d like a second apparatus brought in."
"Do it," Lance replied.
They brought the second apparatus in on a trolley and spent four minutes wiring it, and then it agreed with the first, which was the point at which the room stopped being a room and started being an event.
Two of the technicians had stopped operating their own equipment and were simply watching the screen, and one of them had both hands over his mouth.
"Ma’am, it’s still climbing between cycles. It’s climbing while we’re reading it."
"I can see that."
"There’s no plateau. There’s no—" He looked up from the readout. "Ma’am, there’s no ceiling in the readout."
Theo, on the plate, with his eyes fixed on a spot on the far wall where the paint had been touched up in a slightly wrong white, was having a genuinely atrocious morning.
’S.’
’It’s going to say S. It is absolutely going to say S, and then a man from the government is going to shake my hand, and then I will never be left alone again for the rest of my life.’
The machine said S.
The hall went quiet in a way that Theo had only heard once before, in a gymnasium, with a wooden sword on the floor beside him.
"Ma’am, do we stop?"
The woman glanced at Lance, and then at Theo, and then at the technician.
"Run it again."
"SS," said the technician.
Lance came off the rail. He came down the gallery steps without hurrying, and he did not look at the readout once.
Meanwhile, Theo stood perfectly still. Sweat had run down the back of his collar and he let it go.
He kept his face polite and a little confused, like a young man who did not understand what all the fuss was about, and he held that face the way a man holds a plank over his head.
Inside, he was screaming.
’SS. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck why are you not doing like we agreed body!’
’That’s the rank they were already scared I might be, which means every single agency in that lobby downstairs now gets to be right, and being right will make them insufferable.’
[Adaptation in progress]
’I WILL FIGHT YOU.’
[Adaptation in progress]
The lady glanced at her tablet and then at the technician. The color was gone out of her face, and she looked like a woman who did not want to have to say this.
Eventually she said it.
"Run. It. Again."
The technician did exactly that. Theo stood there sweating buckets, watching the man’s shoulders, and then the technician raised his head, and his mouth and his eyes opened, and he said:
"SSS."