"I'm going to give you the good news now. If you know this fact, then you can create programs of joy and satisfaction."

"I don't like it."

"I didn't ask you to like it. Just know it." He sighed. "Let me give you one more piece of bad news that may put some of this in perspective. Do you know what the natural state of humanity really is?"

I shook my head.

"The cult. That's the impolite term for it, but it's accurate. People need tribal identities. Veteran. Hacker. American. Fan. Employee. Parent. Grandparent. Writer. Executive. The problem with America is that it's a country that invented itself. So there aren't a lot of tribal identities. People keep borrowing identities from other sources. Religious ones are great, especially some of the Eastern disciplines. Martial arts. Creative Anachrony. Transformational Communities. Political movements. Genre fanatics. Sexual communities. We use the word cult to identify the ones that are alien to us, and we ignore the real truth that people need to belong to tribes in order to provide a context for their identities. Without your family, tribe, nation, or context, you don't know who you are. That's why you have to belong to something.

"Break away from one something and become part of another and you're reprogramming your operating context and the identity that operates inside that context. We call that being seduced by a cult, because it threatens us. It suggests that there's something wrong or weak or inappropriate about our identities. It suggests that we're not right. So we call it a cult and make it as wrong as we can so that the people close to us won't want to do it, won't desert us, won't insult or damage our contexts. We do it to preserve our identities, right or wrong. But this is the bad news, Jim. It's always wrong. Because you are not your context."

I chewed that thought over. Foreman was right. I didn't like it. "So, all you're doing is replacing one cult with another?" I asked.

He nodded wryly. "You can look at it that way. It wouldn't be inaccurate. But The Mode Training is an attempt to go beyond the limitations of living inside a cult to the possibilities that are available when you can create any context or cult you need."

"So, it's all brainwashing?"

"Jim, forget that word. All education is reprogramming. All transformation is reprogramming. First we find out what you know; then we identify what's inaccurate or inappropriate. Then we devalue your investment in it so that we can replace it with the correct information. A lot of times, it also means devaluing the context around the information and replacing that with a more appropriate one. This is what you do whether you're learning trigonometry or French or Catholicism. Yes, it's reprogramming. The same way you reprogram a computer. You're a machine, Jim. It's all bad news. So, what are you going to do about it?"

I looked him straight in the eye. "I don't know," I said. I said it with finality.

"Fair enough," said Foreman. "When you get bored with not knowing and start getting curious about what's on the other side-and I know you will-then come see me. The next Training starts in ten days. I'll hold a chair for you."

He stood up and stretched and ran a hand through his hair. He pointed along the rim of the crater. "See that little building over there? That's a comfort station. I'm going to take a walk."

He left Lizard and me alone.

I looked at her. "I don't like being told that what I feel for you is just a program. It makes me feel like I'm not in control."

Her eyes were deep. She asked, "So, who wrote the program?"

"I don't know."

"Yes, you do."

I looked at my love for Lizard. Oh. "I-I guess, I did."

"You guess?"

"I did."

"Uh-huh. And so did I. So what?" She said, "We've been looking at the worms as biological machines and trying to figure them out. What would we discover if we turned the same mirror on ourselves? What kind of machines are we?"

"I'm a jerk," I said. "I'm a jerk machine."

"And I'm a nasty bitch machine," she said. "So what?"

"I don't want to be a machine," I said.

"I got it. That's what kind of a machine you are. The kind who doesn't want to be."

"Uh . . ." And then I started to giggle. "I got it. I'm the kind of machine who goes around telling myself I'm not a machine. Like a little tape recorder playing my little tape, 'I'm not a machine, I'm not a machine."'

She laughed too. And leaned over and kissed me. "You're ready to take the next step, sweetheart. You've already taken it."

"I have?"

"Yes, you have. You're willing to deal with bad news."

I sighed. I looked into her eyes. "All I want is to find the way-not just the way to survive, but the way to win as well. I want to know. Is this it?"

She understood what I was saying. "You'll let us know, afterward," she said.

When we entered the room, it was empty. I mean, empty.

There was no stage, no dais, no platform. There was no podium, no music stand with a manual on it, no director's chair. There were no overhead screens. Everything had been dismantled and removed.

There were no assistants at the doors. There were no assistants in the back of the room. There was no table for them; there were no chairs.

There were no chairs for the trainees either; they were stacked neatly in a large closet in the back wall. The door to the closet was half-ajar when we entered. Periodically, someone would walk over, open the door, look in, look back at the rest of us in the room, look puzzled, and then do nothing; he or she would return to the growing throng standing and milling near the door.

The room was abandoned. It was as if The Mode Training and all the people responsible for it had simply vanished during the night.

We stood around, waiting in puzzled groups, looking at each other and wondering. We talked in low voices. Was someone going to come in and take charge soon? Had they all overslept, or had they forgotten that there was one more day to the training?

Or maybe something serious had happened? Had the training been cancelled abruptly? Was there an emergency? If so, why hadn't they told us? We didn't know.

What the hell was going on here?

There was something else bothering me. For a moment, I couldn't figure out what it was. I looked to Marisov, but she shook her head; she couldn't figure it out either. I turned around slowly, trying to see what I had already seen, but hadn't consciously registered.

There was something wrong about the room. That was part of it.

Everything looked the same, but it wasn't. I had a feeling: if I could figure out what was wrong, it would explain everything else as well.

It wasn't just that the room hadn't been set up or that Foreman and all the assistants weren't here. Something else was missing; something that I was used to wasn't the same

And then I got it. The floor hadn't been swept. It wasn't dirty, but neither was it clean-and that bothered me. It made a difference. There wasn't much dirt, and only a few scraps of paper, but it seemed dirty by comparison to the way we usually found the room.

Always before, the room had been spotless. Ready. Even the bullet holes in the walls were always repaired after the first break. Today, the room was not ready. That's why it looked abandoned. We had grown accustomed to that feeling of readiness. But this wasn't a big clean space waiting to be filled anymore; instead, it was just a big empty space. The difference was profound.