It sounded safe. Aaron decided to go out and see what was going on. He walked down the hall to the interview room.
The secretary was lying on the floor. A large black cop was in the process of handcuffing her. Schram was half-sitting, half-lying on the floor, crumpled against the far wall of the room, covered with blood. Huge bursts of his blood had splattered on to the wall from the impact of the bullets and what looked like a gallon of the stuff had run out of his wounds and puddled on the floor all around him.
"My God," Aaron said. "I'll call an ambulance."
"I already done it," the cop said. "Go to the elevators and wait for 'em."
Aaron did exactly that. And he didn't have to wait for very long; the crew arrived with astonishing speed, four men rolling in a big gurney and carrying their equipment in bags and boxes. They didn't do much work on Schram, just lifted him directly on to the gurney and wheeled him out of the room. And down the hallway. Down the hallway to the bathroom.
The bathroom? Aaron followed them in there.
Schram had already climbed to his feet and was in the process of stripping out of his bloodstained clothes. Underneath his shirt, several small packets had been taped on to his body, electrical wires running into them. All of these things were soaked with blood and appeared to have been blown open from within. As Aaron watched, Schram ripped them off his body, exposing clean, unblemished flesh, and tossed them into the garbage.
"Squibs," he said. "Do you think they bought it?"
Aaron was still just standing there, his jaw flopped open like the hood of an abandoned car.
"You bought it, obviously," Schram said, "so they probably did. Why don't you get back in there and I'll meet you in a couple of minutes, after I get cleaned up." Schram stripped off the last of his clothes and walked, buck naked, into a shower stall, leaving a trail of bloody footprints on the polished white marble floor.
The secretary had been hauled off in chains. Several more "cops" had arrived and begun to interrogate the six witnesses. One of the cops was blustery and bullying and seemed to be treating the six as though they were all potential suspects in the crime. One of them was soothing and sympathetic. As they took turns talking to the six subjects, the readouts on the screen fluctuated back and forth from one extreme to the other.
Within a minute or two, Schram had joined Aaron in the monitor room, wearing a fresh set of clothes. "Can't you get in trouble for doing this?" Aaron said. He knew it was sappy even as he was saying it. But he couldn't help himself.
"For doing what?" Schram asked, sounding perfectly innocent.
"For - for what you just did."
"What did I just do?" Schram said.
"You - I don't know, you scared those people."
"So?"
"Well, isn't that a little extreme?"
"Life is extreme," Schram said.
"But isn't it illegal to do that, or something?"
"They all signed releases. Why do you think we're paying them money?"
"Did the releases give you permission to do that!"
"The releases say that these people are willingly taking part in a psychological experiment," Schram said, "which is certainly the case."
"But aren't you going to tell them it was fake?"
"Of course I will. Of course I'll tell them," Schram said. "How else are we going to get them pissed off?"
"You want them to be pissed off?"
"Before they get out of that room," Schram said, "I want to run them through every emotion in the book."
"Oh. Well, which emotion are they being put through now?"
"Boredom. Which is going to take a while. And in the meantime, I want to go back over our results so far."
Everything that had happened to this point - the six feeds from the six video cameras, the audio track coming over the speaker, and the streams of data coming from the PIPER prototypes - had all been recorded by the computers. By entering some commands into the Calyx system that controlled the whole thing, they were able to go back and replay portions of the experiment, seeing everything, on the dozen or so screens, just as Aaron had seen it the first time it had happened.
The door opened and the hunchbacked janitor dragged himself into the room. He fixed his one good eye on Schram, slouched over to him, and gave him a high five.
"Oscar-winning performance," the janitor said. "You get best supporting actor, Cy," Schram said. "Nah, it's all special effects," Ogle said, reaching up to grab the curtain of tortured flesh that ran from his jawbone down to his chest. He pulled on it, and most of it peeled away in a single piece, leaving a few strips and patches of burnt-looking skin adhering to his face and neck. With a few minutes of additional peeling and scrubbing, Ogle managed to get loose from most of the makeup, though a few fragments of it still stuck to him here and there, like bits of tissue paper left over from a bad shave, and the part of his face that hadn't been covered still had colored greasepaint on it. Ogle didn't care; he was too busy staring at the monitors.
He loved it. His eyes were virtually popping out of his head. His mouth was wide open and frozen in an expression of boyish glee, like a farm boy getting his first look at Disney World. His eyes darted back and forth from one screen to the next; he couldn't decide what to look at.
"Days. Weeks," Ogle said. "I'm gonna be looking at this thing for weeks."
"Check out the look on that can stacker's face when you dragged your sorry ass into the room," Schram said.
"She's not a can stacker," Aaron said, "she's a coupon snipper."
They ran through the whole thing a couple of times. The computer allowed them to run it like a videotape, with fast-forward, rewind, freeze-frame, the whole bit. As they went through it, Schram jotted down notes on a yellow legal pad. Finally they shunted the screens back over to a real-time display of what was happening, right now, in the interview room.
Nothing was happening. The six faces were a picture of terminal boredom. The good cop and the bad cop had gone away and been replaced by a droning, monotonous voice that was going on and on in some kind of pseudolegal jargon.
"That's an actor claiming to be a lawyer for Ogle Data Research," Ogle explained. "He's been lecturing them for half an hour while we dicked around with all this stuff."
"Let's see what self-righteous indignation looks like," Schram said, rising to his feet and heading for the interview room.
"Ten-four on that," Ogle said.
Schram walked into the interview room a moment later and the monitors all went ballistic. Ogle howled like a dog.
"All the same," he said, "they all react the same. The hunchback, the shooting, the pornography, and they all reacted differently. But when they're pissed off, they all look alike. And that's why self-righteousness is the most powerful force in politics."