Harper scrunched up her face tighter and tighter as she stared intently at the mess of post-it notes and half-torn pieces of paper pinned to a bulletin board on her wall. Her face hurt from frowning at it so much, but she couldn't stop. She needed to figure this out. Eventually, she sighed and let her head slump into her hands. She looked like a crazy person, and worse, she wasn't getting anywhere. It was all just so hard to make sense of. Harper didn't feel too angry at herself about that. It wasn't like anyone ever told you how you were supposed to deal with an evil conspiracy to brainwash students into robotic drones. But still, she had to figure it out. She had to. For Lori's sake.
The problem was, she had so little to go on. She knew that someone, or something, had hypnotized Lori in order to get her to wear latex and act like a drone. And that was all she could really be certain about. Harper figured it had to be connected to Lori's tech classes in some way. The first time they'd found out about any of it was when Lori had been activated by her teacher, Professor Elbourne, had used. At first, that had seemed like a coincidence. According to Lori, Professor Elbourne had simply been throwing together pieces of jargon as a random example of something. But in the absence of any other leads, Harper really didn't see any other possible avenue of investigation. Besides, now that she'd seen first-hand what kind of brainwashing had been done to Lexi, she had no doubt that they were dealing with some kind of advanced technology.
It had to be something new, something secret. Some kind of new research being conducted, perhaps. Harper had done a little casual digging on Professor Elbourne and had discovered that even though she was a computing professor, in her student days she'd double-majored with psychology, and had even co-authored some papers on psychology and neuroscience. One of them was even a comparative study on the differences between how computer algorithms learn and how human brains learn. That had aroused Harper's suspicions. She was being careful to remind herself that it was circumstantial evidence at best, and that there was probably a perfectly reasonable explanation for it. But perhaps Professor Elbourne's experience across those different fields explained how she might have been able to create something like that brainwashing video Harper had seen.
Harper shifted uncomfortably on her bed. That video was something else Harper couldn't stop thinking about. She could barely remember it beyond little snippets and echoes, like half-remembered dreams. But even those small fragments haunted her, like a song stuck in her head. She found herself replaying them obsessively over and over again in her head, and even though she cursed herself every time she caught herself doing it, she couldn't stop. Even now. She couldn't stop thinking about how fascinated she'd been with the spiral, and with all the strange glitching and flashing she remembered. She couldn't stop thinking about how seductively relaxing it had been as she'd let her mind slip away into the heart of the spiral.
The memories were so embarrassing. Harper wished she could stop ruminating on them so much. The worst part was the way that the fragments she remembered felt like pieces out of a jigsaw puzzle. There was enough of them that she could start to see how it was all meant to fit together, but not enough that she could tell what the final picture was supposed to be. It was maddening. What if she took another look at it? That was yet another thing Harper couldn't stop thinking about. She couldn't stop feeling as though all she needed was one more brief, harmless look at the brainwashing video, and then she'd be able to understand it and get it out of her head.
Harper pinched herself. She needed to stop thinking like that. Looking at that video again was obviously a terrible idea. It was designed to brainwash people, and if not for Lori, it would have been able to sink its claws into both of them, and god knows what it could have done to their heads. Anyway, Harper had told Lori to delete the video. She probably couldn't look. Probably.
Making herself focus on her unhelpful, haphazard notes again, Harper sighed. What was she going to do? What could she do? Tell people? That was what Lori had wanted, but Harper was sure they'd simply be ridiculed. Even if she used Lori's activation code on her right in front of people, they'd be more likely to think it was a weird prank than to believe them. Besides, they still didn't know what they were dealing with. Who knew what kinds of dangers they might be exposing themselves to if they tried to go public? As far as Harper could see, one of the few things they had going for them was the fact that whoever had done this to Lori probably didn't know that they knew about it.
But what other options did they have? Harper was struggling to think of anything. Above all, they needed more information. It was just wasn't clear how they were supposed to get it. It's not like "my roommate was brainwashed into a latex drone" was the kind of problem you could plug into Google to find help threads on. Harper knew that for sure; in a moment of desperation, she'd given it a go. Maybe they could poke around campus and see if anything turned up? The problem with that is they didn't even know what they should be looking for, and it seemed like there was every chance they could find nothing and end up back at square one.
