Margaret awoke in total darkness. She'd never experienced an absence of light so absolute before, not in her entire life; even when she turned off the lights at night and drew the curtains, there was always a diffuse haze of illumination coming through the fabric from streetlamps or moonlight. Not even her childhood camping trips left her in this kind of pitch blackness-when the embers of the fire died away to nothing, the stars overhead at least shone brightly enough to remind her that light existed. But this... Margaret waved her hand in front of her face. If not for the evidence of her other senses, she would have no idea it was there.
She began to sit up, but a sick wave of dizziness passed through her every time she tried to move and she lay back down on the bed until it passed. For a moment, she wondered if she was ill-maybe the room wasn't dark at all, maybe something was wrong with her eyes as well as her stomach and her sense of balance. Some sort of brain injury? She didn't remember anything like that happening, but of course if her brain was damaged she wouldn't. Margaret felt her head gingerly for bandages or signs of pain, but she seemed to be intact. Just dizzy and confused. She tried to think back, find her last firm memory and work from there to reconstruct events.
She was in... Margaret's brain stumbled for a moment, as much from the whirlwind pace of her European trip as from her inexplicable grogginess. She'd been through six cities in twelve days, an itinerary that took her from Rome to Madrid to Paris to Brussels to Amsterdam to Berlin to... to... had she made it out of Berlin? She felt certain she recalled checking out of the hotel, getting into the tour bus and heading for Vienna. They crossed the Austrian border, and there was a, a breakdown? Yes, that was it. The tour bus broke down and the company arranged for a fleet of limousines for them as an apology.
And... yes! She could see it now in her mind's eye. Margaret got into a limo with Leroy, the retired postal carrier from Santa Monica, and Betty, the college sophomore taking a few weeks before the beginning of fall classes to see the world, and the three of them broke open a bottle of complimentary champagne. And... and Margaret vaguely remembered wondering why it was hitting her so hard, because she had more tolerance than Betty. (And a bit more body mass, she admitted reluctantly. She didn't like the way she looked in green, but Betty's sylph-like body and long, honey blonde curls made a depressing contrast to Margaret's flat brown hair and chunky body.)
She'd gone out for plenty of hen nights and gone through harder stuff than champagne, but three glasses of this made her head swim. In a discomfortingly familiar way, Margaret suddenly realized as she looked back on the moment.
And Margaret remembered thinking about asking the others if they felt the same way, but when she looked over at Betty she saw the young woman slump over sideways and collapse onto the floor of the limo. And she tried to tell the driver, but her face suddenly felt numb and her limbs seemed heavy and lifeless and the champagne glass slipped through her nerveless fingers. Margaret could recall watching it fall, but somehow it never seemed to hit the ground...
And now she was here. In darkness. Dizzy and nauseous. Margaret stumbled to her feet, a sick feeling growing in her gut that had nothing at all to do with the champagne. She took maybe four steps before smacking into a padded wall, the impact of the vinyl surface against her entire body providing her first realization that her clothing was missing. She felt her way along the room for three, maybe four steps before coming to a corner, then another four steps to another corner, then carefully back to the bed. It was bolted to the floor. The only furniture in this tiny little box was bolted to the floor.
Margaret had just started to panic when the lights came on. She blinked, the harsh fluorescent bulbs stinging her completely unprepared eyes, and for a moment all she could see was white. Then she realized that there was nothing else to see-every surface was coated with that same padded vinyl, except for the far wall which looked like it was a floor-to-ceiling television screen displaying a solid white picture. She staggered over to it and pounded on it with her fists, not from any plan but simply because it looked like the only thing she might possibly be able to break, but the plastic window in front of it simply absorbed her blows with only a slight wobble. She hit it again anyway.
Then she heard the voice. "Maggie," it said, in clipped Continental English, "if you can't behave, we'll have to put you back into the dark again." It was a woman's voice, calm and throaty and infinitely patient, but there was a determination behind it that made Margaret slowly lower her hands to her sides. Something told her this woman didn't make any kind of idle threat. And now that she could see the entire room, Margaret realized there was no visible door anywhere in the small structure. A toilet in the corner, a recessed slot directly opposite the bed... but no way out. At all.
The woman's voice softened a little. "That's better," she said. "Maggie, you'll soon learn that there are certain privileges to your existence here. Light is a privilege. Freedom of movement is a privilege. Communication with the outside is a privilege. The better you behave, the more privileges you'll be given. The worse you behave..." The woman paused before adding sympathetically, "Let's just say that you don't want to find out how many privileges you have right now, Maggie."
"Margaret," she corrected automatically. It had become force of habit by now, the word slipping out before she even realized what she'd said. It was just an instinctive response to a lifetime of Megs and Maggies and Peggys and Madges and Mamies and Midges, an endless flood of people who thought she knew what her name was better than she did herself, but as soon as it escaped her lips, Margaret knew she'd made a mistake.
Even so, the swiftness of the woman's response caught Margaret off guard. The lights went out instantly, plunging the room into total blackness once more. The screen clicked off. Even the tiny little hum of the intercom ceased, leaving Maggie in silence as well as darkness in her tiny prison. She had never felt so completely, totally alone in her life.
She tried to fill the silence, humming loudly as she felt her way over to the toilet and carefully relieved herself. The hum sounded weirdly flat with nothing but padded vinyl to echo off of, but it still kept Margaret company for a little while. She made her way back to the bed, trying to think of every song by every singer that she could possibly remember... but after a while, her throat began to feel dry, and the hum dried up into a pathetic croak. There wasn't a faucet in the cube. There wasn't any visible source of food or water at all. Margaret heard the woman's voice echoing uncomfortably in her memory: 'You don't want to find out how many privileges you have right now.' Slowly, her voice trailed away to nothing.
The darkness and silence stretched on for what seemed like hours, until Margaret began to see colored patterns in front of her as her eyes attempted to process a lack of sensory information so complete that her brain simply didn't know how to handle it. Finally, the lights flickered back into life, and the woman's voice returned. "There you go, Maggie," she said, her voice filled with nothing but praise. "You see how much easier it is when you behave for us?"
Margaret sat up, biting back her first few replies out of sheer self-preservation. She'd spent her time in the darkness thinking about just how much she was dependent on her captors' goodwill at the moment, and how very few choices she had right now. She'd read about Patty Hearst and she knew what Stockholm syndrome was, but at the same time she couldn't escape if she was starved or asphyxiated or dehydrated to death. She had to play along for now. "Yes," she said at last, trying to keep her voice polite and respectful. "Am I allowed to ask questions?"
The woman sounded pleased with Margaret's response. "You're allowed to ask," she said, "but we may decide not to answer if we feel that the knowledge would prejudice the results of the experiment. There are certain parameters we're testing with you that we consider to be important variables, and we wouldn't want to have to throw out your data." There was another pause. "Neither would you, Maggie."
Margaret stifled the urge to correct her name again, and instead said, "Why am I here?" She found herself drawing her knees up to her chest, wrapping her pale arms around herself in an attempt at modesty. She couldn't see cameras, but based on the way the woman talked to her, Margaret knew they had to be there. She didn't feel nearly comfortable enough about her body to be seen naked by strangers like this.
Another pause, as if the woman was consulting a chart or a database, and then a reply. "You're participating in an experiment," she said, almost sounding a bit eager for the chance to finally talk about her work. "To determine the amount of time it takes to brainwash an entirely unwilling subject into total compliance, without using torture or physical coercion. I'm sure you can imagine the potential uses for the data we're gathering, so I won't trouble you with the details. You don't really need to know anyway."
She went on, as calmly as if she were speaking to a potential investor and not to a captive test subject. "You were selected for suitability with our experimental criteria-primarily demographic at this time, although it was certainly important to us that you could be removed to a testing environment for an extended period without suspicion-and subsequently renditioned to our private facility for conditioning. Naturally, an important aspect of this experiment involves obtaining genuinely unwilling victims, so we were somewhat constrained when it comes to the usual consent practices. I'm afraid you'll just have to excuse us."
