White Matter

Afterwards

"Here's to professional suicide," James raised his glass of sparkling wine. "Hopefully not mine."

The press conference had finished some time ago. Back here at the Spurious offices the post-function celebration was winding down to a small hard core of stragglers, those who perhaps had no better home to go to. In my group, it was just James, Miranda, and myself.

Coriolis and Graeme had never even shown up. Off somewhere doing press interviews, I presumed.

This was the in-house celebration. Sombre though the mood was, it was deemed a celebration because the conference had been a success. As it should have been, given the degree of scripting and rehearsal. It was a celebration because all the work that had gone into preparing for the day was now over. Whatever happened next, it was no longer up to us.

The venue was a conference centre across town. In a live video link from the basement lab, Miranda had taken her place in the machine as James had put it through its paces (from off screen – James's condition for agreeing to the show was that he take no publically attributable role). The demonstration exercises were similar to those he had used on me when I first joined up, with flash cards, random phrases, and lie detector tests. The difference this time being the greater accuracy and sophistication of the results, including an emotional monitor that showed Miranda's initial nervousness dissipate to be replaced by a sense of pride. The only edgy moment came during question time when one of the reporters asked her to visualise the Taj Mahal. They'd been prepared for something like this and a suitably surreal replica was duly produced on screen, courtesy, James later told me, of Technician Jeff who was stationed in the shed with Google Images and a picture fuzzification app.

"Well I'm gone." James rose wearily to his feet, stretched his already long limbs, and tottered off to find his way home.

We were in the Inspiration Room, its décor as garish as ever and the beanbags augmented with chairs from the open plan next door. The table that had supplied us with finger food and bottles of wine was now a mess of crumbs, spills and empties.

That left just the two of us. I hadn't asked Miranda about her arrangements for getting home, and nothing in her demeanour suggested she was in any hurry to be leaving.

"Are you honestly comfortable with all this deception? You're the public face of it now, you know. It's already getting hits on YouTube, and once it's out there you can never put it back. What happens when someone figures out what's going on? You know they're bound to sooner or later."

"It was something we had to do, Kurt."

"I suppose so. Gotta say, though, you did a great job. Totally inhabited the part. Entirely convincing in the role."

"Well, I was only playing myself." Almost a joke.

After James had left it felt odd, just the two of us sitting there facing each other on office chairs. Too much like we were still at work. At my suggestion we relocated to the now empty beanbags, an act that was in itself highly incongruous for Miranda. After slipping off her shoes, she had crouched down and patted the bean bag into a chair-like configuration before taking her seat. Still wearing the same formal business outfit in which she'd appeared at the scanner demonstration, with a knee-length skirt and pantyhose, she arranged herself in an upright position with legs stretched out before her. I'd been paying attention to the frequency with which she had refilled her wine glass, and while the number was not especially high – she wasn't drunk, not even close – it added up to more than I'd seen her get through at any previous after-work gathering. Perhaps her relief at the press conference being over at last had brought about this long-awaited loosening up. Our beanbags were positioned side by side – like two armchairs around a fire, only without the fire – and oriented away from the other stragglers, a group of engineers happily and noisily lost in some incoherent dispute of their own on the far side of the room. I'd been going easy on the wine myself, just enough to fall into a mood of comfortable intimacy. Short of other landmarks, I found my focus being drawn to her stockinged feet as they flexed and wriggled with each slight movement of her body, as if they too were enjoying an unexpected freedom.