IN (4)

"Follow me" says m-Carmel, who surprises Carson when she ushers him out of the room into what he expects to be blinding sunlight and heat coming off of the patio. In fact she leads him along a grid of hallways

making more lefts and rights than he can track.


"What's happening?" he says as he tires and stumbles, catching a foot on the carpet.

M-Carmel turns to help him up. "Sorry," she says. "You've been slipping between IN and OUT too often. The stats are against you now, and since you haven't been able to go completely IN we thought you'd be okay just walking out of the room."


"How long has it been?" he says.

"Twenty-eight days. Not long really. Your situation presents the classic anomalous pattern of an m-designate. That is, you want IN consciously, but you're unable to maintain it. We're still understanding this process. All we have to go on, really, are patterns."

"So you mean that's it for me?" says Carson.

"Well, it's pretty clear to us. We can usually tell after a month."

"That a person will go IN?"

"Yes. After a month the patterns are clear. It may vary from one to three months before one goes INpermanent, but your patterns have been clear. If we hadn't been quite so busy I'd have taken you out yesterday, but you weren't in real distress until today."


"So this is it then," he says. "It's not going to work for me."

"Doesn't look like it."

"And I'm not the only one, I suppose."

"I know, I know," says m-Carmel with some exasperation. "We all hope that going IN is going to, you know, save the world from conflict. That's what a lot of MCDIKC people say in public.They remind us that it will be like Facebook or Twitter in 2011 - cause a permanent springtime for humanity - absolutely change things. But ..." she gestures with both hands now, pointing off into the distance, "now we have this."

Carson follows her hands, but cannot get a grip on what she means. What her speech reminds him of, though are the ecstatic online messages of the various experts. One pre-eminent theologian turned cultural activist delivered the first online speech to reach over one billion views. She said things like "IN would answer the problems of ethnic and religious strife, she said, because it would move humans toward one another." Or, "Once we were all IN we'd recognize the commonness of each others consciousness and that would finally move us into spiritual oneness." She spoke of how social networking had only been a whiff of the in-touchness that IN offered. "We are heading toward the ultimate metaphysics of being and knowing one another," she concluded. "We will overcome the constraints of the body. We will detoxify the earthly environment by removing our bodies from it, and placing them into everlasting pods of holy-oneness. I will be IN you and you will be IN me!"

"What's this? says Carson, facing m-Carmel.


"This," she says with a smile, looking up at a stained ceiling tile, "is either a leaky roof or a plumbing problem. Nobody knows for sure, because nobody knows where to look."