IN (5)

There were indeed moist-looking rust-coloured stains running along the junctions of the asymmetric arrays of ceiling tiles. Not that Carson wanted to pay attention to this. He'd had some experience with plumbing in his past. In fact he'd re-plumbed the kitchen and bath of a house he and Petra had bought as a fixer-upper. How long ago was that? But he had no intention of letting on that he might know something about it, or be able to make sense of whatever it was the lurked above the sullied facade of white. He'd never been employed in any capacity as a maintenance man, still it crossed his mind that he may blogged about solving a plumbing problem, or worse he could have answered a question posed by one of his family members on Facebook. Surely that wasn't what they'd called him out for. They must have prospects more skilled, more apt, than he was to do this kind of thing. He'd been a marginally successful teacher in a middle-school - Grade five. Of course he'd been only too willing to give it up in favour of lying on a divan, porting IN, and allowing the dictates of his own conscious desires to take control. Had he betrayed himself? There had been the odd moments when he'd imagined buying an old house or some other interesting building, in some still secluded corner, even a desolate wilderness outpost away from the continual streams of noise in which everyone else seemed to find comfort, fix it up and live as a romantic on his own Walden pond.

"You're thinking it, aren't you?" says m-Carmel.

"Pardon? Thinking? What?" 

"You've slowed up, but I can still sense residuals of your INthink. You're thinking about those stains aren't you, and plumbing, and what's caused the problem, and maybe even a little bit about getting your hands on something that needs fixing."

"What?"

"We knew you would. Well I knew it. I called it. Most of the DIKCs didn't think so. They thought that we had to go with someone who had been one in unINlife, but I said that you didn't want someone who was jaded. Who had gone IN to get out of whatever they had been doing. You'd want someone who had been interested in it, but didn't do it for a living. For money. That would never work. They'd never do it without some demanding some kind of this or that for their troubles."

"Wait. What? What are you talking about?"

"Hey, don't worry about it! It's going to work out just fine. Once you see the options and the setup we've got to offer. You're going to like this I think. Maybe it was only twenty-eight days, but I was pretty confident of my call."

"I thought that I, that I was the one who wanted, you know, OUT."

M-Carmel turns to him now and touches him for the first time. She takes hold of him with both hands just above the elbows and, at arms length looks Carson in the eye. "You need to believe meon this. You did make the call for unIN, but when you come out your options are narrowed to what MCDIKC thinks is most expedient. They'll lay out the options. I'll be there of course to steady you, and offer clarifications, but you're going to have to make a decision that's kind of irrevocable."

"So I'm OUT, but I can't just leave and start again?"

"It's just a few steps to the unIN debriefing lounge. We'll sit there and relax. You'll have something to drink, something to eat, and I'll lay it all out for you. That'll help I think. It'll be all right, you'll see. Maybe I said too much too soon."