The Conformity by John Hornor Jacobs Page B

the others on us, and that makes me very nervous. It’s one thing to be close to a girl, a beautiful girl, and another thing to be close to one in front of other people. I feel like I’m on a stage.
    Boom .
    With Casey’s face so close to mine that I can see the delightful spray of freckles on her nose, I’m flooded with memories of all the lives I’ve known, each one bound in some sort of love. I’ve eaten those memories—sex with men and women, the fanatical whirlwind of ceaseless love, the mania of the bloodlust of war, the murderous pleasure in death and the causing of it.
    She stirs things in me I’d rather keep tamped down.
    Her lips are parted, moist, eminently kissable, but I move away because the cacophony of memory and emotion is almost too much to bear. And if I became swept away in it? What then? Could I burn out her mind? My own? Start speaking in other languages again?
    No.
    It’s only after I move away—leaving her there, staring at me with an inscrutable look on her face—that I realize she never really needed my help at all. She’s got her telekinetic arm that can do anything. It was just a pretense to be close.
    Weird how my intelligence varies with proximity to girls. You can live a thousand lives, have countless memories of love and youth, but it never really prepares you for the real thing.
    Davies gives us guns and heavy ballistic-nylon bags full of armaments. I’m not real keen on toting all this crap around, but Tap looks like he’s got a boner and Danielle looks like Santa just gave her a puppy, except this puppy fires one thousand rounds a second and has a grenade launcher.
    I find some MREs—my best friends when all light is gone—and I dig into one with gusto. CHICKEN SPAGHETTI in a bag is the breakfast of champions.
    Negata prowls the room, looking like a jaguar caged. He opens a door at the far side of the room, and I move to join him.
    Beyond the door is blackness, absolute and, I will admit, terrifying. (You have someone stick you in a pitch-black hole for a week and see how you come out on the other side.)
    When he walks forward, vanishing from sight, I reach out for him. He’s swallowed by darkness. “Negata, don’t—”
    I hear a mechanical clank, and suddenly lights flash, flicker, and buzz. An electrical hum. The door swings shut behind us. We stand in a corridor much like the rough-hewn one we traveled before, twenty feet wide and equally tall, but this one stretches off into infinity, a straight passage through the heart of the mountain, flickering lights bursting into incandescence every fifty feet. The floor is smooth, like that of a garage. To my right I notice a pair of oversized golf carts near charging stations.
    â€œSo, we’re taking those?”
    â€œYes.”
    Negata walks to one of the carts, unplugs it from the wall, and chucks his head at me, indicating I should take charge of the other one.
    We pull the pair to the door to the armory. He stops me on the way back.
    â€œAs you lure the Conformity away from here, I want you to think about the sensation of being noticed.”
    â€œI don’t get it.”
    â€œThe attention of the entity behind the Conformity will be upon you. I want you to become aware of the sensation.”
    â€œWhy?”
    He turns and opens the door to the armory. “Because you cannot become unnoticeable until you know what it is to be conspicuous.” He holds the door for me. “Understood?”
    â€œOkay.”
    â€œThis is good.”
    Inside, everyone’s geared up. We usher them into the corridor and load up the electric carts. Ammo, weapons, MREs. Nothing more. No personal items. No baggage. We’re either refugees or nomads now. Or both. I can’t decide.
    I stop Davies before he slides behind the wheel of the cart. “I need to talk with you, just for a moment.”
    â€œWhat is it? Time is