CHAPTER 2: Paranoia Later, Organization Now

  Jing had exactly fifty pairs of UniSpeak translator earbuds in her messenger bag. Either a coincidence or proof that someone had planned this very carefully.

  “Okay,” she said in Mandarin, then switched to English. “Everyone who is not fluent in English, raise your hand.”

  About forty hands went up. They'd explored and found more people over the past few hours.

  The neighbourhood was bigger than they'd first thought. Eighty-seven people total had gathered in what someone had started calling the plaza, though it was really just the intersection where the five impossible streets met. A Korean grocery store sat next to what looked like a German bakery. A McMansion with a Texas flagpole standing guard out front was surrounded by a rowhouse from Queens, New York on one side, and a log cabin house from Northern Quebec on the other. The variance in architectural style made Jing's brain hurt.

  She held up one of the translator earbuds. “These translate in real-time. Mandarin, English, Spanish, Arabic, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Hindi, and Russian. Fifty-three languages total. My company makes them for international business.”

  “How do they work?” That was Samir, the biologist. He had a careful, analytical voice that reminded Jing of her university professors.

  “Neural processing, pattern recognition, context algorithms.” Jing pulled out her tablet, showing the technical specs. “They learn as you speak. The first few hours might be rough, but they adapt to dialects, slang, and technical vocabulary in time.”

  “But they need the internet to update the language databases, don’t they?” Samir interrupted.

  Jing paused. “Yes. Normally. But here,” She gestured around them. “We can still connect to the Internet. No updates. Read-only, but it works. Maybe they're pulling from cached data?”

  “Or maybe someone modified them,” Samir said quietly.

  Jing had checked her bag three times. The translator earbuds were exactly as she'd packed them: still in their charging case, LED indicators showing full battery. Except she'd been loading them into her car in Shenzhen. Now they were here, wherever here was, and they worked despite every technical reason they shouldn't.

  “Does it matter?” That was Ian, the Canadian. He had taken to pacing to wear off his energy. “If they work, we should use them, because we can't organize if we can't talk to each other.”

  “It matters,” Samir said, “because it means someone anticipated we'd need translation. Which means this wasn't random.”

  Silence spread through the crowd. Jing saw the realization dawn on faces. The same realization that had hit her hours ago when she'd counted the earbuds. Fifty devices. Almost a hundred people. There isn’t enough for everyone, but every pair could share a language and have enough.

  “I'll take one.” A woman stepped forward: tall, Black, graying hair cut military short. Maureen, the retired British colonel. “I speak English and French. I can work with anyone who needs either.”

  “I speak Spanish and English,” said Lisette, the woman with the little girl. “Josie and I can share one.”

  More hands went up. Jing handed out the translator earbuds, watching strangers perform a careful dance as they tried to organize themselves. Rashid, an older Middle Eastern man, grabbed a few and immediately began speaking Arabic to a cluster of people who had been standing in silent frustration. Their faces transformed as the translation kicked in, words becoming comprehensible.

  “This is incredible,” someone said in what the translator earbud translated as Portuguese. “I can understand everyone.”

  “The latency is almost zero,” added another voice. Japanese, Jing's brain supplied, before the translation caught up. “How is the processing this fast?”

  Because it shouldn't be, and Jing knew that better than anyone. She'd spent three years demoing these devices to skeptical buyers, explaining the slight delay, the occasional mistranslation, and the need for context to work properly. These earbuds were working better than they ever had in the lab.

  She felt the panic rise in her, but pushed it away. Focus, she told herself. Paranoia later. Organization now.

  Reading the statistics from the master language tracking app on her tablet, Jing noted the linguistic diversity. She counted representatives from at least thirty different languages. Which made sense, she supposed, if you were to sample humanity. Take people from every major language group, every continent, every part of--

  “Where's South America?” someone asked.

  Jing looked up. A man with a Brazilian accent was scanning the crowd. A few hands shot up.

  “Australia?” Jing called out.

  “I'm Australian,” said a stocky man with a buzz cut. Chad, wearing what looked like a police uniform. “Found two others so far. That's it.”

  Samir sidled up to Jing. “It’s a distribution from around the world, but I’ve noticed a few patterns. About half speak English, experience ranks from native to novice.”

  “And I’m speculating, but most seem to be educated,” Ian mentioned.

  “Out of eighty-seven people, that's just over half.” Maureen's expression was thoughtful. “They wanted English speakers. Or at least, they wanted a plurality who could communicate without technology.”

  “Whoever ‘they’ are. But why take Jing with her translator earbuds, yet most of us are English speakers?” Ian questioned.

  “From what I’ve heard so far, many of us are educated. A lot of commerce and science is English-centric, which might account for the number of English speakers. Curious…” Samir mused.

  Jing looked down at her tablet and ran through the information. They wanted us to be able to communicate, but not too easily. They wanted diversity, but not too much. They wanted...

  What? What did you want when you kidnapped a small group of people and put them…where?

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  Ian sniffed loudly, breaking her concentration. “Huh,” he said.

  “Something?” Jing asked.

  “No, it’s probably nothing. Smells of all the buildings combined,” he replied.

  “Speaking of buildings, we should map everything,” she said abruptly. “See if there's a pattern to the placement. Maybe it tells us something about their intentions.”

  “Good idea,” Maureen said. “We also need to establish basic logistics: food, water, and medical supplies. I saw what looked like a clinic two streets over. An NHS urgent care, best I can tell. We should inventory what's there.”

  “I'll help,” offered a woman in scrubs. Her name was Maria, a doctor from S?o?Paulo, one of the South Americans.

  The crowd began to self-organize. Jing watched it happen with the detached, analytical part of her mind. Maureen's military background meant people deferred to her authority instinctively. Ian's restless energy made him good at rallying people to action. Samir's analytical mind helped others feel like there was logic to this, some pattern they could decode.

  And then there was Karen.

  The blonde woman hadn’t spoken during the language talk, but she moved forward now, her voice ringing out as someone who expected people to listen. “We need to establish a governing structure. Form committees, assign roles-”

  “Committees?” Lisette barked. “We've been here less than a day, and you want to form committees?”

  “Organization prevents chaos,” Karen said. Her accent screamed money. That American upper-class inflection that Jing had learned to identify from years of sales calls. “If we don't establish rules now, things will fall apart.”

  “Rules,” Lisette repeated. “Let me guess. You want to be in charge of making these rules?”

  “I have experience in organizational management.”

  “You have experience bossing people around.” Lisette shifted Josie to her other hip. “There's a difference.”

  Jing saw Karen's face flush. Saw her open her mouth to respond. Saw the flash of anger that came from someone not used to being challenged.

  “Hey,” Ian said, stepping between them. “Maybe we table the governance discussion until we know what we're dealing with? Like, basic survival first, political structure later?”

  “This is basic survival,” Karen insisted. “Without organization-”

  “Without food and water, organization doesn't matter,” Maureen cut in. Her voice wasn't loud, but it carried authority. “Miss...” She paused.

  “Blackstone, Karen Blackstone,” Karen said it in a way that indicated you should know she was important.

  “Miss Blackstone. I appreciate your concern for structure. But right now, we need reconnaissance. Jing is correct about mapping the area. We need to know our resources, our boundaries, and our constraints. We also need to find out if others are remaining. Then we can discuss how to manage everything.”

  It wasn't quite a dismissal, but Karen clearly heard it that way. She stepped back, jaw tight, and Jing saw her file away the slight. That was going to be a problem later. People like Karen were used to their authority being accepted without question; they didn't handle challenges well.

  “Okay, technology. Why is the internet frozen? Why can we access it despite there being no networks? Maybe we could set up a local network with our existing technology?” Ian asked.

  “I can work on that, if it will help,” offered a younger man with glasses. Chinese, early twenties maybe. He'd introduced himself as Wei, a computer science student in Beijing. “My dorm room is here, and I have a lot of equipment I can use for testing. Miss Zhào, if you want, I can examine the translator software, see if there are any obvious changes in the code.”

  Jing nodded, then looked around at the growing crowd. More people were arriving, drawn by the gathering. She counted ninety-three now. No, ninety-five. Two more emerged from a house that looked Mediterranean, speaking what she guessed was Greek.

  How many more are there? She wondered. How big is this neighbourhood? How many people did they take?

  “Food!” someone shouted. A man ran up from one of the side streets, out of breath. He spoke in German, the translation crackling through the earbuds: “The refrigerators! They're full. All of them. We checked three houses; they all have fresh food!”

  Murmurs spread through the crowd. Jing saw people breaking away, heading back to their assigned houses to check. She caught Ian's eye, saw the same thought reflected there.

  They're feeding us. Keeping us comfortable.

  Which meant this wasn't about killing them. They weren’t interested in studying them from afar. This was different; something or someone required people to stay alive, healthy, and interacting.

  Something that required them to build a community.

  “We need a census,” Maureen said. She'd pulled out a small notebook: actual paper, Jing noticed, not digital. “Complete count of everyone here. Names, ages, skills, medical conditions. Can you help with that, Miss Zhào?”

  “Call me Jing. And yes.” She pulled up a new spreadsheet on her tablet. “I'll set up a form. We can pass it around and get everyone's information. I can print off the forms in my apartment.”

  “I'll help distribute it,” Ian offered. “I can run it to different sections, make sure everyone fills it out.”

  “And returning to cataloguing the resources,” Samir added. “Every house or building with medical supplies, every food source, every tool or piece of equipment that might be useful.”

  They were falling into roles, Jing realized. Maureen organizing. Ian connecting. Samir analyzing. And herself... what was her role? Translator? Technologist? The person who noticed when things didn't quite add up.

  The sky changed.

  It was subtle. Just a slight dimming, like a cloud passing over the sun. Except there were no clouds. Jing looked up and saw the sky ripple like water disturbed by a stone.

  “Did you see that?” Ian breathed.

  “Everyone can see it,” Lisette said, holding Josie tighter. The little girl whimpered.

  The ripple spread across the entire visible sky, then stabilized. The colour shifted. Still blue, but a slightly different shade. Like someone had adjusted the saturation on a display screen.

  Because that's what it was, Jing realized with a cold certainty. It’s not a real sky. A projection. A simulation of a sky, and they'd just watched someone adjust the settings.

  “I am not comforted by the implication of that,” Samir murmured.

  “We're in a box,” she said aloud. “An artificial environment. That's not real sky, it's--”

  “A hologram,” Wei finished. He was staring up, glasses reflecting the false blue. “Or something like it. Advanced enough to mimic atmospheric scattering, cloud formation...” He trailed off.

  Ian spoke next. “There is no technology on Earth that can do this. Along with the wall at the end of the street… I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, Toto.”

  “Everything we're seeing might be artificial,” Samir quietly added. “The houses, the streets, maybe even the-”

  He stopped. Bent down and pulled up a handful of grass.

  Real grass. Jing could see it; she smelt the green scent of it. Real dirt clinging to real roots.

  “Not everything,” Samir murmured. “Some of it's real. But how much?”

  Karen laughed: high, slightly hysterical. “Oh my god! It must have been those magic mushrooms I had last night!”

  “No. There are too many clues to indicate this is real. And we’ve also got group consensus. It’s not a dream or a hallucination, Karen.” Ian stressed her name a little too sarcastically.

  “And yet,” Maureen said quietly, “here we are.”

  Jing looked around the plaza. Ninety-five people now. No, ninety-eight: three more emerging from a house that looked Scandinavian. Nearly a hundred humans, ripped from their lives, placed in an impossible neighbourhood with technology that shouldn't work and a sky that wasn't real.

  People were adapting. Already. Less than twelve hours in this place, and they were building systems, sharing information, organizing themselves into a community.

  Is that what they want to see? Jing wondered. How fast can we adapt? How well can we cooperate under stress?

  Or was it something else? Something darker, hiding behind the comfortable houses and full refrigerators and sky that was just slightly wrong?

  “Jing,” Ian said, pulling her from her thoughts. “The translators. How long do the batteries last?”

  “Forty-eight hours continuous use. Why?”

  “Because we need to know our constraints. Everything we depend on, everything that might fail.” He was fidgeting again, fingers tapping a rapid rhythm against his leg. “We have tools and our residences. But they control the environment. Which means they control us.”

  “Not if we understand the system,” Samir said. He kept turning the blade of grass in his fingers, studying it for any clues. “Everything runs on rules: physics, biology, even whatever this place is. We need to figure out which ones apply here.”

  He glanced toward his trailer. “I can start by checking environmental samples. I’ve got a portable scope in there, and a bigger one that’ll let me see things down to the cellular level.”

  “And then what?” Lisette demanded. “What do we do then?”

  No one had an answer.