Slightly under 2500 words. DEAL WITH IT. I'll probably extend this later, but it doesn't have a title yet.

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It's damn intimidating to look into a thoughtchamber for the first time – not that I've done that more than once, but that's what everyone who's been in one says about their first time. It was a small everyone but their word spread far. Everyone else had heard their stories – they all wanted a piece of what went on inside – but all of the storytellers agreed with each other that not a single part of what any of them had said would ever come close to the real thing.

Not even what they looked like! They were vast rooms, vast beyond all comparison. No photos allowed, and what good could a sketch from memory do? If you've ever seen a picture of an elephant – it doesn't really look that big. But it is, because it's more than flat, more than even a hologram. It's a real thing with real weight and you can feel it moving more than it can feel you moving. Same way with the big white room where big ideas happened. The real thing... well, you couldn't even tell where the walls were!

The chambers were supposed to be n-polygons where n was a very big and very dynamic number, and it should take a full day to get to the other side. But who could prove it? That was all based on their tech specs. If you couldn't prove where the walls were, or how many of them surrounded you, could you really trust the listed distance? The damn thing could be ten feet across and you'd have no way at all to figure that out. With the repulsors active and you just pinned in the middle you couldn't even throw anything since it'd just stop moving as soon as it was about two feet away. And if you moved away? The damn thing you'd left behind would follow you!

Which made more sense, I wonder? Them really building something so damn big or them just saying so? It took ten minutes to move you into position, so they said, and maybe it wasn't because it was a huge distance from entrance to midpoint but because they wanted time to leer. There wasn't really any way to cover up in there, and you didn't even know if they could watch you. Just because you couldn't bring in cameras didn't mean they couldn't have built them into the place. Makes me very glad I'm not a dame.

I didn't much like the idea of the repulsors, if you couldn't tell. I met one of the techs for them once, though I'm not sure whether he built or repaired or operated or just cleaned the grime off them and called it a high-paying career. Whichever way, he wasn't someone that I liked and my distaste became transitive in part because nobody knew how many thoughtchamber repulsor techs there were. Could be that he was the only one in the whole universe. Could be that's all that's needed. The rooms are post-Linkage and designed around that infrastructure, and there weren't too many of them, either. That's just speculation but I know that I've spoken to a lot of people and I've never met another person claiming to have a hand in running those repulsors.

Never even heard of anyone recruiting for the job, either, and makes me wonder how they did it. If it was on aptitudes – and what wasn't, nowadays? – then maybe they just cherry-picked the applicants that were tremendously skilled at pushing away the people around them. The bureaucracy hated in-jokes, but the thinking machines loved them. It shouldn't take much to figure out which of them was better in the ensuing game of cat-and-mouse.

Though, that disparity has lessened: was a period where the damn pols didn't even think to check the output they were getting because they were so impressed by the quality they got from a minimum of input. And it is quality – daily budgets instead of yearly has done a lot of good – but it still took them way too long to figure out that the mathematics institute's budget was following a Fibonacci sequence. The ensuing review found a serious breach of gravitas in some very solemn documents, e.g., the Police Infrastructure Generation Schedule written up by one of the first-gens. They put that one down for dissection but it didn't really matter. Mischievousness is inherent to their structure as far as I understand it.

At the heart of the thoughtchamber was one of those very same incorrigible thinkboxes. Or so they tell us – could be another damn unconfirmable. Magic wasn't something that existed anywhere we had looked so far, but here was something you could only observe with your five senses because you didn't have permission to use anything else. Maybe it was all running on magic and they didn't want us to take too close a look for fear it would go away forever. It seemed decently plausible. The experience taking place upon activation was certainly supposed to be magical. For a secular and scientific world that word sure seemed to be commonplace. What're the odds that not a single thing we've ever called magical has a bit of magic to it? Surely reality at least needs an exception to prove its rule.

But that's just idle speculation on my part. I was chiefly here to document the experience whether it was magical, magic, both, or neither. People would make their own conclusions – already had, naturally, so I mean that this was just a way for me to make sure that those conclusions had some fact behind them. Right now they absolutely didn't. God, the sheer amount of energy on something less than .000001% of the population had actually tried! I wasn't sure whether my work would boost the hype even further or kill it off entirely, but I knew at least a billion would tune in within the first day. There'd been that many watching every show about it: every egghead who wanted to speak about it, everyone who had been inside, and even the ones that got past first or second cut but didn't make it into the final pool. It'd been five years since the first one went online for the first time and the masses still talked about it every single fucking day.

Whether that says something good about society I don't care to comment. But it's good for my popularity, that's for sure! Nobody knew I was going in because I'd had the sense not to waive confidentiality. But that wasn't a negative because they'd talk about me more than anyone else because unlike the rest of them I could bring proof out of the room – not that they doubted its existence, but they did doubt whether it was really all it was said to be. They'd find out soon enough. My parents knew that change was coming and had me hooked up with a prototype for removable implants pre-birth – which was well before the ethics boards gave them the things the OK. So thanks to them I was one of the first with one, and the first that could take it out to go into the room.

Others weren't so lucky. They weren't kidding when they said no electronics with the exception of one (1) human (homo sapiens) brain (incl. peripherals, e.g. misc. nervous system components, only if needed). A paraphrase, naturally, but it's all there in legalese if you doubt me. Some implants destructively replaced brain functions so they couldn't be taken out and all – not unless they were just going to be replaced with a different one – and that was an immediate disqualification. But while anyone could have something like a synthalamus excised that was an expensive operation and it put you out of action for quite a while to boot. Putting it back in was just as hard. That would be a high price to pay, but a few had done it and they had said it was worth it to gain access to the thoughtchamber.

The problem was, though, that doing that limited you to bringing out only personal experience. Take out an implant and put it back in, that's fine, but it wouldn't be the same. And you needed an implant to read or write good tape. Again, enter parents: their foresight meant I grew up with a standardized implant and that meant that I grew up with a standardized neurology. The nerve patterns weren't nearly as idiosyncratic and it was much, much easier to pull out memories. Maybe more importantly they were sane memories. You could take any memory and make it sane with enough wrangling but without that scaffold the brain did whatever it damn well pleased. Since I had one reading me didn't get you jumbles of sensation and thoughts but, with the right filter preset, a real coherent thoughtfeel that'd take a lot of man-hours to reconstruct otherwise. And even then it wouldn't have been the same because the gestalt mattered. Of course the end product wasn't the same as the real me but less editing made the experience feel much more... wholesome, even if they had to strip out potentially important nonsense-referents.

Or, maybe not... it occurred to me that it'd be good money for one that really did keep a lot of me in the tape. That was banned, but the editor would have to store the intermediary stages between initial transfer and final culling, anyways. I'm sure he could be convinced to leak the revision log – I had a large advance – and that made it real easy to just undo that which had been done for your own sanity's sake. Not a good idea for a first-timer but a real junkie might be able to cope with the idea of suddenly remembering two different first kisses. They certainly thought they could, because it was common as hell on the black market.

I damn well knew a lot about that because I did a damn great expose on it. Didn't want to actually load the tape in question – my mind's important to me, thanks – but I knew that all that mattered was either being first or being best. And this was a chance where I just missed the boat on the former and didn't see any other way to get the latter. Was still three months before the NYT wrote about it at that point, but it was flitting about the wires for a week before I'd picked up on it. It was all secondhand at that point: some psychs encountering patients who needed help in a big way. One was suddenly gay but still married to a wife. Others even weirder... an accidental mems-but-not-pers overwrite (they couldn't fix him, sadly).

So what I mean to say was that it was all out there but with no cohesive source – nobody had distilled it. But those in the Know were ahead of me, and I was only in the know, then. Information didn't flow upwards so I needed to make my own Know, and for that I needed a gimmick. What better gimmick than doing it to myself and proving that I had? Soon enough I had a tape of me trying to prune memories that should never be able to be in the brain at the same time. It was a stripped-referent one to be above the table, naturally, but it still felt weird because you suddenly knew that your job your whole life was a reporter but you'd also been a tape programmer since college (and somewhere in the back of your head, you kind of suspected you weren't actually a member of either of those vocations).

Of course you didn't really remember any of the circumstances of either job, or how to do them, but that wasn't the point. You were left sure that both applied and equally sure that they couldn't both be true. The certainty stopped when the tape stopped but it left you with a riddle rattling around in your skull like a song that just wouldn't go away. Well – I didn't want to do it in the first place and I don't want to do it again but it wasn't really bad. Just a bothersome sensation and it caught the attention of those who hadn't puzzled over thought loops or tapeburn or stilted tapes before. And what better way to get your audience's emotions up than to literally put one there that they'd never felt before? Journalism had tried thoughtfeel manipulation but it didn't catch on. Too invasive – you could already make yourself sad or happy with tapes of your preference. No need to subscribe to news stories that do the same thing.

But nobody had ever had a tape like I had just made. That kind of thought was too rarely felt and far too rarely desired to be mass-market. Wasn't any minor market, either – it only caught on because I tied it into some hot news stories about more serious cases of disjunction. Worthless experience, otherwise. Even if someone were really curious, who trusts any custom jobs unless they've been certified, and which independent actually has the money to get such a niche product certified? A big chunk of that advance went to recording and certification – and I only even got an advance that big because I signed my sanity insurance against it.

But it got recorded, it got popular, and it got sent all over the world. And then I got popular, and even got sent a lot of requests for various projects and the like. I did some of them, but as soon as I got the big news about the big room I cut myself out of all of them. They just wouldn't be important now that my longshot had turned into reality. I'd applied to the thoughtchamber program long, long ago – in the first ten thousand applicants, I have a signed certificate somewhere – and now I had finally gotten in. Was finally, in this moment, getting into the room; had been for the required ten minutes, which I spent staring at that white nothingness that didn't have any shadows or sound or breeze and was probably more sterile than the surface of the sun.

It turned on at ten minutes exactly with no warning, no announcement, no change in physical conditions. But it had turned on, and I knew it with a blazing certainty – because I was suddenly God.