NEAL STEPHENSON

subchapter on bathroom tissue pools, is to sign onto a subsystem of the main computer system that handles the particular programming project she’s working on. She doesn’t know what the project is-that’s classified-or what it’s called. It’s just her project. She shares it with a few hundred other programmers, she’s not sure exactly who. And every day when she signs on to it, there’s a stack of memos waiting for her, containing new regulations and changes to the rules that they all have to follow when writing code for the project. These regulations make the business with the bathroom tissue seem as simple and elegant as the Ten Commandments.

So she spends until about eleven A.M. reading, rereading, and understanding the new changes in the Project. There are many of these, because this is a Monday morning and Marietta and her higher-ups spent the whole weekend closeted on the top floor, having a catfight about this Project, changing everything.

Then she starts going back over all the code she has previously written for the Project and making a list of all the stuff that will have to be rewritten in order to make it compatible with the new specifications. Basically, she’s going to have to rewrite all of her material from the ground up. For the third time in as many months.

But hey, it’s a job.

About eleven-thirty, she looks up, startled, to see that half a dozen people are standing around her workstation. There’s Marietta. And a proctor. And some male Feds. And Leon the polygraph man.

“I just had mine on Thursday,” she says.

“Time for another one,” Marietta says. “Come on, let’s get this show on the road.”

“Hands out where I can see them,” the proctor says.

Y.T.’s mom stands up, hands to her sides, and starts walking. She walks straight out of the office. None of the other people look up. Not supposed to. Insensitive to co-workers’ needs. Makes the testee feel awkward and singled out, when in fact the polygraph is just part of the whole Fed way of life. She can hear the snapping footsteps of the proctor behind her, walking two paces behind, watching, keeping her eyes on those hands so they can’t be doing anything, like popping a Valium or something else that might throw off the test.

She stops in front of the bathroom door. The proctor walks in front of her, holds it open, and she walks in, followed by the proctor.

The last stall on the left is oversized, big enough for two people. Y~T.’s mom goes in, followed by the proctor, who closes and locks the door. Y.T.’s morn pulls down her panty hose, pulls up her skirt, squats over a pan, pees. The proctor watches every drop go into the pan, picks it up, empties it into a test tube that is already labeled with her name and today’s date.

Then it’s back out to the lobby, followed again by the proctor. You’re allowed to use the elevators on your way to the polygraph room, so you won’t be out of breath and sweaty when you get there.

It used to be just a plain office with a chair and some instru-ments on a table. Then they got the new, fancy polygraph systern. Now it’s like going in for some kind of high-tech medical scan. The room is completely rebuilt, no vestige of its original function, the window covered over, everything smooth and beige and smelling like a hospital. There’s only one chair, in the middle. Y.T.’s mom goes and sits down in it, puts her arms on the arms of the chair, nestles her fingertips and palms into the little depressions that await. The neoprene fist of the blood-pressure cuff gropes blindly, finds her arm, and seizes it. Meanwhile, the room lights are dimming, the door is closing, she’s all alone. The crown of thorns closes over her head, she feels the pricks of the electrodes through her scalp, senses the cool air flowing down over

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