The room I’m in now, the room the pod dropped me into… It’s weird. All the walls and floor are made of panels that look like they lock into each other and could be slid apart, like the parts of a dollhouse. Pretty much everything is blank and white. Even plain white, 3D-printed furniture. The only thing that’s not all white is the people, the tools, and the artwork, and this is where it gets stranger. When I crawled out of the pod, I felt like I’d walked into a surreal canvas dimension. About a dozen people with greasy hair, rumpled gray scrubs, and wide eyes stared at me, frozen in the middle of whatever project they were working on. Paintings on the walls, typing into holographic keyboards, laser-whittling into a hunk of wood. They all looked around at each other, and I felt oddly like I’d barged into someone’s exclusive book club. I made a little half-hearted wave. Nobody waved back. A man seated near the pod set down the mound of concrete he was sculpting and crossed over to me. He was fairly tall, and a little on the side of thick-set, with a scruffy black beard. I thought he might be about thirty. “Condolences,” he said. “You’re in the Think Tank.” “The Think Tank?” I repeated. A gray-haired woman sprang up from her chair, the holographic keyboard fizzing as her leg passed through it. “How recently were you brought in?” she asked. “How shuffled?” said a middle-aged man, his hands shaking slightly as he held a paintbrush tipped with red pigment. “Are you shuffled?” “News from outside?” demanded another woman. “Easy, easy!” said the man who’d first approached me, laying a hand on my shoulder and angling himself between them and me. “She just got here. Give her a minute before grilling her.” The others eased back into their chairs, but resentfully, and they never stopped staring at me. The nicer man jerked his head for me to follow him and headed back to his sculpting table. I hurried after him in a way that I hoped didn’t look like scurrying. He settled the lump of concrete in the crook of his knee and chipped at it with a tarnished pick. “Pull up some chair,” he said. I reached back and tried to, but the plastic chair was riveted to the floor. He snickered, though not unkindly. “It’s the little things. You’ve got to find them in a place like this. So, what do you do?” I glanced around the room. “‘Do?’” “You repeat things. Got it.” “No, I… I’m just… I saw a man’s mind extracted from his brain just a few minutes ago.” He raised his eyebrows, nodding. A large chunk of concrete broke off under his pick, and he murmured a curse. “That’s an introduction. Sets the tone right off the bat. They left your brain in?” I drew back. “Do they usually extract people’s minds?” “I’ll say this about the Heartless: they’re efficient. Somebody can’t give them artwork for inspiration? They cut their losses, drain their brains, and use that.” For a few moments, I couldn’t breathe. So that was what I’d seen. A gritty, unfiltered form of inspiration that took much of the mind with it. I wondered if it was worth it. Was that kind of inspiration energy more powerful, or were the Heartless just lazy? “Hey. Blink,” the man said. “You’re starting to look like them already.” I peeked around him to see the room’s other inhabitants. About fifteen feet away, a woman with frizzy hanks of hair that used to be braided sprawled on the floor, smearing paint across it with broad strokes of her hand. Twisting my head, I tried to figure out what it was she was painting. Much of it was blocks of undetailed color, but I thought maybe it was… a human torso, separated from its legs. Chains coiled around both the torso and the legs, each attached to a different speeder bumper that were ripping the figure in half. My shoulders rose to my ears. Across the room, I saw the shaky-handed man painting with big splatters of bloodred and black, and another shading a charcoal sketch on the wall of a grotesque dog-headed beast moaning toward the moon. I could practically hear its tortured whines. “You said this place is called the Think Tank?” I whispered. “Yep.” The man blew across the concrete block, and a spray of sand landed on my lap. “We make the art, they consume it.” “How long have you all been in here?” “Me, a couple years. The others?” He craned his neck to see across the room. “Laina’s been here the longest, but time is hard to keep track of in here. We lost our calendar a while back.” “They took your calendar?” “Yeah, Ichabod. He was keeping tally marks under his clothes, where they wouldn’t see. I guess they brain-drained him, or shuffled him.” I drew my knees up and dug my fingers into my hair. “What does that mean?” He looked up at me for the first time in a couple minutes, and his eyebrows pinched together. “You don’t look so great. First day. Why don’t you take a nap or something, get settled before you learn about anything else?” I made myself fold my hands. “No, no, I want to know. I need to know. You said they watch you? Do they have cameras and microphones?” “Yeah.” “Are there things we’re not supposed to talk about?” “They don’t watch us that closely. Just want to make sure we’re working steadily. Got to keep production rolling.” “So you…” I glanced around the room at all the gorey artwork, and wondered what the writers were working on. “...You make horrible art for them?” “We make art, period.” “But it’s…” I leaned closer to him, whispering, “It is horrible! Why are they painting that instead of something beautiful?” He laughed. “We start out thinking like that. But after a while, it gets hard to come up with beautiful things, and we have to make something that has an effect, so… That’s what we make.” I looked down at his lump of concrete. I couldn’t tell yet what it was meant to be, but maybe it would be something as grotesque as the others. As far as inspiration theory goes, it’s sound. Sort of. Inspiration extractors could get energy from any kind of reaction to a piece of artwork, and disturbing art takes minimal thought while still yielding a strong effect. Less effort for more energy. Mathematically, it makes sense. But that’s not what art is supposed to be! That’s a horrible, industrial way to approach it! I don’t think I can say that too loudly, though. The other Think Tank artists aren’t that far away, and the Heartless might be listening. I really hope I am hiding from the cameras. Anyway. I asked the beard man what ‘shuffling’ was, and his smile… stiffened. “‘Shuffling’ is when the Heartless extract only some of your mind and put it somewhere else,” he said. He gestured to a woman typing on a holographic keyboard. “She’s not sure what her name is, ‘cause she has memories from at least three different people. Might be Sarah, might be Olaris, might be Eisleen. But all three of them did a bit of writing, so the Heartless picked out the writing parts and put them all in her head.” “They can do that?” I whispered. Again, theoretically, it was possible. I had just seen that woman in scrubs extract a man’s entire mind from his brain. Why couldn’t she parse it out in pieces? But being able to do that meant the Heartless had to have extremely advanced brain-mapping technology. They had to know exactly which portions of the extracted mind related to which topics. That kind of advancement could only come from rapid, and most likely unethical, testing. On humans. If anyone’s listening to this, please please please, tell the Artship Guild. “Of course, some of us just get information extracted.” The bearded man tapped his head with the handle of his pick. “Weird blank patches. Can’t remember my childhood, or most of what I did, but I do remember sculpting. Some bits and bobs of other things, too.” “Do you… remember your name?” I asked. “Well, in a past life, I was called Oren Ten.” Silas, Ava, Sarge, Kal, Vedod, please be listening! Oh, I really, really hope you’re listening to this! If anyone else hears this, please send this message to the Sanguine Sojourner, captained by Ava Islestorm! Oren’s here, and he’s alive! He doesn’t remember everything, but he’s here! Ah! I’ve got to be quiet now. They turned off the lights in the Think Tank to make us go to sleep. But here’s one last thing that’s very, very important! Silas, the machine? The machine that Ava made? The one that helps us… do our job? Oren doesn’t remember it. I’ve tried talking to him about it since, and he doesn’t remember. That means the Heartless extracted that part of his mind. That means they might know about it.