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days to travel from the airstrip in Brussels to the station.
    He forced himself to continue paging through the archaically styled booklet.
    All orders are to be obeyed without question. Failure to comply with any order is grounds for expulsion from Synchronicity …
    He flipped through the booklet once and came back to an explanation of what would happen first at Synchronicity. He scanned line after line of meaningless crap. Then something caught his attention. Cold.
    One of your initial tasks will be selecting gear for your stay. You will be allowed to select one set of gear from many with slight variations. Each set is a full body suit in which you will spend all of your time. The gear is composed of light plastic. It will cover every part of your body including your face. We have made every effort to make the gear as comfortable as possible.
    Exiting your gear is only allowed in the privacy of your own quarters. Any person who leaves assigned quarters without his or her gear or who removes their gear outside their quarters will be expelled from Synchronicity. The violator’s contract with Vineaux Genomix will be terminated.
    Chris read the passage three times. He believed it only after reading it the third time. Then he stopped believing it and read it again. Did they really mean it? He read on.
    Outside of your quarters, all communication takes place through your link. An intermediate protocol will be added to obfuscate your name and sex. You will know others on the station only by their obfuscated names. Attempting to communicate your real name, sex, or VG rank will result in severe sanctions and possible termination of your contract.
    A steward came by and delivered some cold lunch. Chris picked at it for a while and thought about things. He knew that Alec Vineaux himself considered these trips to Synchronicity special. Chris thought that their leader, known for being a bold extremist, might have invented these rules. So maybe it wasn’t a joke. But how could anyone enjoy Synchronicity while being forced to wear a freak suit the whole time?
    After lunch, Chris selected the passenger’s list from the services the plane offered through his link and located his associate, Jack, on the map. According to the plane, his friend sat in a row to himself three chairs back. Chris braced himself and rose, not quite trusting the acceleration as constant. The flight deck had turned perpendicular to the wings to make everyone comfortable under the thrust, but Chris half-expected something to shift at any moment. He’d taken gravity for granted for too long.
    He spotted Jack and made his way into his row, settling in next to his coworker. Jack had his eyes closed so Chris pinged him through his link. Jack blinked and looked over.
    “Hey, Chris. Nice flight, eh?”
    Chris found a sound curtain service and activated it through his link so he could speak with Jack privately. The sounds of the spacecraft dropped away.
    “An amazing ride, even by VG standards. But on the long side. I have a question about the manual. This booklet isn’t serious, right?”
    “It’s on the level. Didn’t Vic tell you? Make sure you’ve read that before we get to Synchronicity.”
    “There’s some crazy stuff in here that’s hard to take seriously. And why the hardcopy? Why can’t we just download it to our links? I suspect this is all some kind of joke.”
    Jack turned to look at Chris. For a moment, it seemed he wasn’t going to answer at all.
    “Listen, Chris. Go with this. I’m telling you to go with this, and I mean go with it one hundred percent. Alec makes and breaks his execs on this program. If you don’t want to be at VG, then don’t get off at Synchronicity and stick with the flight back. Otherwise, take a Chinese pill and read the manual.”
    When Jack told someone to take a Chinese pill, he meant to toe the company line. The Chinese bloc sourced half the GDP of the Earth, and they were the only nation powerful enough to ignore