I was in a workplace that I didn’t recognize and was called into a room with co-workers I didn’t know for a preview of training we had signed up for.

We were told to assess our personalities by writing down words that describe ourselves. I found this to be very difficult, but eventually came up with four or five words; I think one of them was “feeling,” which I thought was cheating because of Myers-Briggs and INFP.

I kept looking for J. C. from work because I thought she would know about and could explain this exercise, which made no sense to me — picking a few descriptors subjectively isn’t a personality assessment, and I was under the impression that it wouldn’t go much beyond that.

When we had come in, we had been assigned to seats, and now it was announced that there would be assigned seating for lunch for perpetuity. J. C. may have arrived by then, but even her calming influence couldn’t keep me from becoming hysterical. I couldn’t believe what was happening and that I was to be forced to spend every lunch hour with the same person or people every day. It seemed unbearably cruel, and I was torn between anger and despair.

A group of us was taken somewhere to tour the grounds. I noticed that what appeared to be a spotlight in the ground was tracking our movements and opening up as if preparing to fire. I pointed this out to the group, and a young man told me to take most of the group to higher ground. Something happened, although it wasn’t quite an explosion, and when I looked back and down, it appeared that the earth had fallen in, but the fate of the young man and those who had stayed to help him was unclear under the settling dust.

Then we were inside, and I was on upper floor looking down into a laboratory. A girl stood on the other side of a window, laughing and apparently waiting for the group to move on. I noticed something in the lab turning toward her, and before I could do or say anything, it had attacked. She was gone, leaving behind a white harness. Someone explained that she had gotten too close to the window and that a security system in the lab had detected the harness, which was a tracking device. Everyone found that they were wearing one.

This story seemed too pat for me — why endanger people without warning? — and I saw the enforced lunch seating in an even more sinister light. No one else seemed perturbed by these incidents, but I could feel danger everywhere like a tangible presence. Perhaps that is what I had meant by “feeling.”