The lanky technician pushed open the door for me, and I stepped through into a room populated by ten large black pods. Each was about eight feet tall, with a four foot square base. Each had an array of tubes and wires emerging from the back, and had a computer terminal on the front, with two screens. One screen showed an infrared image of the pod’s occupants, with a bioscan readout. The other showed plain text.
    “And this is where my father is?” I asked, frowning at the pods. The technician nodded.
    “Luminary Marcent, you said, right?” he said. I nodded, and he pointed at the pod second in from the left.
    “There he is.”
    I had difficulty reigning in my temper. My father had said he was going away for some time to join some big government think tank. I didn’t realise that he’d meant it quite so literally. I walked over to the terminal, looking at the infrared image on the screen. It showed my father’s face, all right, in a restful pose. He seemed to be asleep.
    “They get themselves into strange sleep cycles in there,” said the technician, standing at my shoulder again. He seemed a bit nervous now, though I couldn’t think why. “He’s asleep at the moment.”
    I closed my eyes, then looked at the technician again.
    “May I ask why my father is in a sensory deprivation pod?” I asked. The technician hesitated. He was beginning to look very nervous now.
    “Well, it’s for purity of ideas, you see. In there, they’ve got nothing to do but think, so they come up with all sorts of things, and you know it’s not influenced by current fashions and trends. You have to leave them in a while, of course… so that the fashions fade.”
    “He’s been in there for three years!” I said, wondering how I’d managed to keep my voice so level. The technician twitched, shrugged, then backed away slightly.
    “I just look after them, make sure they’ve got enough food and that everything’s working right,” he said, his tone whiny. Just following orders, I thought. I shook my head and turned back to the pod.
    “Is it possible to communicate with him?” I said.
    “No,” the technician said. “What they type comes through onto the scr-” he stopped mid-sentence, as if he had made a huge mistake. I turned towards him, then looked back at the screen. The top screen still showed my father’s face. I looked at the other.
    There was a list of files, each dated, going back to the day my father first joined the think tank. I clicked on one of the early ones. It was a sort of diary, talking about the adjustment to sensory deprivation, and how it was actually quite nice being in the quiet, when you got used to it.
    The technician was getting very fidgety behind me now. I ignored him, knowing that he couldn’t stop me from looking at the files… it was my right, both as next of kin, and as a minor Luminary myself.
    I clicked on a later file, mostly nonsense, with the odd strange idea.
    The latest file, written just a few hours before my arrival had three words repeated over and over again.
    ‘Let Me Out.’
    Looking back over the previous few entries, I saw the same thing, over and over again. Just those three words. I kept clicking back. A month, six months, still the same thing. Finally I found the last cogent entry. Nearly two and a half years previous.
    I turned an icy glare on the technician, who had started visibly shaking now.
    “Get me your superior,” I said.