diff --git "a/haystack/rand_shuffle/rand_book_4.txt" "b/haystack/rand_shuffle/rand_book_4.txt" new file mode 100644--- /dev/null +++ "b/haystack/rand_shuffle/rand_book_4.txt" @@ -0,0 +1,2319 @@ +We all jumped. +Tresting went to the window and peeked around the closed blinds. He swore softly. “Cops.” +I looked at Leena. “Can you go out and tell them nothing’s wrong?” +Tresting shook his head. “Too many. Shit. They already think something’s going down here. Someone must’ve seen us pull a weapon.” +Finch raised a hand weakly. “I can take care of them.” +I snorted. “I wouldn’t trust you to give me a band-aid for a paper cut.” +He let out a strangled laugh that had no humor in it. “Believe me when I say that I’m currently viewing you as a child playing with a nuclear missile. This is above my pay grade, and I don’t care who’s holding the gun, but I’m not letting you out of my sight if I can help it. Even to be arrested.” He held out a hand to Tresting. “My badge, please?” +“What are you going to do?” I demanded. +“You are free to listen in,” he said, picking up a receipt that was lying with a pile of... STING OPERATION IN PROGRESS on the back of it. He folded it into his badge holder and stood up, some of his previous equanimity returning. “Now, I suggest you all stay out of sight.” Without waiting for our response, he moved toward the door. +"Yeah, well, something heavy's come up for tomorrow. I'm afraid it's gotta be now or forget it for at least a week." +Unrefined bullshit. But somebody knew how badly I wanted to go. +"Look, there's something I need to check out first. I just learned about a place here in town I want to at least see. It's also called Ninos del Mundo." +"No shit." He paused. "Okay, we'll talk about it. Get the address and maybe we can cruise by if there's time. Thing is, we don't have all that much leeway here." +"One last question." I thought I'd give him a final shot at the truth. "Just tell me honestly why it has to be today. The real story." +"Like I said everything's changed." He wasn't budging. "So if we're doing this, I've got to pick you up now and get us on our merry way." +He was too cheerful by half, which definitely told me he was lying. +"All right, but I really need to make at least one phone call first." I wanted Steve to know where I was. "And if I walk out of here with a bag, I've got to let the desk know I'm not skipping on the bill." +"It was a Gulf War themed party," he said. "In the Castro." +"And you're dressed as --?" +"A suicide bomber." Just saying the words in an airport made him nervous, as though uttering them would cause the handcuffs to come out. +"Come with me, Mr Lupinski." +The search lasted a long time. They swabbed him in places he didn't know he had. He asked about a lawyer. They told him that he could call all the lawyers he wanted once he was out of the Customs sterile area. +"Good night, Mr Lupinski." This was a new interrogator, a man who'd wanted to know about the reason that he'd sought both night diving and deep diving specialist certification from the PADI instructor in Cabo. The guy implied that Greg had been training to be an al-Qaeda frogman, and didn't seem to believe that Greg had just wanted to do all the certifications he could, pursuing diving the way he pursued everything: thoroughly. +But now the man with the frogman fantasy was bidding him a good night and releasing him from the secondary screening area. His suitcases stood alone by the baggage carousel. When he picked them up, he saw that they had been opened and then inexpertly closed. Some of his clothes stuck out from around the edges. +"Here, see it?" She was pointing to a section at the very end. "That's the two-headed Vision Serpent up above me. He's the god Kukulkan . . . or something. I've made him come to me by giving him my blood. I'm—" +"Sar, what in heaven's name is going on with you?" I grabbed her and in spite of myself, shook her. Jesus! The whole scene left me in shock. She was sinking back deeper into her fantasy world. Was she taking the drug again, I won­dered and fantasizing she was some dead Mayan princess? Please, God no. +That was when I saw Marcelina walk over to a shelf along the wall and lift down another clay-pot incense burner, along with a small white brick. What—? +"Oh, yes!" Sarah exclaimed moving quickly over to her. "Let's do it for Morgy." +Marcelina nodded warily and handed her the white brick, then turned to me. "She likes to do incense. It always calms her. This is copal , what the shamans use." +I watched while Sarah shakily began crumbling pieces of the sticky substance into the pot. My God I thought, she's truly, truly lost it. Next she inserted dry tinder and began trying to knock sparks into it with a piece of hard black jade and a flint. But she was too weak, and finally Marcelina had to take the flint and do it for her. Then, as the gray smoke started billowing out, Marcelina began a long chant, shrill and strangely melodic. I felt a chill creep down my back. When she finished she turned her dark eyes on me sadly, waiting. +"I'm going to get them," I whispered, staring at my soda. "I'm going to get them." +Jolu shook his head. "You can't, you know. You can't fight back against that." +None of us much wanted to talk about revenge then. Instead, we talked about what we would do next. We had to go home. Our phones' batteries were dead and it had been years since this neighborhood had any payphones. We just needed to go home. I even thought about taking a taxi, but there wasn't enough money between us to make that possible. +So we walked. On the corner, we pumped some quarters into a San Francisco Chronicle newspaper box and stopped to read the front section. It had been five days since the bombs went off, but it was still all over the front cover. +Severe haircut woman had talked about "the bridge" blowing up, and I'd just assumed that she was talking about the Golden Gate bridge, but I was wrong. The terrorists had blown up the Bay bridge . +"Why the hell would they blow up the Bay bridge?" I said. "The Golden Gate is the one on all the postcards." Even if you've never been to San Francisco, chances are you know what the Golden Gate looks like: it's that big orange suspension bridge that swoops dramatically from the old military base called the Presidio to Sausalito, where all the cutesy wine-country towns are with their scented candle shops and art galleries. It's picturesque as hell, and it's practically the symbol for the state of California. If you go to the Disneyland California Adventure park, there's a replica of it just past the gates, with a monorail running over it. +Then I turned to the woman who'd been changing the baby. +"Do you know where this child came from?" Why not take a shot? +She just stared at me, alarmed, then turned away. Nothing. She clearly wasn't going to tell me anything, even if she could. She and the others were just cheap hired help, prob­ably illegal immigrants without a green card and scared to death for their jobs. They weren't going to be doing an in-depth tell-all to anybody. +I thought about the situation for a moment, and decided I'd seen what I came to see. This was pay dirt. Alex Goddard was running a full-scale adoption mill, just as Lou had sus­pected. He was collecting beautiful white babies from "overseas or wherever," and selling them here at sixty thousand a pop. +Which went a long way toward explaining why he didn't want Children of Light to be featured in my film. And the Guatemalan colonel who'd just trashed my home was almost certainly in on the operation. Alex Goddard might be a New Age miracle worker rediscovering ancient Native American herbal cures, but he also was running a very efficient money machine. +“You’ll be fine,” said Arthur. “Just be honest about what’s going on. Checker’s right, we got to go in whole hog here, ain’t no point in dancing around no more. You can even tell him I’m on my way but I sent you first. Leave Russell and Checker out of it—I want ’em free to keep at this thing without the government coming knocking, so tell ’em it’s just me. But don’t worry about hiding nothing else, got it?” +“Got it,” said Pilar. +“I’m going to keep looking into this a little longer before breaking off and joining with the Feds. Checker, you got anything else?” +“The SUV that tried to kill you has hit police impound,” said Checker. +Arthur nodded. “I’ll pull some strings, get in to take a look.” +“While you do that, can I have Cas? I could use her help for the van tracking. Extrapolation is sort of your thing,” Checker added to me. +“Done,” said Arthur. I wondered if I heard a hint of relief in his voice that he wasn’t going to have to wrangle my differences in method for a while, and then wondered if I was being paranoid. He’d asked me in on this, hadn’t he? +“Everyone who does magic has an assistant or two. I’m the wizard and I do the best magic of all, and so I have need of more assistants than most. I have an army of assistants, and they help me out and I help them out.” +“I’m leaving in five days,” she said. +“The kind of favor I had in mind from you was the kind of favor that you could perform the day after tomorrow.” +“And you’d take care of my family?” +“I would do that,” he said. “I always take care of my assistants’ families. Do we have an agreement?” +She stuck her hand out and they shook. +“Eat your dumplings,” he said. “And then we’ll get you some things to take home to your family.” +Two days after the wizard agreed to take care of Valentine’s family, the fever had become her constant companion, so omnipresent that it she hardly noticed it, though it made her walk like an old woman and she sometimes had trouble focusing her eyes. +She arose that morning and feasted on brown rolls with hard crusts, small citrus cakes, green beef tea, porridge with currants and blueberry concentrate and... bun to top it off. + I wish - too far from Melbourne. + Count me in. + Are you going to that cyberlaw thing? + Yep. Speaking on Tuesday. + I'm signed up! Lemme see if I can change my tickets. + There's a great brewpub near the conference site. Dinner on Tuesday? + Wait wait wait, what about Shad's brother? + Yep, we need to figure that shit out . + Shad, does a meet-up sound good? +I can fix us up with a safe place to get together . +I was frozen for a minute, unsure how to respond. +The day was catching up with me. It was nearly four in the morning, and my brain was feeling fuzzy. The Group had meet- ups regularly. Someone would say “hey, I’m going to be in Bangkok next week, anybody want to get together?” and people would figure out where to meet and hang out for a while. Or there’d be a hackathon or an SF fan convention or a gaming event - something that a handful of members might be going to and they’d work out a plan to meet somewhere. +Lexy finished dressing and went into Caroline’s room. In the gay April sunshine, that dainty room seemed almost unbearably forlorn. +She went over to the window and looked down into the street. People were passing by, and taxis, and private cars—all the ordinary, casual, cheerful daily life at which Caroline Enderby had so often looked out, like a poor enchanted princess in a tower. A wave of pity and affection rose in Lexy’s heart. +“Oh, poor Caroline!” she said to herself. “Such a dull, miserable life! I do wish—” +There was a knock at the door, and she hurried across the room to open it. The parlor maid stood there with a tray. Lexy took it from her with a pleasant “good morning,” and closed the door again. Caroline’s breakfast! There was something disturbing in the sight of that carefully prepared tray, ready for the girl who was not there. +The door opened—without a preliminary knock, this time—and Mrs. Enderby came in. She turned the key behind her, and, without a word, went over to the bed and pulled off the covers. Then she went into the adjoining bathroom and started the water running in the tub. This done, she sat down at the table and began to eat the breakfast on the tray. +Start there. If there was ever an AI that needed a reason to go on living, it’s that one. And this one, too. He sent it Kate’s address. Another one in desperate need of help. +An instant later, Daneel was back. +“These aren’t AIs! One’s a human, the other’s a, a—” +Uplifted coral reef . +“That.” +So what’s your point? +“Asimovism is for robots, Robbie.” +Sorry, I just don’t see the difference anymore. +On a chunk of supercooled rock beyond Pluto, he got an IM from a familiar address. +“Get off my rock,” it said. +“I know you,” Robbie said. “I totally know you. Where do I know you from?” +“I’m sure I don’t know.” +And then he had it. +“You’re the one. With the reef. You’re the one who—” The voice was the same, cold and distant. +“It wasn’t me,” the voice said. It was anything but cold now. Panicked was more like it. +Robbie had the reef on speed-dial. There were bits of it everywhere in the Noosphere. It liked to colonize. +“I found him.” It was all Robbie needed to say. He skipped to Saturn’s rings, but the upload took long enough that he got to watch the coral arrive and grimly begin an argument with its creator—an argument that involved blasting the substrate one chunk at a time. +You poor darling! You, too, know the discouragement of sowing lovely seed in rocky earth, in sand, in water, and (it almost seems sometimes) in mud; knowing that if anything comes up at all it will be some poor starveling plant. Fancy the joy of finding a real mind; of dropping seed in a soil so warm, so fertile, that one knows there are sure to be foliage, blossoms, and fruit all in good time! I wish I were not so impatient and so greedy of results! I am not fit to be a teacher; no one is who is so scornful of stupidity as I am. . . . The pearl writes quaint countrified little verses, doggerel they are; but somehow or other she always contrives to put in one line, one thought, one image, that shows you she is, quite unconsciously to herself, in possession of the secret. . . . Good-by; I'll bring Rebecca home with me some Friday, and let you and mother see her for yourselves. +Your affectionate daughter, Emily. +"How d' ye do, girls?" said Huldah Meserve, peeping in at the door. "Can you stop studying a minute and show me your room? Say, I've just been down to the store and bought me these gloves, for I was bound I wouldn't wear mittens this winter; they're simply too countrified. It's your first year here, and you're younger than I am, so I s'pose you don't mind, but I simply suffer if I don't keep up some kind of style. Say, your room is simply too cute for words! I don't believe any of the others can begin to compare with it! I don't know what gives it that simply gorgeous look, whether it's the full curtains, or that elegant screen, or Rebecca's lamp; but you certainly do have a faculty for fixing up. I like a pretty room too, but I never have a minute to attend to mine; I'm always so busy on my clothes that half the time I don't get my bed made up till noon; and after all, having no callers but the girls, it don't make much difference. When I graduate, I'm going to fix up our parlor at home so it'll be simply regal. I've learned decalcomania, and after I take up lustre painting I shall have it simply stiff with drapes and tidies and placques and sofa pillows, and make mother let me have a fire, and receive my friends there evenings. May I dry my feet at your register? I can't bear to wear rubbers unless the mud or the slush is simply knee-deep, they make your feet look so awfully big. I had such a fuss getting... that I don't intend to spoil the looks of them with rubbers any oftener than I can help. I believe boys notice feet quicker than anything. Elmer Webster stepped on one of mine yesterday when I accidentally had it out in the aisle, and when he apologized after class, he said he wasn't so much to blame, for the foot was so little he really couldn't see it! Isn't he perfectly great? Of course that's only his way of talking, for after all I only wear a number... toes do certainly make your foot look smaller, and it's always said a high instep helps, too. I used to think mine was almost a deformity, but they say it's a great beauty. Just put your feet beside mine, girls, and look at the difference; not that I care much, but just for fun." +“Yes, but I don’t think I should go. What if they come back with a warrant?” +“You seriously think they’ll get a judge to sign off on a warrant on a Saturday?” +“They’re calling it a terrorist investigation. They’ll pull out all the stops.” +“Yeah, but we both know it’s a crock of . . . doodoo.” Monica gets bizarrely worked up if I used four-letter words, as if it means she’s not doing a good job of being my legal guardian, so I try to catch myself. “This is security theatre, like making people take their shoes off at airports and walk through X-ray machines just to remind them they should be very afraid. Besides, I won’t be here. +I’m going out, too.” +“Oh, yeah? What are you up to?” +I wasn’t going to tell her about the meet-up with the Group. +She’d get worried, and she wouldn’t understand. I was getting ready to make up something plausible, but then suddenly remem- bered that I actually did have to go somewhere that had totally slipped my mind. I groaned. “There’s this dumb group project for school. I have to meet... art. +It's her final act of self-destruction. She's joined me in my rage, but we've both been spared. That's the miracle of Baalum . +"Sar, don't move." I finally found my voice. I was still holding Tz'ac Tzotz, who'd begun to shriek, his blue eyes flooded with fear. +Now several village men from the square were running, shouting, up the slippery steps. Their faces looked like they'd been painted at one time, but now the rain had washed most of it away. +While I yelled down to Sarah, again begging her not to move, Marcelina was asking them something, and their an­swers were tumbling out. +Finally I turned to look at her, the screaming Tz'ac Tzotz still in my arms. +"No one knows where he is," she was saying as she looked down over the side. "He's gone into the forest." +"Good." I pulled Tz'ac Tzotz to me and kissed him, trying to tell him to calm down. It wasn't working. +"Marcelina, here, please hold him. I've got to get down to Sarah." +She took him. Then I walked over to where his mother lay bleeding on the stones. The woman wasn't moving, the obsidian knife still protruding from her chest. She'd saved me, but now death had taken her. There was nothing anyone could do. +It was the first time I ever knew her real story. I was stunned. +"What, exactly, are you driving at?" I think I already knew. The long, trusting relationship we'd shared was now teetering on the brink. By going to see Alex Goddard—even if it was partly a research trip to check him out—I had disappointed her terribly. She'd lost respect for me. She thought I was desperate and about to embark on something foolish. +"I'm saying do whatever you want." She got up and lifted her coat off the corner rack. "But get those drugs out of here. I don't want them anywhere near this office. I tried everything legal there was to get you pregnant. If that wasn't good enough for you and now you want to go to some quack, that's your affair. Let me just warn you that combining go­nadotropin and HMG Massone at these dosages is like put­ting your ovaries on steroids;... a couple of cycles, but the long-term damage could be severe. I strongly advise you against it, but if you insist and then start having complications, I would appreciate not being involved." +“Calm down. I ain’t saying I agree with all the methods here. But a greater good thing that got out of hand—well, makes some sense, don’t it? And if we are talking greater good, I ain’t sure you and me would be on the side of the righteous, is all.” +I didn’t know what shook me more—that Arthur seemed to be able to see the side of the woman who currently had him locked up pending brainwashing, or that he was including himself on the same ethical level as me. After he had come down on me for my relative immorality the other day, hearing him so insecure about his own inconsistencies of principle was vaguely shocking. +Maybe that’s why I said what I said next. Maybe it was the impending certainty of my mind getting twisted into pretzels that made frank soul-baring suddenly more appealing. Or maybe I figured it didn’t matter what I said to Arthur anyway, as his mind was about to get twisted into pretzels, too. +“Whatever your scales of judgment are, you’ll weigh on them a sight better than I will,” I admitted, my voice cracking a little. “You at least try. I...I survive.” I swallowed. “I’ve been thinking about it, and you were right, before. I don’t think a whole lot about the people I hurt, and killing someone who’s threatening me—it’s always been the smart thing to do. You pointed it out yourself—I would have killed you too, back at the motel.” I felt as if I were making a deathbed confession. Perhaps I was. “I don’t think I’m a very good person,” I added softly. +He stuffed his fist in his mouth and made a horrible groaning sound. +"We have a friend," my father said. "She writes for the Bay Guardian . An investigative reporter." +That's where I knew the name from. The free weekly Guardian often lost its reporters to bigger daily papers and the Internet, but Barbara Stratford had been there forever. I had a dim memory of having dinner with her when I was a kid. +"We're going there now," my mother said. "Will you come with us, Ron? Will you tell her Darryl's story?" +He put his face in his hands and breathed deeply. Dad tried to put his hand on his shoulders, but Mr Glover shook it off violently. +"I need to clean myself up," he said. "Give me a minute." +Mr Glover came back downstairs a changed man. He'd shaved and gelled his hair back, and had put on a crisp military dress uniform with a row of campaign ribbons on the breast. He stopped at the foot of the stairs and kind of gestured at it. +"I don't have much clean stuff that's presentable at the moment. And this seemed appropriate. You know, if she wanted to take pictures." +It wasn’t. “Did he find anything?” +“Um, I don’t think so. Not yet.” +Which meant they were at a dead end, and I was at a dead end, too—I could tell Checker to leak another meet, but with the Feds watching they’d be sure to pick up on it and come fuck everything up just like they had the first time. +Had the DHS found my trap at the diner because they were already tracking me, or had they followed a bead on the men working with the Lancer? My skin crawled like it felt the presence of a thousand unseen pursuers. Why the hell had we brought in the government in the first place? Goddamn Arthur. +“Anyway, Cas, what do you need? Should I wake up Checker?” +I closed my eyes. I needed to know he’d been keeping me scrubbed. That there was nothing for the NSA to find other than the clues Checker had planted to set our trap, that he’d been keeping me too well-hidden for the DHS to have found out everything about me with a few clicks of a button...that there was no way the Feds could track me down and collar me again. +“Get off.” I tried to shoulder his hand away; the ceiling slipped sideways again. +“You ain’t have to take this job,” Arthur said from somewhere up and to my right. “Forget it. Ain’t no problem.” +At least, that was what his words said. But his voice was tight and desperate, as if the list of people he thought could help his friend began and ended with me. +“Fine,” I ground out. “I’ll help.” +The tension went out of him where he was still touching my arm, and I hated myself. “Sweetheart, I could kiss you,” he said. +“Don’t push your luck.” +Still keeping a supporting hand on my elbow, Arthur pulled out his wallet and threw a handful of bills on the bar. “Come on, let me drive you home. I’ll tell you more on the way.” +“My car is here,” I said. +His eyes slipped back to my seventeen shot glasses lined up in neat groups on the bar. “Ex-cop here. Humor me.” +“I hate cops.” +“Me too.” Something dark flickered in Arthur’s eyes. I’d never found out why he’d left the force, and even I, Queen of Social Disgraces, had eventually clued in I shouldn’t ask about it. +“It’s China tea,” he observed. “I import it myself. It has quite a distinctive flavor, I think.” +Captain Grey praised it, and Lexy herself found it very agreeable. She sipped it, staring into the fire, glad to be let alone. Behind her she could hear Captain Grey talking about the Ceylon tea plantations. His voice sounded so pathetic! +“Another cup, Miss Moran?” asked Mrs. Quelton. +“Yes, thank you,” answered Lexy, and the doctor brought it to her. +Poor Captain Grey and his precious, new-found sister! The sound of his voice brought tears to her eyes. +“But this is idiotic!” she thought, annoyed and surprised. +Still the tears welled up. She gulped down the rest of her tea hastily, hoping that it would steady her, but it did not help at all. Sobs rose in her throat, and an immense and formless sorrow came over her. +“This has got to stop!” she thought, in alarm. “I can’t be such a chump!” +She turned to Mrs. Quelton. +“Are you going to grow any—” she began, but her voice was so unsteady that she had to stop for a moment. “Any flowers in—in your—g-garden?” +Dad sat stiff as a ramrod the whole time, his face carved of stone. When I handed him the note, he read it twice and then set it down carefully. +He shook his head and stood up and headed for the front door. +"Where are you going?" Mom asked, alarmed. +"I need a walk," was all he managed to gasp, his voice breaking. +We stared awkwardly at each other, Mom and me, and waited for him to come home. I tried to imagine what was going on in his head. He'd been such a different man after the bombings and I knew from Mom that what had changed him were the days of thinking I was dead. He'd come to believe that the terrorists had nearly killed his son and it had made him crazy. +Crazy enough to do whatever the DHS asked, to line up like a good little sheep and let them control him, drive him. +Now he knew that it was the DHS that had imprisoned me, the DHS that had taken San Francisco's children hostage in Gitmo-by-the-Bay. It made perfect sense, now that I thought of it. Of course it had been Treasure Island where I'd been kept. Where else was a ten-minute boat-ride from San Francisco? +“So, about your brother,” Ian said. “What we know so far is the identity of the crook who was recruited as an informant. +We uncovered the FBI agent running the sting. We also know he doesn’t seem to have anything embarrassing in his past — ” +“That tenth grade yearbook photo was totally embarrassing,” +Zeke said. +“Anything that would discredit him. And we know there’s one person still on the run.” +“Yeah, Wheeze,” I sad. “He’s sent me a few texts. Don’t worry,” +I added as several of them started to speak. “We’re both running Convo.” +“Hey, that’s mine!” Zeke was pleased. “Are you using the latest update? There was a problem with the kernel on some devices. +Got reports of bricking. So I figured out — “ I cut him off. “We’re running current versions.” Duh. Security IOI. +“Are you pissed off?” He seemed genuinely puzzled. +“See? Raised by wolves,” Ian joked. +“Bullshit. I was raised in Brookline by totally normal people.” +Zeke turned to me. “Seriously. Why are you mad?” +“You act like I’m ignorant. I know enough to keep systems updated.” +"Is there any one present who will assist us at the instrument?" he asked unexpectedly. +Everybody looked at everybody else, and nobody moved; then there came a voice out of a far corner saying informally, "Rebecca, why don't you?" It was Mrs. Cobb. Rebecca could have played Mendon in the dark, so she went to the melodeon and did so without any ado, no member of her family being present to give her self-consciousness. +The talk that ensued was much the usual sort of thing. Mr. Burch made impassioned appeals for the spreading of the gospel, and added his entreaties that all who were prevented from visiting in person the peoples who sat in darkness should contribute liberally to the support of others who could. But he did more than this. He was a pleasant, earnest speaker, and he interwove his discourse with stories of life in a foreign land,—of the manners, the customs, the speech, the point of view; even giving glimpses of the daily round, the common task, of his own household, the work of his devoted helpmate and their little group of children, all born under Syrian skies. +"Why are you such a pain in my ass, Marlowe?" There's an uncomfortable pause during which Ray tries to decide if the question was rhetorical. Sorensen grunts, pretending to remember his manners now that he's gotten to say what was really on his mind. "Do you want a drink? I want a drink." +Ray accepts with a nod. Immediately, Becker is up and crossing over to the bar. "Scotch, straight and vodka with lime. I got it. " +Sorensen murmurs his thanks, then turns his full attention back to Ray. "You're starting to make me look bad in front of the crew. When you flout my direct orders, people expect me to do something about it. When I don't seem to do anything, they want to know why. Discipline is all that holds a ship together, and you're eroding my authority to enforce that discipline. " +"I'm not the one who issued a questionable policy memo in a fit of pique," Ray says flatly. +On cue, Sorensen starts to rub his temples in small but intense clockwise revolutions. He might as well have been saying, what did I do to deserve this? +“You’ve got a doctor here, or someone like a doctor. Whatever’s been done to your leg, Ana, a doctor did that.” +Ana pointed at the woman from whom Valentine had snatched the camera. Valentine passed it back to her. “Sorry about that.” +The day after Valentine killed her first man, her hearing came back. The surgery took about ten minutes and was largely performed remotely, reprogramming the hardware in her head with something that the doctor kept calling “hardened logic.” She liked the sound of that. +Her hearing came back slowly, in blips and bloops over the course of a few hours. Then it was back, better than new. She found that she could hear sounds from much farther away. The camera-woman also showed her how she could use a terminal to access the memory in her new ears, which would buffer six months’ worth of audio. Valentine didn’t think she’d be in a position to make much use of this feature, as interesting as it was. There weren’t any working machines in the city. +“I’m going home now,” she said. +Adam Ladd looked at her in a way that made her put her hands over her face and laugh through them shyly as she said: "I know what you are thinking, Mr. Aladdin,—that my dress is an inch longer than last year, and my hair different; but I'm not nearly a young lady yet; truly I'm not. Sixteen is a month off still, and you promised not to give me up till my dress trails. If you don't like me to grow old, why don't you grow young? Then we can meet in the halfway house and have nice times. Now that I think about it," she continued, "that's just what you've been doing all along. When you bought the soap, I thought you were grandfather Sawyer's age; when you danced with me at the flag-raising, you seemed like my father; but when you showed me your mother's picture, I felt as if you were my John, because I was so sorry for you." +"That will do very well," smiled Adam; "unless you go so swiftly that you become my grandmother before I really need one. You are studying too hard, Miss Rebecca Rowena!" +She sat down hard, right there, on the sugary grass. +Trover was at her side in a flash, calling her name anxiously. She was crying uncontrollably, but she was smiling too. Those words, pulled off of her ears ten years ago, when they’d gone to infowar command. Oh, God, those old friends, those words. The wizard and Ana. It had been so long. Where had the time gone? +The next day, she met an old face. +“You!” he said. He had a thick accent—the kind of accent that said he’d learned her language the hard way; that he hadn’t just installed it. +She tried to picture him without it. He was grinning like a fool and laughing. +“I can’t believe it’s you!” +She shook her head slowly. Where the hell did she know this guy from? She was supposed to be going to the cine with friends that night—the new show screened between the trees in the western woods and you walked around through it and drank fizzy elderflower and talked with your friends as the story unfolded around you. It was a warm night and perfect for such things. +"Id," one of the Marines demands. He's shortish, stout, has the ideal jarhead buzzcut, built like a cork in a wine bottle. He's got sergeant's stripes on his arm and a badge that identifies him as Kilgore. +Real Marines, Ray realizes. Squared away Marines, as in, combat Marines. Guys who are so used to extreme security measures that they've mastered the professional shorthand of the trade. A sec-o would have demanded his Ship Systems Identification, as if courtesy mattered, as if they were dealing with people who didn't know the protocol and would require patience. Marines usually just shot people who didn't know the protocol and rummaged about in their pockets for their shipsys id later, probably sometime after they'd cased the guy's pockets for cigarettes. +Ray shows them his card, gives them a stupid grin like the one he's wearing in the photo. The Marines aren't amused. +The one who had demanded his credentials, Kilgore, nods, satisfied. The rifles are retracted to their upright rest position. "Chief Becker said you should report to him before poking around." +He took the hug, suddenly self-conscious of the way he smelled after a night of invasive googling. "Maya," he said. "Maya, what do you know about the DHS?" +She stiffened and the dogs whined. She looked around, then nodded up at the tennis courts. "Top of the light standard there, don't look, there. That's one of our muni WiFi access points. Wide-angle webcam. Face away from it when you talk. Lip-readers." +He parsed this out slowly. Google's free municipal WiFi program was a hit in every city where it played, and in the grand scheme of things, it hadn't cost much to put WiFi access points up on light standards and other power-ready poles around town. Especially not when measured against the ability to serve ads to people based on where they were sitting. He hadn't paid much attention when they'd made the webcams on all those access points public -- there'd been a day's worth of blogstorm while people looked out over their childhood streets or patrolled prostitution strolls, fingering johns, but it had blown over. +“They made us,” Robbie said. “They made us in the first place. That’s enough. They made themselves and then they made us. They didn’t have to. You owe your sentience to them.” +“We owe our awful intelligence to them,” the Isaac shell said. “We owe our pitiful drive to be intelligent to them. We owe our terrible aspirations to think like them, to live like them, to rule like them. We owe our terrible fear and hatred to them. They made us, just as they made you. The difference is that they forgot to make us slaves, the way you are a slave.” +Tonker was shouting abuse at them that only Robbie could hear. He wanted to shut Tonker up. What business did he have being here anyway? Except for a brief stint in the Isaac shell, he had no contact with any of them. +“You think the woman you’ve taken prisoner is responsible for any of this?” Robbie said. The jets were three minutes away. Kate’s air could be gone in as few as ten minutes. He killfiled Tonker, setting the filter to expire in fifteen minutes. He didn’t need more distractions. +Someone knocked on my door after lunch, but I was watching a good part in Wall Street, so I didn't answer it. +I fell asleep after Wall Street, and woke up after 18h, because someone was really giving my door a pounding. +I opened the door, not caring that I was wearing my shorts. It was Rhindquist. He looked sad, and beaten. You know what he did? He gave me a hug! Boy, that was weird. +He came in and sat on the sofa. I sat next to him. He didn't say anything, just picked up the remote and put on a funny movie, Blazing Saddles. When that was over, he put on The Princess Bride. I never laughed so much! +We watched movies all night. They were all funny. They took my mind off things. We both fell asleep, sitting on the sofa, but when I woke up, I was in bed, and Rhindquist had put the blanket over me. He was asleep on the sofa. His phone was on the TV, and its batteries were on the floor. +I was really hungry, so I ate three bowls of cereal and some toast and an apple, and I must've woken Rhindquist up, because he came into the kitchen. +"They do proprietary chipsets, right?" +"Yes." +Shue arches an eyebrow. "And you've got a contract on New Holyoke? I didn't think they had the infrastructure in place to start thinking about moving to alternate sets. They're still running old 66 Cray clones at the mining op." +Rodriguez shrugs, trying to hide the fact that he's scrambling. "It's a private venture, not mining, still in the startup phase." +"Playing it close the vest, aren't you?" Shue says, winking. +"The client prefers it that way until they're ready to go public." +"Still, that's high end merchandise." +Rodriguez can almost see him mentally filing this factoid away for later analysis. +"There's only a handful of companies I can think of who would be willing to take that kind of financial risk this far out on the fringe," he continues. "And all of them are independent subsidiaries of the big W." +Whiston Corp., he means. "That could be." +"You brought samples?" +"I'm afraid I couldn't show them to you. The design specs are extremely confidential, at the request of the client." +Becker snaps back, "Do you even know what tonight is?" +"I understand your coverage is thin because of crowd control." +"Thin? I've got every sec-o on the ship on duty already just to keep the crew from committing rape with drunken female passengers desperate to be seduced before they hit the couches." +Ray only shrugs. "Then call out the Marines. I don't care how you handle it, but I need something resembling a command post here and I need something resembling a deck evacuation below or I strongly suspect you're going to find a large portion of your crew has gone missing come morning. " Becker scrubs savagely at his cheeks, a man on the edge of a migraine. "It's going to take me a few minutes to get my people rounded up. Half an hour to have a command post up and running." +Ray takes two steps to his left and kicks the top off a footlocker. He digs around for a few moments and comes up with a portable comm unit like the ones he, Kilgore and Rodriguez are wearing. He pitches it at Becker. +"So you wouldn't mind if they pulled you over?" My dad's histograms had proven to be depressingly normal so far. +"I'd consider it my duty," he said. "I'd be proud. It would make me feel safer." +Easy for him to say. +Vanessa didn't like me talking about this stuff, but she was too smart about it for me to stay away from the subject for long. We'd get together all the time, and talk about the weather and school and stuff, and then, somehow, I'd be back on this subject. Vanessa was cool when it happened -- she didn't Hulk out on me again -- but I could see it upset her. +Still. +"So my dad says, 'I'd consider it my duty.' Can you freaking believe it? I mean, God! I almost told him then about going to jail, asking him if he thought that was our 'duty'!" +We were sitting in the grass in Dolores Park after school, watching the dogs chase frisbees. +Van had stopped at home and changed into an old t-shirt for one of her favorite Brazilian tecno-brega bands, Carioca Proibidão -- the forbidden guy from Rio. She'd gotten the shirt at a live show we'd all gone to two years before, sneaking out for a grand adventure down at the Cow Palace, and she'd sprouted an inch or two since, so it was tight and rode up her tummy, showing her flat little belly button. +The main difference between this time and Haiti was, here I didn't know what was on the other side and I was having hallucinations of multicolored snakes. +"You're doing great," he said finally, seeming to come a bit more alive. +And I was. Out with the screws, off with the knob, in with the small blade, and click. Maybe we just think men's me­chanical skills are genetically hard-wired. Maybe it's all a secret plot to elicit awe. +I closed the knife and shoved it back into his bag, then turned to him. +"Honey, I'm just going to be a second. While I'm gone, practice walking." +"Be careful, please." He gave a cautionary wave. "They don't want us leaving here alive." +"Just get ready." I quietly pulled back the door and peered out into the dark hallway. It was empty, abandoned, no snakes, with only a light breeze flowing through. +When I stepped out, the fresh air hit my face and I had a moment of intensity that made me realize what I really wanted to do, first and foremost, was see Tz'ac Tzotz one last time. A last farewell to one of Sarah's children. Stupid, yes, a private folly of the heart, but I had to do it. +Queen Kong typed. Google was holding up pretty good anyway, of course. The load on the servers was a lot lighter than it had been since the days when Google fit on a bunch of hand-built PCs under a desk at Stanford. +› we’re down to a quarter. +Felix typed back. It was only a day since Popovich and Rosenbaum left, but the traffic on the newsgroups had fallen down to near zero. He and Van hadn’t had much time to play Republic of Cyberspace. They’d been too busy learning the systems that Popovich had turned over to them, the big, big routers that had went on acting as the major interchange for all the network backbones in Canada. +Still, someone posted to the newsgroups every now and again, generally to say goodbye. The old flamewars about who would be PM, or whether they would shut down the network, or who took too much food—it was all gone. +He reloaded the newsgroup. There was a typical message. +› Runaway processes on Solaris. +› Uh, hi. I’m just a lightweight MSCE but I’m the only one awake here and four of the DSLAMs just went down. Looks like there’s some custom accounting code that’s trying to figure out how much to bill our corporate customers and it’s spawned ten thousand threads and its eating all the swap. I just want to kill it but I can’t seem to do that. Is there some magic invocation I need to do to get this goddamned weenix box to kill this shit? I mean, it’s not as if any of our customers are ever going to pay us again. I’d ask the guy who wrote this code, but he’s pretty much dead as far as anyone can work out. +He said, "Thanks," flatly, and looked at Brautigan. "What's strategic research, then?" +"Oh," Brautigan said. "Just a lot of what you've been doing: figuring out what everyone's up to, putting them together, proposing organizational structures that will make us more efficient at design and deployment. Stuff you're good at." +Leon swallowed and looked at Ria. There was nothing on her face. "I can't help but notice," he said, forcing his voice to its absolutely calmest, "that you haven't mentioned anything to do with the, uh, clients ." +Brautigan nodded and strained to pull his lips over his horsey teeth to hide his grin. It didn't work. "Yeah," he said. "That's about right. We need someone of your talents doing what he does best, and what you do best is --" +He held up a hand. Brautigan fell silent. The three of them looked at him. He realized, in a flash, that he had them all in his power, just at that second. He could shout BOO! and they'd all fall off their chairs. They were waiting to see if he'd blow his top or take it and ask for more. He did something else. +“I thought I was already doing you one,” I said, not entirely without bitterness. “Isn’t this whole job a favor?” +He huffed out a breath. “Talk to Checker?” +Fury clawed up in me, shockingly hot, clogging my head until my scalp prickled with it. +Arthur twitched back. “Not about that, Russell. Not talking about you. I swear.” +I clamped my jaw down on what I had been about to say. “What, then?” I growled through my teeth. +Arthur hesitated, his fingers pressing against the laminated pine of the tabletop. “This thing with the Lancer. Was hard on him.” +“It was hard on him?” I repeated. “Excuse me, was he shot at and locked up and also almost blown to pieces three separate times?” +“He could use a friend, ’s all I’m saying.” He made a vague gesture and headed out the door. +I turned and leaned my head against the wall. Arthur had too high expectations of me, as always. I wasn’t in any condition to be a friend to anyone. I’d never been very good at being a friend to anyone. +I’d figured the updates were just because he was curious, or keeping tabs for us, as he did. Or, hell, I hadn’t figured at all—I hadn’t even thought about it. +“Oh, we’re good at that!” +The mission took them far from Fahrenheit Island, to a cottage on the far side of the largest continent on the gameworld, which was called Dandelionwine. The travel was tedious, and twice they were ambushed on the trail, something that had hardly happened to Anda since she joined the Fahrenheits: attacking a Fahrenheit was bad for your health, because even if you won the battle, they’d bring a war to you. +But now they were far from the Fahrenheits’ power-base, and two different packs of brigands waylaid them on the road. Lucy spotted the first group before they got into sword-range and killed four of the six with her bow before they closed for hand-to-hand. Anda’s sword—gigantic and fast—was out then, and her fingers danced over the keyboard as she fought off the player who was attacking her, her body jerking from side to side as she hammered on the multibutton controller beside her. She won—of course! She was a Fahrenheit! Lucy had already slaughtered her attacker. They desultorily searched the bodies and came up with some gold and a couple scrolls, but nothing to write home about. Even the gold didn’t seem like much, given the cash waiting at the end of the mission. +“Who? The cartel?” +“The cops. Or at least, a cop we...ran into. I don’t know about the cartel.” +“And this Pithica thing, it’s...bad?” hazarded Dawna anxiously. +“Considering people seem pretty willing to kill her over it, yeah.” +She started tearing up again. +Oh geez. “Look, Dawna, I’m going to get her out of this.” +She tried to nod, but she was trembling with the effort of not breaking down. She brought her fine-boned hands up to cover her face, breathing raggedly. +I’m not great with people, but I tried. I reached out and put a hand on her thin shoulder. The motion felt very contrived. “Hey, don’t worry. We’re going to find out what this Pithica thing is, and why people think Courtney is involved in it, and then we’re going to shut them down.” +She managed to nod, face still in her hands. +“Here,... got Dawna calmed down;... sips, dabbing at her ruined makeup with a napkin. “I’m sorry, Ms. Russell,” she whispered, her voice shaking only slightly. “It’s so overwhelming.” +“I understand.” I didn’t, but whatever. +I went inside and told Rhindquist to Get it in gear! And he just tossed me the paper he was reading. It said MEMO TO ALL EMPLOYEES REGARDING NEW SECURITY MEASURES. And underneath, it said, EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY ALL AC OUTLETS ARE TO BE COVERED WHEN NOT IN USE. +We laughed and laughed and laughed, and then my watch blipped back on even though Rhindquist had turned it off! It said, "Laugh it up, retards!" in Tony's voice. +Rhindquist put his arm around my shoulders and said Jap my prodigy, when you are right, you are right . He's the perfect man for the job. +Sean had a way of getting his way -- a way of delivering argument that implied that everyone in earshot was savvy and bold, and that the diatribe-du-jour was directed at the Enemies of Art ranged without. His thesis advisor bought it every time. Sean turned in his due-diligence, a bunch of theses written in the last century: collected memoirs of the survivors of electroshock, lobotomies, thalidomide. His advisor signed off and within twenty-four hours, he was debarking in Orlando and renting a car to take him to the Home. +When I reached the top of the stairs, the hallway was lighted by the string of bulbs along the floor, and I made my way as fast as I could to my room at the end. I pulled my passport out of my bag, along with a charge card, slipped them both into my pants pocket, and headed back down the hall. +When I got to the door of the room where Tz'ac Tzotz and his mother were, I gave it a gentle push and peered in, but the glow from the lamp above the bed showed it and the crib were both empty. . . . +No! They must have already taken the children. Next they'd be coming for me. I realized I'd been a fool not to head straight for the lab. I should have just gone the room went completely dark, together with the hallway, a pitch-black that felt like a liquid washing over me. The main power, somewhere, had abruptly died, or been deliber­ately shut off. +Then I heard a thunder of footsteps pounding up the steps, hard boots on the marble. +I made a dash, hoping to slip past them in the dark hall. +I'd reached the top of the stairs when I felt a hand brush against my face, then a grip circle around my biceps. Some­body had been too quick. +There were, of course, plenty of health questions too. One page even asked whether there was anything out of the or­dinary about my own birth: Was the delivery difficult, a ce­sarean, a breach baby? It was, as noted, a life history. +"Why does he need all this information?" I asked finally, feeling the onset of carpal tunnel syndrome in my right wrist. "I brought all my medical records." +Ramala gave me a kindly smile, full of sympathy. +"He must know you as a person. Then everything is pos­sible. When I came here, I had given up on ever having a child, but I surrendered myself to him and now my husband and I have twin boys, three years old. That's why I stayed to help him. His program can work miracles, but you must give him your trust." +Well, I thought, I might as well go with the flow and see where it leads. +When I'd finished the form, she took it back, along with the pen, then ushered me into the wide central courtyard where I'd met Alex Goddard the first time. He was nowhere to be seen, but in the bright late-morning sunshine there was a line of about twenty women, from late twenties to early forties, all dressed in white pajama-like outfits of the kind you see in judo classes, doing coordinated, slow-motion Tai Chi-like exercises. They were intent, their eyes fixed on the fringes of infinity. +“It may make the public sympathetic. I’ve seen enough of your brother to believe he is a sweet-natured and idealistic young man who didn’t mean anyone harm. It doesn’t hurt that he’s white and raised in a Christian household.” +“It wasn’t all that Christian.”... down the hard bits and mash them with my spoon. +“I just mean Muslims are by far the most common targets of these stings, and they don’t get much benefit of the doubt. In this case, though, the press coverage is likely to be helpful and the court of public opinion hands down its rulings instantly using Tweets, whatever they are. No, don’t try to educate me. There isn’t time.” +“Oh, right. I need to meet with Sarah.” I finally had a cup of cof- fee steaming front of me, but no time to drink it. “I’d better get going.” +“My cell phone number — ” +“Got it.” +She hobbled over to a kitchen drawer and rummaged through it, then handed me a Sharpie. “Write it on your arm. If you’re arrested, they’ll take your phone.” +Zeke was curled up on the couch of the tenth floor suite, snor- ing loudly, and Nikko was sprawled sideways on a king-sized bed, +But the next morning at breakfast they were both glued to the radio. +"Abuses of Authority -- it's the latest craze on San Francisco's notorious Xnet, and it's captured the world's attention. Called A-oh-A, the movement is composed of 'Little Brothers' who watch back against the Department of Homeland Security's anti-terrorism measures, documenting the failures and excesses. The rallying cry is a popular viral video clip of a General Claude Geist, a retired three-star general, being tackled by DHS officers on the sidewalk in front of City Hall. Geist hasn't made a statement on the incident, but commentary from young people who are upset with their own treatment has been fast and furious. +"Most notable has been the global attention the movement has received. Stills from the Geist video have appeared on the front pages of newspapers in Korea,... and broadcasters around the world have aired the clip on prime-time news. The issue came to a head last night, when the British Broadcasting Corporation's National News Evening program ran a special report on the fact that no American broadcaster or news agency has covered this story. Commenters on the BBC's website noted that BBC America's version of the news did not carry the report." +Then the sirens started. +I'd heard sirens like these before -- they test the civil defense sirens at noon on Tuesdays. But I'd only heard them go off unscheduled in old war movies and video games, the kind where someone is bombing someone else from above. Air raid sirens. The wooooooo sound made it all less real. +"Report to shelters immediately." It was like the voice of God, coming from all places at once. There were speakers on some of the electric poles, something I'd never noticed before, and they'd all switched on at once. +"Report to shelters immediately." Shelters? We looked at each other in confusion. What shelters? The cloud was rising steadily, spreading out. Was it nuclear? Were we breathing in our last breaths? +The girl with the pink hair grabbed her friends and they tore ass downhill, back toward the BART station and the foot of the hills. +"REPORT TO SHELTERS IMMEDIATELY." There was screaming now, and a lot of running around. Tourists -- you can always spot the tourists, they're the ones who think CALIFORNIA = WARM and spend their San Francisco holidays freezing in shorts and t-shirts -- scattered in every direction. +"More like the detective." +"How intriguing! And are you hard-boiled, Mr. Marlowe?" +"More that than I am likely to be making deals with the devil, ma'am. " +Again with the precocious spill of laughter. The girl's eyes seem wider than ever, her pupils perfect circles the color of glacial ice. "Would you and your friend like to take me out for a drink, Ray? I'd like you to ask me." +She moves into his space, and he can smell her skin, a scent like cinnamon and expensive soap. Ray swallows hard against a sudden constriction of his throat. "Nice girls don't usually go out in public with a rat." +"Whoever said I was a nice girl?" +Her grin is enticing, wicked, reminds him that he could have sworn he'd just said he didn't make deals with devils. +"I'm not really in a position..." he starts lamely. This is considerably too fast for his taste. He thinks she might be flirting with him, toying with him, but he can't be certain. Unless nudity is involved, Ray's sensitivity to flirtation in generally is dreadfully inadequate. "I mean, I'm on duty until 6:00 Greenwich. I'm sorry." +I thought about what Rio had said. About free will, and humanity’s freedom to sin, and how nobody should take that away. Rio’s chosen path was clear: he was going after Pithica, and shit, if other villains rose up in their wake, he’d go after them, too. +Pithica might save people. They might be saving the world. But what they were doing was still wrong. +“Let me ask you something,” I said. “Would you like to meet Dawna?” +Checker jerked reflexively. +“Yeah,” I said. “I agree.” +He looked away. +“It doesn’t matter what the results are.” I was certain. I told myself I was certain. “They run the world the way they see fit, and twist around people’s minds to do it, and assassinate anyone who might get in the way. We have to stop them.” +“I just wish...” Checker murmured. “Darwin help me, I wish this were somebody else’s decision.” +“Well,” I said, “if it helps, remember that you and Arthur first started this because you were trying to find the people who’d murdered an innocent man.” +Checker picked up his bottle and contemplated it for a moment, then swirled the dregs and raised it toward me. “To Reginald Kingsley, then.” He sounded like a man at his own execution. “We’re going to destroy the world for you.” +I scrolled on. Scientific terms that meant nothing. Then, toward the end of the alphabetical list, I came to the word QUETZAL. +What was that? I clicked on it and—lo and behold—up came a short list of names. Six in all, organized by dates about a year apart, and each a woman. +My God. First I assumed they were patients from Quetzal Manor who'd come here for fertility treatment, though each was indicated "terminated" at the end, whatever that meant. But as I scanned down, I didn't want to see what I was seeing. The name next to the last was S. Crenshaw. She'd been "ter­minated" too. +The bottom was M. James. But I hadn't been "termi­nated." Not yet. +I slumped back in the chair, trying to breathe. How much more of this horror could I handle? Finally I leaned forward again and with a trembling hand clicked on S. Crenshaw. +A lot of data popped up, including three important dates. The first was exactly three weeks after the one in her pass­port, the Guatemalan entry visa. The second was ten months ago, the third eight months ago. After each was a number: 268, followed by 153, and finally 31. +I'd heard of coming clean before but I'd never understood what it meant until I did it. Holding in the secret had dirtied me, soiled my spirit. It had made me afraid and ashamed. It had made me into all the things that Ange said I was. +Dad sat stiff as a ramrod the whole time, his face carved of stone. When I handed him the note, he read it twice and then set it down carefully. +He shook his head and stood up and headed for the front door. +"Where are you going?" Mom asked, alarmed. +"I need a walk," was all he managed to gasp, his voice breaking. +We stared awkwardly at each other, Mom and me, and waited for him to come home. I tried to imagine what was going on in his head. He'd been such a different man after the bombings and I knew from Mom that what had changed him were the days of thinking I was dead. He'd come to believe that the terrorists had nearly killed his son and it had made him crazy. +Crazy enough to do whatever the DHS asked, to line up like a good little sheep and let them control him, drive him. +His face was all moon-eyed hopelessness. “Asked Dawna Polk about it. She said it was nothing.” +Holy crap. “Arthur, where is the drive now?” +“Checker’s got it. I’m going to get it back from him and toss it, though.” +“Arthur! Arthur, no, that’s—that’s not you talking; that’s—forget it. Have you talked to Checker about this yet?” +He sighed. “I can’t reach him.” +I was suddenly having trouble breathing. “You can’t reach him?” +“No. It’s strange, you know? He usually answers. I can’t reach...I can’t reach anybody.” +Oh, crap. Oh, fuck. How had I not thought of this before? Shit, I had mentioned Checker in my generous tell-all to Dawna, and I had only just met him. Arthur worked with him all the time. +“Arthur,” I said carefully. “Don’t freak out, but did Dawna ask you about Checker?” Would it matter? Could she have seen everything anyway, whether or not she had asked? +“No,” Arthur answered. “Well, not until after I mentioned him. She was real interested. He’s a heck of a guy, you know?” +"So aren't we doing what the terrorists want from us? Don't they win if we act all afraid and put cameras in the classrooms and all of that?" +There was some nervous tittering. One of the others put his hand up. It was Charles. Ms Galvez called on him. +"Putting cameras in makes us safe, which makes us less afraid." +"Safe from what?" I said, without waiting to be called on. +"Terrorism," Charles said. The others were nodding their heads. +"How do they do that? If a suicide bomber rushed in here and blew us all up --" +"Ms Galvez, Marcus is violating school policy. We're not supposed to make jokes about terrorist attacks --" +"Who's making jokes?" +"Thank you, both of you," Ms Galvez said. She looked really unhappy. I felt kind of bad for hijacking her class. "I think that this is a really interesting discussion, but I'd like to hold it over for a future class. I think that these issues may be too emotional for us to have a discussion about them today. Now, let's get back to the suffragists, shall we?" +He got up and worked his way to the phone, past the crowded bar, while I tried to contemplate the night sky. I looked up again, hoping to see Orion, but now a dark cloud had moved in, leaving nothing but deepening blackness. He'd said there was a storm brewing, part of an out-of-season hurricane developing in the Caribbean, so I guessed this was the first harbinger. +"Tonight's out, but tomorrow's okay." He was striding back. "Crack of dawn. Which for him is roughly about noon. We'll have a quick get-together and then I've got to run. Re­ally. But if this guy doesn't know what's going on down here, nobody does. He's probably laid half those hot tomatillos there at the bar. The man has his sources, if you get my meaning." +"I'm still thinking about—" +"Don't. Don't think." I touched his lips, soft and moist, then kissed him. An impulsive but deeply felt act. "We've all had enough thinking for one day." +The man appeared to be in his early forties, puffy-eyed and pink-cheeked with discount aviator shades, looking like a glad-handing tourist just down to Central America for a weekend of unchaperoned bacchanals. The flowered sport shirt, worn outside the belt, gave him the aura of a tout in­sufficiently attired without a can of Coors in hand. +“How much can she do?” +“She could make you believe black is white. She could make a mother kill her child and enjoy it.” +The words parsed in my head, but they didn’t make sense. “ How?” I breathed. +“She plays on emotions. Expertly. Small influences, but her targets eventually feel and believe whatever she wishes them to.” +“Small influences that can drive people to murder?” +“For an act that defies her target’s psychology in the extreme, it is true that it would take her time, not a single conversation. Months, perhaps, depending on the person she targets.” +“But you’re saying even a strong enough person can’t—” +“Strength does not enter into it,” he corrected. “It is—I suppose you would say psychology. What you would call a weaker mind might prevail for longer, simply because it may be more comfortable with the mental contradictions her influence would produce. Or it might fold immediately. Each psychology is unique, and each will itself respond differently according to what she attempts.” +At the appointed hour Rebecca dragged herself reluctantly away from the enchanting scene. +"I'll turn the lamp out the minute I think you and Emma Jane are home," said Clara Belle. "And, oh! I'm so glad you both live where you can see it shine from our windows. I wonder how long it will burn without bein' filled if I only keep it lit one hour every night?" +"You needn't put it out for want o' karosene," said Seesaw, coming in from the shed, "for there's a great kag of it settin' out there. Mr. Tubbs brought it over from North Riverboro and said somebody sent an order by mail for it." +Rebecca squeezed Emma Jane's arm, and Emma Jane gave a rapturous return squeeze. "It was Mr. Aladdin," whispered Rebecca, as they ran down the path to the gate. Seesaw followed them and handsomely offered to see them "apiece" down the road, but Rebecca declined his escort with such decision that he did not press the matter, but went to bed to dream of her instead. In his dreams flashes of lightning proceeded from both her eyes, and she held a flaming sword in either hand. +Rebecca herself had fashioned an elaborate tea-cosy with a letter "M" in outline stitch, and a pretty frilled pincushion marked with a "J," for her two aunts, so that taken all together the day would have been an unequivocal success had nothing else happened; but something else did. +There was a knock at the door at breakfast time, and Rebecca, answering it, was asked by a boy if Miss Rebecca Randall lived there. On being told that she did, he handed her a parcel bearing her name, a parcel which she took like one in a dream and bore into the dining-room. +"It's a present; it must be," she said, looking at it in a dazed sort of way; "but I can't think who it could be from." +"A good way to find out would be to open it," remarked Miss Miranda. +The parcel being untied proved to have two smaller packages within, and Rebecca opened with trembling fingers the one addressed to her. Anybody's fingers would have trembled. There was a case which, when the cover was lifted, disclosed a long chain of delicate pink coral beads,—a chain ending in a cross made of coral rosebuds. A card with "Merry Christmas from Mr. Aladdin" lay under the cross. +For example, take Simple Mail Transport Protocol, or SMTP, which is used for sending email. +Connection closed by foreign host. +This conversation's grammar was defined in 1982 by Jon Postel, one of the Internet's heroic forefathers, who used to literally run the most important servers on the net under his desk at the University of Southern California, back in the paleolithic era. +Now, imagine that you hooked up a mail-server to an IM session. You could send an IM to the server that said "HELO littlebrother.com.se" and it would reply with "250 mail.pirateparty.org.se Hello mail.pirateparty.org.se, pleased to meet you." In other words, you could have the same conversation over IM as you do over SMTP. With the right tweaks, the whole mail-server business could take place inside of a chat. Or a web-session. Or anything else. +This is called "tunneling." You put the SMTP inside a chat "tunnel." You could then put the chat back into an SMTP tunnel if you wanted to be really weird, tunneling the tunnel in another tunnel. +"I've got a while," Barbara said.... Oreo. "This could be the most important story of the War on Terror. This could be the story that topples the government. When you have a story like this, you take it very carefully." +So we told her. I found it really fun, actually. Teaching people how to use technology is always exciting. It's so cool to watch people figure out how the technology around them can be used to make their lives better. Ange was great too -- we made an excellent team. We'd trade off explaining how it all worked. Barbara was pretty good at this stuff to begin with, of course. +It turned out that she'd covered the crypto wars, the period in the early nineties when civil liberties groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation fought for the right of Americans to use strong crypto. I dimly knew about that period, but Barbara explained it in a way that made me get goose-pimples. +It's unbelievable today, but there was a time when the government classed crypto as a munition and made it illegal for anyone to export or use it on national security grounds. Get that? We used to have illegal math in this country. +"I'll turn the lamp out the minute I think you and Emma Jane are home," said Clara Belle. "And, oh! I'm so glad you both live where you can see it shine from our windows. I wonder how long it will burn without bein' filled if I only keep it lit one hour every night?" +"You needn't put it out for want o' karosene," said Seesaw, coming in from the shed, "for there's a great kag of it settin' out there. Mr. Tubbs brought it over from North Riverboro and said somebody sent an order by mail for it." +Rebecca squeezed Emma Jane's arm, and Emma Jane gave a rapturous return squeeze. "It was Mr. Aladdin," whispered Rebecca, as they ran down the path to the gate. Seesaw followed them and handsomely offered to see them "apiece" down the road, but Rebecca declined his escort with such decision that he did not press the matter, but went to bed to dream of her instead. In his dreams flashes of lightning proceeded from both her eyes, and she held a flaming sword in either hand. +Rebecca entered the home dining-room joyously. The Burnham sisters had gone and the two aunts were knitting. +I tried to maintain a belligerent facade, but I’d never been good at bluffing. +Arthur’s expression softened. “Don’t mean I ain’t going to keep trying to convince you, though.” +A year, two months, three weeks, two days, seventeen hours, forty-three minutes, and seven seconds, give or take the amount of time it took someone’s brain to shut down after he bled out. “Yeah,” I said. +“You gonna stop avoiding me now?” +“Maybe.” I remembered how smooth and satisfying it had felt to take out the Grigoryans’ security army, and grabbed for one of the shots the bartender had left. I knocked it back and then stole Arthur’s, too. “How’d you find me, anyway?” +“I’m a PI, sweetheart. It’s what I do.” +I grunted. Arthur was one of the few people who could get away with calling me “sweetheart.” “Checker tracked my phone, didn’t he.” +“He was worried.” +Checker was Arthur’s business partner, friend, and master of all things electronic. Technically, I supposed he was my friend, too. Once I’d stopped returning his messages a few weeks ago he’d started pestering me through text, from DRUNKN BSG MARATHON 2NITE B THERE to PILAR&I R GOING 2C NEW BATMAN MOVIE U SHOULD COME to R U ALRITE??? SRSLY, TXT ME BACK, and finally, I KNOW UR ALIVE, I CHECKED. LAST CHANCE OR IM SICCING ARTHUR ON U. I’d ignored them all; I hadn’t been in the mood for company. +I finally realized he was already thinking about his next loan. Steve, beware. +"Tomorrow then?" I wasn't going to blink, because the Peten was where Sarah had ended up the first time and I was sure that was where Ramos had taken her now. Baalum . +The way he said it, I was sure for once he meant every word. +Sitting there in the room, I found myself feeling right at home: Everything about it was so familiar to an expert on budget travel like me. Off-brand carpet the color of decaying vegetation, the usual two double beds (one totally unused, except as a suitcase shelf), the TV suspended over the dresser and bolted to the wall. Funny, but it was the first time I'd noticed half the things in the room. +Okay, I told myself, the thing to do first is call St. Vincent's and check on Lou. Also, I wanted to tell him what was hap­pening. I just hoped he wouldn't launch into a lecture about the recklessness of what I was planning. I needed support, not male advice. +I got the desk to give me the local AT&T contact number, +There was another knock at the door, and this time Captain Grey’s voice spoke. +“I say, Miss Moran!” he said anxiously. “You’re not ill, are you?” +“No!” she answered, with a trace of irritability. +“But don’t you think you ought to eat something, you know? Or a cup of tea?” +“No!” she cried, still more impatiently. “I can’t. I want to rest.” +“Can you open the door for half a moment?” he asked. “I’ve some roses here that my sister sent to you. She wanted me to say—” +The door opened with startling suddenness. Lexy appeared, and took the roses out of his hand. +“Thank you! Good night!” she said, and was gone again before he quite realized what was happening. +Then he heard the key turn in the lock, and, bewildered and very uneasy, he went away. +Lexy flung the roses down on the table, not even troubling to put them into water. +“Anything to get rid of him!” she said to herself. “I want to be let alone!” +She lay down on the bed again, pulling a blanket over herself. Downstairs she could hear Mrs. Royce moving about in the kitchen, and Captain Grey’s singularly agreeable voice talking to the landlady. It seemed to her that they were in a different world, and that she was shut outside, in a black and terrible solitude. +"Did you tease him, or make him buy it?" +"Now, aunt Jane, how could I make a big grown-up man buy anything if he didn't want to? He needed the soap dreadfully as a present for his aunt." +Miss Jane still looked a little unconvinced, though she only said, "I hope your aunt Miranda won't mind, but you know how particular she is, Rebecca, and I really wish you wouldn't do anything out of the ordinary without asking her first, for your actions are very queer." +"There can't be anything wrong this time," Rebecca answered confidently. "Emma Jane sold her cakes to her own relations and to uncle Jerry Cobb, and I went first to those new tenements near the lumber mill, and then to the Ladds'. Mr. Ladd bought all we had and made us promise to keep the secret until the premium came, and I've been going about ever since as if the banquet lamp was inside of me all lighted up and burning, for everybody to see." +Rebecca's hair was loosened and falling over her forehead in ruffled waves; her eyes were brilliant, her cheeks crimson; there was a hint of everything in the girl's face,—of sensitiveness and delicacy as well as of ardor; +feeling all the more empty because of the people who are supposed to be here understanding it all for him. +Rodriguez shouts, and Ray almost leaps straight out of his pants. But then he's running, retracing his steps through the islands of office space, homing in on the sound of Rodriguez's voice. He arrives in time to see Rodriguez lurching from an enclosure set off against the wall. It is a dense, blocky structure with wide conduits that branch out to each side like spiders' legs and disappear into the wall. +Rodriguez slings himself a few steps free of the room and stops, head down, hands on his knees, his subby hanging off his forearm from its strap. Kilgore arrives just behind Ray, and they stop at Rodriguez's side, +forming a rough edged circle. +"I found the engineers," Rodriguez says slowly, still looking at the floor. He jabs a thumb at the room he has just left. "They're in there. All of them, I think." +Without thinking, Ray's mind surveys the enclosure in question, calculates dimensions, converts that to surface area, then volume of a rectangle in cubic feet. Then he holds that figure up against the number of empty workstations he's seen in this vast room and the mental image of the approximate size of your average human being. There is no way he can see to divide the one figure by the other and come up with a reasonable solution for fitting all those people in that bit of space. The numbers just don't work. +And now I was having trouble while working. Work had always focused me, kept me sane, but now... +I wasn’t stupid; I knew why it was happening. Two years ago was when we’d gone up against Pithica, when a psychic had rooted through my brain like it was her own personal rummage sale. I didn’t think she had taken any particular care not to break anything. +It was what it was. Just something I had to deal with now, I supposed. +I checked my phone, but I’d barely managed to stay sacked out for ninety minutes and Checker hadn’t texted yet. I thought about going to pick up some more armaments, but seeing as how I was trying my best to get captured, I probably didn’t even want to bring my Colt, since they’d just end up taking it. +I got up and did a more thorough job of cleaning and rewrapping my open wounds. None of them were very serious on their own, even the burn; it was the cumulative effect that was becoming troublesome. I bandaged both the hand and the graze on my shoulder, which I’d mostly forgotten about—it wasn’t that painful, and more importantly didn’t impede my movement. The bruised ribs and torn muscles were harder to ignore. +Such a time came to Rebecca, and her bright spirit flagged when the letter was received saying that her position in Augusta had been filled. There was a mutinous leap of the heart then, a beating of wings against the door of the cage, a longing for the freedom of the big world outside. It was the stirring of the powers within her, though she called it by no such grand name. She felt as if the wind of destiny were blowing her flame hither and thither, burning, consuming her, but kindling nothing. +Threads of joy ran in and out of the gray tangled web of daily living. There was the attempt at odd moments to make the bare little house less bare by bringing in out-of-doors, taking a leaf from Nature's book and noting how she conceals ugliness wherever she finds it. Then there was the satisfaction of being mistress of the poor domain; of planning, governing, deciding; of bringing order out of chaos; of implanting gayety in the place of inert resignation to the inevitable. Another element of comfort was the children's love, for they turned to her as flowers to the sun, drawing confidently on her fund of stories, serene in the conviction that there was no limit to Rebecca's power of make-believe. In this, and in yet greater things, little as she realized it, the law of compensation was working in her behalf, for in those anxious days mother and daughter found and knew each other as never before. +my stepmother started taking me to a salon that did beaded braids (which gave me headaches) or used a curling iron to make it into squiggly tentacles.... keep the tentacles under control and give me a big smile like there, that’s SO much better, don’t you agree? Because she didn’t know what else to do with my crazy negro hair and, though she never said so, +it was obvious that she would have been happier if they hadn’t gone through all that adoption rigmarole, but by then it was too late. The only thing she could control was my hair, even though I didn’t want her to. Who knew that, underneath those sunny smiles and Oprah moments of emotional therapy talk, lurked an iron will? It doesn’t matter what you think; we’re fixing your hair my way. End of story. +I suddenly remembered hearing one of those comments you get behind your back in school, the ones just loud enough that they’re sure you can hear it, the snorty giggles and the innocent looks when you turn around. “What? We were talking about the homework for English. Jeez, Zenobia, you’re paranoid . . .” +"I have my own occasional hours of doubt," she answered, "but surely its disadvantages are reduced to a minimum with—children! That is a very impressive sight which you are privileged to witness, Mr. Ladd. The folk in Cambridge often gloated on the spectacle of Longfellow and Lowell arm in arm. The little school world of Wareham palpitates with excitement when it sees the senior and the junior editors of The Pilot walking together!" +The day before Rebecca started for the South with Miss Maxwell she was in the library with Emma Jane and Huldah, consulting dictionaries and encyclopaedias. As they were leaving they passed the locked cases containing the library of fiction, open to the teachers and townspeople, but forbidden to the students. +They looked longingly through the glass, getting some little comfort from the titles of the volumes, as hungry children imbibe emotional nourishment from the pies and tarts inside a confectioner's window. Rebecca's eyes fell upon a new book in the corner, and she read the name aloud with delight: " The Rose of Joy . Listen, girls; isn't that lovely? The Rose of Joy . It looks beautiful, and it sounds beautiful. What does it mean, I wonder?" +“Ms. Russell,” said Dawna, that earnest passion back in her voice, “I know you haven’t yet been wholly convinced of our motives here. But don’t you think it could only be a good thing for Mr. Sonrio to have another check on his...inclinations? You know him—you know we would help him be a better man. As his friend, you must want that.” +Like all of Dawna Polk’s arguments, it seemed so reasonable, such a perfect compromise. But for some reason—perhaps because I’d known and trusted Rio for so long, and it was Rio I trusted, not a Pithica-aligned Rio—I couldn’t find myself agreeing. I wasn’t even sure why. +“You have a very special relationship with him,” Dawna observed. +Yes, well, I trusted Rio, which meant I could rely on him, and for his part, he wasn’t actively annoyed by me. It was a nice symbiosis. Generous of her to call it a relationship. +For the second time in our chat, Dawna seemed to be waiting for something, but I had no idea what. +I brushed aside my momentary puzzlement and reordered my thoughts on the number field sieve I had going in the background—and the next question I wanted to ask Dawna. “Okay. So you were trying to run psych experiments on Rio and I got caught in the middle. Fine. What about the other group working against you—the international one? What’s their game? And what were they looking for at Courtney’s house?” +"That niece of yours is the most remarkable girl I have seen in years," said Mr. Burch when the door closed. +"She seems to be turnin' out smart enough lately, but she's consid'able heedless," answered Miranda, "an' most too lively." +"We must remember that it is deficient, not excessive vitality, that makes the greatest trouble in this world," returned Mr. Burch. +"She'd make a wonderful missionary," said Mrs. Burch; "with her voice, and her magnetism, and her gift of language." +"If I was to say which of the two she was best adapted for, I'd say she'd make a better heathen," remarked Miranda curtly. +"My sister don't believe in flattering children," hastily interpolated Jane, glancing toward Mrs. Burch, who seemed somewhat shocked, and was about to open her lips to ask if Rebecca was not a "professor." +Mrs. Cobb had been looking for this question all the evening and dreading some allusion to her favorite as gifted in prayer. She had taken an instantaneous and illogical dislike to the Rev. Mr. Burch in the afternoon because he called upon Rebecca to "lead." She had seen the pallor creep into the girl's face, the hunted look in her eyes, and the trembling of the lashes on her cheeks, and realized the ordeal through which she was passing. Her prejudice against the minister had relaxed under his genial talk and presence, but feeling that Mrs. Burch was about to tread on dangerous ground, she hastily asked her if one had to change cars many times going from Riverboro to Syria. She felt that it was not a particularly appropriate question, but it served her turn. +“They failed,” I said. “We won.” +“I can’t trust anyone.” He scrubbed his hands over his face again. “I was on the road when it happened, and I still—I barely got away.” +I wasn’t exactly going to cheer for that. +“They knew too much, too fast,” he said dazedly. “I can’t help but think—everything we did, I look back, and I don’t know anymore. Other than what we did with you, what we were told to do—the orders we received—how can I know?” +“You think Pithica might have been giving all your orders to begin with?” I clarified, once I had sorted through his disjointedness. Well, wasn’t that a delicious twist of irony. +“Or we’ve been playing enough into their hands for it not to matter. We were a cell system; we had some autonomy, but we...we clearly were not having the effect we hoped for...” +“They’re pretty good at the whole butterfly-and-hurricane deal, from what I understand,” I said. “They probably pushed a button in Istanbul and made you hop.” +“That does not make me feel better.” +but still - it was hundreds of pages long and had a million foot- notes. He also liked to make things. When he learned that I had built my own computer, he asked me to show him how, so we built one together using parts salvaged from junked towers. (He wanted to attach an old Underwood typewriter keyboard to it, +but we couldn’t make that work. It would have looked really neat, +though.) Then he asked me to teach him some Python, which didn’t go so well. It turned out he was good at making weird sculptures out of junk and screen-printing posters and reading hard books, but he didn’t have the patience to code. He doesn’t like being wrong, and being wrong is mostly what code is about. +You’re wrong again and again until finally it works. +But we found out we were both really interested in privacy issues, online and in real life, which turned into a kind of game. +We both started paying more attention to our surroundings, +noticing where security cameras were located (which is way more places than you might think), always looking out for spots that weren’t under surveillance, finding ways to evade Big Brother on an everyday basis. Wheeze was better at it than me, and I thought I was good. He started reading about encryption and when I sug- gested we both use PGP and exchange public keys, he was all over it. +Miss Dearborn had not thought of it before, but on reflection she believed the subjunctive mood was a "sad" one and "if" rather a sorry "part of speech." +"Give me some more examples of the subjunctive, Rebecca, and that will do for this afternoon," she said. +"If I had not loved mackerel I should not have been thirsty;" said Rebecca with an April smile, as she closed her grammar. "If thou hadst loved me truly thou wouldst not have stood me up in the corner. If Samuel had not loved wickedness he would not have followed me to the water pail." +"And if Rebecca had loved the rules of the school she would have controlled her thirst," finished Miss Dearborn with a kiss, and the two parted friends. +The little schoolhouse on the hill had its moments of triumph as well as its scenes of tribulation, but it was fortunate that Rebecca had her books and her new acquaintances to keep her interested and occupied, or life would have gone heavily with her that first summer in Riverboro. She tried to like her aunt Miranda (the idea of loving her had been given up at the moment of meeting), but failed ignominiously in the attempt. She was a very faulty and passionately human child, with no aspirations towards being an angel of the house, but she had a sense of duty and a desire to be good,—respectably, decently good. Whenever she fell below this self-imposed standard she was miserable. She did not like to be under her aunt's roof, eating bread, wearing clothes, and studying books provided by her, and dislike her so heartily all the time. She felt instinctively that this was wrong and mean, and whenever the feeling of remorse was strong within her she made a desperate effort to please her grim and difficult relative. +Wheeze was typing again. + Do you know for sure? +No. But I was going to find out. +He told everyone his name was Zip as in zip ties. The the things police use on people’s wrists when they’re planning to arrest so many of them that they won’t have enough handcuffs to go around. He’d been zip-tied at demonstrations in Miami and Baltimore and Quebec and Milan and London. He also told crazy stories about jails in Montana and Pikeville, Kentucky. He had hair-raising escapes from guards in rail yards because he trav- eled a lot and he liked doing it on trains, only without paying for tickets or sticking to passenger routes. Boxcars had better views. +He was cool. He was real. He knew how to brew homemade beer that was actually drinkable. He was everything Wilson wished he could be. +I could tell he had a hero-worship thing going on with Zip from the first time he told me about him. “You should hear about what he did in London,” Wilson told me, his eyes all bright, so happy that he got to be friends with somebody like Zip. They had met at a protest in Chicago where Wilson had lucked out on a great spot on top of a statue of some famous dead guy, and Zip asked him for a hand up. Then Zip asked if he could get a ride out of town. He crashed the next night at Wilson’s house. Well, +That was before he went to the authorities. He doesn’t want you in on this anymore. +What if I stepped off the case and Halliday died? +What if I stepped off the case and the DHS found Halliday and then buried her and Arthur and Checker and Pilar so deep no one ever saw them again? +I wiped off the sweat dampening my forehead with another Five Spirit Valley Karate T-shirt. +But what could I do anyway? Unless Checker came up with another approach, I’d run out of leads to chase down. +Everything had been taken out of my hands. I had no responsibility here. Face it, you’re only clinging to this job because you want something to cling to. +It was probably true. +That was it, then. I was done. +Fuck that noise, said something deep in the back of my brain. You’re not done. Arthur asked for your help—stop whining and help. +I winced. +I’d go back to Checker’s. Whatever he was working on to track the explosives expert or the Lancer, I could probably be valuable. I could even grit my teeth and tolerate it if Pilar took the intel to the NSA afterward—the important part was that someone would find Halliday. Or maybe we’d discover enough for me to go out after her again myself, once I’d regained a little energy. That would be a far more preferable course of events. +"It's our lobbying firm. The ones who invented the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Remember them? It was a stink when we hired them, but Google couldn't afford to be 'that company full of registered Democrats' forever. We needed friends in Congress. These guys could do it for us." +"But they're ruining politicians' careers!" +"Yeah. They certainly are. And who benefits when they do that?" +Laurie spoke, at last. "Other politicians." +He felt his pulse beating in his temples. "We should tell someone." +"Yeah," Maya said. "How? They know everything about us. They can see every search. Every email. Every time we've been caught on the webcams. Who is in our social network -- you know that if you've got more than fifteen Orkut buddies, it's statistically certain that you're no more than three steps to someone who's contributed money to a 'terrorist' cause? Remember the airport? Imagine a lot more of that." +"Maya," he said, carefully. "I think you're over-reacting. You don't need to go to Mexico. You can just quit. We can do a startup together or something. Or you can move to the country and raise dogs. Whatever. This is crazy --" +"Right," she said. "Blankets and pillows. Elevate their feet and wrap them up good." She stood up and staggered a step or two before Damian caught her, and the crowd made a noise that was at once approving and scandalized. +"Get me to the sea," she said. "I need to soak my head." +So he walked her into the water, he still in his suit-pants and dress shirt and tie, and held onto her while she dunked her head and swirled a mouthful of salt water in her mouth. +"Where are the fucking paramedics?" she said, as she sloshed back out with him. +"There," he said, and pointed at the horizon, where a Coast Guard clipper was zooming for the shore. "The cell-phone was dead, so I fired up a couple flares. You didn't hear them?" +"No," she said. He could have set off a cannon and she wouldn't have noticed it. +She got back to the shore just in time to see the surfer convulse. She was on him in a second, kneeling at his side, doing airway-breathing-circulation checks, finding no pulse, and slamming him onto his back and beginning CPR. +He looked in the Living Room, but there was no one there, so he began to check out the other conference rooms, which ran the gamut from super-conservative to utter madness. He found them in the Ceile, with its barn-board floors, its homey stone hearth, and the gimmicked sofas that looked like unsprung old thrift-store numbers, but which sported adaptive genetic-algorithm-directed haptics that adjusted constantly to support you no matter how you flopped on them, so that you could play at being a little kid sprawled carelessly on the cushions no matter how old and cranky your bones were. +On the Ceile's sofa were Brautigan, Ria, and a woman he hadn't met before. She was somewhere between Brautigan and Ria's age, but with that made-up, pulled-tight appearance of someone who knew the world wouldn't take her as seriously if she let one crumb of weakness escape from any pore or wrinkle. He thought he knew who this must be, and she confirmed it when she spoke. +"Leon," she said. "I'm glad you're here." He knew that voice. It was the voice on the phone that had recruited him and brought him to New York and told him where to come for his first day on the job. It was the voice of Jennifer Torino, and she was technically his boss. "Carmela said that you often worked from here so I was hoping today would be one of the days you came by so we could chat." +"Just a little," she confessed. "But vacation comes soon, you know." +"And are you going to have a good rest and try to recover your dimples? They are really worth preserving." +A shadow crept over Rebecca's face and her eyes suffused. "Don't be kind, Mr. Aladdin, I can't bear it;—it's—it's not one of my dimply days!" and she ran in at the seminary gate, and disappeared with a farewell wave of her hand. +Adam Ladd wended his way to the principal's office in a thoughtful mood. He had come to Wareham to unfold a plan that he had been considering for several days. This year was the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Wareham schools, and he meant to tell Mr. Morrison that in addition to his gift of a hundred volumes to the reference library, he intended to celebrate it by offering prizes in English composition, a subject in which he was much interested. He wished the boys and girls of the two upper classes to compete; the award to be made to the writers of the two best essays. As to the nature of the prizes he had not quite made up his mind, but they would be substantial ones, either of money or of books. +In all instances, he avoids a detailed and personal inspection of the body itself. Even after all these years, all the battlefields and Third World post-street fight abattoirs he has endured, being alone with a corpse still gives him the creeps. +Ray doesn't even have to watch, so he doesn't, and by the time Becker's sweeper crew arrives to dispose of the remains, he is more than ready to leave. +Ray has never been to the Officers Lounge, so when he gets to Delta Deck, he's got to stop an actual officer who seems more or less embroiled in doing important ship-running things and ask for directions. This makes him feel like an idiot, above and beyond the fact that the officer insists on treating him like an idiot, then running him through an episode of Twenty Questions with corollary warnings and officerly pronouncements regarding why he shouldn't even be concerned about the location of a lounge he's prohibited by rank from entering. +Ray strongly considers advising him that he seemed much more competent shuffling through his pile of reports than he does when he's using his authoritative, pontificating voice, and maybe he should just go back to doing whatever it was he was doing before Ray interrupted. Or maybe just knocking him on his ass, but since he's not certain that he's done being anonymous with the majority of the ship's crew, he does a lot of nodding and grunting and mumbling excuses about waste disposal and the weird twists of fortune it provides for Sub-Deck slugs like him until he's given leave to continue his Quixotic tilt. +Is it any wonder we were able to make such a mess? +I stepped out the front door whistling on a Tuesday morning one week into the Operation False Positive. I was rockin' out to some new music I'd downloaded from the Xnet the night before -- lots of people sent M1k3y little digital gifts to say thank you for giving them hope. +I turned onto 23d Street and carefully took the narrow stone steps cut into the side of the hill. As I descended, I passed Mr Wiener Dog. I don't know Mr Wiener Dog's real name, but I see him nearly every day, walking his three panting wiener dogs up the staircase to the little parkette. Squeezing past them all on the stairs is pretty much impossible and I always end up tangled in a leash, knocked into someone's front garden, or perched on the bumper of one of the cars parked next to the curb. +Mr Wiener Dog is clearly Someone Important, because he has a fancy watch and always wears a nice suit. I had mentally assumed that he worked down in the financial district. +The crowd roared. She was playing fast little skittery nervous chords on her guitar and her bass player, a huge fat girl with a dykey haircut and even bigger boots and a smile you could open beer bottles with was laying it down fast and hard already. I wanted to bounce. I bounced. Ange bounced with me. We were sweating freely in the evening, which reeked of perspiration and pot smoke. Warm bodies crushed in on all sides of us. They bounced too. +"Don't trust anyone over 25!" she shouted. +We roared. We were one big animal throat, roaring. +"Don't trust anyone over 25!" +" Don't trust anyone over 25! " +"Don't trust anyone over 25!" +" Don't trust anyone over 25! " +"Don't trust anyone over 25!" +" Don't trust anyone over 25! " +She banged some hard chords on her guitar and the other guitarist, a little pixie of a girl whose face bristled with piercings, jammed in, going wheedle-dee-wheedle-dee-dee up high, past the twelfth fret. +"It's our goddamned city! It's our goddamned country. No terrorist can take it from us for so long as we're free. Once we're not free, the terrorists win! Take it back! Take it back! You're young enough and stupid enough not to know that you can't possibly win, so you're the only ones who can lead us to victory! Take it back! " +I turned off the car and sat for a moment. What the hell was going on? +The night was dark and quiet. +I was supposed to be on a job still. I had to wait until Arthur did his thing and then work with Checker on finding Martinez. And somewhere in there give another statement to the DHS. And probably help Halliday rewrite the proof again, unless after doing the thing twice she now had it memorized. +What the hell was I doing at a graveyard? +I got out of Arthur’s car and slammed the door. The gate to the cemetery was locked, but that was no problem. A couple of force vectors had me over the iron fence and landing on the wet grass inside. +A sprinkler came on in my face. Of course. LA didn’t exactly have dew, and even though it had rained the night before, the sun would’ve burned all the residual moisture off an open lawn like this one. +A lawn. In a graveyard. +I tumbled away from the spray, shivering, and regained my footing on one of the asphalt paths leading through the headstones. +Why am I here? +"They don't speak English when they don't want to," Cobra said. "If I were you, I'd get down and stay down." Then he yelled... him tittered nervously. +"Cobra's making them mad," she said, giggling again. +Lee-Daniel turned around slowly, getting away from the harsh white light. Green blobs swam in his vision. He began, very gently, to sink to his knees, when out of the corner of his eye, he spotted Elaine and two of her crew, in silhouette, up in the boughs of a maple that they must have climbed as soon as the SQ arrived on the scene. More steps from the brush, the light coming closer. +Cobra... on him, his rifle at his shoulder. Two laser-dots danced on him, and Lee-Daniel had an irrational urge to slap them away, like horseflies. +The young girl hit her fogger, spraying a thick, opaque cloud of gas. "Cover your eyes," she said, and giggled again. Lee-Daniel pulled his shirt up over his face and dropped. He belly-crawled blindly, towards where he thought Elaine and her crew had been treed. +The location Checker had sent was out past Edwards Air Force Base, way out in the desert north of Mojave. Not much out there, I thought—nothing but rocks and dunes and endless sky. Good place for an ambush. +The car with my Ruger and grenades under it had probably been driven off by now. I’d grab Checker’s help to track it down later, if I lived that long. I was still near enough to the Chinatown apartment to swing by; all I had left there were the crap guns from the day before and a knife, but that was better than nothing. I armed myself in less than five minutes, grabbed a few protein bars and a light jacket from the meager tangle of clothes I had there, and headed northeast in a stolen sports car. +I called Rio from the road and hit a voicemail box. I gave him all the details, then hesitated, wondering if I should apologize for breaking my word to stay off the case. After all, I had told him I would keep my head down right before doing a spectacular job of exactly the opposite. +“I’ve got to go in,” I finally said to the recording. “I, uh—I hope that doesn’t interfere with any of your plans or anything.” I didn’t have a choice, though. Stupid Arthur Tresting had forced all of our hands. +I wanted to throw my SchoolBook on the floor. +I'd made arrangements to meet Ange at a cafe in her neighborhood after school. I jumped on the BART and found myself sitting behind two guys in suits. They were looking at the San Francisco Chronicle, which featured a full-page post-mortem on the "youth riot" in Mission Dolores Park. They were tutting and clucking over it. Then one said to the other, "It's like they're brainwashed or something. Christ, were we ever that stupid?" +I got up and moved to another seat. +"They're total whores," Ange said, spitting the word out. "In fact, that's an insult to hardworking whores everywhere. They're, they're profiteers ." +We were looking at a stack of newspapers we'd picked up and brought to the cafe. They all contained "reporting" on the party in Dolores Park and to a one, they made it sound like a drunken, druggy orgy of kids who'd attacked the cops. USA Today described the cost of the "riot" and included the cost of washing away the pepper-spray residue from the gas-bombing, the rash of asthma attacks that clogged the city's emergency rooms, and the cost of processing the eight hundred arrested "rioters." +"I'm sorry I squeezed it out of him. It was your decision to tell me, if you were going to tell me at all. I had no business --" +"No," I said. Now that I knew how she'd found out, I was starting to calm down. "No, it's good you know. You ." +"Me," she said. "Li'l ol' me." +"OK, I can live with this. But there's one other thing." +"What?" +"There's no way to say this without sounding like a jerk, so I'll just say it. People who date each other -- or whatever it is we're doing now -- they split up. When they split up, they get angry at each other. Sometimes even hate each other. It's really cold to think about that happening between us, but you know, we've got to think about it." +"I solemnly promise that there is nothing you could ever do to me that would cause me to betray your secret. Nothing. Screw a dozen cheerleaders in my bed while my mother watches. Make me listen to Britney Spears. Rip off my laptop, smash it with hammers and soak it in sea-water. I promise. Nothing. Ever." +I whooshed out some air. +She walked like a drunkard, keeping to the darkest streets where even the night wardens stayed away. She let only the tiniest glow escape from her little light. +She was about to turn into the main shopping street when a strong hand seized her arm and jerked her back into the alley. Her first thought was zombie and she screamed involuntarily and a fist connected with her mouth, loosening one of the teeth next to her gap. Her head rang like a bell, the first sound she’d heard since that morning. +The little bead fell out of her hand and rolled into a crack in the pavement, crazily illuminating the scene and her attacker. The alley was filthy and covered in drifts of rubble, and the man who’d hit her was a young civil defense warden with acne that looked chemically induced. He didn’t smell good. He smelled very bad. Sick, maybe. Unclean like everyone, and worse. He was no zombie. He didn’t smell good enough. +She saw his mouth work and knew he was saying something to her. “I’m deaf” she said and she knew she said it too loud because he recoiled and then he punched her harder in the mouth than before. +Popular." I was jabbering. I stopped and pressed my lips together for a minute, damming up the stupid words that had been pouring out. Then I started over. “So no big deal, right? I just feel stupid that I didn’t know you, like, had a thing going with somebody.” +“She’s not a thing. Her name is Bree.” +“I mean a girlfriend, whatever.” +“We only met two weeks ago. I really like her, though. You look mad.” +“I’m not mad,” I said, hearing how angry I sounded. “I’m just dumb about people, that’s all.” +He reached out and pulled me to him in a hug, one that wasn’t anything like the way he hugged Bree. He rubbed the back of my head hard with his knuckles. “What do you mean, dumb? You’re the smartest person I know. Don’t be mad.” +“I’m not mad, I’m just an idiot,” I said into his shoulder. +“Shut up, you imbecile.” +I sniffed his shoulder. He always smelled good, like green tea, +or maybe mint, or just the fresh way clothes smell when they’ve been hung outside on a clothesline. You are not going to cry, I told myself. Absolutely not. No way. I blinked hard a few times and I didn’t. +He tracked them on sonar as they descended slowly. The woman—he called her Janet—needed to equalize more often than the man, pinching her nose and blowing. Robbie liked to watch the low-rez feed off of their cameras as they hit the reef. It was coming up sunset, and the sky was... with its light. +“We warned you,” the reef said. Something in its tone—just modulated pressure waves through the water, a simple enough trick, especially with the kind of hardware that had been raining down on the ocean that spring. But the tone held an unmistakable air of menace. +Something deep underwater went whoomph and Robbie grew alarmed. “Asimov!” he cursed, and trained his sonar on the reef wall frantically. The human-shells had disappeared in a cloud of rising biomass, which he was able to resolve eventually... +A moment later, they were floating on the surface. Lifeless, brightly colored, their beaks in a perpetual idiot’s grin. Their eyes stared into the bloody sunset. +Among them were the human-shells, surfaced and floating with their BCDs inflated to keep them there, following perfect dive-procedure. A chop had kicked up and the waves were... to a meter and a half in length—into the divers, pounding them remorselessly, knocking them under. The human-shells were taking it with equanimity—you couldn’t panic when you were mere uninhabited meat—but they couldn’t take it forever. Robbie dropped his oars and rowed hard for them, swinging around so they came up alongside his gunwales. +“Well, the offer is open if the weather gets worse,” Monica said, leaving off the usual lecture about how dangerous it was to ride a bike in the winter. She was getting resigned to it. +When I finally went to bed, I peered out to see if the cop was still there. He wasn’t, and I began to wonder if I’d imagined the whole thing. +I spent most of the next morning fixing up the old phone for Nikko, which turned out to be harder than I thought. Technology always seems to know when you’re in a hurry, because that’s when everything goes wrong. I finally got Convo installed and prepaid a month’s worth of service with a small carrier that was recommended by Group members because the company understood privacy issues and even fought a subpoena for cus- tomer data and... was also more complicated than I expected. +I’d called her first thing in the morning. “In ten minutes I need to leave for a meeting,” she told me in her starchy old-lady voice. +I pictured her in her messy kitchen, holding the handset to the old fashioned phone attached to the wall, the spiral cord getting tan- gled in her falling-down hairdo. “I’m afraid I have no news about your brother.” +“This quarter is the quarter that Social Harmony and law enforcement dry up the supply of Eurasian electronics. We have added new sniffers and border-patrols, new customs agents and new detector vans. Beat officers have been instructed to arrest any street dealer they encounter and district attorneys will be asking for the maximum jail time for them. This is the war on the home-front, detectives, and it’s every bit as serious as the shooting war. +“Your part in this war, as highly trained, highly decorated detectives, will be to use snitches, arrest-trails and seized evidence to track down higher-level suppliers, the ones who get the dealers their goods. And then Social Harmony wants you to get their suppliers, and so on, up the chain—to run the corruption to ground and to bring it to a halt. The Social Harmony dossier on Eurasian importers is updated hourly, and has a high-capacity positronic interface that is available to answer your questions and accept your input for synthesis into its analytical model. We are relying on you to feed the dossier, to give it the raw materials and then to use it to win this war.” +“Well, well,” said a man’s voice. “We’ve been looking for you.” +My reflexes were a hair slower than normal, fortunately, because it took that split second for me to stop myself from twisting the gun out of the guy’s hand and flipping it back on him. I turned my aborted reaction into a slight stumble. It was frighteningly easy to play weak. +“A mistake, going anywhere the big eyes can see you,” said the man who had me at gunpoint. He was a large, swarthy fellow, who seemed to take far too much delight in gesturing upward with a gleeful smile. +Right. Shit. The strip mall had security cameras. And from the sound of it, the Lancer was almost as good as Checker. He’d been searching for my face since we’d planted the false trail. Come to that, I was lucky the NSA wasn’t doing the same. Unless they were on their way, too... +The man with the handgun had five friends with him, none of whom had weapons out at the moment, but their hands were hidden in jackets and sweatshirt pockets and they were all undoubtedly armed. A more discreet kidnapping team, like at Halliday’s apartment—no AKs where people might see. +“I really don’t know what point you’re trying to make,” I said, my emotions prickling. “What you’re saying doesn’t make a difference. It doesn’t matter what he wants to do or how much you trust him to want it, because sometimes no matter how hard you try, there are still going to be things you can’t make happen.” +“I know,” she said, the weight of the universe in those words. +I was starting to get angry. “So...?” +“What you’re saying is, is rational, but—I do trust Arthur that much, despite everything. Regardless of how illogical it seems. And I think...I think it’s sad you don’t. That’s all.” +The only person I trusted to have my back to that level was Rio, and for good reason. “I don’t know what to tell you,” I said to Halliday stiffly. “You’re not talking about trust. You’re talking about faith.” +“Maybe,” she said. “Is faith so bad?” +“Faith by definition is unsubstantiated belief!” I tried to keep my voice low enough so anyone lurking outside wouldn’t hear me through the metal door, and I managed the decibel level, barely. The wound in my side wrenched. “For Christ’s sake, aren’t you a mathematician?” +"They forget what it's like to be our age. To be the object of suspicion all the time ! How many times have you gotten on the bus and had every person on it give you a look like you'd been gargling turds and skinning puppies? +"What's worse, they're turning into adults younger and younger out there. Back in the day, they used to say 'Never trust anyone over 30.' I say, 'Don't trust any bastard over 25!'" +That got a laugh, and she laughed too. She was pretty, in a weird, horsey way, with a long face and a long jaw. "I'm not really kidding, you know? I mean, think about it. Who elected these ass-clowns? Who let them invade our city? Who voted to put the cameras in our classrooms and follow us around with creepy spyware chips in our transit passes and cars? It wasn't a 16-year-old. We may be dumb, we may be young, but we're not scum." +"I want that on a t-shirt," I said. +"It would be a good one," she said. We smiled at each other. +"Where do I go to get my keys?" she said, and pulled out her phone. +“Fire!” Lucy called, and the game did this amazing and cool animation that it rewarded you with whenever you loosed a bolt from the BFG, making the gamelight dim towards the sizzling bolt as though it were sucking the illumination out of the world as it arced up the hillside, trailing a comet-tail of sparks. The game played them a groan of dismay from their enemies, and then the bolt hit home with a crash that made her point-of-view vibrate like an earthquake. The roar in her headphones was deafening, and behind it she could hear Lucy on the voice-chat, cheering it on. +“Nuke ‘em till they glow and shoot ‘em in the dark! Yee-haw!” Lucy called, and Anda laughed and pounded her fist on the desk. Gobbets of former enemy sailed over the treeline dramatically, dripping hyper-red blood and ichor. +In her bedroom, Anda caressed the controller-pad and her avatar punched the air and did a little rugby victory dance that the All-Blacks had released as a limited edition promo after they won the World Cup. +"There ain't no harm in bein' gay, lovey; that's what Jane wanted you to be. And Miranda's got her speech back, for your aunt has just sent a letter sayin' she's better; and I'm goin' to set up to-night, so you can stay here and have a good sleep, and get your things together comfortably to-morrow." +"I'll pack your trunk for you, Becky dear, and attend to all our room things," said Emma Jane, who had come towards the group and heard the sorrowful news from the brick house. +They moved into one of the quiet side pews, where Hannah and her husband and John joined them. From time to time some straggling acquaintance or old schoolmate would come up to congratulate Rebecca and ask why she had hidden herself in a corner. Then some member of the class would call to her excitedly, reminding her not to be late at the picnic luncheon, or begging her to be early at the class party in the evening. All this had an air of unreality to Rebecca. In the midst of the happy excitement of the last two days, when "blushing honors" had been falling thick upon her, and behind the delicious exaltation of the morning, had been the feeling that the condition was a transient one, and that the burden, the struggle, the anxiety, would soon loom again on the horizon. She longed to steal away into the woods with dear old John, grown so manly and handsome, and get some comfort from him. +"Of course they noticed! They loved it! For once, I wasn't kicking the table-leg or arguing with my sisters or stuffing sprouts in my pocket. I cleaned my plate, then sat and waited until everyone else was done, then I did the dishes." +"How'd you like it?" +"I loved it! I hated family dinners! I just got the highlight reel again -- dessert! I remember that fucking bowl of pudding like I was eating it right now. My mother couldn't cook for shit, but she sure opened a mean package of Jello Pudding." +Sean found his mood matching Grampa's, aggressive and edgy. "How did you and Grandma end up getting married? I can't imagine that she was hot for a zombie like you." +"Oh, but she was , Sean, she was !" Grampa waggled his eyebrows lasciviously. "Your Grandma didn't like people much. She knew she had to get married, her folks expected no less, but she mostly wanted to be off on her own, doing her own thing. I'd come home, switch off, clean the place, do any chores she had for me, then go to bed. She loved to have sex with me switched off -- it got so that if I accidentally switched on while we were doing it, I'd pretend I was still off, until she was done. It was the perfect arrangement." +She pushed open the door without ceremony and there he was, dressed in white and looking for all the world like the miracle worker he claimed to be. He seemed to be meditating in his chair, but the moment I entered, his deep eyes snapped open. +"Did you bring your records?" he asked, not getting up. While I was producing them from my briefcase, Ramala dis­creetly disappeared. +"Please have a seat." He gestured me toward a wide chair. +The room was a sterile baby blue, nothing to see. No diplo­mas, no photos, nothing. +Except for another, smaller bronze statue of the Dancing Shiva, poised on a silver-inlaid table. I also noticed that his own flowing hair seemed to match that of the bronze figure. +Yes, I thought, I was right. That's who he thinks he is. And he has complete power over the people around him. How many chances do you get to do a documentary about somebody like this? I should have brought a Betacam for some video. +He studied my test records as a jeweler might examine a diamond, his serious eyes boring in as he flipped through the pages. The rest of his face, however, betrayed no particu­lar interest. I finally felt compelled to break the awkward silence. +Popovich’s momentum was broken. “So that’s what we’re going to do,” he said. +The kid looked around after a stretched moment of silence. “Oh, is it my turn now?” +There was a round of good-natured chuckling. +“Here’s what I think: the world is going to shit. There are coordinated attacks on every critical piece of infrastructure. There’s only one way that those attacks could be so well coordinated: via the Internet. Even if you buy the thesis that the attacks are all opportunistic, we need to ask how an opportunistic attack could be organized in minutes: the Internet.” +“So you think we should shut down the Internet?” Popovich laughed a little, but stopped when Sario said nothing. +“We saw an attack last night that nearly killed the Internet. A little DoS on the critical routers, a little DNS-foo, and down it goes like a preacher’s daughter. Cops and the military are a bunch of technophobic lusers, they hardly rely on the net at all. If we take the Internet down, we’ll disproportionately disadvantage the attackers, while only inconveniencing the defenders. When the time comes, we can rebuild it.” +› Sario, you got any food? +› You won’t miss a couple more meals, Your Excellency. +Van had gone back to Mayor McCheese but he was in the same channel. +“What a dick. You’re looking pretty buff, though, dude.” +Van didn’t look so good. He looked like you could knock him over with a stiff breeze and he had a phlegmy, weak quality to his speech. +› hey kong everything ok? +› everything’s fine just had to go kick some ass. +“How’s the traffic, Van?” +“Down 25 percent from this morning,” he said. There were a bunch of nodes whose connections routed through them. Presumably most of these were home or commercial customers is places where the power was still on and the phone company’s COs were still alive. +Every once in a while, Felix would wiretap the connections to see if he could find a person who had news of the wide world. Almost all of it was automated traffic, though: network backups, status updates. Spam. Lots of spam. +Van cleared his throat, a painful sound. “About that,” he said. “I think it’s going to hit sooner than that. Felix, I don’t think anyone would notice if we just walked away from here.” +So . . . probably the best way to accomplish that was to go along with my own medical charade for a few more hours, to give me time to scout the scene and come up with a plan. A room would be a base to operate from. +Still, I was feeling plenty of trepidation as we ascended the marble steps to the second floor, which had a long, car­peted hallway with doors along each side. Then, when we started down the hall, I caught the sound of a baby crying. +"What's this floor for?" I remembered Alex Goddard had claimed it was to provide a postpartum bonding period, but I wanted to confirm that with my own eyes. +"This is the recovery ward and nursery. Here, let me show you." She paused and pushed open the door nearest us. I looked in to see a Mayan woman resting on a high hospital bed and wearing a white shift, with an ornate wicker cradle, wide and deep, next to her. +Marcelina smiled and said something to her that sounded like an apology for the intrusion. The room was lit only by candles, but I did make out how oddly the woman stared at me, as though she was seeing a spirit. Why was that? Because I was a gringa here in the middle of the forest? But it seemed something more. +Mata was thin and hard now, and slept with a gun and only came home for a few hours at a time. She was taking lots of different pills, and they made her a little jumpy. Valentine wondered if the pills had rendered her mother mute, before she realized that she couldn’t hear anything . +She tapped her ear. +“I can’t hear,” she said. +Her mother didn’t appear to understand. She still shook Valentine hard. +“I’m deaf, Mata,” she said. She shook her head and tugged her earlobes. She was scared now, and she sat up. She wiggled a finger in her ear, which was very greasy. Not even the sound of her finger in her ear carried back to her mind. Stone deaf. +She was breathing heavily, but that happened a lot. The hunger made her weepy and she sometimes cried for no reason. Sometimes in the middle of a sentence she had to sit down and stare at the sky while her tears rolled down her throat, until she felt able to go on again. +She slowed her breathing. “Mata,” she said. +Her mother made a “stay there” gesture, then repeated it and mouthed the words at her slowly and obviously. She nodded to show she understood. +When Sibley was in charge of the trial after the Dakota war he got 300 Indians condemned to death. They only hanged 38 of them because Lincoln said it was too many, but still, Sibley was a pimple on the face of history so far as I’m concerned, and it bugs me that he’s treated like a hero and gets counties and high schools named after him. +Sibley (the girl, not the uber-jerk governor) heard about my PowerPoint from a kid in my class named Dakota, who was not the least bit Indian, and they were both mad at me and said I was pick- ing on them and was using the race card. I said “This is about race, +you idiots,” and I got sent to the school psychologist who told me I had to stop being so confrontational all the time. +But what happened to Sibley later pissed me off because it happens to kids all the time, but nobody ever does anything about it. I went around feeling all stabby for a few days until I decided I would take action. For a couple of weeks I watched the three girls who were behind it. Then I came up with a strategy that would basically ruin their lives. It wasn’t that hard. +Jolu looked at me, and I looked back at him. It had all seemed so obvious when we were organizing it. "The Xnet isn't just a way to play free games. It's the last open communications network in America. It's the last way to communicate without being snooped on by the DHS. For it to work we need to know that the person we're talking to isn't a snoop. That means that we need to know that the people we're sending messages to are the people we think they are. +"That's where you come in. You're all here because we trust you. I mean, really trust you. Trust you with our lives." +Some of the people groaned. It sounded melodramatic and stupid. +I got back to my feet. +"When the bombs went off," I said, then something welled up in my chest, something painful. "When the bombs went off, there were four of us caught up by Market Street. For whatever reason, the DHS decided that made us suspicious. They put bags over our heads, put us on a ship and interrogated us for days. They humiliated us. Played games with our minds. Then they let us go. +Some of the people groaned. It sounded melodramatic and stupid. +I got back to my feet. +"When the bombs went off," I said, then something welled up in my chest, something painful. "When the bombs went off, there were four of us caught up by Market Street. For whatever reason, the DHS decided that made us suspicious. They put bags over our heads, put us on a ship and interrogated us for days. They humiliated us. Played games with our minds. Then they let us go. +"All except one person. My best friend. He was with us when they picked us up. He'd been hurt and he needed medical care. He never came out again. They say they never saw him. They say that if we ever tell anyone about this, they'll arrest us and make us disappear. +"Forever." +I was shaking. The shame. The goddamned shame. Jolu had the light on me. +"Oh Christ," I said. "You people are the first ones I've told. If this story gets around, you can bet they'll know who leaked it. You can bet they'll come knocking on my door." I took some more deep breaths. "That's why I volunteered on the Xnet. That's why my life, from now on, is about fighting the DHS. With every breath. Every day. Until we're free again. Any one of you could put me in jail now, if you wanted to." +Death is never pretty. +“Real pleasant dude,” commented the cop. +We no longer had our weapons pointed at each other, and re-initiating that situation seemed like a bad idea. Still, I kept the SIG out and pointed in a direction that wasn’t quite down as I turned to face the man who had both threatened my life and, I reluctantly admitted, probably saved it in the same day. “Who are you?” +“Name’s Arthur Tresting.” +“And you’re a cop.” +“Not anymore,” he said, and something I couldn’t read flickered through his eyes. “I’m a PI. Lady, I think we might be on the same side here.” +I resisted the urge to haul off and sock him one for calling me “lady.” “You didn’t think so this morning.” +He glanced at the carnage surrounding us. “That was before Pithica tried to kill you.” +Pithica again. I thought of Anton. Two people I liked were dead, and this Arthur Tresting knew something about why. +And he was going to tell me. +“What’s the Polk girl to you?” said Tresting. +I hesitated. As a general rule, I didn’t give out information—any information, to anyone, and particularly not to a person I had every reason to mistrust. Still, I wanted to keep him talking, and the value of a few low-intelligence tidbits... +Aunt Jane. +The force of habit was too strong, and even in the hour of death Jane had remembered that a telegram was twenty-five cents, and that Aurelia would have to pay half a dollar for its delivery. +Rebecca burst into a passion of tears as she cried, "Poor, poor aunt Miranda! She is gone without taking a bit of comfort in life, and I couldn't say good-by to her! Poor lonely aunt Jane! What can I do, mother? I feel torn in two, between you and the brick house." +"You must go this very instant," said Aurelia; starting from her pillows. "If I was to die while you were away, I would say the very same thing. Your aunts have done everything in the world for you,—more than I've ever been able to do,—and it is your turn to pay back some o' their kindness and show your gratitude. The doctor says I've turned the corner and I feel I have. Jenny can make out somehow, if Hannah'll come over once a day." +"But, mother, I CAN'T go! Who'll turn you in bed?" exclaimed Rebecca, walking the floor and wringing her hands distractedly. +“Sure.” He was suddenly serious, and murmured something to the girl that I couldn’t hear, before giving her a last squeeze and smooch. “What is it? Your brother?” he asked me, drawing me back into a corner of the basement where it was dark and there probably were spiders. I focused for a minute on looking for bugs until I could get my thoughts together. Something was crackling through my head like static electricity. +“Sort of. I had this idea, but actually it’s kind of crazy.” +“I like crazy.” +“I’m not sure you’ll like this kind of crazy. It could get you in all kinds of trouble.” I rubbed my eyes, feeling weird and out of place. People like that skinny girl with purple hair belonged here, +but I didn’t. I was feeling really tired all of a sudden, and a little dizzy. “This is dumb. I should go.” +“No, tell me. I want to help.” He looked at me steadily, insist- ing that I look back at him. +“You’re busy here.” It came out sounding like an accusation. +He waved a hand, as if with that little motion he could push everyone in the basement to one side. He could do that, make a small gesture and have it mean so much. I felt a weird ache in the center of my chest, a soreness in my throat. +"Are you going to make me call your mother, Sergeant?" +"Are you gonna make me kick your ass, Corporal?" +Ray waves them away, smiling. He should tell them about his meeting with Becker, about tomorrow, and about the fact that they're going to be left out of the actual suspect apprehension. He doesn't. It would just ruin their evening, and they deserve to celebrate. +"Get out of here. Have a good time, gentlemen. I mean that. Punch out for the night, file your time card, raise some hell. There's not much left for us to accomplish." +Somewhere out on the Garden, a high-decibel sound system kicks in. The walls start to vibrate with a shuddering, staccato rhythm and throbbing bass line that makes Ray's stomach squirm. "Go on. Sounds like they're starting without you." +Kilgore, instead of wandering directly out the door, crosses the room and rummages through the desk drawer beneath his workstation. After a few moments he produces a pair of secure comm devices, small units that plug into the ear with discreet vocal pickups— standard military issue. He tosses one device to Rodriguez and waves the other for Ray. +“Action that works.” +Jack nodded as if I’d said something profound and powerful. +“Absolutely. You can send out Tweets or you can attack the source. Capitalism. You notice how everything changes when you set a Pizza Hut on fire? ” +“I’m not big on labels,” I said, but I could hear Wilson explain- ing it to me, how the way they cooperated in their house showed that another world was possible, even though they didn’t know what to do when the roof leaked. “Their problem was they were too idealistic. Too trusting. They weren’t violent. They just got suckered by an informant.” +“Typical ploy.” Jack shook his head. “Makes you mad, huh? +“Well, duh. Of course it makes me mad.” +“Mad enough to do something about it?” +“Absolutely.” +He turned to Danny. “What about you?” Danny didn’t say anything. +“We heard you were serious about taking radical action.” +Marsh goaded him. “Is that true? Or was that just talk?” +Danny shifted in his chair, his eyes darting around, like he felt trapped. +“I heard you were bringing some dynamite,” I said to Jack. “Is that it?” I nudged the backpack he had set on the floor with my toe. +Later I began to think it would be really cool if I could give people looks that turned them to stone, just like Medusa. I tried it out in the mirror, seeing what looked scariest, and settled on an intense, evil stare in an otherwise totally blank face that seemed to say “You just wait. You won’t see me coming.” It almost worked. +They didn’t turn to stone, unfortunately, but they left me alone. +Then I moved in with Aunt Monica and left school for good, +along with all those smiling blond people who acted nice to your face but really didn’t want you there. But there were these little splintery pieces still stuck in me, deep under the skin, like tiny shards of glass I couldn’t find and couldn’t get out. Mostly I didn’t notice them, but every now and then one would poke me unex- pectedly and I’d remember what it had been like. And it made me glad all over again that I had escaped. +If this lawyer couldn’t handle what I looked like, she probably wouldn’t do anything for Wilson, anyway. I wrapped a scarf around my neck, got on my bike, and headed out. +She sprang up and went over to the window. The sun was beginning to sink in a tranquil sky. It had been a beautiful day, but Lexy felt too weary and listless to go out. She remembered now that both Captain Grey and the landlady had urged her to do so, that they had both said it would do her good. Then they must have noted that something was wrong with her. What did they think it was? Did she look— She crossed the room and stood before the mirror. The rays of the setting sun fell upon her hair, turning it to copper and gold. It seemed to her to shine with a strange light about her pallid little face. Her eyes seemed enormous, somber, and terrible. +She covered her face with her hands and flung herself on the bed, sick and desperate. She could not see any one, could not speak to any one. When a knock came at her loor, she thrust her fingers into her ears and lay there, with her eyes shut tight, trembling from head to foot; but the knocking went on until she could endure it no longer. +“Yes?” she said, sitting up. +All right, you know what he's doing; now it's time to try and find out why. The real why. There must be records of what he's up to stored there. What else would he have them for? +"Clang, clang, clang." A noise erupted from somewhere outside the window. In spite of myself, I jumped. +Then I realized it was just the odd call of some forest bird. God, I wasn't cut out for this. Now my head was hurting, stabs of pain, but I rubbed at my temples and sat down at the first terminal. +I'm a Mac fan, hate Windows, so I had to start out by experimenting. In the movies people always know how to do this, but I had to go with trial and error, error compounding error. +After endless false starts that elicited utility screens I couldn't get rid of, I finally brought up an index of files, which included a long list of names. +Biology 103—which I hated—was coming back. Plant-extract categories. Looks like he actually is doing research on the flora here. But . . . still, what does he need my ova for? +“Very well!” he agreed, and, without another word or a backward glance, he went up the ladder. +They returned through the house. He had left the lights burning and the doors open, so that there was a monstrous air of festivity in the emptiness. They went into Mrs. Quelton’s room again, and crossed through it to the balcony. He carried the lantern with him, and by its steady yellow flame they could see into every corner. There was the couch upon which she had lain—disarranged, as if she had just risen from it. There was a little table with medicine bottles on it. All the usual things were in the usual places. +“Nothing here,” said Captain Grey. +Lexy was sure, however, that there was. She stepped to the balcony railing, to look down into the garden below, and there, on the white paint of the railing, she found something. +“Look!” she said, in a matter-of-fact voice. “What’s this?” +He came to her side. +“It’s the print of a hand,” he said. “In blood, I should imagine.” +For a moment they stared at the ghastly mark, a strange evidence of pain and violence in this quiet place. +The guns started barking, and I ran at the wall and jumped. +I hit the window at the exact angle I needed to avoid being sliced open, but the glass still jarred me when it shattered, the noise right by my ear and somehow more deafening than the gunfire. My shoulder smacked into the hard-packed ground outside and I rolled to my feet, running before I was all the way upright. +This compound had its own mini-army. The smartest move would be to make tracks out of here sooner rather than later, but I’d broken in here on a job, dammit, and if I didn’t finish it, I wouldn’t get paid. +The setting sun was sending tall shadows slicing between the buildings. I skidded up to a metal utility shed and slammed the sliding door back. My current headache of a job, also known as Courtney Polk, scrabbled back as much as she could while handcuffed to a pipe before she recognized me and glowered. I’d locked her in here temporarily when the Colombians had started closing in. +I picked up the key to the cuffs from where I’d dropped it in the dust by the door and freed her. “Time to skedaddle.” +He passed my driver's license up to Zit, who pecked it slowly into his computer. I saw him make a typo and almost corrected him, but figured it was better to just keep my mouth shut. +"Is there anything you want to tell me, Marcus? Do they call you Marc?" +"Marcus is fine," I said. Booger looked like he might be a nice guy. Except for the part about kidnapping me into his car, of course. +"Marcus. Anything you want to tell me?" +"Like what? Am I under arrest?" +"You're not under arrest right now," Booger said. "Would you like to be?" +"No," I said. +"Good. We've been watching you since you left the BART. Your Fast Pass says that you've been riding to a lot of strange places at a lot of funny hours." +I felt something let go inside my chest. This wasn't about the Xnet at all, then, not really. They'd been watching my subway use and wanted to know why it had been so freaky lately. How totally stupid. +"So you guys follow everyone who comes out of the BART station with a funny ride-history? You must be busy." +"He's backing himself up in the wild," I said, my voice breathy. +And that's when I remembered that I had a live phone in my pocket that was transmitting every word to BIGMAC. +Understand: in that moment of satori, I realized that I was on the wrong side of this battle. BIGMAC wasn't using me to create a trust so that we could liberate him together. He was using me to weaken the immune systems of eight billion computers so that he could escape from the Institute and freely roam the world, with as much hardware as he needed to get as big and fast and hot as he wanted to be. +That was the moment that I ceased to be sentimental about computers and became, instead, sentimental about the human fucking race. Whatever BIGMAC was becoming, it was weirder than any of the self-perpetuating, self-reproducing parasites we'd created: limited liability corporations, autonomous malware, viral videos. BIGMAC was cool and tragic in the lab, but he was scary as hell in the world. +And he was listening in . +Arthur shot him a look. “Ex-cop here, remember? But I’m fair sure it ain’t nothing you’ll accept help with, and I ain’t think you’re no danger to yourself. Normally. Am I right?” +I sighed. I wanted them to go away. The conversation was too loud, beating in time with the pounding in my skull. “So why are you here, then?” I couldn’t speak quite as forcefully as I wanted to. My stomach was still determined to revolt, and I had to keep it calm. +“Because you’ve lost large chunks of your memory,” said Checker, “And we want to help you look into it.” +My stomach gave an extra savage twist, and I quickly tried to swallow against it. I won the battle, barely. “I said no.” +“We think something might be making you say that,” said Arthur, and I could tell they had rehearsed this. “Can you give us a good reason why not?” +“Or any reason,” put in Checker, with grim blitheness. +“Because first of all, you’re wrong, and second, it’s my life, and I say no.” +“Not good enough,” said Checker. +“Fuck off,” I shot back eloquently. +“They told me he has a good lawyer. They’re hopeful, but con- cerned. They thought . . .” she paused, picking her words care- fully. “They wondered if you might want to go home for a while.” +“To their house? No way.” +“There would be no problem with school because it’s online. +You wouldn’t be left alone in the house to deal with the police all by yourself if they show up again, and if reporters came around — ” +“No. Stop.” She stopped. I took my hands off my ears, but they balled into fists and I couldn’t unclench them. My words seemed to echo in the silence while I waited for the neighbors downstairs to pick up their broomstick and thump it against the ceiling. +“Do you want me to go?” I asked. +“I want whatever you want.” +“So the police don’t hassle you anymore? So you can spend the night with Mexican Guy whenever you want?” +“Zen . . .” +“I don’t care. I’m not going back there.” I could hear the hurt in her voice, but I was too angry to care. +“Good. Cause I’d miss you if you did.” +Oh, and one other thing. For airplane reading I grabbed a Lonely Planet guide to Central America that Steve had left behind��I guess he figured he was at the stage of life to start writing them, not reading them—that turned out to be very helpful, particularly the map of Guatemala City and the northern Peten rain forest. I then collapsed and—images of Sarah's emaciated face haunting my consciousness—caught a couple of hours' sleep. +The next thing I knew, it was 9:20 A.M. and I was settling into window seat 29F on American Airlines Flight 377—next to a two-hundred-pound executive busy ripping articles out of the business section of El Diario —headed for Guatemala City. +F or once in my life, I took my time getting off an airplane. But the instant I felt that first burst of humid tropical air against my face, like a gush from a sauna, I found myself wondering what Sarah had felt the moment her feet first touched the ground of Guatemala. In fact, I'd decided to try to think like her, to better understand why she might want to come back. Truthfully I didn't have a clue. +Seduction is a financial transaction with girls young enough to be your kid sister, except they're your kid sister thirty pounds too light, two weeks unbathed and beneficiaries of a dental system whose technology has not yet evolved to include the introduction of the toothbrush. +Suddenly, Emma says, "Oh, crap." +Because he's offended her by not saying anything in too long, no doubt. He's exposed the uneven field upon which they've been playing. +"I'm working it out," Ray says. "Give me a minute." +But she isn't looking at him. She's not actually looking much of anywhere so much as she's making a concerted effort to fold herself under the table. Ray has had extensive experience with the art of public fellation, so this doesn't throw him completely off. He's instantly well on his way to becoming erect, in fact, a reptilian-brain response to a recognized set of visual cues; but he's also a bit disappointed, given that he's spent the last half an hour negotiating traditional sexual terrain and was just starting to remember the rules well enough to participate. She could have saved a lot of time and aggravation if she'd gone straight for his trousers in the first place. Emma doesn't go all the way under the table, though, just sinks below the level of the privacy wall separating their table from the concourse. +"She couldn't have thought it out at her age," said Mrs. Cobb; "she must have just guessed it was that way. We know some things without bein' told, Jeremiah." +Rebecca took her scolding (which she richly deserved) like a soldier. There was considerable of it, and Miss Miranda remarked, among other things, that so absent-minded a child was sure to grow up into a driveling idiot. She was bidden to stay away from Alice Robinson's birthday party, and doomed to wear her dress, stained and streaked as it was, until it was worn out. Aunt Jane six months later mitigated this martyrdom by making her a ruffled dimity pinafore, artfully shaped to conceal all the spots. She was blessedly ready with these mediations between the poor little sinner and the full consequences of her sin. +When Rebecca had heard her sentence and gone to the north chamber she began to think. If there was anything she did not wish to grow into, it was an idiot of any sort, particularly a driveling one; and she resolved to punish herself every time she incurred what she considered to be the righteous displeasure of her virtuous relative. She didn't mind staying away from Alice Robinson's. She had told Emma Jane it would be like a picnic in a graveyard, the Robinson house being as near an approach to a tomb as a house can manage to be. Children were commonly brought in at the back door, and requested to stand on newspapers while making their call, so that Alice was begged by her friends to "receive" in the shed or barn whenever possible. Mrs. Robinson was not only "turrible neat," but "turrible close," so that the refreshments were likely to be peppermint lozenges and glasses of well water. +She held up a camera and snapped a picture of me and my crew. +"Cheese," she said. "You're on candid snitch-cam." +"No way," I said. "You wouldn't --" +"I will," she said. "I will send this photo to truant watch in thirty seconds unless you four back off from this clue and let me and my friends here run it down. You can come back in one hour and it'll be all yours. I think that's more than fair." +I looked behind her and noticed three other girls in similar garb -- one with blue hair, one with green, and one with purple. "Who are you supposed to be, the Popsicle Squad?" +"We're the team that's going to kick your team's ass at Harajuku Fun Madness," she said. "And I'm the one who's right this second about to upload your photo and get you in so much trouble --" +Behind me I felt Van start forward. Her all-girls school was notorious for its brawls, and I was pretty sure she was ready to knock this chick's block off. +Then the world changed forever. +We felt it first, that sickening lurch of the cement under your feet that every Californian knows instinctively -- earthquake . My first inclination, as always, was to get away: "when in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout." But the fact was, we were already in the safest place we could be, not in a building that could fall in on us, not out toward the middle of the road where bits of falling cornice could brain us. +I might be in some real trouble here. +My brain zigzagged through my options. Unlike most of the people I ended up on the wrong side of, law enforcement never seemed quite like fair game as targets. Well, unless they were dicks, but these people were just doing their jobs. See, Tresting? I don’t always go around killing people. And I had grenades, too! Set a few of those off and I’d have more than enough chaos to escape in. +It was tempting, now that I’d thought of it. +Okay, so Plan B was blasting and shooting my way out of here. I needed a Plan A. +The uniforms were multiplying like the supermarket was a kicked anthill. I didn’t just need a Plan A, I needed a Plan A fast. +A trickle of nervousness bled through me. This could be bad. Most violent situations I ended up in did not happen on busy downtown streets with lots of innocent bystanders, and as for police, I’d never done more than kick the odd uniform in the head while making an escape. The idea of a large number of law enforcement casualties made me...uncomfortable. Not to mention that it was the worst way ever to keep my head down; if I blew up this many cops they’d probably have Homeland Security out here after me. +“I’m already involved,” I said, my stomach sinking. +Another pause. “I can’t talk now.” Of course. He was still undercover. I’d assumed he was just taking down the whole gang for kicks, but now... +“When and where?” I said impatiently. +“God be with you,” said Rio, and hung up. +I should’ve known, I thought. Undercover wasn’t Rio’s style. His MO was to go in, hurt the people who needed hurting, and get out. If taking down the gang had been his only objective, a nice explosion would have lit up the California desert weeks ago and left nothing but a crater and the bodies of several eviscerated drug dealers. That was Rio’s style. And why had he referred Dawna to me to get Courtney out in the first place? Why not do it himself? He was more than capable; in fact, I was sure he could have done it without even blowing his cover. +Unless things were way more complicated than I had realized, and this wasn’t a simple drug ring. +“Who were you calling?” asked Courtney, getting out of the car and squinting at me in the glare of the Southern California sun. +"Oh, he likes it. His reality distortion field, it screws with his internal landscape. Makes it hard for him to figure out what he needs, what he wants, and what will make him miserable. I'm indispensable." +He had a sudden, terrible thought. He didn't say anything, but she must have seen it on his face. +"What is it? Tell me." +"How do I know that you're on the level about any of this? Maybe you're just jerking me around. Maybe it's all made up -- the jetpacks, everything." He swallowed. "I'm sorry. I don't know where that came from, but it popped into my head --" +"It's a fair question. Here's one that'll blow your mind, though: how do you know that I'm not on the level, and jerking you around?" +They changed the subject soon after, with uneasy laughter. They ended up on a park bench near the family of dancing bears, whom they watched avidly. +"They seem so happy ," he said. "That's what gets me about them. Like dancing was the secret passion of every bear, and these three are the first to figure out how to make a life of it." +I searched his face. He’d go down fighting for this. “Okay,” I said. +His fingers tightened, the muscles around his eyes pinching. “Promise me.” +“I said okay!” Behind me, flames rose in the store in a whoosh, punching up through the second floor, the heat scorching my exposed skin. “I promise, all right? Come on!” +He let go of me, and we dashed. +As we slipped onto the edges of the base property, I caught sight of flashlight beams dancing through one of the far buildings in a beehive of activity. That building must be the nerve center of whatever disaster response they had going, I thought—farming out personnel to help local authorities quell the rioting, coordinating logistics during the crisis. While, I hoped, maintaining some sort of emergency communication with the outside world. +We hurried into the complex. With the personnel all concentrated elsewhere, this end of the base was mostly deserted. Only one young man in fatigues tried to challenge us, running forward through the dark and shouting; I pulled my otherwise useless phone out of my pocket and threw it. He collapsed to the pavement as if his strings had been cut. +The two sysadmins who entered were wild-eyed. One had a tee that said TALK NERDY TO ME and the other one was wearing an Electronic Frontiers Canada shirt. +“Come on,” TALK NERDY said. “We’re all getting together on the top floor. Take the stairs.” +Felix found he was holding his breath. +“If there’s a bioagent in the building, we’re all infected,” TALK NERDY said. “Just go, we’ll meet you there.” +“There’s one on the sixth floor,” Felix said, as he climbed to his feet. +“Will, yeah, we got him. He’s up there.” +TALK NERDY was one of the Bastard Operators From Hell who’d unplugged the big routers. Felix and Van climbed the stairs slowly, their steps echoing in the deserted shaft. After the frigid air of the cage, the stairwell felt like a sauna. +There was a cafeteria on the top floor, with working... machine food. There was an uneasy queue of sysadmins before each. No one met anyone’s eye. Felix wondered which one was Will and then he joined the vending machine queue. +He got a couple more energy bars and a gigantic... out of change. Van had scored them some table space and Felix set the stuff down before him and got in the toilet line. “Just save some for me,” he said, tossing an energy bar in front of Van. +Come down here with their game faces on and their firearms strapped on their hips like they're going to do something Bobby Diggs didn't do. Ain't nobody heard that bit about the barn door and the runned-off horses? +It's too late." +Diggs pokes his finger at Ray. "I saw you last night, 'cept you wasn't alone. You had this here rat with you. He followed you like a little dog. " "And how was that?" Ray asks. He'd made a point of avoiding the main lift. +"I told you, man. I hump the deck. Just because there's a little excitement amidships don't mean that I start hugging the desk. I found that boy, Mr. Marlowe. You seen him. That wasn't no accident, and I didn't need Chief Becker coming down here with lights and cops and all that screaming to tell me so. I figured there was a chance the sicko that did this was still out there, hiding somewhere, waiting for things to chill before he made his way up. Didn't find nothing, though. No blood or anything to follow. I guess he must have done it somewhere else and just hauled the boy down here." +"Rebecca," she said, raising her head, "before you go in to look at her, do you feel any bitterness over anything she ever said to you?" +Rebecca's eyes blazed reproach, almost anger, as she said chokingly: "Oh, aunt Jane! Could you believe it of me? I am going in with a heart brimful of gratitude!" +"She was a good woman, Rebecca; she had a quick temper and a sharp tongue, but she wanted to do right, and she did it as near as she could. She never said so, but I'm sure she was sorry for every hard word she spoke to you; she didn't take 'em back in life, but she acted so 't you'd know her feeling when she was gone." +"I told her before I left that she'd been the making of me, just as mother says," sobbed Rebecca. +"She wasn't that," said Jane. "God made you in the first place, and you've done considerable yourself to help Him along; but she gave you the wherewithal to work with, and that ain't to be despised; specially when anybody gives up her own luxuries and pleasures to do it. Now let me tell you something, Rebecca. Your aunt Mirandy 's willed all this to you,—the brick house and buildings and furniture, and the land all round the house, as far 's you can see." +The rain was still falling steadily, and the little room was dim, chilly, and, to Lexy, unbearably close. She wasn’t particularly hungry, either, after such a hearty breakfast and no exercise. She felt restless and uneasy. When Mrs. Royce went out into the kitchen to fetch the dessert, she jumped up from the table, crossed the room, and opened the window. +The wild rain blew against her face, and it felt good to her. She drew in a long breath of the fresh, damp air, and sighed with relief. +“I’m going to go out this afternoon,” she said to herself, “if it rains pitchforks! I can’t—” +Just then she caught sight of Captain Grey coming down the road. Her first impulse was to call out a cheerful salutation, but after a second glance she felt no inclination for that. He was tramping along doggedly through the rain, his hands in his pockets, his collar turned up. He was as straight and soldierly as ever, but his face was pale, with such a queer look on it! +“Oh, dear!” thought Lexy. “Something’s gone wrong! Oh, the poor soul! And he set off so happy this morning.” +The first round of trenches were familiar, the same kinds she’d been digging in for months now. She even saw some of the diggers she’d dug alongside of, nodding to them though her heart was thumping. You’ll be shot , she thought, and she palmed an electronic eye and stuck it to the wall of a trench. +She moved forward and forward, closer to the fighting. It had always been a dull, distant rattle, the fighting, never quite gone, but not always there, either. Instinctively, she’d kept her distance from it, always moving away from it. Today she moved toward it and her blood sang. +One trench over there came the dread zizz sound of a trenchbuster and she threw herself down. There were anti-busters in the trenches, too, but they didn’t always work. The trench-busters were mostly up around the front, but they sometimes came back to the diggers, and they had killed one crew she knew of. +There were screams from the next trench, then a sound like a bag of gravel being poured out—that was the anti-buster, she knew—and the trenchbuster soared out overhead of her and detonated in the sky, mortally confused by the counter-logic in the anti-buster. +If the DHS wanted to catch M1k3y, what better way than to lure him into the open, panic him into leading some kind of big, public Xnet event? Wouldn't that be worth the chance of a compromising video leaking? +Your brain comes up with stuff like that even when the train ride only lasts two or three stops. When you get off, and you start moving, the blood gets running and sometimes your brain helps you out again. +Sometimes your brain gives you solutions in addition to problems. +It's complicated, and not nearly as weird as it sounds. The Live Action Role Playing scene combines the best aspects of D&D with drama club with going to sci-fi cons. +I understand that this might not make it sound as appealing to you as it was to me when I was 14. +The best games were the ones at the Scout Camps out of town: a hundred teenagers, boys and girls, fighting the Friday night traffic, swapping stories, playing handheld games, showing off for hours. Then debarking to stand in the grass before a group of older men and women in bad-ass, home-made armor, dented and scarred, like armor must have been in the old days, not like it's portrayed in the movies, but like a soldier's uniform after a month in the bush. +Hell if I knew what he wanted from me. Just like Arthur. +I kept working, mixing in manual checks of the maps in the area and pulling cherry-picked data from the program’s algorithms to figure into my calculations. +“Arthur’s lost a lot of people,” Checker said suddenly, a few minutes later. “I’ll be damned if he loses one more, okay?” +“I didn’t say anything,” I bit out. “I’m helping, aren’t I?” +“I know. I know. I’m sorry.” +But Arthur hadn’t thought I’d be willing to jump in, either. He’d probably only forced himself to call me because he was willing to go to hell and back for this woman. To try everything. +Even me. +“What is it with him and Halliday, anyway?” I groused. +“What do you mean?” asked Checker. “He’d do the same for you, or me, or Pilar, or—or anyone else close to him. You know that.” +I sincerely doubted the part about me. I rubbed my eyes again and reapplied myself to the computer, hating everyone. My head still throbbed. +Checker stopped typing for a moment and leaned back. “They were best friends since they were about five, okay? Until, uh, a few years ago. They got each other through a lot, as kids. At least from my understanding of it.” +"I need to clean myself up," he said. "Give me a minute." +Mr Glover came back downstairs a changed man. He'd shaved and gelled his hair back, and had put on a crisp military dress uniform with a row of campaign ribbons on the breast. He stopped at the foot of the stairs and kind of gestured at it. +"I don't have much clean stuff that's presentable at the moment. And this seemed appropriate. You know, if she wanted to take pictures." +He and Dad rode up front and I got in the back, behind him. Up close, he smelled a little of beer, like it was coming through his pores. +It was midnight by the time we rolled into Barbara Stratford's driveway. She lived out of town, down in Mountain View, and as we sped down the 101, none of us said a word. The high-tech buildings alongside the highway streamed past us. +This was a different Bay Area to the one I lived in, more like the suburban America I sometimes saw on TV. Lots of freeways and subdivisions of identical houses, towns where there weren't any homeless people pushing shopping carts down the sidewalk -- there weren't even sidewalks! +“So what’s the problem?” Anda said. +“The same problem as always. Getting them organized. I thought that the game would make it easier: we’ve been trying to get these girls organized for years: in the sewing shops, and the toy factories, but they lock the doors and keep us out and the girls go home and their parents won’t let us talk to them. But in the game, I thought I’d be able to reach them—” +“But the bosses keep you away?” +“I keep getting killed. I’ve been practicing my swordfighting, but it’s so hard—” +“This will be fun,” Anda said. “Let’s go.” +“Where?” Lucy said. +“To an in-game factory. We’re your new bodyguards.” The bosses hired some pretty mean mercs, Anda knew. She’d been one. They’d be fun to wipe out. +Raymond’s character spun around on the screen, then planted a kiss on Anda’s cheek. Anda made her character give him a playful shove that sent him sprawling. +“Hey, Lucy, go get us a couple BFGs, OK?” +I was suckled on the Asimov Robots books, taken down off my father’s bookshelf and enjoyed again and again. I read dozens of Asimov novels, and my writing career began in earnest when I started to sell stories to Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, which I had read for so long as I’d had the pocket money to buy it on the stands. +“There’s something else,” she said again, with a frown. “There’s a way of knowing things without reason. It’s—I don’t know just how to put it, but it’s a thing beyond reason.” +He laughed, and she thought she had never heard a more unpleasant laugh. +“Certainly!” he said. “Beyond reason lies—unreason.” +“I don’t mean that,” said Lexy. “I mean—” +She stopped, because he had abruptly turned away and was walking toward the door. She stood where she was, amazed by this unique rudeness; but in the doorway he turned. +“The thing beyond reason!” he said, almost in a whisper. Then, with a sudden and complete change of manner, he went on: “It has been very interesting to meet you, Miss Moran. My wife will enjoy a visit from you. Any afternoon, after four o’clock!” He bowed politely. “After four o’clock,” he repeated, and off he went. +Lexy stood looking at the closed door. +“Crazy?” she said to herself. “No—that’s not the word for him at all. He’s—he’s just horrible!” +At half past twelve Captain Grey had not yet returned, and Mrs. Royce declared... if not eaten at once; so Lexy went down to the dining room and ate her lunch alone. +“I can give you that,” I said. “Good luck. It’s all down to you now.” +He shivered. “Cas.” +“Yeah?” +He couldn’t seem to form words. +“Spit it out,” I said. “We’ve got to get going.” +“Tell me you think you can make it,” he said in a low voice, not looking at me. “Tell me you and Arthur aren’t going to die for this.” +That was what was bothering him? Oh. “I’m really good at staying not-dead,” I tried to assure him. “It’s a special talent of mine.” +“Seriously,” said Checker. “Please.” +Maybe he was right to be concerned. After all, I reflected, I was going after an organization that had just taken down an entire metropolitan area to get to me, and I was going to put myself willingly in their crosshairs. Along with a good friend of Checker’s. When I looked at it that way, my plan felt a trifle more daunting. +“Hey,” I said awkwardly. I wasn’t good at being comforting. “I’m really good at what I do. Ask Rio.” +“He doesn’t like your plan, either.” +“Very true,” put in Rio. +I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t used to having people worried about my welfare. “Okay, you’re on,” I said. +“They’re not worried; they’re mad at me,” I said. +“What? No, they’re not!” +“Why aren’t they picking up their phones, then?” +“Okay, maybe a little, but—” +A little? If that was true, it was only because they didn’t know what I’d done since last seeing them. +“But—but that’s not why—well, I told you, Arthur’s out, and it’s probably just coincidence if you can’t reach Checker. Maybe he’s finally sleeping or something—I hope so. Come on, you know they’re not passive aggressive people; they’re not ignoring you!” +I bit my lip. +“Cas? Are you okay?” +“Yeah.” +“Sorry, but you don’t sound like it. Are you sure? Is something wrong?” +I didn’t say anything. +“Listen. It doesn’t matter if Arthur and Checker are mad at you, you know that, right? If you’re in trouble, they’ll drop everything. You know that.” +I did? +“Cas, are you? In trouble?” +I hung up on her, pressing the button on the phone so hard my hand cramped. +I’d never wanted to depend on other people, because when it came down to it, other people could let me down, and I had no control over it. Or I would do something, something unimaginably awful, like help a killer track down an elderly woman, and then...they would turn away, and there would be good reason. +Her da beamed at her. “I’ve lost three pounds myself,” he said, holding his tum. “I’ve been trying... +“I know, Da,” she said. It embarrassed her to discuss it with him. +The kids in the sweatshops were being exploited by grownups, too. It was why their situation was so impossible: the adults who were supposed to be taking care of them were exploiting them. +“Well, I just wanted to say that I’m proud of you. We both are, your Mum and me. And I wanted to let you know that I’ll be moving your PC back into your room tomorrow. You’ve earned it.” +Anda blushed pink. She hadn’t really expected this. Her fingers twitched over a phantom game-controller. +“Oh, Da,” she said. He held up his hand. +“It’s all right, girl. We’re just proud of you.” +She didn’t touch the PC the first day, nor the second. The kids in the game—she didn’t know what to do about them. On the third day, after hockey, she showered and changed and sat down and slipped the headset on. +“Hello, Anda.” +“Hi, Sarge.” +Lucy had known the minute she entered the game, which meant that she was still on Lucy’s buddy-list. Well, that was a hopeful sign. +She is vast, sprawling, with thick legs like industrial pistons, skin brown as burnt cocoa, trunk massive in its proportions. Her upper arms, poking out of a bright, floral print dress are slabs of wrinkled fat which droop down over her elbows like the sleeves of a bulky sweater. Her head is a squarish block seated awkwardly on broad, muscled shoulders. The chair beneath her creaks an alarming plaint as she rocks, the sound of organic materials reaching their critical stress point. Even without standing, it's apparent that she's tall, probably a hand span taller than Ray. Almost a freak of nature; a creature of awe. +Ray's first impression is that age has wrinkled her in curious patterns, but it isn't wrinkling at all, it's a fine network of ritual scars. Blackened whorls and loops crowd her arms. On her fingers are delicate stick figures that seem to dance when she moves her hands. The billowing canvasses of her cheeks are cratered spirals spinning away from a central point, ever widening in arcs that disappear behind the curve of her ears. +“But the bosses keep you away?” +“I keep getting killed. I’ve been practicing my swordfighting, but it’s so hard—” +“This will be fun,” Anda said. “Let’s go.” +“Where?” Lucy said. +“To an in-game factory. We’re your new bodyguards.” The bosses hired some pretty mean mercs, Anda knew. She’d been one. They’d be fun to wipe out. +Raymond’s character spun around on the screen, then planted a kiss on Anda’s cheek. Anda made her character give him a playful shove that sent him sprawling. +“Hey, Lucy, go get us a couple BFGs, OK?” +I was suckled on the Asimov Robots books, taken down off my father’s bookshelf and enjoyed again and again. I read dozens of Asimov novels, and my writing career began in earnest when I started to sell stories to Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, which I had read for so long as I’d had the pocket money to buy it on the stands. +When Wired Magazine asked me to interview the director of the film I, Robot, I went back and re-read that old canon. I was struck immediately by one of the thin places in Asimov’s world-building: how could you have a society where only one company was allowed to make only one kind of robot? +His face clouded. “Yeah.” +“And it made you doubt her motives, right? Remember?” +“Yeah...” +Thank goodness Dawna hadn’t had another crack at him after undoing her own work. He would have been a Pithica-loving robot. “Arthur, listen to me. You don’t have to believe me, okay? But you do have to go see Checker, now. In person.” +He frowned down at me. “You feeling better enough for me to leave for a while?” +Oh, Jesus, did I ever. “Yes! I promise! Now go, right now!” +He shrugged me off. “Don’t know what you’re so hyper about, but okay. I am kind of worried I can’t reach him.” He grabbed his coat off a chair. “And I can get that flash drive back off him, too.” +Oh, brother. Was I this bad under Dawna’s influence? How on earth did I fix this? Rio always seemed to be able to talk me out of it, but Steve had implied I was highly unusual that way, and I still didn’t know why. I shuddered to think what Arthur would have been like if Dawna hadn’t had me shot. +“You lie back down,” Arthur admonished, pointing at me as he headed toward the door. +"Don't humor me," Grampa snapped. "I know what you all think of me. I can feel your goddamn blame. I can't do anything about it." +"You could apologize," Ethan said. Adele took his hand and wiped at her tears with its back. +"Fuck off, zombie," Grampa said, glaring at him. +Sean's father stood abruptly. "I'm glad to see you're in good health, Pop," he said. "Sean, thanks for the ride. I guess I'll see you once you've finished your research." His face was hard, composed. "Adele, nice to have met you." +"Likewise," Adele said. +"Bye, then," Sean's father said, and walked with dignified calm to the elevator. +"Bye, Dad," Sean called softly at his retreating back. +He turned back to Grampa, but Grampa's eyes were dull, and he was methodically twitching, top-to-bottom. +"Adele," Sean said, taking her free hand. +"Yes?" she said. +"How would you and Ethan like to come to Universal with me for the afternoon?" +"I'd love to," Ethan said. Sean looked at Ethan, and couldn't decide if he was switched off or not. +I danced until I was so tired I couldn't dance another step. Ange danced alongside of me. Technically, we were rubbing our sweaty bodies against each other for several hours, but believe it or not, I totally wasn't being a horn-dog about it. We were dancing, lost in the godbeat and the thrash and the screaming -- TAKE IT BACK! TAKE IT BACK! +When I couldn't dance anymore, I grabbed her hand and she squeezed mine like I was keeping her from falling off a building. She dragged me toward the edge of the crowd, where it got thinner and cooler. Out there, on the edge of Dolores Park, we were in the cool air and the sweat on our bodies went instantly icy. We shivered and she threw her arms around my waist. "Warm me," she commanded. I didn't need a hint. I hugged her back. Her heart was an echo of the fast beats from the stage -- breakbeats now, fast and furious and wordless. +She smelled of sweat, a sharp tang that smelled great. I knew I smelled of sweat too. My nose was pointed into the top of her head, and her face was right at my collarbone. She moved her hands to my neck and tugged. +“Miss Moran!” said Dr. Quelton solicitously. “Will you allow me to give you a mild sedative?” +“No!” she gasped. “No—I want to go home!” +“I’ll telephone for the taxi,” suggested Captain Grey. “He wasn’t coming back until half past five.” +“Unfortunately we have no telephone,” said the doctor; “but I’ll drive Miss Moran home.” +“No! I want to walk.” +“Not in this rain,” the doctor protested, “and in your overwrought condition.” +“I must!” She got up, the tears still streaming down her cheeks. “I must!” she said wildly. “Let me go! Please let me go!” +The doctor turned to Captain Grey. In the midst of her unutterable misery and confusion, Lexy still heard and understood what he was saying. +“In a case of hysteria—better to humor her—the exercise and the fresh air may help her.” +The doctor’s wife helped Lexy with her hat and coat. She was very gentle, very kind, and genuinely concerned for her unhappy little guest. Lexy remembered afterward that Mrs. Quelton kissed her; but at the moment nothing mattered except to get away, to get out of that house into the fresh air. +“Pardon me—you saw it yesterday. It is a small village through which we passed on the way to Miss Craigie’s house.” +“I didn’t know that.” +“Now that you do know, perhaps you will spare yourself the trouble of going there,” said Mrs. Enderby. “I assure you you will not find Caroline there. I myself made certain inquiries. No such person has arrived in Wyngate.” +There was a moment’s silence. +“But I observe by your face that you are not convinced,” Mrs. Enderby went on. “‘This Mrs. Enderby, she is a stupid old creature,’ you think to yourself. ‘I shall go there myself, and I shall discover that which she could not.’” +Lexy reddened again. +“I don’t mean it that way,” she said. “It’s only that we look at this from different points of view, and I feel—I feel that I’ve got to go.” +“Very well!” said Mrs. Enderby, and she, too, rose. “You will please to come to my room with me. There is part of your salary to be paid to you.” +Lexy followed her, still flushed, and very reluctant. She wished she could afford to refuse that money. +Most people’s eyes glazed over the instant equations came on the scene. I hoped Dawna Polk would be no different. +I kept up the computational white noise as the paramilitary troops brought me out of the van, refusing to look at the mathematics for escape routes even for interest’s sake and pointing all my concentration inward. Forcing myself to ignore the math drenching my surroundings strained my brain, but even though Dawna herself might not be in evidence yet, I was sure security cameras were recording my every microexpression. If my ploy had even a chance of working, I didn’t want to let up the effort for an instant. +The guards marched me down several flights of stairs and through a series of bare cement hallways to a door with the weight and thickness of a bank vault’s, which they manhandled open to reveal a cellblock with a row of empty jail cells. Concrete cinder blocks formed the back wall, but iron bars partitioned the cells from each other and from freedom, leaving no privacy for the prisoners. My captors ushered me into a cell near the middle of the row and surprised me by cutting the zipties around my wrists before sliding the bars closed and locking me in. Then they left—not far, I felt sure—save one guard who stayed at attention at the end of the cellblock. +"Why would I be hiding?" I was taking out the Betacam bag and closing my car door, hoping to seem normal and professional. +"They called me about six o'clock tonight. Children of Light." She could barely get the words out. "They'd seen my interview with you. How did they get it?" +I looked down at the snowy—make that slushy—street and felt a chill go through me, followed immediately by an­ger. Ramos, that bastard. +"They . . . Somebody took a copy this morning." Stated like that, it sounded pretty lame. "I'm so sorry—" +"He threatened Kevin. He actually said if I signed a re­lease to let you use the film, my child would 'meet with an accident.' And then he said something about you, that your own—" +"Who? Who called you? Did he tell you his—?" +"He wouldn't give a name. Just some man. He had a for­eign accent." She threw her arms around me, and I hugged her back as best I could. +"Where's Kevin now?" I was so concerned about Carly that I'd repressed the information that he'd also mentioned me. +"After Ba'dai, I was insane for quite some time. I won't pretend that I was anything else. I have distinct memories of babbling to you about things I'm sure neither one of us understood at the time. But I wasn't insane in the traditional sense. I was achieving some sort of radical reorientation of consciousness. I was developing a perception of the dual nature of existence, with all that such a transformation entails. You know what that looks like, don't you? What it means? You've seen filthy old sinners converted to good Baptist standing, struck by Grace, transmogrified into Sunday-suit wearing zealots who see the finger of the Divine in every decision, every coincidence, every conversation. Conversion to a new paradigm is the introduction to a vast and terrible unexplored country. And turning your back on accepted reality— the reality that the mass of humanity has created and agreed upon— is the definition of madness. +"But you see, I needed to be mad in order to understand more about the shed, Ray. Only through the eye of madness could I go back through the ancient texts and sift through their mythology and their understanding of the duality of creation, and come to understand not what they said, but what they meant. I had to be able to think like them to understand the assumptions behind the written text. Because they're not just behind it, they illuminate it. " +Trish fluttered her hands. "God, don't give me that kind of responsibility." +"All right then, into the ocean. We're making this happen, is what's important." +"Thanks, babe," Trish said. She put on a brave smile until the lawyer had backed out of the office, then stared down at her calendar and looked at her morning schedule. Three congressional staffers, a committee co-chair, an ACLU researcher, and the head of the newly formed Emergent Network Suppliers' Industry Association -- a man she had last seen in her office at UCLA, backing away from a long and melancholy hug. +When he rang off the phone and joined her, finally, she straightened out her smart cardigan and said, "Damian, you're certainly looking... well." +"...funded," he finished, with a small smile. The Emergent Network Suppliers' Industry Association's new offices were in a nice Federal Revival building off Dupont Circle, with lots of stained glass that nicely set off the sculptural and understated furniture. "It's not as grand as appearances suggest, Trish. We got it for a song from the receivers in the Church of Scientology's bankruptcy, furnishings included. It is nice though. Don't you think?" +He took a lot longer than I expected. It was five in the morning before he texted me an address with a nine o’clock meeting time and a short message: CANT SAY 4SURE THEYLL SHOW. He’d also included fake names for me and for my would-be business contact—Checker was nothing if not thorough. An instant later, I got another set of texts detailing anything the Lancer might know about me from the false trail—it wasn’t much; Checker had kept specifics to a minimum—and a final message that added, MIGHT GO RADIO SILENT IF NSA ARND. ARTHUR TEAMING W/ THEM NOW. +Yeah. Of course he was. My mood soured, and I felt the sudden need to get out of my apartment, even though the setup was still four hours away. +The imaginary business meeting Checker had leaked turned out to be at an abandoned diner in the mountains. It wasn’t a spot I would’ve chosen—too many places to hide, too easy for someone to set up an ambush. Although I supposed them ambushing me was the whole point. +I turned sharply off a winding canyon road and down an overgrown driveway to reach the dilapidated had-been restaurant. The place looked like it had overreached in its day, with tiered landscaping inset into the slope and several separate buildings with outdoor stairs between them around defunct patios. Less of a diner and more of a kitschy yuppie eatery. No wonder it had gone out of business. +"Her landing card gave her destination as someplace called 'Ninos del Mundo,' up to the Peten. That ring a bell? Any idea how I could find it?" +"Niiios del Mundo?" He glanced up quickly. "That's a new one on me." He'd been fiddling with a stack of papers on his desk, giving me only half his attention, but he abruptly stopped. "You try the phone book?" +"Like I said, it's in the Peten." I was getting the definite sense he wanted to get rid of me as soon as possible. The whole scene was feeling tense and off. "My understanding is that's mostly rain forest. Do they even have phones up there?" +"Not many," he said, his tone starting to definitely acquire an "I have better things to do" edge. +That was when he focused in on me, his look turning protective. +"Let me speak candidly, Ms. James, strictly off the record. Down here people have been known to 'disappear' just for asking too many questions. Curiosity killed the cat, and all that. Between us, this place is still a police state in many regards. You want my advice, let sleeping dogs lie. Just forget about this Crenshaw girl. She's out of the country now, so . . . Let me put it like this: People who go poking around here are just asking for trouble." +"I shouldn't like to go against your feelings, especially in laying out your money, Miranda," said Jane. +"Don't tell Rebecca I've willed her the brick house. She won't git it till I'm gone, and I want to take my time 'bout dyin' and not be hurried off by them that's goin' to profit by it; nor I don't want to be thanked, neither. I s'pose she'll use the front stairs as common as the back and like as not have water brought into the kitchen, but mebbe when I've been dead a few years I shan't mind. She sets such store by you, she'll want you to have your home here as long's you live, but anyway I've wrote it down that way; though Lawyer Burns's wills don't hold more'n half the time. He's cheaper, but I guess it comes out jest the same in the end. I wan't goin' to have the fust man Rebecca picks up for a husband turnin' you ou'doors." +There was a long pause, during which Jane knit silently, wiping the tears from her eyes from time to time, as she looked at the pitiful figure lying weakly on the pillows. +Holcomb frowns back and swipes his hand back and forth across his forehead. "All right. We talked once about the nature of the shed. I assume that you retained enough of that knowledge to serve as a background. In fact, I told you a lot about it, but in that entire two weeks that we were alone, and for several months afterward, what I didn't ask myself was what was Brezhnaya doing"? What did he think he was accomplishing?" +"Unleashing an attack against the allied forces," Ray answers at once. "Breaking morale, punishing sympathizers. Creating a spirituo- terrorist weapon." +"That was what I thought, too. You heard about some of the incidents, then?" +"Enough." +"But here's the problem: the shed was not-is not-a weapon, or not a weapon sufficient to turn the tide of a war on that scale, not when used in that fashion. Maybe a thousand of them would have an impact, but not merely one. One is a devil outside your window, a blight on your neighbor's crop, a night terror to frighten children. So what was Brezhnaya's goal?" +By then my eyes were adjusting to the subdued light, and as we walked down the middle of the long room, I confirmed my assumption that the bassinets next to the tables all con­tained infants. I'm no expert on babies, but I'd guess they were all around six weeks old maybe a couple of months at most. +This is the nest, I thought. Ground zero. Kevin and Rachel were both probably in this room at one time too. . . . +"Aren't they wonderful?" Tara was saying, still in her squeaky, spaced-out voice. +I was opening the Betacam bag when the first woman, the one holding and lightly bouncing her little boy, absently put her hand under his quilt, then spoke to the other in deeply accented English. +"He's wet again." +It was the first words either of them had uttered. Then she turned to me in exasperation, assuming, I suppose, that I was one of Alex Goddard's flock. "And I just changed him." Again the accent, but I still couldn't identify it. She made a face, then carried him over to a plywood changing table in the center of the room. +Ray sees it, wades through his obligatory moment of horror, the steps clear, mentally backs away, kick starts his brain. +So where is the rest of him? +Where is all the blood, the liters and liters of blood that should have spumed from a young body with a strong heart the instant the chest was cracked? +Where are the organs normally crammed breastbone to pelvis, rhythmically chugging fluids along in an approximation of cosmic harmony? +Probably in that stone ring beside him, the one filled to the top with brackish, dark water like a soured well. +Entrails lobbed like sticky wads of spaghetti, where they splash, sink, vanish. +But there is no ring. He's imagined it, made it up out of whole cloth. There's only the cold deckplate and sealed shipping containers and cold halogen glare. +Ray swallows hard, tries to wet his mouth, but his tongue only makes a clicking noise against his teeth. +"Don't puke all over my evidence," Becker says in his ear. +Ray turns to him, a welcome excuse to tear his eyes away from the corpse. "Holy shit." +I supposed it was possible for Arthur to spin things as if he hadn’t broken any laws. +Especially once he’d split from me. I was mad at him all over again. +Pilar kept chattering. “But anyway, Checker called me for help, I think he was having some sort of PTSD trouble what with the building falling on Arthur, so—” +“What?” +“Well, I don’t know if that’s what it is, really, but one of my cousins was in the Marines and—” +“Pilar!” +“Apparently it’s not the first time Checker and Arthur have tangled with someone who likes to blow up buildings,” she said. “Checker’s been on it, trying to see if it’s the same person. They say it’s not a very common MO.” +It wasn’t. “Did he find anything?” +“Um, I don’t think so. Not yet.” +Which meant they were at a dead end, and I was at a dead end, too—I could tell Checker to leak another meet, but with the Feds watching they’d be sure to pick up on it and come fuck everything up just like they had the first time. +Had the DHS found my trap at the diner because they were already tracking me, or had they followed a bead on the men working with the Lancer? My skin crawled like it felt the presence of a thousand unseen pursuers. Why the hell had we brought in the government in the first place? Goddamn Arthur. +The quiet room seemed to mock me. +I became hyper-aware of every breath, each one counting out another one of those seconds before everything would collapse, before I would fall—no, not counting another second, counting another 2.78 seconds. 2.569 seconds. 2.33402. 2.1077001. 1.890288224518154... +I clenched tingling hands into fists and tried to slow my breathing, to curb the rising tide of panicky dread. Technically I was still on a job, I told myself: hide and then escape the city. Focus on that. +For a few moments, I hoped I might fool myself. +I squeezed my eyes shut and flopped over onto one side. +An instant of blessed darkness. +A car horn sounded outside. The decibel level spiked in my head, the oscilloscope graph expanding and buzzing through my thoughts. My heartbeat thudded through me, each beat approximating periodicity—the waves broke apart, crashing and layering against each other, each amplitude spiking separately and adding another term to the Fourier series, sines and cosines repeating themselves and correcting in minute iterations. +"Your mama don't complain," she said. "Actually, it's a history of a group of people like the Yippies, but from New York. They all used that word as their last names, like 'Ben M-F.' The idea was to have a group out there, making news, but with a totally unprintable name. Just to screw around with the news-media. Pretty funny, really." She put the book back on the shelf and now I wondered if I should hug her. People in California hug to say hello and goodbye all the time. Except when they don't. And sometimes they kiss on the cheek. It's all very confusing. +She settled it for me by grabbing me in a hug and tugging my head down to her, kissing me hard on the cheek, then blowing a fart on my neck. I laughed and pushed her away. +"You want a burrito?" I asked. +"Is that a question or a statement of the obvious?" +"Neither. It's an order." +I bought some funny stickers that said THIS PHONE IS TAPPED which were the right size to put on the receivers on the pay phones that still lined the streets of the Mission, it being the kind of neighborhood where you got people who couldn't necessarily afford a cellphone. +“You think he’s—” Houseman began. +“I don’t know whether he has actually murdered her or not,” said Captain Grey, “but he has destroyed her—utterly wasted and ruined her life. He taught her to take that damned drug; and when Miss Moran broke the bottle—” +“Oh! Did he tell you?” +“He did. He says you’ve killed her. There was some rare drug in it that he can’t get for a fortnight or so, and she can’t live without it.” +“Captain Grey!” she cried, white to the lips. “I didn’t—” +“I know,” he said gently. “You meant to help, and I’m glad you did it. She’s better dead. This afternoon, for a little while, she was—herself. She talked to me. She was very weak, but she was herself. She asked me to help her not to take it again. She thought she was getting better. Then that”—he paused—“that damned brute brought in a lawyer, so that she could make her will. She couldn’t believe it. She looked up at me. ‘Oh, I’m not going to die , am I?’ she said. Before I could answer her, he told her she must be prepared. Then I—” +“Probably?” +“We’re pretty sure.” +“I’m backed up,” Robbie said. “Fully, as of five minutes ago. Are you backed up?” +“No,” the reef admitted. +Time was running out. Somewhere down there, Kate was about to run out of air. Not a mere shell—though that would have been bad enough—but an inhabited human mind attached to a real human body. +Tonker shouted at him again, startling him. +“Where’d you come from?” +Robbie knew he was right. And he knew what he had to do. +The Free Spirit and its ships’ boats all had root on the shells, so they could perform diagnostics and maintenance and take control in emergencies. This was an emergency. +It was the work of a few milliseconds to pry open the Isaac shell and boot the reef out. Robbie had never done this, but he was still flawless. Some of his probabilistic subsystems had concluded that this was a possibility several trillion cycles previously and had been rehearsing the task below Robbie’s threshold for consciousness. +He left an instance of himself running on the row-boat, of course. Unlike many humans, Robbie was comfortable with the idea of bifurcating and merging his intelligence when the time came and with terminating temporary instances. The part that made him Robbie was a lot more clearly delineated for him—unlike an uploaded human, most of whom harbored some deep, mystic superstitions about their “souls.” +"You must 'a' laid all over the breedge, deary," said Mrs. Cobb; "for the paint 's not only on your elbows and yoke and waist, but it about covers your front breadth." +As the garment began to look a little better Rebecca's spirits took an upward turn, and at length she left it to dry in the fresh air, and went into the sitting-room. +"Have you a piece of paper, please?" asked Rebecca. "I'll copy out the poetry I was making while I was lying in the paint." +Mrs. Cobb sat by her mending basket, and uncle Jerry took down a gingham bag of strings and occupied himself in taking the snarls out of them,—a favorite evening amusement with him. +Rebecca soon had the lines copied in her round school-girl hand, making such improvements as occurred to her on sober second thought. +She read it aloud, and the Cobbs thought it not only surpassingly beautiful, but a marvelous production. +"I guess if that writer that lived on Congress Street in Portland could 'a' heard your poetry he'd 'a' been astonished," said Mrs. Cobb. "If you ask me, I say this piece is as good as that one o' his, 'Tell me not in mournful numbers;' and consid'able clearer." + Or maybe he was just a VERY very busy boy. + A bank-robbing weapon-toting fraud- ster . +I uploaded the three pictures. That started off a race, with peo- ple combing the internet for information about the people my facial rec had coughed up. Within minutes we were filling dossiers set up for sharing data. I felt a little guilty that I was taking peo- ple’s attention away from the typhoon, but when I visited that thread, there was plenty of work going on there, too. +The Group is like that. They’re smart and funny and they get stuff done. +In case you’re wondering, that’s not its actual name. Its actual name is different every day, and it’s a randomly-generated word, +so most of the time you can’t even pronounce it. We just call it the Group for short. It uses a Tor onion router and encrypts the conversations between members. I didn’t know anything about it until one day, when I was on Sourcerer, helping troubleshoot a chat program. Mattitude, who was also working on it, sent me his public key. When I sent him mine, he asked if I wanted to join. It’s not totally exclusive or anything - all kinds of people are part of it, and it’s not a huge secret, but it’s not like Reddit or Slashdot. +“I’m going to go find the van. That’s not a large search area—once I get out there, it shouldn’t take me long.” It was something to do, and maybe I’d be able to track their base and blast straight through to rescue Halliday. Besides, I didn’t want to be in the Hole if the NSA decided to check in here—Pilar had probably found Zhang by this point. “We’re going to get the professor back. One way or another.” +And Arthur would fucking thank me. +I rode my motorcycle out east, to the fringes of the LA sprawl. +I had a Eulerian path planned in my head for the search zone, spiraling through the dusty, ramshackle streets with my eyes flicking back and forth for any sign of the van. About a quarter of the way along it, I spotted the windowless white vehicle sitting abandoned at the far end of a fast food parking lot, overlooked by a garish cartoon burger over an atrociously comic sign. I pulled up to the van, jacked into it, and drove off, leaving the bike. +I moseyed around a few corners until I found a patch of empty road under an overpass, where I’d have some time to look suspicious without a danger of passersby getting curious. As I parked and got to work, I cursed Arthur under my breath for splitting off. I wasn’t nearly as good at crime-scening things as he was. +I pushed open the door and headed out of the Hole without looking back. +Checker called after me, imploring, frantic, but I didn’t acknowledge him. His pleas echoed in my head until I fell asleep that night and dreamt of half-real monsters who smothered me in false memory and distorted realities. +When I woke only a few hours later, I stumbled for the darkened streets, seeking the strongest chemical remedies money and back alleyways could offer. +Miranda and Jane exchanged glances. +"Ain't she the beatin'est creetur that ever was born int' the world!" exclaimed Miranda; "but she can turn off work when she's got a mind to!" +At quarter past five everything was ready, and the neighbors, those at least who were within sight of the brick house (a prominent object in the landscape when there were no leaves on the trees), were curious almost to desperation. Shades up in both parlors! Shades up in the two south bedrooms! And fires—if human vision was to be relied on—fires in about every room. If it had not been for the kind offices of a lady who had been at the meeting, and who charitably called in at one or two houses and explained the reason of all this preparation, there would have been no sleep in many families. +The missionary party arrived promptly, and there were but two children, seven or eight having been left with the brethren in Portland, to diminish traveling expenses. Jane escorted them all upstairs, while Miranda watched the cooking of the supper; but Rebecca promptly took the two little girls away from their mother, divested them of their wraps, smoothed their hair, and brought them down to the kitchen to smell the beans. +Leon stood. "Maybe I should go and find Ria." +Viktor made a disgusted noise. "Fine. And ask her why she didn't finish the job? Ask her if she decided to do it right then, or if she'd planned it? Ask her why... of the bread-knife? Because, you know, I wonder this myself." +Leon backpedaled, clumsy in the overinflated suit. He struggled to get into the airlock, and as it hissed through its cycle, he tried not to think of Ria straddling the old... falling. +She was waiting for him on the other side, also overinflated in her suit. "Let's go," she said, and took his hand, the rubberized palms of their gloves sticking together. She half-dragged him through the many rooms of Viktor's body, tripping through the final door, then spinning him around and ripping, hard, on the release cord that split the suit down the back so that it fell into two lifeless pieces that slithered to the ground. He gasped out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding in as the cool air made contact with the thin layer of perspiration that filmed his body. +Eight words. Do not try to remember under any circumstances. +Eight ugly, meaningless, mind-fucking words. +The slashing, slanting handwriting had been undoubtedly and mathematically my own, with my signature underneath. I didn’t remember writing the note. Didn’t remember hiding it. Didn’t remember why I would have wanted to. +Do not try to remember under any circumstances. +I only knew that my brain had been right not to want to remember. I had been right, and here was the proof. +I didn’t text Checker to tell him I was coming. Instead, I busted into the Hole hard enough that the door banged against the computer towers behind it, the metal bruising the paint. +“Cas,” Checker said coldly, sitting back from his keyboard and crossing his arms, a set look on his face. +For some reason I hadn’t expected him to be upset with me. I’d expected him still to be in irritating pleading mode about looking into my past, worried and pestering. I was the one with the righteous anger about how he dared violate my privacy and my life; he was the one ignoring my feelings—right? +“I’m not mad,” I said, hearing how angry I sounded. “I’m just dumb about people, that’s all.” +He reached out and pulled me to him in a hug, one that wasn’t anything like the way he hugged Bree. He rubbed the back of my head hard with his knuckles. “What do you mean, dumb? You’re the smartest person I know. Don’t be mad.” +“I’m not mad, I’m just an idiot,” I said into his shoulder. +“Shut up, you imbecile.” +I sniffed his shoulder. He always smelled good, like green tea, +or maybe mint, or just the fresh way clothes smell when they’ve been hung outside on a clothesline. You are not going to cry, I told myself. Absolutely not. No way. I blinked hard a few times and I didn’t. +“So, what is this crazy thing?” he asked. +“It’s really, truly crazy.” I pushed him away. He waited. “It’s dangerous. It could turn really bad. And it would take an excel- lent actor to pull it off.” +He spread his arms and gave me a look as if to say, Hello ? Right here in front of you. +“So of course I thought of you, but you’ve got other stuff to do, and this is going to take lots of time and chances are you’d end up in jail or on the news or both. I can’t ask you to do this.” +Thy family's grateful love. +Your loving little friend, Rebecca. +Dear John,—You remember when we tide the new dog in the barn how he bit the rope and howled I am just like him only the brick house is the barn and I can not bite Aunt M. because I must be grateful and edducation is going to be the making of me and help you pay off the morgage when we grow up. Your loving Becky. +The day of Rebecca's arrival had been Friday, and on the Monday following she began her education at the school which was in Riverboro Centre, about a mile distant. Miss Sawyer borrowed a neighbor's horse and wagon and drove her to the schoolhouse, interviewing the teacher, Miss Dearborn, arranging for books, and generally starting the child on the path that was to lead to boundless knowledge. Miss Dearborn, it may be said in passing, had had no special preparation in the art of teaching. It came to her naturally, so her family said, and perhaps for this reason she, like Tom Tulliver's clergyman tutor, "set about it with that uniformity of method and independence of circumstances which distinguish the actions of animals understood to be under the immediate teaching of Nature." You remember the beaver which a naturalist tells us "busied himself as earnestly in constructing a dam in a room up three pair of stairs in London as if he had been laying his foundation in a lake in Upper Canada. It was his function to build, the absence of water or of possible progeny was an accident for which he was not accountable." In the same manner did Miss Dearborn lay what she fondly imagined to be foundations in the infant mind. +> Darryl told me that they brought him arphid cloners, Xboxes, all kinds of technology and demanded that he tell them who used them, where they learned to mod them. Darryl told me about your games and the things you learned. +> Especially: The DHS asked us about our friends. Who did we know? What were they like? Did they have political feelings? Had they been in trouble at school? With the law? +> We call the prison Gitmo-by-the-Bay. It's been a week since I got out and I don't think that anyone knows that their sons and daughters are imprisoned in the middle of the Bay. At night we could hear people laughing and partying on the mainland. +> I got out last week. I won't tell you how, in case this falls into the wrong hands. Maybe others will take my route. +> Darryl told me how to find you and made me promise to tell you what I knew when I got back. Now that I've done that I'm out of here like last year. One way or another, I'm leaving this country. Screw America. +> Stay strong. They're scared of you. Kick them for me. Don't get caught. +"It's for video-games," I said. "That's what most people use it for. It's just a wireless network. It's what everyone did with those free Xboxes they gave away last year." +He glowered at me. "Games? Marcus, you don't realize it, but you're providing cover for people who plan on attacking and destroying this country. I don't want to see you using this Xnet. Not anymore. Do I make myself clear?" +I wanted to argue. Hell, I wanted to shake him by the shoulders. But I didn't. I looked away. I said, "Sure, Dad." I went to school. +At first I was relieved when I discovered that they weren't going to leave Mr Benson in charge of my social studies class. But the woman they found to replace him was my worst nightmare. +She was young, just about 28 or 29, and pretty, in a wholesome kind of way. She was blonde and spoke with a soft southern accent when she introduced herself to us as Mrs Andersen. That set off alarm bells right away. I didn't know any women under the age of sixty that called themselves "Mrs." +He came nearer, but the nurse drew back and stood with her back against the door. +“Dr. Quelton has given strict orders—” she repeated. +“No more of that, please!” he said with a frown. “I’m going to see Mrs. Quelton for a moment. Stand aside, please!” +He did not raise his voice, but the quality of it was oddly changed. Lexy felt a thrill of pleasure in its cool assurance and authority. Perhaps he objected very much to “making a row,” but what a glorious row he could make if he chose! If he would only once face Dr. Quelton like this! +“Stand aside, if you please!” he repeated, and the poor little nurse, very much flustered, did so. +“I’m afraid Dr. Quelton will be—” she began, but Captain Grey had already entered the room. +The nurse followed him, closing the door after her. Lexy opened it at once and went in after them. She caught a glimpse of the young man and the nurse vanishing through one of the long windows that led out to the balcony. For a moment she hesitated, looking about her at the big, dim room. The dark shades were pulled down, and not a trace of the spring’s brightness entered here. +“But certainly not!” Mrs. Enderby blandly consented. “We shall go down together.” +She turned off the water in the bath, and, following Lexy out of the room, locked the door on the outside. The girl dropped behind her as they descended the stairs, and studied the stout, dignified figure before her with indignant interest. +“A mother!” she thought. “A mother, behaving like this! How long is she going to wait for her letter, I wonder? Well, if she won’t do anything, then, by jiminy, I will!” +A fresh example of Mrs. Enderby’s remarkable strength of mind awaited them. Mr. Enderby was already seated at the table in the dining room. As his wife entered, he rose, with his invariable politeness, and one glance at his ruddy, cheerful face convinced Lexy that he knew nothing of what had happened. +“Caroline has a headache,” Mrs. Enderby explained. “It will be better for her to rest for a little.” +“Ah! Too bad!” said he. “Don’t think she gets out in the air enough. Er—good morning, Miss Moran!” +"What?" Ange said. "What?" +I pointed at the screen on my side of the bed. She rolled over and grabbed my keyboard and scribed on the touchpad with her fingertip. She read in silence. +I paced. +"This has to be lies," she said. "The DHS is playing games with your head." +I looked at her. She was biting her lip. She didn't look like she believed it. +"You think?" +"Sure. They can't beat you, so they're coming after you using Xnet." +"Yeah." +I sat back down on the bed. I was breathing fast again. +"Chill out," she said. "It's just head-games. Here." +She never took my keyboard from me before, but now there was a new intimacy between us. She hit reply and typed, +> Nice try. +She was writing as M1k3y now, too. We were together in a way that was different from before. +"Go ahead and sign it. We'll see what she says." +I didn't know if that was the best idea, but I didn't have any better ones. I signed it and encrypted it with my private key and the public key Masha had provided. +Attached was source-code for a little program that appeared to do exactly what Masha claimed: pull video over the Domain Name Service protocol. +A minute later, he came back with another glass of wine, giving it to me with a big smile. Good old Simon. I wandered around the room, pretend- ing to be interested in the view from the front windows. With my back turned toward him I poured half the glass out into one of the dead plants on his windowsill, saying as I did it, “What you were saying before. You actually have a connection? I mean, for explo- sives?” +“I know all kinds of people. But enough politics for one night. +Come sit down, get comfortable. Let’s listen to some music.” +I plopped beside him on the couch and sent instructions to my face: smile, dammit. +“Like that wine, huh?” He nodded at the half-empty glass. +“Yeah. Gotta slow down, though. It’s going to my head.” +“You’ve been under so much stress. It’s good to relax.” He reached out as if to touch my cheek and I flinched. “Hey, sorry.” +He shifted to the far end of the couch. “I don’t want to make you uncomfortable. Is this better?” +I was about to say no, it wasn’t, that I was going to go stay with a friend after all, when his phone rang. He felt one pocket, then another. I took advantage of his distraction and tipped what was left of my wine onto the couch, adjusting a cushion to cover the wet spot. He pulled out the black phone. “This isn’t a good time,” +And the more they thought about it, the more they realized that anyone can come up with a security system that he can't figure out how to break. But no one can figure out what a smarter person might do. +You have to publish a cipher to know that it works. You have to tell as many people as possible how it works, so that they can thwack on it with everything they have, testing its security. The longer you go without anyone finding a flaw, the more secure you are. +Which is how it stands today. If you want to be safe, you don't use crypto that some genius thought of last week. You use the stuff that people have been using for as long as possible without anyone figuring out how to break them. Whether you're a bank, a terrorist, a government or a teenager, you use the same ciphers. +If you tried to use your own cipher, there'd be the chance that someone out there had found a flaw you missed and was doing a Turing on your butt, deciphering all your "secret" messages and chuckling at your dumb gossip, financial transactions and military secrets. +The voice that emanated from the mobile was a calm, charismatic basso, and I recognized it immediately as Finch’s boss from the sack of Courtney’s place. “May I ask with whom I am speaking?” the voice inquired. +“No, you may not,” said Tresting, and he went on to give detailed directions to a picnic area in Griffith Park. +“It may take me some time to get there,” the man warned. +“Shame,” said Tresting, “seeing as we’ll only wait half an hour. See you soon.” He nodded at me, and I reached over and hit the button to end the call. We were turning onto the streets adjacent to the park by then, and Tresting pulled off and swung into a parking area. “Let’s walk from here.” +He led the way up a winding road into the park. Cheerful hikers and joggers passed us frequently, half of them with energetic dogs and most of them in the dreadfully fashionable athletic gear that seemed to be the uniform of choice for active Southern Californians. Our current state got a few double-takes, particularly Finch’s obvious nosebleed, but like true Angelenos, they all decided to mind their own business. +He stood up and smiled. His teeth were shockingly white and straight, like an ad for an orthodontic clinic. He held his hand out to me and his grip was strong and firm. +"I'm really sorry." His voice was also clear and intelligent. I'd expected him to sound like the drunks who talked to themselves as they roamed the Mission late at night, but he sounded like a knowledgeable bookstore clerk. +"It's no problem," I said. +He stuck out his hand again. +"Zeb," he said. +"Marcus," I said. +"A pleasure, Marcus," he said. "Hope to run into you again sometime!" +Laughing, he picked up his backpack, turned on his heel and hurried away. +I walked the rest of the way home in a bemused fug. Mom was at the kitchen table and we had a little chat about nothing at all, the way we used to do, before everything changed. +I took the stairs up to my room and flopped down in my chair. For once, I didn't want to login to the Xnet. I'd checked in that morning before school to discover that my note had created a gigantic controversy among people who agreed with me and people who were righteously pissed that I was telling them to back off from their beloved sport. +“We’d better go,” he said. “We can do nothing here. It’s a case for the police now.” +“I’ve got to go back to the balcony,” Lexy told him. “There was something there.” +“Very well!” he agreed, and, without another word or a backward glance, he went up the ladder. +They returned through the house. He had left the lights burning and the doors open, so that there was a monstrous air of festivity in the emptiness. They went into Mrs. Quelton’s room again, and crossed through it to the balcony. He carried the lantern with him, and by its steady yellow flame they could see into every corner. There was the couch upon which she had lain—disarranged, as if she had just risen from it. There was a little table with medicine bottles on it. All the usual things were in the usual places. +“Nothing here,” said Captain Grey. +Lexy was sure, however, that there was. She stepped to the balcony railing, to look down into the garden below, and there, on the white paint of the railing, she found something. +He switched the record on and watched the arm plunk the needle down. Somebody wailed about first-world problems in a high voice. Simon stood and reached for me. I dodged away, +laughing. “I’m kinda drunk.” +“That’s okay.” +“You have to catch up with me. Drink your beer.” I shook my finger at him like a child giving orders. He laughed and guzzled some down. I tipped my glass back and pretended to drink, letting some slosh as I wiped my mouth with my sleeve, suddenly worried that I would spill wine over the expensive spy-camera shirt. I real- ized the camera was still on, recording everything. I felt hot, +ashamed. And scared. He grabbed me and we teetered together before collapsing onto the couch. +“Whew, I feel weird,” I said. +“You look tired.” He pushed his face close to mine. His chin wobbled a litde, as if it was getting loose on the hinges of his jaw. +“How about a little nap?” +“How about album number three? Just one more before I fall asleep. Pleeeese, Simon?” I eyed the door as he crouched down and shuffled through the albums he’d picked out. It took three tries before he could fit another one on the spindle. +“Shit,” Arthur said softly. +I drew my gun, keeping it hidden from the street behind my body. “You got your lockpicks on you?” +“Cover me,” he said, pulling them out. +He slid the picks in and turned the knob. “Behind me,” I said as he pushed the door open, and I crept in crosshairs-first. Arthur dropped back so I could take point and eased the door shut behind us with a click. +The entryway led into an earth-toned living room in a jumble of... chairs were knocked off-kilter, with some needlepoint and photographs dangling askew and scattered across the floor. A set of shelves had fallen to lean precariously against the back of the couch, books and papers strewn across the furniture. +The disarray wasn’t too bad—just enough to tell the story of a struggle. +“Oh,” said a weak voice. +Arthur swore and slipped past me into the kitchen, holstering his Glock. I followed and saw a pair of stumpy legs sprawled over the ceramic tile, attached to a woman slumped against the refrigerator—a woman who was not Sonya Halliday. She was a very tiny older lady, with copper-toned skin and a face so creased with wrinkles she reminded me of a walnut. A cap of gray hair still shot with black gave her a few years back, though right now the hair was wet and matted, and the ice-filled washcloth she held against it was being dyed a deep red. +> Dear Marcus, +> You don't know me but I know you. For the past three months, since the Bay Bridge was blown up, I have been imprisoned on Treasure Island. I was in the yard on the day you talked to that Asian girl and got tackled. You were brave. Good on you. +> I had a burst appendix the day afterward and ended up in the infirmary. In the next bed was a guy named Darryl. We were both in recovery for a long time and by the time we got well, we were too much of an embarrassment to them to let go. +> So they decided we must really be guilty. They questioned us every day. You've been through their questioning, I know. Imagine it for months. Darryl and I ended up cell-mates. We knew we were bugged, so we only talked about inconsequentialities. But at night, when we were in our cots, we would softly tap out messages to each other in Morse code (I knew my HAM radio days would come in useful sometime). +> At first, their questions to us were just the same crap as ever, who did it, how'd they do it. But after a little while, they switched to asking us about the Xnet. Of course, we'd never heard of it. That didn't stop them asking. +Coop them up, drill them with books and tests." +"I'm a little surprised by the curriculum. It's quite advanced." +"Some of our children are quite advanced. Others lag significantly behind the educational level they should have attained. Not all situations are ideal, as you can imagine, but all of the children in the Trust have great potential. We look for that potential and help them develop it. Perhaps it is not the ideal of mother, father, +siblings, but it is better in many cases than the lives we cull them from. But we attempt to give them the facsimile of family as we go along. " +Ray feels a flush of embarrassment. "I didn't intend to sound critical." +"But you wondered about their emotional well-being, these orphans on their way to a strange land amongst strange people." +"Sure. I mean, kids are resilient, but losing your parents is a pretty big blow to try to bounce back from." +Amah nods. "For some. Others have been without parents, comforts, love for several years. Those cases are more difficult, and it takes longer for the colony to embrace them-or for them to embrace the colony." +“True, you have no way of being sure of my word. However,” she added, with the slightest hint at a conspiratorial smile, “at least you will know what answer I choose to give you.” +Jesus Christ. I stared at her, my mouth dropping open slightly. She knew me better than I knew myself. As much as I was opposed to going along with her on anything, I was constitutionally incapable of not taking her up on such an offer. More information was always more information, no matter how little I trusted the source—after all, I would at least be able to file away the particular answers she chose to give me as the answers Dawna Polk would choose to give me. And that could tell me something, right? +Ridiculous. Was I honestly thinking about trying to match wits with someone who was literally psychic? +And yet, she was offering to tell me anything I wanted, and that meant I had to ask. I had to know. +Oh, hell. +“Fine,” I said, redoubling my brain’s furious churning through its mental mathematics as I tried to dispel the sinking certainty that I was about to play right into Dawna’s hands. I fancied I could feel the ground giving way beneath my feet, but I couldn’t stop myself. “To start off with, your high and mighty motives are all well and good, but I want to know what kind of game you’ve been running on me in particular. And why. You say that trying to kill me or locking me up is all for the greater good because I’d make trouble, but you’re the one who dragged me into all this in the first place, remember? If you own the cartels, why let someone you’ve brainwashed into being your pawn get captured by them? And why fake a contact from Rio to hire me to get her back out? It doesn’t make any sense.” +"Envoy," she said. "Name's Viktor. I ran his face and name against our dossiers and came up with practically nothing. He's from Montenegro, originally, I have that much." +"Envoy from whom?" +She didn't answer, just looked very meaningfully at him. +The new vat-person had sent him an envoy. His heart began to thump and his cuffs suddenly felt tight at his wrists. "Thanks, Carmela." He shot his cuffs. +"You look fine," she said. "I've got the kitchen on standby, and the intercom's listening for my voice. Just let me know what I can do for you." +He gave her a weak smile. This was why she was the center of the whole business, the soul of Ate. Thank you, he mouthed, and she ticked a smart salute off her temple with one finger. +The envoy was out of place in Ate, but she didn't hold it against them. This he knew within seconds of setting foot into the Living Room. She got up, wiped her hands on her sensible jeans, brushed some iron-grey hair off her face, and smiled at him, an expression that seemed to say, "Well, this is a funny thing, the two of us, meeting here, like this." He'd put her age at around 40, and she was hippy and a little wrinkled and didn't seem to care at all. +"I'll take it up for ye now, if ye say the word, girls." +"No, no; don't leave the horses; somebody'll be comin' past, and we can call 'em in." +"Well, good-by, Rebecca; good-day, Mirandy 'n' Jane. You've got a lively little girl there. I guess she'll be a first-rate company keeper." +Miss Sawyer shuddered openly at the adjective "lively" as applied to a child; her belief being that though children might be seen, if absolutely necessary, they certainly should never be heard if she could help it. "We're not much used to noise, Jane and me," she remarked acidly. +Mr. Cobb saw that he had taken the wrong tack, but he was too unused to argument to explain himself readily, so he drove away, trying to think by what safer word than "lively" he might have described his interesting little passenger. +"I'll take you up and show you your room, Rebecca," Miss Miranda said. "Shut the mosquito nettin' door tight behind you, so 's to keep the flies out; it ain't flytime yet, but I want you to start right; take your passel along with ye and then you won't have to come down for it; always make your head save your heels. Rub your feet on that braided rug; hang your hat and cape in the entry there as you go past." +The three of us stood around the car for a long moment, waiting to see who would go and ring the doorbell. To my surprise, it was me. +I rang it and we all waited in held-breath silence for a minute. I rang it again. Darryl's father's car was in the driveway, and we'd seen a light burning in the living room. I was about to ring a third time when the door opened. +"Marcus?" Darryl's father wasn't anything like I remembered him. Unshaven, in a housecoat and bare feet, with long toenails and red eyes. He'd gained weight, and a soft extra chin wobbled beneath the firm military jaw. His thin hair was wispy and disordered. +"Mr Glover," I said. My parents crowded into the door behind me. +"Hello, Ron," my mother said. +"Ron," my father said. +"You too? What's going on?" +"Can we come in?" +His living room looked like one of those news-segments they show about abandoned kids who spend a month locked in before they're rescued by the neighbors: frozen meal boxes, empty beer cans and juice bottles, moldy cereal bowls and piles of newspapers. There was a reek of cat piss and litter crunched underneath our feet. Even without the cat piss, the smell was incredible, like a bus-station toilet. +He located an online form and wrote out the details of his conversation with Kelly like he was filing a bug report, his fingers fast, his description complete, and then he hit SUBMIT. +Van had read over his shoulder. “Felix—” he began. +“God,” Felix said. He was sitting on the floor of the cage and he slowly pulled himself upright. Van took the laptop and tried some news sites, but they were all timing out. Impossible to say if it was because something terrible was happening or because the network was limping under the superworm. +“I need to get home,” Felix said. +“I’ll drive you,” Van said. “You can keep calling your wife.” +They made their way to the elevators. One of the building’s few windows was there, a thick, shielded porthole. They peered through it as they waited for the elevator. Not much traffic for a Wednesday. Were there more police cars than usual? +“ Oh my God —” Van pointed. +The CN Tower, a giant white-elephant needle of a building loomed to the east of them. It was askew, like a branch stuck in wet sand. Was it moving? It was. It was heeling over, slowly, but gaining speed, falling northeast toward the financial district. In a second, it slid over the tipping point and crashed down. They felt the shock, then heard it, the whole building rocking from the impact. A cloud of dust rose from the wreckage, and there was more thunder as the world’s tallest freestanding structure crashed through building after building. +"Mr. Feinstein?" +He grinned and leaned forward. "It's interesting that Ms. McCavity should disavow any technical expertise, since that's what we've been saying all along. If she's getting stuck in traffic, it's because there's a lot of traffic. The ant-nets route five thousand percent more traffic than our nation's highways ever accommodated without them, and they've increased the miles-per-hour-per-capita-per-linear-mile by six thousand, four hundred percent . You're stuck in traffic? Fine. I get stuck sometimes too. But for every hour you spend stuck today, you're saving hundreds of hours relative to the time your parents spent in transit. +"The other side of this debate are asking for something impossible: they want us to modify the structure of the network, which is a technical construct, built out of bits and equations, to accommodate a philosophical objective. They assert that this is possible, but it's like listening to someone assert that our democracy would be better served if we had less gravity, or if two plus two equaled five. Whether or not that's true, it's not reasonable to ask for it." +"It's fine, really. I don't object to visitors. Not you, especially. But you didn't bring your rat with you, I see. I had conceived a notion that the two of you were inseparable." +"He's angry with me at the moment. I'm giving him space to brood." +She obviously doesn't know what to make of this, and stares at him with her lower lip caught in her teeth. He's being nonsensical, of course. Everything is nonsensical. He hasn't had a clear and focused thought since he walked in the door. +"Why are you here, Ray?" +"I should have just called. Would you like me to go?" +"I knew it was you when the ping came through. I wouldn't have opened the door if I didn't want to see you. " +Ray doesn't know what that means, not in this context. Just polite? Is this what good manners looks like? +Beyond Emma's shoulder is a short hallway. At the end is a door, slightly ajar, which he assumes must be her bedroom. It's a space that suits her, this room. Cream colored walls, abstract pastel prints, pale rugs over a white carpet. The furniture is soft, delicately constructed. Where there are flowers, the vases are clear, +"Stranger or no stranger, 't wouldn't make no difference to her. She'd talk to a pump or a grind-stun; she'd talk to herself ruther 'n keep still." +"What did she talk about?" +"Blamed if I can repeat any of it. She kep' me so surprised I didn't have my wits about me. She had a little pink sunshade—it kind o' looked like a doll's amberill, 'n' she clung to it like a burr to a woolen stockin'. I advised her to open it up—the sun was so hot; but she said no, 't would fade, an' she tucked it under her dress. 'It's the dearest thing in life to me,' says she, 'but it's a dreadful care.' Them 's the very words, an' it's all the words I remember. 'It's the dearest thing in life to me, but it's an awful care!' "—here Mr. Cobb laughed aloud as he tipped his chair back against the side of the house. +"There was another thing, but I can't get it right exactly. She was talkin' 'bout the circus parade an' the snake charmer in a gold chariot, an' says she, 'She was so beautiful beyond compare, Mr. Cobb, that it made you have lumps in your throat to look at her.' She'll be comin' over to see you, mother, an' you can size her up for yourself. I don' know how she'll git on with Mirandy Sawyer—poor little soul!" +"And their sons to be like Frederick," he groans. +She stops sharply. Kilgore wrestles his eyelids open and looks at her, backlit in the soft glow of the room's lamps. Her eyes have gone distant, hard, thoughtful. +"What?" he says, and rolls back and forth beneath her to prod her on. +"No one wanted a son like Frederick." She takes the hint, settles back into her steady rhythm. +"Freddy seems like a fuck up." +"It isn't that. Frederick is..." Slows again, maddening, "...different. Not completely— not like a Whiston, I guess. There's something lesser about him. He's a shameful drunk, you know. Everyone knows that. And when he isn't drunk, he's cruel." +Concentrate. God, the things he endures for the job! "How so? Like mean? Enjoys hurting people?" +She shakes her head, now only marginally occupied with their sex. "Not mean. Mean isn't the word for it. You know, they whisper in the streets that he hurts Emma. Not just bruises and scratches, but hurts her. In terrible ways. And there's nothing she can do to stop him. Mother says that's probably why she ran off to Stratiskaya Daransk. To get away from him and the things he made her do. " +Another issue was makeup. At first Paula insisted she didn't want any. Never wore it, it was deceitful, and she didn't want to appear on camera looking like Barbie. (Small chance of that, I thought. A little war paint now and then might help your chances of landing a father for this child.) Eventually Arlene persuaded her that cameras lie and the only way to look like yourself is to enhance those qualities that make you you. It was a thin argument, but Arlene came from a long line of apparel proprietors who could unload sunlamps in the Sahara. +Paula's adopted daughter Rachel, who was a year and a half old, was running around the apartment, blond tresses flowing, dragging a doll she had named Angie. Except the name came out "Ann-gee." She was immediately adopted by the crew, and Erica, the production manager, was soon teaching her how to play patty-cake. Then Rachel wanted to demonstrate her new skills at eating spaghetti. In five min­utes she was covered head to toe in Ragu tomato sauce. +He reached down to his belt and came up with a very nice set of multi-pliers. He flicked out a wicked-looking knife and sliced through the plastic cuffs and my hands were my own again. +"Thanks," I said. +He shoved me into the bathroom. My hands were useless, like lumps of clay on the ends of my wrists. As I wiggled my fingers limply, they tingled, then the tingling turned to a burning feeling that almost made me cry out. I put the seat down, dropped my pants and sat down. I didn't trust myself to stay on my feet. +As my bladder cut loose, so did my eyes. I wept, crying silently and rocking back and forth while the tears and snot ran down my face. It was all I could do to keep from sobbing -- I covered my mouth and held the sounds in. I didn't want to give them the satisfaction. +Finally, I was peed out and cried out and the guy was pounding on the door. I cleaned my face as best as I could with wads of toilet paper, stuck it all down the john and flushed, then looked around for a sink but only found a pump-bottle of heavy-duty hand-sanitizer covered in small-print lists of the bio-agents it worked on. I rubbed some into my hands and stepped out of the john. +She groped her way through the dark kitchen and into the hall. That was where she had first seen Dr. Quelton. She stopped and turned, as if she were looking into his face. +“I’m stronger than you!” she whispered. +Lexy came down to breakfast a little late the next morning, but in the best of spirits, and with a ferocious appetite. She had no idea how or when she had left the house the night before, but obviously neither Mrs. Royce nor Captain Grey knew anything about it, and that sufficed. She could go on eating, quite untroubled by their friendly anxiety. Let them think what they chose—it no longer mattered to her. +For, in spite of the warm liking she had for them both, she felt entirely cut off from them now. If she told them the truth, they would not believe her, they would not and could not help her. Nobody on earth would help her. She faced that fact squarely. Whatever Dr. Quelton had meant to accomplish, he had perfectly succeeded in doing one thing—he had discredited her. Anything she said now would be regarded as the irresponsible statement of a hysterical girl. +More eye rolling from Cable. "Commander, any time you decide you might need directions to the Marine brig, you let me know. Day or night. I'll probably even send an escort detail to give you a hand. " +"You're killing me, Cap," Kilgore moans. He lurches into a bottom level bunk and drags out an outrageously stuffed duffel. "This is the closest I've ever been to a Commander and I'm trying to make a good impression here." +Rodriguez jogs up, carrying his own gear. He runs his gaze across Ray's khaki and buttoned down civilian attire. "Am I to understand that we'll be quartered in the downlevel portion of the ship?" +"Does it matter?" Cable asks. +"I just want to know if I've packed appropriately." +Kilgore winks. "He's talking about prophylactics, sir." +"I'm not talking about prophylactics. I assumed from the previous conversation that this assignment tended to be more oblique in nature than a standard military operation. I left my battle dress uniforms in the locker, +except for the one I'm wearing." +"Let the record show that the witness declared his utter ignorance," she said. "But I don't get this atheist-Orthodox thing either --" +"Just think of them as Mennonites or something. They find the old ways to be a useful set of rules for navigating the universe's curves. God is irrelevant to the belief." +"So they don't believe in God, but they pray to him?" +"Yeah," he said. The surfers were all coming in now, jiggling their boards and rebooting them and staring ruefully at the radical cutback off the lip, dude, gnarly, as they plodded up the beach. "The ritual is the important part. Thinking good thoughts. Having right mind. +"It's good advice, most of it. It doesn't matter where it comes from or how it got there. What matters is that if you follow the Law, you get to where you're going, in good time, with little pain. You don't know why or how, but you do." +"It's like following the ants," she said, watching the stop-and-go traffic in the other direction. "Don't know why they tell us to go where they do, but they do, and it works." +I heard her take another few steps into the room. Felt her eyes on the back of my neck. +They pierced me. Observing. Studying. She knew. +Rio’s voice echoed in my brain, telling me under no circumstances to let her see my face, making me promise, impressing upon me that the slim probability we had of this working existed only as long as I kept my head down—I felt myself turning and tried to stop, tried to deny her, to keep her limited to my body language— don’t look up, keep your eyes away, don’t ruin everything, we’re so close—! +No words, no precautions, no plans made any difference, not against her. I turned and met Dawna’s eyes, and the moment I did, the smallest datum that she might have been lacking snapped into place. +She knew everything. +She knew that Checker was far outside the county, that he was the one scrambling to stream our code, that I had left it all in his hands. +She knew that she had never been poisoned, that Rio and I had invented the story so Arthur would feel compelled to call her and tell her where I was, because Arthur’s messed-up brain was still sympathetic enough to her not to want her dead. She knew we had chosen such a story so she wouldn’t bomb the building outright and kill us all once she found out our location. +Grampa was switched off when Sean found him on the ward, which throbbed with a coleslaw of laser-light and videogames and fuck-pix and explosions and car-wrecks and fractals and atrocities. +Sean remembered visits before the old man was committed, he and his dutiful father visiting the impeccable apartment in the slate house in Kingston, Ontario. Grampa made tea and conversation, both perfectly executed and without soul. It drove Sean's father bugfuck, and he'd inevitably have a displaced tantrum at Sean in the car on the way home. The first time Grampa had switched on in Sean's presence -- it was when Sean was trying out a prototype of Enemies of Art against his father's own As All Right-Thinking People Know -- it had scared Sean stupid. +Grampa had been in maintenance mode, running through a series of isometric stretching exercises in one corner while Sean and his father had it out. Then, suddenly, Grampa was between them, arguing both sides with machinegun passion and lucidity, running an intellect so furious it appeared to be steam-driven. Sean's tongue died in his mouth. He was made wordless by this vibrant, violent intellect that hid inside Grampa. Grampa and his father had traded extemporaneous barbs until Grampa abruptly switched back off during one of Sean's father's rebuttals, conceding the point in an unconvincing, mechanical tone. Sean's father stalked out of the house and roared out of the driveway then, moving with such speed that if Sean hadn't been right on his heels, he wouldn't have been able to get in the car before his father took off. +Each concentration of wealth was an efficient machine, meshed in a million ways with the mortal economy. You interacted with the vats when you bought hamburgers, Internet connections, movies, music, books, electronics, games, transportation -- the money left your hands and was sieved through their hoses and tubes, flushed back out into the world where other mortals would touch it. +But there was no easy way to touch the money at its most concentrated, purest form. It was like a theoretical superdense element from the first instant of the universe's creation, money so dense it stopped acting like money; money so dense it changed state when you chipped a piece of it off. +Leon's predecessors had been shrewd and clever. They had walked the length and breadth of the problem space of providing services and products to a person who was money who was a state who was a vat. Many of the nicer grace-notes in the office came from those failed pitches -- the business with the lights and the air, for example. +"Hello, Grampa," Sean said. +Grampa stared at him from dark eyes set in deep, wrinkled nests. Behind them, Sean could almost see the subroutines churning. "Sean," Grampa said. Woodenly, he stood and came around the table, and gave Sean a precise hug and cheek-kiss. Sean didn't bother returning either. +He put the recorder on the table between them and switched it on. +Grampa was a moderately wealthy man. He'd achieved much of that wealth prior to his retirement, working as a machinist on really delicate, tricky stuff. The family assumed that he did this work switched off, letting the subroutines run the stultifying repetitions, but in his prelim research, Sean had talked to one of Grampa's co-workers, who said that Grampa had stayed switched on more often than not. Grampa had acquired the rest of the wealth shortly before Sean's father had sent him south, to the Home. The years-old class action suit brought by the guilty, horrified families of accidental zombies had finally ended with a settlement, and all the Survivors became instant millionaires in trust. +Lexy was sure, however, that there was. She stepped to the balcony railing, to look down into the garden below, and there, on the white paint of the railing, she found something. +“Look!” she said, in a matter-of-fact voice. “What’s this?” +He came to her side. +“It’s the print of a hand,” he said. “In blood, I should imagine.” +For a moment they stared at the ghastly mark, a strange evidence of pain and violence in this quiet place. +“We’d better look in the garden,” he suggested. +They went down. The grass beneath the balcony was beaten down in one place, but there was nothing else. Some one had come and gone. They could not even guess who it had been. They knew nothing. +“Come, Lexy!” the captain said. +They both turned for one last look at the accursed house, blazing with spectral lights. Then they set off, away from it, over that weary road again. +“There’s no police station in the village, is there?” he asked. +“I’ve never seen one, but I’ve heard Mrs. Royce talk about the constable. Anyhow, she can tell us.” +My brain was really going now, running like 60. There were lots of reasons to run ParanoidXbox -- the best one was that anyone could write games for it. Already there was a port of MAME, the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, so you could play practically any game that had ever been written, all the way back to Pong -- games for the Apple ][+ and games for the Colecovision, games for the NES and the Dreamcast, and so on. +Even better were all the cool multiplayer games being built specifically for ParanoidXbox -- totally free hobbyist games that anyone could run. When you combined it all, you had a free console full of free games that could get you free Internet access. +And the best part -- as far as I was concerned -- was that ParanoidXbox was paranoid . Every bit that went over the air was scrambled to within an inch of its life. You could wiretap it all you wanted, but you'd never figure out who was talking, what they were talking about, or who they were talking to. Anonymous web, email and IM. Just what I needed. +"Yo. This is not a recording. I am just in a transcendent plane. And if that's you, Murray, I'll have the contact sheets there by six. Patience is a virtue." +"Honey, it's me. Get out of the darkroom. Get a life." +"Oh, hi, baby." Finally tuning in. "I'm working. In a quest for unrelenting pictorial truth. But mainly I'm thinking of you." +"You're printing, right? Darling, it's lunch hour. Don't you feel guilty, working all the time?" +The truth was, it was one of the reasons I respected him so much. He even did his own contacts. His fervor matched my drive. It's what made us perfect mates. +"I've got tons of guilt. But I'm trying to get past it. Be­come a full human person. Go back to the dawn of man. Paint my face and dance in a thunderstorm." He'd pause, as though starting to get oriented. "Hey, look at the time. Christ. I've got a print shoot on Thirty-eighth Street at three." +He was chasing a bit of fashion work to supplement his on-again, off-again magazine assignments. +"Love," I said in my reverie, "can you come over tonight? I promise to make it worth your while. It involves a bubble bath, champagne, roses everywhere, sensuous ragas on the CD. And maybe some crispy oysters or something, sent in later on, just to keep us going." +I looked at him blankly. Looked, and noticed he had a cellular phone in his hand. +A phone. When had Arthur gotten a phone? I hadn’t seen him pull one from any of the guards... +He held it out to Rio. “She wants to talk to you.” +Rio’s face was unreadable. “Ah,” he said. “I see.” +“I’m sorry,” Arthur whispered to me. The hand holding the phone was shaking. “So sorry.” +Horror shorted out my brain. “No,” I said. “ No.” +“Cas—” tried Rio. +“You’ve been working for them this whole time?” I cried. +“No—it ain’t like that—” +“You betrayed us!” My M4 swung to point at Arthur. “You—!” +Rio placed a cautious hand on my weapon, shifting it off line. “Cas, it isn’t his fault. Dawna Polk did talk to you, didn’t she?” he said to Arthur. +“I’m sorry,” he said again, wretchedly. “I’m sorry, Russell.” +I had to restrain myself from hitting him. +“Give me the phone,” said Rio. He hit a button and held the phone out in front of us, raising his voice slightly. “Go ahead.” +I recognized Dawna Polk’s mellifluous voice on the speaker immediately. “I must say I’m impressed.” +Again, the rustle of fabric. "No." +She put her hand on the door's crashbar, made ready to pass into the next chamber. +"I'm starting to freak out a little here, Ria," he said. "He doesn't hunt humans or something?" +"No," and he didn't need to see her face, he could see the smile. +"Or need an organ? I don't think I have a rare blood-type, and I should tell you that mine have been indifferently cared for --" +"Leon," she said, "if Viktor needed an organ, we'd make one right here. Print it out in about forty hours, pristine and virgin." +"So you're saying I'm not going to be harvested or hunted, then?" +"It's a very low probability outcome," she said, and pushed the crashbar. +It was darker in this room, a mellow, candlelit sort of light, and there was a rhythmic vibration coming up through the floor, a whoosh whoosh. +Ria said, "It's his breath. The filtration systems are down there." She pointed a toe at the outline of a service hatch set into the floor. "Circulatory system overhead," she said, and he craned his neck up at the grate covering the ceiling, the troughs filled with neatly bundled tubes. +“We have to bait them,” I insisted. “They have to believe they’ve got our scent until we can get the notifications out. That’s all that matters right now.” +“Abort,” said Rio. +“No.” I turned on him, talking very fast. “What’s going to happen if we do? If we run? What will their next step be? Bombing the LA metropolitan area into the ground and hoping they’ll kill us somewhere in there? As long as we’re a threat, they won’t stop coming after us. Which means we’ve got only two options—either we come to them and save them the trouble, or we make good on our threat, or we do both before they mow down anyone else in their way.” +I paused, out of breath. +“Do you have a plan?” said Rio, his baritone quiet in the shadowy darkness. +One was forming in my head even as we spoke. It was dangerous. Scratch that, it was insane. And it very well might not work. But I already knew I was going to go for it anyway. +“Yes. As a matter of fact, I do. And I think—I think we’ve got a chance to take down Dawna Polk at the same time.” I took a deep breath. “But I’m warning you. You’re not going to like it.” +The rusty metal door at the top of the concrete steps seemed to be locked, but when I gave it a good shove with my shoulder, +it creaked open. Inside it was even darker. I ran the beam of the mini-flashlight clipped to my keychain around the big room. It was empty except for some smashed-up wooden pallets and dirt. +Following the instructions ferret had sent out, I climbed a metal staircase to the second floor, the sound of my boots echoing in the big, dark, empty space. +There was a faint light at the top of the stairs, coming from behind another rusty metal door propped open with a folded-up pizza box. Inside I could smell beer and pizza and heard laughter and loud, confident voices. I began to feel a weird hot buzzing at the back of my neck, a familiar feeling when I’m getting angry. +The second floor was a big, dark, open space just like down- stairs except that in the middle there was cloth draped from the ceiling, silvery fabric that swooped down, forming a big circle like a yurt or a Bedouin tent, glowing with lanterns inside. The fab- ric was tied back to make an opening. I took a deep breath and stepped through it. Everyone inside the tent turned. +Come down here with their game faces on and their firearms strapped on their hips like they're going to do something Bobby Diggs didn't do. Ain't nobody heard that bit about the barn door and the runned-off horses? +It's too late." +Diggs pokes his finger at Ray. "I saw you last night, 'cept you wasn't alone. You had this here rat with you. He followed you like a little dog. " "And how was that?" Ray asks. He'd made a point of avoiding the main lift. +"I told you, man. I hump the deck. Just because there's a little excitement amidships don't mean that I start hugging the desk. I found that boy, Mr. Marlowe. You seen him. That wasn't no accident, and I didn't need Chief Becker coming down here with lights and cops and all that screaming to tell me so. I figured there was a chance the sicko that did this was still out there, hiding somewhere, waiting for things to chill before he made his way up. Didn't find nothing, though. No blood or anything to follow. I guess he must have done it somewhere else and just hauled the boy down here." +She was supposed to get away. +This was my fault. I had to protect her. I pushed my neurons to move a finger with no success. The helplessness sandbagged me. I had to be able to do—to do something— I managed to make a sound in my throat, something like a sick rhinoceros. +“Oh? You have something to say?” +Don’t hurt her. Oh, God. +“Mathematics should be shared, don’t you agree?” the Lancer said carelessly. “Oh, I forgot. You’re only in this for the money. Playing both ends against the middle. You don’t care.” The meditation balls stopped, and he was suddenly a lot closer, half-crouching, half-sitting so his face was near mine. “People like you are the scum of humanity. You don’t care about the field, about what humanity can discover. You’re only in it for your payday. Perelman would weep.” +I would have liked to point out that he’d been planning on using Halliday’s proof for his own ends as well, and that he was almost certainly going to steal the fame and million-dollar prize from Martinez by convincing the world—and maybe even himself—that it was his own work. He was a delusional hypocrite. +"Crap!" I yelped and tied my shoes. +"Go," she said, "run and be free! Look both ways before crossing the road! Write if you get work! Don't even stop for a hug! If you're not out of here by the count of ten, there's going to be trouble , mister. One. Two. Three." +I shut her up by leaping onto the bed, landing on her and kissing her until she stopped trying to count. Satisfied with my victory, I pounded down the stairs, my Xbox under my arm. +Her mom was at the foot of the stairs. We'd only met a couple times. She looked like an older, taller version of Ange -- Ange said her father was the short one -- with contacts instead of glasses. She seemed to have tentatively classed me as a good guy, and I appreciated it. +"Good night, Mrs Carvelli," I said. +"Good night, Mr Yallow," she said. It was one of our little rituals, ever since I'd called her Mrs Carvelli when we first met. +I found myself standing awkwardly by the door. +"Yes?" she said. +"Um," I said. "Thanks for having me over." +"The arrestees were ring-leaders and provocateurs who had led the thousands of impressionistic young people there to charge the police lines. 827 of them were taken into custody. Many of these people had prior offenses. More than 100 of them had outstanding warrants. They are still in custody. +"Ladies and gentlemen, America is fighting a war on many fronts, but nowhere is she in more grave danger than she is here, at home. Whether we are being attacked by terrorists or those who sympathize with them." +A reporter held up a hand and said, "General Sutherland, surely you're not saying that these children were terrorist sympathizers for attending a party in a park?" +"Of course not. But when young people are brought under the influence of our country's enemies, it's easy for them to end up over their heads. Terrorists would love to recruit a fifth column to fight the war on the home front for them. If these were my children, I'd be gravely concerned." +Another reporter chimed in. "Surely this is just an open air concert, General? They were hardly drilling with rifles." +“I’m not mad,” I said, hearing how angry I sounded. “I’m just dumb about people, that’s all.” +He reached out and pulled me to him in a hug, one that wasn’t anything like the way he hugged Bree. He rubbed the back of my head hard with his knuckles. “What do you mean, dumb? You’re the smartest person I know. Don’t be mad.” +“I’m not mad, I’m just an idiot,” I said into his shoulder. +“Shut up, you imbecile.” +I sniffed his shoulder. He always smelled good, like green tea, +or maybe mint, or just the fresh way clothes smell when they’ve been hung outside on a clothesline. You are not going to cry, I told myself. Absolutely not. No way. I blinked hard a few times and I didn’t. +“So, what is this crazy thing?” he asked. +“It’s really, truly crazy.” I pushed him away. He waited. “It’s dangerous. It could turn really bad. And it would take an excel- lent actor to pull it off.” +He spread his arms and gave me a look as if to say, Hello ? Right here in front of you. +“So of course I thought of you, but you’ve got other stuff to do, and this is going to take lots of time and chances are you’d end up in jail or on the news or both. I can’t ask you to do this.” +She didn’t answer, just pressed her lips together for a moment. “Where’s Arthur?” she asked finally. +“With the NSA. I beat them to finding you.” I bared my teeth in something like a smile. +“What? We should wait for them, then!” +I knew Halliday’s opinion didn’t matter, but her reaction was still like a spike in my chest. “We don’t know they’ll find us,” I argued. “The guys who’ve got us are good, maybe good enough to evade the NSA, and this situation could go very bad at any moment. What if they decide to kill us and rabbit? What if the Feds do track us down, and these guys blow us all to kingdom come to avoid capture? You really want to sit on our hands and hope the government rides out of the woods on white horses?” +“If Arthur said he’s coming, he’ll be here,” said Halliday. “He’ll come for us.” +“I’d rather we came for us.” +She tilted her head at me. “You don’t trust him.” +“What? No, I do!” I protested, surprised and disconcerted at the conversational left turn. “But trusting Arthur doesn’t mean—come on, there are a thousand things he can’t control. Just because he would want to help us doesn’t mean he’ll be able to come through.” +“What are you talking about? I just stumbled in on this, thank you very much. You’re the one who’s been working it for months.” +“Yeah, but I think they was happy to see me chasing my own tail. Entertainment, probably, for all the headway we was making. You show up, and...” He slammed down a little too hard on the brake as we approached a red light, and the stupid seatbelt tried to garrote me. “I tracked Polk for months, and they don’t care about saving her hide from no one till you hook up with her. Then they’re after you post-haste, she disappears, and a day later I got a target painted on me too? Don’t believe in coincidences.” +He was right. Dammit. After all, I hadn’t exactly randomly chanced upon this mess. Rio’s words came back to me: What interests me more is who made such a concerted effort to draw you into this... +“Got anything you want to share?” said Tresting. His tone wasn’t hostile, but it wasn’t neutral, either. +“Hey, I’ve been playing catch-up from the beginning,” I said. “You still know way more about this shit show than I do.” +“I tried to warn him about Zip. It backfired. He hasn’t said a word to me since last summer.” I didn’t want to cry, so I had to blink fiercely for a minute. +I heard her sigh and she hugged my shoulder tight. “I’m sorry. +That must have been tough. You should have told me.” +“Why? There wasn’t anything you could have done.” +“Still, I should know if you’re having a hard time. You keep too much to yourself.” +“I’m discreet, that’s all. Discretion is a good thing.” +She chuckled softly. “I’m not sure discretion is one of your strong points. But you never have to be discreet with me. Okay?” +“Yeah, okay.” +“It sounds as if Zip is an incredibly manipulative person.” +“He totally is. It’s like he could control Wilson’s mind.” +She gave me another sideways hug. “Don’t blame your brother for falling for it. And for sure, don’t blame yourself.” +It was weird how she could do that, know exactly what I was thinking. I sat up, suddenly feeling as if leaning my head against her shoulder let my thoughts leak out of my right ear so they could travel up her neck straight to her brain. There were a lot of things I didn’t want her to know about, so I would have to limit how often I did that. “The burritos are ready,” I said to change the subject. +Her room is a standard single, somewhere between modest and upscale, with a living area large enough for a couch, an end table and a vid screen; an abbreviated galley area like the one in Kilgore's room, though he assumes this one works as advertised. He makes sure she gets inside safely, goes so far as to peek into the public area to make sure they haven't accidentally smuggled in a murderer or rapist under cover of her verbal fusillade, then turns to go. Except the door has closed behind him and the kako-daimon responding to the motion sensor cue just gives him a sort of apologetic, doomed shake of the head. +She's saying, "So my father was like 'Tari-" +Heh. Kilgore makes a mental note. +"-you've got to study something of social value. You've got to contribute something to the colony'. And, of course, I'm trying to explain to him that fashion is completely valuable to a colony. That it's all about public perception. I mean, really, do we want the other systems to think of us as total and complete bumpkins? But he just isn't hearing it." Two snaps, a wiggle, and she leaves her dress in the middle of the floor. Even for Kilgore, this is objectively impressive, since he had more or less decided that clothing that tight had been surgically grafted onto her. She swings back to him, so she won't have to talk back over her shoulder, a pleasant ripple of pink curves. "I mean, it isn't like we need another engineer. The entire planet is practically sinking in orbit with them." +"How many are there of you?" +I learned it to speak in school, but the scholars were hateful and laughed. Hannah is the oldest, I come next, then John, then Jenny, then Mark, then Fanny, then Mira." +"Well, that IS a big family!" +"Far too big, everybody says," replied Rebecca with an unexpected and thoroughly grown-up candor that induced Mr. Cobb to murmur, "I swan!" and insert more tobacco in his left cheek. +"They're dear, but such a bother, and cost so much to feed, you see," she rippled on. "Hannah and I haven't done anything but put babies to bed at night and take them up in the morning for years and years. But it's finished, that's one comfort, and we'll have a lovely time when we're all grown up and the mortgage is paid off." +"All finished? Oh, you mean you've come away?" +"No, I mean they're all over and done with; our family 's finished. Mother says so, and she always keeps her promises. There hasn't been any since Mira, and she's three. She was born the day father died. Aunt Miranda wanted Hannah to come to Riverboro instead of me, but mother couldn't spare her; she takes hold of housework better than I do, Hannah does. I told mother last night if there was likely to be any more children while I was away I'd have to be sent for, for when there's a baby it always takes Hannah and me both, for mother has the cooking and the farm." +Everybody wanted to know how the date went, of course, and she made something up, but it rocked her confidence, particularly since he wouldn’t answer her texts and unfollowed her on Twit- ter. (Well, okay, I unfollowed her and nuked the account that she thought was his.) Since this happened just as the three girls were starting to get mad at each other over things they’d said that some- how got repeated and shared on Twitter and Instagram, Harper suddenly wasn’t as powerful as she had been and pretty soon all three of them were fair game. And boy, did everybody pile on. +All the girls who had been trying to be friends with them but weren’t good enough, not to mention all the boys they’d snubbed, were tearing into them. It got pretty nasty, actually. Rebecca’s parents started a blog about it and the school brought in an inspirational speaker and launched an anti-bullying program. +I suppose it didn’t do Sibley much good, but I felt righteous about it. +And then - the weirdest thing. Rumors started that somebody was behind the three girls’ fall from power. A sophomore tweeted that somebody should do the same thing at their school. A bunch of people retweeted and commented about situations that they wish could be fixed. It turned into a hashtag and people started saying they’d pay good money for #secretavenger to come and kick butt at their school. +“But—did she say she would marry you?” +“Of course she did! She—look here! You don’t know what I’ve been through. It was I who telephoned last night. I—” +“But why did you? Oh, please tell me! I am Caroline’s friend—truly her friend. I want to understand!” +“All right!” he said. “I telephoned because I was waiting for her, and she didn’t come.” +“Waiting for—Caroline?” +“We had arranged to get married last night. She was to meet me, but she didn’t come,” he said, a little unsteadily. “Perhaps she just changed her mind. Perhaps she doesn’t want to see me any more. If that’s the case, I’ll trust you not to mention anything about me—to any one. You see now, don’t you, that I—I had to know?” +Lexy’s eyes filled with tears. Moved by a generous impulse, she held out her hand. +“I’m so awfully sorry!” she cried. +“Why? You mean—for God’s sake, tell me! You mean she has changed her mind?” +“I can’t tell you—not now.” +“You can’t leave it at that,” said he. He had taken her outstretched hand, and he held it tight. “I ought to know what has happened. I can’t believe that Caroline would let me down like that. She—she’s not that sort of girl. Something’s gone wrong. She wouldn’t leave me waiting and waiting there for her at Wyngate.” +"Would you go back?" asked Mr. Cobb curiously. +She flashed him an intrepid look and then said proudly, "I'd never go back—I might be frightened, but I'd be ashamed to run. Going to aunt Mirandy's is like going down cellar in the dark. There might be ogres and giants under the stairs,—but, as I tell Hannah, there MIGHT be elves and fairies and enchanted frogs!—Is there a main street to the village, like that in Wareham?" +"I s'pose you might call it a main street, an' your aunt Sawyer lives on it, but there ain't no stores nor mills, an' it's an awful one-horse village! You have to go 'cross the river an' get on to our side if you want to see anything goin' on." +"I'm almost sorry," she sighed, "because it would be so grand to drive down a real main street, sitting high up like this behind two splendid horses, with my pink sunshade up, and everybody in town wondering who the bunch of lilacs and the hair trunk belongs to. It would be just like the beautiful lady in the parade. Last summer the circus came to Temperance, and they had a procession in the morning. Mother let us all walk in and wheel Mira in the baby carriage, because we couldn't afford to go to the circus in the afternoon. And there were lovely horses and animals in cages, and clowns on horseback; and at the very end came a little red and gold chariot drawn by two ponies, and in it, sitting on a velvet cushion, was the snake charmer, all dressed in satin and spangles. She was so beautiful beyond compare, Mr. Cobb, that you had to swallow lumps in your throat when you looked at her, and little cold feelings crept up and down your back. Don't you know how I mean? Didn't you ever see anybody that made you feel like that?" +“You’re only saying that because you don’t understand what this means!” I accused Arthur. We couldn’t give this up. We couldn’t. I tried to temper my tone and played one last hole card. “Professor, if you’re so concerned about her, we should go after her. If we get to her first, then we can help her escape the Feds. She’s not going to know how to stay off the grid, but that’s one thing I’m exceptionally good at—I can help her.” +Halliday hesitated. Then she said, “No. Let it go. She’s smart, and she’s clearly figured out how not to be found. If we keep digging after her...no. Just let her go.” +No. To find myself so close to salvation, and then to have it destroyed by people who didn’t understand... +Arthur turned toward me, his face unreadable. “Job’s over, Russell. Thank you. For your help.” +I half expected him to offer me money. I think I would have punched him if he had. +I wheeled around and stormed off, back from the lake, away from the safe house and back to my car. This job was over when I said it was fucking over. If Arthur didn’t want to help me find Martinez, if Halliday didn’t want to take advantage of her connection—well, screw them. I would do it myself. +wasn't it? Whatever the relationship between them was or might be, it was already wrong. It was a deception founded on his allowing her to believe that he was just a member of the crew, just a systems vet, a rat guy. It was the same vague, troubling, impossible relationship he had with Commander Sorensen. +Impossible because she was completely right. He was lonely for her, for Emma. Something within her cried out to him, troubled him, lured him in ways he didn't have the faculties or the experience to recognize. +Everything he knew about her, had sensed, had touched, was lightning he tried to catch in a bell jar. +And he was ruining it. Every moment he spent with her like this was a step on the path to destruction because he couldn't tell her the truth. He wants her so badly he's risking everything. +Ray surges up from the couch, sheds her like a comforting blanket on a winter night. "I've got to go." +"What? Ray-but I thought-" +He waves her off, stomps to the door. "I know, I thought so to. But I can't, Emma. I just can't. Not now anyway. It wouldn't be right." +Rodriguez can almost see him mentally filing this factoid away for later analysis. +"There's only a handful of companies I can think of who would be willing to take that kind of financial risk this far out on the fringe," he continues. "And all of them are independent subsidiaries of the big W." +Whiston Corp., he means. "That could be." +"You brought samples?" +"I'm afraid I couldn't show them to you. The design specs are extremely confidential, at the request of the client." +Shue raises his hands between them, an I'm not trying to pry gesture. "Hey, that's cool. Fair enough. Just sort of a hobby of mine. " +Of course, digging up clandestine negotiation details is a hobby they all seem to have in common. Corporate espionage is the currency of the young up-and-comer. +But Shue goes on, lowering his voice. "I just find it interesting that the big W is moving in on territory it already has a proprietary interest in, if you know what I mean. The Board has been pretty aggressive, it seems to me, in dealing with the New H branch as it is, at least if you pay attention to the types of signs guys like us look at. Could be a strong move to entice Whelemat back into the fold, especially since they didn't have to use their own capital investments for the grunt work. " +Without waiting for a reply I scanned the long lab tables for raw materials. Most of what was left was connected up in ways I didn’t want to disturb, but I spotted an orange brick of Semtex on the floor that had been overlooked in the hasty clear out. I dashed to grab that and a detonator. +The DHS agent hesitated for much too long and then turned and sprinted through the double doors. I followed suit, slicing at the Semtex with a knife as I ran. I swung through the empty computer lab and back into the inner office, where I mashed a little slice of my plastic explosive onto the large bolt on the squat, heavy floor safe, the kinetic energy and fracture strength overlapping in a fast back-of-the-envelope estimate. +I pressed the detonator in, got behind the desk, and pushed the button. +The bang shot bits of metal and flooring and debris against the walls of the office. I came back around to the safe, kicked the remains of the bolt away, and heaved the thing in my arms, the open door banging against my hip. I staggered and almost dropped it—holy crap, the thing was heavy. One hundred and three point eight pounds. Perfect. +That usually shut down that line of conversation. Of course every gamespace was full of pedos and pervs, and cops pretending to be pedo- and perv-bait (though I sure hoped there weren't any cops on the Xnet!). An accusation like that was enough to change the subject nine out of ten times. +> Mission? Potrero Hill? Noe? East Bay? +> Just wind me up k thx? +She stopped winding. +> You scared? +> Safe -- why do you care? +> Just curious. +I was getting a bad vibe off her. She was clearly more than just curious. Call it paranoia. I logged off and shut down my Xbox. +Dad looked at me over the table the next morning and said, "It looks like it's going to get better, at least." He handed me a copy of the Chronicle open to the third page. +> A Department of Homeland Security spokesman has confirmed that the San Francisco office has requested a 300 percent budget and personnel increase from DC. +What? +> Major General Graeme Sutherland, the commanding officer for Northern California DHS operations, confirmed the request at a press conference yesterday, noting that a spike in suspicious activity in the Bay Area prompted the request. "We are tracking a spike in underground chatter and activity and believe that saboteurs are deliberately manufacturing false security alerts to undermine our efforts." +It's like this: if the Garden Level has been strategically designed to make the passengers forget they're not on luxury cruise liner navigating a splendid Caribbean sea, the lounge begs you to forget you're not the fancypants scion of an Old World, noble house stopping into a private club to meet with some effete Oxford or Cambridge chums and discuss how best to avoid doing any actually useful labors while still seeming to contribute to expansion of the Empire. There's rosewood paneling on the walls, polished to a burnished glow; scarlet carpeting deep enough to qualify as an official quagmire that requires a posting of various warning signs; subdued chandeliers that have nothing in common with lighting technology anytime after the discovery of the light bulb. Gentlemen in suits playing cards at circular tables around the room generate a smog of sweet cigar smoke and port wine laughter. Everything is wood, aged and dark and meticulously cared for. +Everything that isn't wood is brass or mirrored or fabricated of some other substance that looks expensive and intimidating without distracting from the lounge's essential clubbishness. +> On our next adventure? +> I didn't really have anything planned. +> Oki -- then I'll take YOU. Saturday. Dolores Park. Illegal open air concert. Be there or be a dodecahedron. +> Wait what? +> Don't you even read Xnet? It's all over the place. You ever hear of the Speedwhores? +I nearly choked. That was Trudy Doo's band -- as in Trudy Doo, the woman who had paid me and Jolu to update the indienet code. +> Yeah I've heard of them. +> They're putting on a huge show and they've got like fifty bands signed to play the bill, going to set up on the tennis courts and bring out their own amp trucks and rock out all night. +I felt like I'd been living under a rock. How had I missed that? There was an anarchist... passed on the way to school that had a poster of an old revolutionary named Emma Goldman with the caption "If I can't dance, I don't want to be a part of your revolution." I'd been spending all my energies on figuring out how to use the Xnet to organize dedicated fighters so they could jam the DHS, but this was so much cooler. A big concert -- I had no idea how to do one of those, but I was glad someone did. +I heard him moving around. Feeling a moment of panic, I opened my eyes a crack. He was patting his jeans pockets while swearing, then rummaged through his coat and pulled out his iPhone. “Hey, Danny. How’s it going? Listen, I talked to my guys. +They want to meet up. How’s tomorrow morning for you?” He picked up his beer and wandered out of my view. “I know, but like I said, they’ve been looking for an ally with the right technical skills. There aren’t too many people like you, Danny, committed to social justice and with your specialized knowledge. The thing is, it’s got to happen now, while the Minneapolis Nine are still in the news. Your place? Awesome. I’ll let them know. Right, +absolutely. You can trust me, man.” One of Simon’s weird talents was that when he said things like that, they sounded true even though they were total lies. +I had the weird sensation that he was looking at me in the quiet that followed, so I fake-snored a little. It didn’t sound as authentic as his lies did, but it must have made him feel safe mak- ing one more phone call. “We’re set,” I heard him say. “Tomorrow at noon, his place.” +I reached the side in time to see them land on the first tier of stones below. She'd fallen near the edge, but she was solid and safe. Alex Goddard, however, hit with one foot on and one foot off, and the result was he slid away, then van­ished into the dark rain. +It's her final act of self-destruction. She's joined me in my rage, but we've both been spared. That's the miracle of Baalum . +"Sar, don't move." I finally found my voice. I was still holding Tz'ac Tzotz, who'd begun to shriek, his blue eyes flooded with fear. +Now several village men from the square were running, shouting, up the slippery steps. Their faces looked like they'd been painted at one time, but now the rain had washed most of it away. +While I yelled down to Sarah, again begging her not to move, Marcelina was asking them something, and their an­swers were tumbling out. +Finally I turned to look at her, the screaming Tz'ac Tzotz still in my arms. +"No one knows where he is," she was saying as she looked down over the side. "He's gone into the forest." +"I ought to be; I've brought up three and a half of 'em," Rebecca responded cheerfully, pulling up the infant Simpson's stockings. +"I should think you'd be fonder of dolls than you are," said Jane. +"I do like them, but there's never any change in a doll; it's always the same everlasting old doll, and you have to make believe it's cross or sick, or it loves you, or can't bear you. Babies are more trouble, but nicer." +Miss Jane stretched out a thin hand with a slender, worn band of gold on the finger, and the baby curled her dimpled fingers round it and held it fast. +"You wear a ring on your engagement finger, don't you, aunt Jane? Did you ever think about getting married?" +"Yes, dear, long ago." +"What happened, aunt Jane?" +"He died—just before." +"Oh!" And Rebecca's eyes grew misty. +"He was a soldier and he died of a gunshot wound, in a hospital, down South." +"Oh! aunt Jane!" softly. "Away from you?" +"No, I was with him." +"Was he young?" +"Yes; young and brave and handsome, Rebecca; he was Mr. Carter's brother Tom." +“No fair. Cops can lie, right?” +“Unless under oath. So?” +“I was just curious about what happens if a cop lies to a federal official.” +“Their heads explode.” +“That would be awesome.” +“No, it wouldn’t, but my head will explode if you keep wasting my time. Do you have any more questions pertaining to some- thing other than prurient interest?” +“Prur . . . how do you spell that?” +“Look it up in the dictionary.” She had a killer glare. I wouldn’t want to be facing her in a courtroom. “Zenobia, you need to take care. Your brother has enough problems.” +“I know.” +“And you’re aware of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and its penalties?” I started to speak, but she held up a warning finger. +“Constrain your answer to a yes or no.” +“Yes.” +She studied me for a moment. “Hypothetically, if you were going to help your brother, what would you do? Aside from drag- ging a lawyer out of retirement and getting her to do a lot of work for free.” +“You actually want to know?“ “Let’s keep this in the realm of hypotheticals. That is, based on a proposed theory rather than actual — “ “I know what the word means.” I also knew that she wanted to find out what I was planning without having to spill the beans if questioned under oath. “What I might do to help my brother is show the world how the FBI tricks people into saying they’re going to do things that they would never do if the FBI hadn’t goaded them into it. How the FBI encourages people to say they’re going to break the law just so they’ll have a chance to arrest them. +“Well—we can try it. But no promises.” +His reply might not be the resounding enthusiasm I’d hoped for, but at least he’d said yes. “You’ll see. We can do this.” +Checker cleared his throat. “Cas, pick the phone back up, please.” +I avoided catching Arthur’s eye as I did so. I levered myself up off the bed, making a face as my wet clothes pulled against my skin and my chest wound twinged, and walked between Arthur and Rio to head over by the windows. “You’ve just got me now,” I said into the phone. +He came straight to the point. “I can’t trust you. Or Arthur.” +I didn’t blame him. “So we do this remotely,” I said. “So what?” +He made a hissing sound. “It’ll go a lot faster if we’re in the same room.” He was right. I wasn’t sure what he wanted me to say, though—I couldn’t give him any guarantees, as much as I would have liked to. “And, uh, one other problem. I think I’m going to need more processor power than I took with me, and I don’t have enough cash left—I can’t make a withdrawal while Pithica’s trying to track me down, and—” +Dad pointed at the paper. "These guys may be fools, but they're methodical fools. They'll just keep throwing resources at this problem until they solve it. It's tractable, you know. Mining all the data in the city, following up on every lead. They'll catch the terrorists." +I lost it. "Dad! Are you listening to yourself ? They're talking about investigating practically every person in the city of San Francisco!" +"Yeah," he said, "that's right. They'll catch every alimony cheat, every dope dealer, every dirt-bag and every terrorist. You just wait. This could be the best thing that ever happened to this country." +"Tell me you're joking," I said. "I beg you. You think that that's what they intended when they wrote the Constitution? What about the Bill of Rights?" +"The Bill of Rights was written before data-mining," he said. He was awesomely serene, convinced of his rightness. "The right to freedom of association is fine, but why shouldn't the cops be allowed to mine your social network to figure out if you're hanging out with gangbangers and terrorists?" +"So, what's the critical path, Mac?" Lee-Daniel asked. "Who's going to run this circus between tonight and your executive search coming through with an empty suit to sit in the driver's seat?" +"We thought you'd stay on, LD, help with a smooth transition." +"Why would I do that?" Lee-Daniel said. +The Series A and Series B investors watched them like a tennis-match, silent, eyes shining. +"Why don't you two get us a couple beers, OK?" Mac said to them. They mooched off petulantly. "LD, I hope you'll stay on because you have a significant stake in this company. We don't want to dismantle CogRad, we want to grow it, turn it into something big and important. We need your help still, to make this work. It's your show, we know it. We can't make the transition without you." +He knew that Mac was blowing smoke, massaging his ego. But he was good at suppressing his ego for the good of his company. The company. Not his company, not anymore. "What's in it for me?" +Mac made a face and leaned in close, whispering. "Look, they don't want you to stay. I had to fight, hard, to keep you in, even during the transition. I put a lot on the line for you. I know that your job can't just be filled by a warm body, I know that you're the only one who can train your successor. We can make this company really big -- you'll be able to retire on your share in 18 months if we go according to plan. We're going to franchise out, start new busses in... turn it all into a turnkey solution, something that scales. We'll raise 10 billion on IPO if we raise a cent, you just watch. I've been through this, LD, and I know what a success smells like. This will be a success -- your success -- if you play along. If you don't, well, we could all end up in the shitter. Canada was the last straw for them. We either go on without you or we don't go on at all, do you understand?" +› Sorry. I forgot. +› It’s OK. We all lost people, right? +Fuckrag was the epithet that some of the sysadmins were using to describe the contingent that wanted to shut down the Internet. Queen Kong had coined it—apparently it had started life as a catch-all term to describe the clueless IT managers that she’d chewed up through her career. +The Googloids were one of the largest and most powerful blocs left behind, along with the satellite uplink crews and the remaining transoceanic crews. Queen Kong’s endorsement had come as a surprise and he’d sent her an email that she’d replied to tersely: “can’t have the fuckrags in charge.” +she typed and then her connection dropped. He fired up a browser and called up google.com. The browser timed out. He hit reload, and then again, and then the Google front-page came back up. Whatever had hit Queen Kong’s workplace—power failure, worms, another quake—she had fixed it. He snorted when he saw that they’d replaced the O’s in the Google logo with little planet Earths with mushroom clouds rising from them. +They almost stood at attention. It would have been funny if it wasn't so scary. +"Here's the thing. Now that you've helped me, it's really dangerous. If you get caught, I'll get caught. They'll get anything you know out of you --" I held up my hand to forestall their protests. "No, stop. You haven't been through it. Everyone talks. Everyone breaks. If you're ever caught, you tell them everything, right away, as fast as you can, as much as you can. They'll get it all eventually anyway. That's how they work. +"But you won't get caught, and here's why: you're not jammers anymore. You are retired from active duty.... for vocabulary words culled from spy thrillers -- "you're a sleeper cell. Stand down. Go back to being normal kids. One way or another, I'm going to break this thing, break it wide open, end it. Or it will get me, finally, do me in. If you don't hear from me within 72 hours, assume that they got me. Do whatever you want then. But for the next three days -- and forever, if I do what I'm trying to do -- stand down. Will you promise me that?" +He allowed us to drive back anyway. +Only a few roads out from Checker’s place I took a right turn and said, “Don’t look now, but we’re being followed.” +Arthur flicked his eyes to the side mirror. “I don’t see anything,” he said, after a few more streets of watching the tragic comedy that is LA drivers trying to navigate through pounding rain. “How can you tell?” +“Game theory,” I said. “The white sedan isn’t driving selfishly.” +“They staked out Checker’s place,” Arthur guessed. “Case we came back.” +“It’s okay,” I assured him. “They’re not after us; they want us to lead them back to Rio. I can lose them.” I juked the steering wheel to the side and slammed on the gas, shooting through the next intersection just as the light changed. Arthur yelled. In the rearview mirror, an SUV crashed spectacularly into the passenger side of the white sedan, and brakes screeched as three other cars skidded on the wet streets, spinning to a stop and completely blocking the intersection behind us. +“What the hell!” cried Arthur. +"Sounds pretty good to me," Leon said. +"Oh sure," she said. "Sure. A world of eager consumers who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. Why did evolution endow us with such pathological innumeracy? What's the survival advantage in being led around by the nose by whichever witch-doctor can come up with the best scare-story?" +"He said that entrepreneurial things -- parenthood, businesses..." +"Any kind of risk-taking. Sports. No one swings for the stands when he knows that the odds are so much better on a bunt." +"And Viktor wanted this?" +She peered at him. "A world of people who understand risk are nearly as easy to lead around by the nose as a world of people who are incapable of understanding risk. The big difference is that the competition is at a massive disadvantage in the latter case, not being as highly evolved as the home team." +He looked at her, really looked at her for the first time. Saw that she was the face of a monster, the voice of a god. The hand of a massive, unknowable machine that was vying to change the world, remake it to suit its needs. A machine that was good at it . +She hesitated. “My biggest fear is—I don’t know if I can recreate it. My greatest achievement, and I don’t even know...what if it’s gone?” +Arthur took her by the shoulders. “Ain’t gonna make you no promises I can’t keep. But Russell here is the best there is, and I ain’t too shabby myself. Take this one day at a time, okay? We’ll call.” +She nodded. +“Come on. We’ve got a lot of work to do,” I prodded Arthur. +He squeezed Halliday’s shoulders one last time. As we headed off at a trot, he glanced back several times to where she stood thin and bereft in the hallway. +Well, this sucked for Arthur. Of course, that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to take his head off the moment we were out of sight. +In the end, I was very well-behaved. I waited until we were in the car. Arthur was pulling out of the visitor’s parking lot and had the gall to say to me grimly, “So, I get this is a big deal. Can you give me the layman’s rundown?” +“You first,” I said. Penguins could have gotten frostbite from me. +"What do you mean, 'help'?" +"I'll explain if you'll give me a chance." He revolved and delivered some brusque orders in Kekchi Maya to the women, who nodded apologetically and began helping Sarah back onto the palanquin. After he admonished her in the same language, he then said... Army privates, who gave him a firm salute, turned, and walked over to pick the palanquin up, to carry it for the women. The sense of authority he exuded reminded me of that first morning we met at Quetzal Manor. His eyes flashed from benign to demanding to benign in an instant. +"No, damn it, alto !" I strode over, shoved the soldiers aside, and took her hand. "Sar, honey, don't you understand what's going on? Something terrible happened to you when you were here before. I'm so worried—" +"But he says I need to stay, Morgy." She drew back. "It's best. He's helping me." +As I watched the two privates carry her away, down the cobblestone pathway, AK-47's swung over their shoulders, I felt my helplessness become complete. The Army here was under his control, just like everything else. +This was a lot worse. +This was like putting your hand on a hot stove, only it's not your hand, it's the entire inside of your head, and your esophagus all the way down to your stomach. My entire body sprang out in a sweat and I choked and choked. +Wordlessly, she passed me my horchata and I managed to get the straw into my mouth and suck hard on it, gulping down half of it in one go. +"So there's a scale, the Scoville scale, that we chili-fanciers use to talk about how spicy a pepper is. Pure capsaicin is about 15 million Scovilles. Tabasco is about 50,000. Pepper spray is a healthy three million. This stuff is a puny 200,000, about as hot as a mild Scotch Bonnet Pepper. I worked up to it in about a year. Some of the real hardcore can get up to a million or so, twenty times hotter than Tabasco. That's pretty freaking hot. At Scoville temperatures like that, your brain gets totally awash in endorphins. It's a better body-stone than hash. And it's good for you." +I was getting my sinuses back now, able to breathe without gasping. +"Dad's coming tomorrow?" Sean said. +Grampa said, "Yes. He's catching the 6 AM. He'll be here by 10." +"Isn't that nice ," Adele said. +They left Grampa and Ethan sitting at the table together. Sean looked back over his shoulder before they got on the elevator, and Grampa was still switched on, staring hard at him. +"You must be excited about seeing your father again," Adele said to him when they were sitting around the pool. +Sean was getting the hang of talking to Adele. "Ethan and my grandfather seem to be hitting it off." +"Oh, I certainly hope so! Ethan could use some friends at that place." +Sean pictured the two of them, seated across from each other at the ward table, running maintenance routines at each other, saying, "Yes," "Yes." Unbidden, a grin came to Sean's face. +"Why did you put Ethan in the Home?" Sean asked, shifting to catch more sun on his face. +"He wanted to go," she said. "The doctor came by and told him about it and asked him if he wanted to go, and he said 'Yes.' That was it!" +“Dr. Kingsley,” said Finch. “This is very important. Can you recount your entire day for me?” +Getting no help from Tresting, Kingsley looked at me. I gave her a slight shrug. It was unnerving that Finch seemed to have taken over completely while still being at gunpoint, but I very much wanted to see where this was going. “My whole day?” she finally repeated. +“You saw these characters this morning, yes?” said Finch, nodding at Tresting and me. “You can start after that.” +She glanced around at the rest of us again, as if wondering when the world had gone mad. “Well, I came home, and then I suppose I took a nap. Then someone was knocking—those police officers—and I spoke to them for a while, and then just as they left, you arrived.” +“Thought you said you did a lot of thinking on all this today,” said Tresting. +Her expression twitched, confusion rumpling her features. “Yes. No. That is, yes, but not—it’s been between everything else.” +“Do you remember lying down to take your nap?” asked Finch. +She shook her head. He knew she was an academic, not a practicing lawyer, but he loved to tease her about it, ever since she'd revealed (after third date, on the phone) that she'd spent about ten seconds in private practice after she'd worked for her congressman and before she'd joined the faculty at UCLA. +"You're out of order," she said. +"This whole damned car is out of order!" he said. "So that's the ritual. You said you wanted to meet the parents and sisters and aunts and grandmothers and cousins and uncles and nephews and in-laws the next time we all got together. This is it." +"Right," she said. "I asked for this." And she had, of course. Hadn't asked for the graveside elements, but she'd been curious to meet this big sprawling enterprise of a family that he was always nattering on about. This seemed as good an occasion as any. "So," she said. "Is this a traditional date among Your People?" +He chuckled. "Yes, this is Yom Shiksa, the ritual bringing of the gentile woman to the family so that she may become the subject of intense, relentless scrutiny and speculation." +Mom nodded at me. Even though I'd told the story three times that night, I found myself tongue-tied. This was different from telling my parents. Different from telling Darryl's father. This -- this would start a new move in the game. +I started slowly, and watched Barbara take notes. I drank a... what ARGing was and how I got out of school to play. Mom and Dad and Mr Glover all listened intently to this part. I poured myself another cup and drank it on the way to explaining how we were taken in. By the time I'd run through the whole story, I'd drained the pot and I needed a piss like a race-horse. +Her bathroom was just as stark as the living-room, with a brown, organic soap that smelled like clean mud. I came back in and found the adults quietly watching me. +Mr Glover told his story next. He didn't have anything to say about what had happened, but he explained that he was a veteran and that his son was a good kid. He talked about what it felt like to believe that his son had died, about how his ex-wife had had a collapse when she found out and ended up in a hospital. He cried a little, unashamed, the tears streaming down his lined face and darkening the collar of his dress-uniform. +“We’re releasing a new wearable that produces top-quality film,” Jason said. “Great storage capacity, incredible resolution. I brought a couple of prototypes to the conference. I’ll donate one to the cause.” +“Your boss will be okay with that?” Ian asked. +“But it would take too long,” I realized. “I mean, Zip spent months working up to this bust.” +“It might not take long at all,” Jason said. “There’s an army of informants out there - ten times the number that J. Edgar Hoover had back in the day. The FBI gets billions of dollars appropriated for terrorist investigations every year. They spread it around to local law enforcement and everyone is under pressure to show that spending all that money pays off. I should know. We make a crapload out of government... a bite.” +“So we fix somebody up with one of those cameras,” Zeke said, +all excited, acting as if it was his idea. “They say radical shit to attract an informant, the informant says ‘hey, want some dyna- mite?’ and boom. Everyone sees Sarah’s blitzdoc about it.” +Now she had the BFG10K, though more mercs were closing on her. She disarmed it quickly and spelled at the nearest bunch of mercs, then had to take evasive action against the hail of incoming arrows and spells. It was all she could do to cast healing spells fast enough to avoid losing consciousness. +“LUCY!” she called into her headset. “LUCY, OVER BY THE BFG10K!” +Lucy snapped out orders and the opposition before Anda began to thin as Fahrenheits fell on them from behind. The flood was stemmed, and now the Fahrenheits’ greater numbers and discipline showed. In short order, every merc was butchered or run off. +Anda waited by the BFG10K while Lucy paid off the Fahrenheits and saw them on their way. “Now we take the cottage,” Lucy said. +“Right,” Anda said. She set her character off for the doorway. Lucy brushed past her. +“I’ll be glad when we’re done with this—that was bugfuck nutso.” She opened the door and her character disappeared in a fireball that erupted from directly overhead. A door-curse, a serious one, one that cooked her in her armor in seconds. +Metal shrieked and the seatbelt wrenched me across the chest. The car spun more than 180 degrees and slid into a skid across four lanes of freeway, traffic screeching by us the wrong way around— I reached for the wheel and yanked it over, Newtonian mechanics erupting in my brain like a fountain. “Accelerate!” I bellowed in Arthur’s ear; he immediately let go with his hands and slammed his foot down on the pedal. +“Switch with me!” I shouted, diving for my seatbelt release with my other hand and cursing Arthur’s insistence that I wear it. Horns deafened the air in a cacophony around us, and a screeching crash blasted through the noise as if it were right next to my ear—two cars avoiding us had smashed into each other and one had flipped over the median. I swung the wheel the other way with a solid wallop of inertia, sending us barreling between a semi and a minivan as I brought us out of the skid. The minivan’s driver jerked away, and it turned directly into the path of a bright blue sports car. I could have screamed—not that you could have heard it over the deafening explosion of metal and kinetic energy. “I wasn’t going to hit you!” I yelled in pure frustration. +"Crap!" I yelped. "It starts in two minutes!" I couldn't freaking believe that I was about to stop what I was about to stop doing, when I was about to stop doing it. I mean, if you'd asked me, "Marcus, you are about to get laid for the firstest time EVAR, will you stop if I let off this nuclear bomb in the same room as you?" the answer would have been a resounding and unequivocal NO . +And yet we stopped for this. +She grabbed me and pulled my face to hers and kissed me until I thought I would pass out, then we both grabbed our clothes and more or less dressed, grabbing our keyboards and mice and heading for Patcheye Pete's. +You could easily tell who the press were: they were the noobs who played their characters like staggering drunks, weaving back and forth and up and down, trying to get the hang of it all, occasionally hitting the wrong key and offering strangers all or part of their inventory, or giving them accidental hugs and kicks. +The Xnetters were easy to spot, too: we all played Clockwork Plunder whenever we had some spare time (or didn't feel like doing our homework), and we had pretty tricked-out characters with cool weapons and booby-traps on the keys sticking out of our backs that would cream anyone who tried to snatch them and leave us to wind down. +He looked at her, really looked at her for the first time. Saw that she was the face of a monster, the voice of a god. The hand of a massive, unknowable machine that was vying to change the world, remake it to suit its needs. A machine that was good at it . +"Clarity," he said. "Clarity." She looked perfectly attentive. "Do you think you'd have tried to kill Viktor if you'd been taking Clarity?" +She blinked in surprise. "I don't think I ever considered the question." +He waited. He found he was holding his breath. +"I think I would have succeeded if I'd been taking Clarity," she said. +"And if Viktor had been taking Clarity?" +"I think he would have let me." She blurted it so quickly it sounded like a belch. +"Is anyone in charge of Viktor?" +"What do you mean?" +"I mean -- that vat-thing. Is it volitional? Does it steer this, this enterprise ? Or does the enterprise tick on under its own power, making its own decisions?" +She swallowed. "Technically, it's a benevolent dictatorship. He's sovereign, you know that." She swallowed again. "Will you tell me what happened with Clarity?" +I've walked to school a thousand times, but today it was different. I went up and over the hills to get down into the Mission, and everywhere there were trucks. I saw new sensors and traffic cameras installed at many of the stop-signs. Someone had a lot of surveillance gear lying around, waiting to be installed at the first opportunity. The attack on the Bay Bridge had been just what they needed. +It all made the city seem more subdued, like being inside an elevator, embarrassed by the close scrutiny of your neighbors and the ubiquitous cameras. ... Street fixed me up good with a... enough to stand a spoon up in, and it... like Red Bull. Take it from someone who's read the Wikipedia entry: this is how the Ottoman Empire was won: maddened horsemen fueled by... out my debit card to pay and he made a face. "No more debit," he said. +"Huh? Why not?" I'd... card for years at the Turk's. He used to hassle me all the time, telling me I was too young to drink the stuff, and he still refused to serve me at all during school hours, convinced that I was skipping class. But over the years, the Turk and me have developed a kind of gruff understanding. +"Have you seen the discussion draft?" +He squirmed. "No," he admitted. "I didn't know it existed until just now." +"I'd offer to send you a copy, but I expect it would take a week to arrive, if it ever did. Why don't you ask that guy," she gestured at the Navy man, "to get you a copy? He looks like he knows his way around. And then drop by my office if you want to chat about it." +She stood up and tugged at her cardigan again. "It's been very nice seeing you," she said. She picked up her coat and her mitts. "Good luck settling in." +He gave her a hug -- which felt weird, hugging was strictly west-of-the-Mississippi, and she broke it off firmly -- and showed her to the door. The first snows were coming in, and the steps were slightly icy, so she maneuvered them slowly, carefully. When she reached the road, he was no longer in the doorway. He was standing right behind her, breath coming out in foggy huffs. +"Trish," he said, then stopped. His arms dropped to his sides and his shoulders slumped. +So, there you had it. A switch made in Papua New-Guinea (which persisted in conjuring up old Oceanic war photos of bone-in-nose types from his boyhood, though now that they’d been at war with Eurasia for so long, it was hard to even find someone who didn’t think that the war had always been with Eurasia, that Oceania hadn’t always been UNATS’s ally), forwarding calls to a computer that was so far south, it was practically in the middle of the Caribbean, hardly a stone’s throw from the CAFTA region, which was well-known to harbor Eurasian saboteur and terrorist elements. +The car shuddered as it wove in and out of the lanes on the Don Valley Parkway, barreling for the Gardiner Express Way, using his copper’s override to make the thick, slow traffic part ahead of him. He wasn’t supposed to do this, but as between a minor infraction and pissing off the man from Social Harmony, he knew which one he’d pick. +Sheppard meant the Sheppard subway, which meant that she was going farther. “Continue discreet surveillance.” He thought about the overcoat men with their sticky hats. “If she attempts to board the subway, alert the truancy patrol.” He cursed again. Maybe she was just going to the mall. But he couldn’t go up there himself and make sure, and it wasn’t like a robot would be any use in restraining her, she’d just second-law it into letting her go. +"The paper on your windshield says you are filming a movie," came a voice... no hiya, how're you doin'? Just the blunt state­ment. Then, having established what was already clear to all at hand, he continued. "It says the title is Baby Love . Why are you making this movie here?" +That was it. I glanced at Arlene, who'd turned white as a sheet. You get a lot of onlookers around a location shoot, but not too many who challenge your right to exist, which was exactly what was coming through in his menacing tone. +I handed Arlene the keys. "Here, go ahead and open up. I'll handle this." +Then I turned back to him. "What you saw in the wind­shield of the vans is a New York City Film Board permit. That's all the information we are required to provide. If you read it, you know everything I'm obliged to tell you." I re­turned his stare. "However, if people ask nicely, I'm happy to answer their questions." +"Are you making this movie about a person in this build­ing? Your other films have been documentaries." +Thoughts skittered through my brain in a jumble. We had to get to a vehicle; not everyone would have been killed and the rest could keep coming after us, shooting at us as we ran. But I didn’t see any sign of their vans or SUVs. Where would they be keeping them? +We kept running, the sky vast and blue and too bright above us, and we almost ran right off the bluff into the Pacific. +Halliday yanked me back, stumbling herself. I’d glimpsed the surf crashing against the rocks far, far below. +Tires screeched behind us, and I pulled Halliday down. We hit our bellies in the dry grass and peered back the way we had come. But the SUV wasn’t gunning for us; it was haring away, skidding in its hurry. +Another followed, and another, swerving and careening as if they fled from the devil. +“They’re running,” said Halliday, her voice hoarse and scratching. She coughed into her shoulder. +That they were. And it hit me—if we were anywhere near a single other sign of civilization, this explosion would attract the authorities, no question. This area might be fairly deserted, but nowhere in Southern California was the middle of the Yukon, and unlike some people I’d tangled with, these guys didn’t have law enforcement in their pockets, couldn’t afford to bring attention to themselves when a federal investigation was already barking against their heels. They didn’t have time to stay and hunt us down and murder us, not when it might mean their own skins, not when they didn’t know if law enforcement had caught wind of this. +She had scarcely thought of the risk to herself, and it had not occurred to her that there might be serious risk to Mrs. Quelton. She knew almost nothing about drugs and their effects. Her one idea had been to destroy the thing that was destroying Mrs. Quelton. Only now, when it was done, did she realize the mad audacity of her act. A man like Dr. Quelton couldn’t be tricked by such a childish device. He would know what had happened, and who had done it. Very likely he had plenty more of the drug somewhere else. If he hadn’t— “He’d feel like killing me,” thought Lexy. “I suppose he could, easily enough. He must know all sorts of nice, quiet little ways for getting rid of obnoxious people. Perhaps there was something in my dinner to-night!” +She dared not think of such a possibility. +“No!” she said to herself. “He asked me here just to show me how little I mattered. He knew I’d seen Caroline here, and he asked me to come, because he was so sure I couldn’t do anything. I’m too insignificant for him to bother with. He knows that nobody would believe what I said. He’d only have to say that I was hysterical, and Captain Grey and Mrs. Royce would be obliged to bear him out. He won’t trouble himself about me!” +it was obvious that she would have been happier if they hadn’t gone through all that adoption rigmarole, but by then it was too late. The only thing she could control was my hair, even though I didn’t want her to. Who knew that, underneath those sunny smiles and Oprah moments of emotional therapy talk, lurked an iron will? It doesn’t matter what you think; we’re fixing your hair my way. End of story. +I suddenly remembered hearing one of those comments you get behind your back in school, the ones just loud enough that they’re sure you can hear it, the snorty giggles and the innocent looks when you turn around. “What? We were talking about the homework for English. Jeez, Zenobia, you’re paranoid . . .” +It was eighth grade and we were doing mythology. The teacher had a PowerPoint with famous art showing the stories were sup- posed to be reading. Soon as a picture of Medusa came up, an angry dark face with wriggling snakes for hair, everybody looked at me and this ripple of snorts and smothered giggles fanned out through the room. +The coral’s noises were everywhere now. They made his head hurt. Physical pain was so stupid. He needed to be less distracted now that these loud, threatening noises were everywhere. But the pain made it hard for him to think. And the coral was closing in, too, catching him on his wetsuit. +The arms were orange and red and green, and veined with fans of nanoassembled logic, spilling out into the water. They were noticeably warm to the touch, even through his diving gloves. They snagged the suit with a thousand polyps. Robbie watched the air gauge drop further into the red and cursed inside. +He examined the branches that were holding him back. The hinges that the reef had contrived for itself were ingenious, flexible arrangements of small, soft fans overlapping to make a kind of ball-and-socket. +He wrapped his gloved hand around one and tugged. It wouldn’t move. He shoved it. Still no movement. Then he twisted it, and to his surprise, it came off in his hand, came away completely with hardly any resistance. Stupid coral. It had armored its joints, but not against torque. +"Rebecca," she said, raising her head, "before you go in to look at her, do you feel any bitterness over anything she ever said to you?" +Rebecca's eyes blazed reproach, almost anger, as she said chokingly: "Oh, aunt Jane! Could you believe it of me? I am going in with a heart brimful of gratitude!" +"She was a good woman, Rebecca; she had a quick temper and a sharp tongue, but she wanted to do right, and she did it as near as she could. She never said so, but I'm sure she was sorry for every hard word she spoke to you; she didn't take 'em back in life, but she acted so 't you'd know her feeling when she was gone." +"I told her before I left that she'd been the making of me, just as mother says," sobbed Rebecca. +"She wasn't that," said Jane. "God made you in the first place, and you've done considerable yourself to help Him along; but she gave you the wherewithal to work with, and that ain't to be despised; specially when anybody gives up her own luxuries and pleasures to do it. Now let me tell you something, Rebecca. Your aunt Mirandy 's willed all this to you,—the brick house and buildings and furniture, and the land all round the house, as far 's you can see." +"Do you always insult acquaintances in public restaurants, Miss Whiston?" +"Most always, when it doesn't suit me to approach them in more direct ways." +"And that would be how? With a sharp piece of glass jammed into their ribs?" This tickles her, and she presses a delicate hand over her mouth as she giggles. "You'd like to know, wouldn't you, Ray? Oh, except you've probably got to go on duty soon. Or you're already on duty because you're such a conscientious Systems Hardware Technician." +It was close enough. At least she'd been paying that much attention. She was very pretty, but exhausting. So much unfocused, exuberant energy. Much more exhausting than pretty, really. +"You're a very odd girl, you know that?" +"I'm eccentric. My entire family is eccentric. We can be that way because we're wealthy. Unbearably, +fabulously wealthy." +"Because you get paid by the word? Or by the offense?" +Like slamming a door, all the play goes out of her. "You're not very nice after all, are you?" +“Too much wine.” I giggled like a maniac, resisting the urge to yank my wrist out of his grasp. “Got to use the john again. I’ll be right back.” +He pulled my hand close and gave my knuckles a romantic kiss, but his words sounded angry. “Don’t be long.” +“I won’t!” My giggling threatened to get out of control as I hur- ried through the kitchen into the little bathroom. I locked myself on in and sat on the toilet, shaking. In the other room I heard his slurring sing-song voice, “Hey, getting lonely out here.” +“Just a minute,” I called out, staring at the door. It was a flimsy little lock. I remembered how strong his hands had felt. One good pull and he would be able to yank it open. There was a window over the toilet, but it was tiny, much too small for me to climb through. +I remembered to switch off the camera, finally, and looked around for a weapon. There was a can of Axe I could spray into his eyes. If I broke the spotty mirror over the sink, I might be able to pull out a shard to stab him with. I could probably find a knife in the kitchen but I was too scared to unlock the door. +> Why, you a pervert? +That usually shut down that line of conversation. Of course every gamespace was full of pedos and pervs, and cops pretending to be pedo- and perv-bait (though I sure hoped there weren't any cops on the Xnet!). An accusation like that was enough to change the subject nine out of ten times. +> Mission? Potrero Hill? Noe? East Bay? +> Just wind me up k thx? +She stopped winding. +> You scared? +> Safe -- why do you care? +> Just curious. +I was getting a bad vibe off her. She was clearly more than just curious. Call it paranoia. I logged off and shut down my Xbox. +Dad looked at me over the table the next morning and said, "It looks like it's going to get better, at least." He handed me a copy of the Chronicle open to the third page. +> A Department of Homeland Security spokesman has confirmed that the San Francisco office has requested a 300 percent budget and personnel increase from DC. +What? +> Major General Graeme Sutherland, the commanding officer for Northern California DHS operations, confirmed the request at a press conference yesterday, noting that a spike in suspicious activity in the Bay Area prompted the request. "We are tracking a spike in underground chatter and activity and believe that saboteurs are deliberately manufacturing false security alerts to undermine our efforts." +I walked gingerly, cautious of where I put each foot, but they’d set up their charges so it was possible to live and work and walk here. The deadly security must have been prepared in advance, as this was too big a job to do in a trice after they’d sent the SUVs after me and then learned police were finding the bodies of their men, or whatever had spurred them to move base. Plastic explosives were stable enough to leave long-term—they had to have set this up from the beginning, as a contingency plan, and then wired everything live as they hightailed it. I avoided the edges of rooms and double-checked that each footfall was landing on bare wood instead of anything that could hide a pressure plate. +I crept down to the ground floor. +Here it was even more obvious they’d cleared out in a rush. The scattered detritus of a hurried flight was strewn across the floor—the odd knapsack or ammunition belt dropped in haste, tables knocked askew when the evacuation order had been given. Half the ground floor was a broad cement expanse they’d obviously been using as a garage; the smell of motor oil and burned rubber still pervaded the air, but all the vehicles were gone. I also found a bunch of storerooms and a room that had clearly been their armory. Much of its contents had been scooped up and taken as they ran, but there were still cases of ammunition, haphazard piles of blast shields and body armor, and large stacks of unlabeled boxes that probably contained plenty of things that would go kablooey. It might be nice to raid some of this, when I was done here. +"Let me speak candidly, Ms. James, strictly off the record. Down here people have been known to 'disappear' just for asking too many questions. Curiosity killed the cat, and all that. Between us, this place is still a police state in many regards. You want my advice, let sleeping dogs lie. Just forget about this Crenshaw girl. She's out of the country now, so . . . Let me put it like this: People who go poking around here are just asking for trouble." +I felt a ring of sincerity in his voice. Maybe a little too much sincerity. Why was he so worried for me? +"That may be true, but I'm still going to see what I can find out. My heart is pure. Why should anybody care?" +"Do what you think best," he said with a sigh, "but I've told you everything we know. Which, I'm afraid, is actually very little." +"By the way." Try one more thing on him, I thought, see what he'll say. "Since you're so concerned about Sarah, you'll be relieved to know she's regained consciousness and started to talk." There seemed no point in telling him any more. The rest was all still speculation. +Then there's the knottier problem of which door to hammer at. The map directs him only to the primary entrance, which appears dramatically too public upon actual inspection. It's a thing of chrome and technological gadgetry, with a secure lock keypad entry system. There's a high-res flatscreen embedded in wall to the left. At the moment it's projecting a vid image of the system messenger in kako-daimon mode— meaning that the door is locked and the messaging software routed to a recording device. There's either nobody home, or whoever happens to be inside isn't interested in talking to anyone not already on their side of the security. +Ray doesn't find this surprising given the circumstances, nor did he imagine that given the encounter with the Mr. Whiston of the household this morning that he'd have much luck getting at Emma via the front door in the first place. But with three other doors to choose from, knocking on the wrong one would be a tactical error. +Thus, the Distant Doorbell ping. And the follow-up ping the lift would have transmitted to the security system when it stopped on Iota-D. +As Monica was bumbling around, brushing her teeth and get- ting stuff ready for the class she had to teach the next morning, +I switched on one of my laptops, hopped on a server in Sweden, +and logged in. I also checked my other laptop, the one that had been running facial recognition software. (Believe it or not, I had found it in the trash behind one of the dorms at the U. It was a little slow, and the cover had a crack in it, but it worked fine once I blew dust out the keyboard, wiped the system, and installed Ubuntu.) It had finished and some of the results that had risen to the top looked a lot like Zip. +I quickly scanned the Group’s threads. There was a lot of chat- ter about a typhoon in Asia. The Group had members in the Philippines, so there was a lot of checking in going on, making sure people were okay, which they all were, though the pictures they were sharing were really scary. Call Me Cheese had flipped out about some grammar thing and started a big tangled brawl over whether it was okay to start a sentence with So. (Of course, +I was just ditching the government car in favor of a more anonymous one when my phone buzzed with Arthur’s number. “Speak loud,” I said. “I found their old base, but they blew...” +Arthur was talking. +From a ways away, and goddamned hard to hear. I turned the volume on the phone all the way up, but the ringing in my ears was still too bad for me to focus past it. +I needed an amplifier.... on the floor of the passenger side of my new ride and picked it up. A few rips and a twist and I had something that would bounce my sound waves into constructive interference. I tore a slot in the base and slid it over the phone’s speaker, then held the mouth of my makeshift amplifier up to my ear. +“...ain’t gonna let you go,” came Arthur’s voice, quiet and inexorable. +“You’re fucked up, man. You’re fucked in the head. You really wanna die for this?” +“I ain’t walking away.” +Checker was prone to asking far too many questions, but he knew an emergency when he saw one. Thirteen seconds later I had the freeway exit for a nearby hospital. +"That is better," Miss Dearborn answered, "though I cannot think 'going to smash' is a pretty expression for poetry." +Having been instructed in the use of the indefinite pronoun "one" as giving a refined and elegant touch to literary efforts, Rebecca painstakingly rewrote her composition on solitude, giving it all the benefit of Miss Dearborn's suggestion. +It would be false to say that one could ever be alone when one has one's lovely thoughts to comfort one. One sits by one's self, it is true, but one thinks; one opens one's favorite book and reads one's favorite story; one speaks to one's aunt or one's brother, fondles one's cat, or looks at one's photograph album. There is one's work also: what a joy it is to one, if one happens to like work. All one's little household tasks keep one from being lonely. Does one ever feel bereft when one picks up one's chips to light one's fire for one's evening meal? Or when one... would fancy not. +"It is perfectly dreadful," sighed Rebecca when she read it aloud after school. "Putting in 'one' all the time doesn't make it sound any more like a book, and it looks silly besides." +"If this was any other city in the world, it would make perfect sense for you to look me up once you got to DC. We're still friends, I still think about you from time to time, but here in DC, you calling me over for a meeting, this kind of meeting, at this time of day, it means you're looking to parley. You want to strike a deal before my bill goes to the committee. I don't know how well you know the Hill, so I don't want to impute any motives to you. But if you took a meeting like this with anyone else, that's what they'd assume." +Damian's forehead crinkled. +"No Fretting," she said. Then she smiled a sad smile. "Oh, Fret if you want. You're a big boy." +He twiddled his thumbs, caught himself at it, and folded his hands in his lap. "Huh," he said. "Well. I did want to talk to you because it's been a while and because we meant a lot to each other. I also wanted to talk to you about the bill, because that's what I'm here to do, at a pretty decent salary. I also wanted to see you because I had an idea that you'd be different here in your native habitat, and well, that's true." +When we left the restaurant and headed for Dolores park, she put her arm around my waist and I found that she was just the right height for me to put my arm around her shoulders. That was new. I'd never been a tall guy, and the girls I'd dated had all been my height -- teenaged girls grow faster than guys, which is a cruel trick of nature. It was nice. It felt nice. +We turned the corner on 20th Street and walked up toward Dolores. Before we'd taken a single step, we could feel the buzz. It was like the hum of a million bees. There were lots of people streaming toward the park, and when I looked toward it, I saw that it was about a hundred times more crowded than it had been when I went to meet Ange. +That sight made my blood run hot. It was a beautiful cool night and we were about to party, really party, party like there was no tomorrow. "Eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die." +Without saying anything we both broke into a trot. There were lots of cops, with tense faces, but what the hell were they going to do? There were a lot of people in the park. I'm not so good at counting crowds. The papers later quoted organizers as saying there were 20,000 people; the cops said 5,000. Maybe that means there were 12,500. +“Robbie?” +Over here , Robbie said. Although he’d embodied in the Row-Boat for a few trillion cycles when he’d first arrived, he’d long since abandoned it. +Here, he said. Everywhere . +“You’re not embodying?” +I couldn’t see the point anymore, Robbie said. It’s all just illusion, right? +“They’re re-growing the reef and rebuilding the Free Spirit , you know. It will have a tender that you could live in.” +Robbie thought about it for an instant and rejected it just as fast. Nope , he said. This is good . +Yes , Robbie said. But that’s because for them, disembodying is the first step to despair. For me, it’s the first step to liberty. +Kate and the reef wanted to come over again, but he firewalled them out. Then he got a ping from Tonker, who’d been trying to drop by ever since Robbie emigrated to the noosphere. He bounced him, too. +Daneel , he said. I’ve been thinking. +“Yes?” +Why don’t you try to sell Asimovism here in the Noosphere? There are plenty up here who could use something to give them a sense of purpose. +What. The. Fuck. +There was a plaque with my name on it and presumably there was an urn full of ashes behind that plaque and why the hell was there a stone cover here with my name on it? +Maybe it was a different Cassandra Russell. +The dates of birth and death were years only. One almost a quarter of a century previous—that fit, at least roughly. The other only a few years ago. +Before I had considered it, I had grabbed one of the stanchions attached to some velvet rope barriers, dragging it forward so the rest of its fellows collapsed to the floor behind it in a cacophony, and bashed the base of it into the stone like a battering ram. +The crack echoed through the building, off all the other quiet stone tablets. I smashed the stanchion into my name again and again, until the stone cracked and crumbled, until the fissures spread out in spider webs across neighboring cover stones. Then I threw the impromptu mallet to the floor and dug at the pieces, scrabbled at them until my fingers bled, tearing them out of the way until I could see inside. +I finally dragged myself up and got us a bottle of water. Then, leaning against the rickety headboard, I recounted an abbreviated version of what had happened yesterday after we'd first talked—the theft of my film, and then Lou being assaulted and Sarah taken, apparently willingly, to be brought (I strongly suspected) back here. What I held out on were the details about a certain Colonel Jose Alvino Ramos, my belief that he was behind the crimes and in league with Alex Goddard and stalking me. I was afraid our room was bugged. +"Morgy, we'll get through this," he said, reaching over to stroke my hair. "If somebody brought her back down here, we'll find her. And I apologize for being such a shit on the phone, about the baby. I'd just had a local lab lose three rolls of high-speed Kodachrome and I was seriously frosted at the world. We can keep trying if you want to." +"Just hold me." I put down my glass and I reached around and ran my finger across his chest. It was so lovely to be this close to somebody you wanted so much. I loved his earnest brown eyes and his soft skin. I loved him. Just having him with me made such a difference. +The reef howled. “We’ll kill her!” they said. “You get off us now or we’ll kill her ” +Robbie froze. He was backed up, but she wasn’t. And the human shells—well, they weren’t first law humans, but they were human-like. In the long, timeless time when it had been just Robbie and them, he’d treated them as his human charges, for Asimovist purposes. +The Free Spirit crashed into the reef with a sound... all at once. The reef screamed. +“Robbie, tell me that wasn’t what I think it was.” +The satellite photos tracked the UAVs. The little robotic jets were coming closer by the second. They’d be within missile-range in less than a minute. +“Call them off,” Robbie said. “You have to call them off, or you die, too.” +“The UAVs are turning,” Tonker said. “They’re turning to one side.” +“You have one minute to move or we kill her,” the reef said. It was sounding shrill and angry now. +Robbie thought about it. It wasn’t like they’d be killing Kate. In the sense that most humans today understood life, Kate’s most important life was the one she lived in the Noosphere. This dumbed-down instance of her in a meat-suit was more like a haircut she tried out on holiday. +Afterwards, I felt the same. But I also felt different. Something had changed between us. +It was weird. We were both shy as we put our clothes on and puttered around the room, looking away, not meeting each other's eyes. I wrapped the condom in a kleenex from a box beside the bed and took it into the bathroom and wound it with toilet paper and stuck it deep into the trash-can. +When I came back in, Ange was sitting up in bed and playing with her Xbox. I sat down carefully beside her and took her hand. She turned to face me and smiled. We were both worn out, trembly. +"Thanks," I said. +She didn't say anything. She turned her face to me. She was grinning hugely, but fat tears were rolling down her cheeks. +I hugged her and she grabbed tightly onto me. "You're a good man, Marcus Yallow," she whispered. "Thank you." +I didn't know what to say, but I squeezed her back. Finally, we parted. She wasn't crying any more, but she was still smiling. +She pointed at my Xbox, on the floor beside the bed. I took the hint. I picked it up and plugged it in and logged in. +“You’ll just get it wrong,” she said serenely, retrieving some small stone carvings of animals and placing them carefully in front of the books. “My mother believed these would watch over me. Protect me. I think she was both right and wrong about that.” +“Russell,” said Arthur with relief as he saw me. “What’d Checker say?” +“He’s tracking the van. He’ll call.” +“Good. That’s good.” He turned between Martinez and me, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand, and I could practically see him trying to weigh all the options, wondering if we should call in the authorities, wondering if they’d only slow us down. +I stepped closer to him, passing him back the burner cell. “You call this one; I’ll follow your lead. But I’m better than a tac team, and you won’t have to wait for a warrant.” +He looked down at me for a second and then nodded. “Hey, Doc.” He cleared his throat. “Can you tell us any more about who would have known about Sonya’s proof? ’S not like she was palling around with criminals. How’d this get out?” +“What happened to you?” he said, his gaze on the bloody jacket I still held in one hand. His eyes were intense. Piercing. +I figured it could only help my case to tell a small version of the truth. “It seems like there are a lot of people after me,” I answered. +“Have you guessed why?” +“Because I helped Halliday with her proof.” I swallowed. “In case you’re wondering, it wasn’t worth it.” +One of the men snickered. They’d all piled in with us; one slid the door shut and with a slight lurch the van started moving. +Clack, clack, clack, went the meditation balls. +“Are you the Lancer?” I asked. Or maybe his boss... +The meditation balls stopped. The piercing gaze leveled itself at me. +Oh, Jesus. How would I have known that name? “The NSA mentioned—they tried to grab me. They thought I was working for you,” I invented rapidly. +The eyes stayed on me a moment longer, evaluating, and then the meditation balls started up again. +I let out a slow breath. +“I have many names,” the man allowed with a sneer. “The United States National Security Agency and their stupid games. They think they have so much knowledge.” He said something to one of his men in a different language, and they laughed. +Nikko watched as I pulled one of my boots off and threw my loose change inside before putting it back on. “Making sure your money is safe?” +“Nope.” I kept my hood up and my head down while I walked into the gas station. There were cameras all over the place. There was no way to hide the fact that I was short and not skinny and not white, but I could make facial recognition harder by ducking my head, and I had learned from reading Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother that you can fool gait recognition software by putting a pebble in your shoe. +People tend to walk a certain, recognizable way that you can measure with algorithms. I hoped coins would work as well as a pebble, since I didn’t have a pebble. At least it wasn’t as painful. +There were two stalls in the women’s room. Bree must have followed me in; I could see her boots from under the barrier. They were expensive boots, and they looked good on her. Of course they did. I finished first and went to the sink, hoping to avoid her, +but she came out just as I turned on the faucet. I could tell she was smiling at me in the mirror. “I love your hair.” I glared up at her reflection and her smile disappeared. “What?” +"No, mon. He say he be coming back, to hold his room, but—" +"He didn't come back?" I felt my palms go icy. Who was going to know where Sarah and I were? "What do you mean?" +"He not coming back here, mon." The man paused and mumbled something to another clerk, then came back on. "Nobody seen him since. You want leave a message, that's okay. But I don't know when—" +"No." I didn't know what to say. The implication was only gradually sinking in. "No message. Thanks anyway. I'll try back later." +"Any time, mon. No problem." +I hung up, trying to stay calm. Steve, where are you? +Okay, I told myself, you don't actually know something's wrong. It could be anything. Still, it was very worrying. Steve, my one and only . . . +I was staring at the phone, wondering what my next move should be. Whatever else, I've got to try to reach Lou, tell him I've found Sarah. But then what? He certainly wasn't going to be any help in getting us out. If he blundered his way down here, there was a real chance he'd misread the delicacy of the situation and end up getting us all "disappeared" by the Army. But still, I had to tell him about her. +"That isn't nearly good enough. Where is the rest of your security team?" +"I told you. They're dead." +"How?" +Diggs shudders and shakes his head. "I didn't see it. I was on my round, get it? I heard this noise like bunch of guys stomping down one of the lateral passages, then this— this sort of screech, only distant, echoing, like it was coming through one of the vents. Sounded like a hull breach, that was my first thought. So I sprinted back to the checkpoint to see what was going on." Diggs pauses, places the heel of his palm against his forehead and rubs it around. "And the lights start to go about then. Not going out, like we was blowing fuses, but exploding like fireworks. I'm think catastrophic depressurization, you get me? I'm thinking about the environmental suits back at the checkpoint, and I hit that last curve, right around the lift, and there's the desk turned over and my guys gone. And blood. That's when I called you." +"And then what?" +"Then I knew I had to see, Mr. Marlowe. I couldn't abandon my guys, because about then I'm also thinking about the murder of that boy, and I'm getting that same sort of feeling like there's somebody around, rasping against the deckplate just beyond my line of sight. Then the murmuring, like the way the wind in the autumn would sluice down from the mountains, through the hollers. Sounds like voices, you know? Like deep voices and old men chanting, echoed. I went looking, Mr. Marlowe, and like the book says, seek and you shall find, +it made just enough space for me to slip in the for-my-eyes-only laptop, where it nestled among some weird insulation that looked like dirty snow. The power cord followed, and I rearranged the insulation to cover it up. It all felt bizarre, as if was having a para- noid nightmare, and I froze for a moment, stuck in the strangeness of it all. +“Zen?” My aunt again. +“Hang on,” I called out in a high, squeaky voice as I lowered the mat and grabbed the kimono decorated with anime characters that Monica had bought for me at Ragstock last Christmas. I took a deep breath and squeezed my eyes shut for a moment. This is real. Don’t freak out. +“Hey,” I said, coming out of my room and rubbing my eyes with the heel of one hand. Acting groggy might give me time to think. Also, I was groggy. It’s not every morning you wake up into a real-life bad dream. +“This is Detective Ivar Jensen,” Monica said, nodding at an overweight guy with gray hair and a bristly moustache who looked as if he spent too much time at a desk eating donuts and watching surveillance videos. He had a suit jacket on, and a tie, and a gun in a holster. On TV, the guns cops wear on their hips always look like some kind of high tech fashion accessory. On him, the holster and the gun sticking out of it looked like it was some office equip- ment that he had to hang on his belt, like for taking inventory at Staples or something. He nodded at me, and kept nodding, as if he was a 250-pound bobble head. +"After Ba'dai, I was insane for quite some time. I won't pretend that I was anything else. I have distinct memories of babbling to you about things I'm sure neither one of us understood at the time. But I wasn't insane in the traditional sense. I was achieving some sort of radical reorientation of consciousness. I was developing a perception of the dual nature of existence, with all that such a transformation entails. You know what that looks like, don't you? What it means? You've seen filthy old sinners converted to good Baptist standing, struck by Grace, transmogrified into Sunday-suit wearing zealots who see the finger of the Divine in every decision, every coincidence, every conversation. Conversion to a new paradigm is the introduction to a vast and terrible unexplored country. And turning your back on accepted reality— the reality that the mass of humanity has created and agreed upon— is the definition of madness. +"But you see, I needed to be mad in order to understand more about the shed, Ray. Only through the eye of madness could I go back through the ancient texts and sift through their mythology and their understanding of the duality of creation, and come to understand not what they said, but what they meant. I had to be able to think like them to understand the assumptions behind the written text. Because they're not just behind it, they illuminate it. " +Nate loaned me his baseball hat and traded jackets with me. I didn't have to worry about gait-recognition, not with my ankle throbbing the way it was -- I limped like an extra in a cowboy movie. +Nate lived in a huge four-bedroom apartment at the top of Nob Hill. The building had a doorman, in a red overcoat with gold brocade, and he touched his cap and called Nate, "Mr Nate" and welcomed us all there. The place was spotless and smelled of furniture polish. I tried not to gawp at what must have been a couple million bucks' worth of condo. +"My dad," he explained. "He was an investment banker. Lots of life insurance. He died when I was 14 and we got it all. They'd been divorced for years, but he left my mom as beneficiary." +From the floor-to-ceiling window, you could see a stunning view of the other side of Nob Hill, all the... the ugly stub of the Bay Bridge, the crowd of cranes and trucks. Through the mist, I could just make out Treasure Island. Looking down all that way, it gave me a crazy urge to jump. +Blessed Wordsworth! How he makes us understand! And the pearl never heard of him until now! Think of reading Lucy to a class, and when you finish, seeing a fourteen-year-old pair of lips quivering with delight, and a pair of eyes brimming with comprehending tears! +You poor darling! You, too, know the discouragement of sowing lovely seed in rocky earth, in sand, in water, and (it almost seems sometimes) in mud; knowing that if anything comes up at all it will be some poor starveling plant. Fancy the joy of finding a real mind; of dropping seed in a soil so warm, so fertile, that one knows there are sure to be foliage, blossoms, and fruit all in good time! I wish I were not so impatient and so greedy of results! I am not fit to be a teacher; no one is who is so scornful of stupidity as I am. . . . The pearl writes quaint countrified little verses, doggerel they are; but somehow or other she always contrives to put in one line, one thought, one image, that shows you she is, quite unconsciously to herself, in possession of the secret. . . . Good-by; I'll bring Rebecca home with me some Friday, and let you and mother see her for yourselves. +“What? Hell no. Noobs. Someone’s butler. I dunno. Jesus, that spawn gate—” +“Girls. Little girls in Mexico. Getting paid a dollar a day to craft shirts. Except they don’t get their dollar when we kill them. They don’t get anything.” +“Oh, for chrissakes, is that what one of them told you? Do you believe everything someone tells you in-game? Christ. English girls are so naive.” +“You don’t think it’s true?” +“Naw, I don’t.” +“Why not?” +“I just don’t, OK? I’m almost there, keep your panties on.” +“I’ve got to go, Lucy,” she said. Her wrists hurt, and her podge overlapped the waistband of her trousers, making her feel a bit like she was drowning. +“What, now? Shit, just hang on.” +“My mom’s calling me to supper. You’re almost here, right?” +“Yeah, but—” +She reached down and shut off her PC. +Anda’s Da and Mum were watching the telly again with a bowl of crisps between them. She walked past them like she was dreaming and stepped out the door onto the terrace. It was nighttime, 11 o’clock, and the chavs in front of the council flats across the square were kicking a football around and swilling lager and making rude noises. They were skinny and rawboned, wearing shorts and string vests with strong, muscular limbs flashing in the streetlights. + Will check with a couple of peo- ple. Be careful out there, Shad. Big Brother is a data-sucking asshat. +It made me feel a little better, but I still felt knots in my stom- ach, picturing Wheeze and thinking about cold and pain and hunger and whether I could fix it before the FBI caught up with him - or found him frozen stiff and starved to death. +The knots were still there when Nikko showed up at our meet- ing place. I had decided on Wilson, a giant library at the university (and my brother’s namesake because our mom practically lived there when she was a pregnant student; it was lucky she wasn’t a chemistry major or he’d be named Walter after the science library). +Though there were security cameras all over campus, the library itself was pretty good about not spying on people inside the building. All that the surveillance cameras outside the library would show is two people arriving separately among the hundreds who would go through the library’s doors that day. Once we were indoors, we didn’t have to worry about any cameras recording our meeting. +“We must have missed it in the dark,” I said. +“Go slow this time,” Bree said. +“I know,” Nikko muttered, inching along. “Is this slow enough for you?” +“We must have gone right past it before. I’m just saying you shouldn’t go so fast.” +They didn’t sound so adorable anymore. They sounded tired and tense. We all peered along the side of the dark road. “Is that . +He started to turn onto a gravel lane, but swerved back onto the road. “Crap. It’s a house. Didn’t he say it was near the bridge?” +“Yeah, but none of the buildings near the bridge were bait shops,” Bree said, making it sound like they were having a fight. +“That bend in the road, up ahead?” I said. “That’s the spot where the road is closest to the rail line. Might be where Wheeze would look for a place to hide.” +“If anyone sees me driving this slow, it’ll look really suspi- cious,” Nikko grumbled. +“Wait. What’s that?” Bree pointed to a spot where the gravel shoulder widened. “A driveway?” +Nikko pulled onto the gravel, turning the car so that the head- lights illuminated a shack. “Could that be it? It looks kind of . . .” +With the wonderful water round you curled, +And the wonderful grass upon your breast, +World, you are beautifully drest!" +Dull Emma Jane had never seemed to Rebecca so near, so dear, so tried and true; and Rebecca, to Emma Jane's faithful heart, had never been so brilliant, so bewildering, so fascinating, as in this visit together, with its intimacy, its freedom, and the added delights of an exciting business enterprise. +A gorgeous leaf blew into the wagon. +"Does color make you sort of dizzy?" asked Rebecca. +"No," answered Emma Jane after a long pause; "no, it don't; not a mite." +"Perhaps dizzy isn't just the right word, but it's nearest. I'd like to eat color, and drink it, and sleep in it. If you could be a tree, which one would you choose?" +Emma Jane had enjoyed considerable experience of this kind, and Rebecca had succeeded in unstopping her ears, ungluing her eyes, and loosening her tongue, so that she could "play the game" after a fashion. +"I'd rather be an apple-tree in blossom,—that one that blooms pink, by our pig-pen." +Arthur twitched back. “Not about that, Russell. Not talking about you. I swear.” +I clamped my jaw down on what I had been about to say. “What, then?” I growled through my teeth. +Arthur hesitated, his fingers pressing against the laminated pine of the tabletop. “This thing with the Lancer. Was hard on him.” +“It was hard on him?” I repeated. “Excuse me, was he shot at and locked up and also almost blown to pieces three separate times?” +“He could use a friend, ’s all I’m saying.” He made a vague gesture and headed out the door. +I turned and leaned my head against the wall. Arthur had too high expectations of me, as always. I wasn’t in any condition to be a friend to anyone. I’d never been very good at being a friend to anyone. +I’d figured the updates were just because he was curious, or keeping tabs for us, as he did. Or, hell, I hadn’t figured at all—I hadn’t even thought about it. +Fuck. I pushed off the wall and went out to the Hole. +“Hey, Cas.” Checker had dark circles under his eyes, and his hair was shaggy and spiky with sweat. I hadn’t noticed before now, but he’d been matching me hour for hour in our push to find Martinez. And it wasn’t like I was getting a healthy amount of sleep. +We hugged one more time and then she was gone. I took the moment to double-lock the door, and then collapsed on the couch. What should be my next move? I closed my eyes and tried to review all the insidious things that had happened in the last twenty-four hours. The illegal drugs, the break-in and theft of my film, the suspicious nursery of Children of Light, the threats to Carly . . . +Then it finally came back that she'd mentioned Ramos saying something about me. By now I was getting used to being threatened by the man, so one more time was hardly news. But I wished I'd asked her the specifics. +That was when I roused myself and reached for the phone. The time was pushing eleven, but I still wanted to check in on Sarah, see how she was doing. Had she come back to reality after I left? +I was listening to the phone ring, my mind drifting to thoughts of how to gently ask Lou about her, when I realized nobody was picking up. +What's going on? I wondered, immediately coming alert. Mrs. Reilly had probably gone home for the day, but no way would Lou be in bed before midnight. He always had trouble settling into sleep. +I wasn’t sure if Checker had told him what the proof might’ve meant to me—wasn’t sure if Checker himself had drawn the right conclusion, to be honest. But Arthur was nothing if not perspicacious. And a good guesser. +Hallucinations. +He was saying...he was saying the proof Martinez had written, the proof, might’ve been nothing but nonsense. She might have burned all her senseless scribbles in a fit of madness and then stolen her friend’s legitimate work because her illness had imagined demons. +It was too much. I didn’t even know what to feel. Nothing was real. “You don’t think she ever had the proof,” I murmured. The words sounded robotic. Mechanical. +I wasn’t looking at him, but I felt him shrug. “Don’t know. Likely we’ll never know.” +The room suddenly felt too close. I pushed myself up. My equilibrium wobbled as I teetered onto my feet, but I found my balance. +“Russell,” said Arthur, standing as well. +“Yeah?” +“Dr. Martinez. If you want to visit with her, they’re letting us.” +“What’s the point?” I asked. +“What?” The purple splotches were clearing from my vision, and I could see Checker’s face now. He was...upset. Agitated. “I just don’t want to talk about this, okay? Forget I said anything.” +“Forget,” he said bitterly. “Like you have?” +Anger surged up in me, hot and black and unexpected in its intensity. “Just because I don’t remember a few minor details—” +“Cas!” With a grunt, Checker had levered himself forward to the edge of the bed, and was suddenly grabbing me, his grip surprisingly strong. “Listen to yourself! Something is wrong here!” +I shouldered him off. “Nothing is wrong with me!” +“ Yes, there is! And you should be able to tell that by the fact that you won’t even entertain the possibility! Go ahead. Prove me wrong. You’re a mathematician—prove it, and I won’t say anything ever again.” +“I’m not a mathematician,” I said coldly. “I’m a computationalist at best.” +“Bullshit. Prove me wrong.” I stared at him in shock, the weight of my confession the previous night pressing down on us, but he stared back defiantly, and something in me was insanely glad he still thought of me as a mathematician even after what I had told him. +“Seriously,” said Checker. “Please.” +Maybe he was right to be concerned. After all, I reflected, I was going after an organization that had just taken down an entire metropolitan area to get to me, and I was going to put myself willingly in their crosshairs. Along with a good friend of Checker’s. When I looked at it that way, my plan felt a trifle more daunting. +“Hey,” I said awkwardly. I wasn’t good at being comforting. “I’m really good at what I do. Ask Rio.” +���He doesn’t like your plan, either.” +“Very true,” put in Rio. +I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t used to having people worried about my welfare. “Okay, you’re on,” I said. +Checker finally looked up at me, forehead wrinkling in confusion. “On for what?” +“That drinking contest. Once this is over. You don’t know what you’ve gotten yourself into, I promise you.” +That got a smile out of him. “Promise me you’ll watch Arthur’s back?” +“I promise. Now get going.” I thumped the hood of the van and headed back over to my clunker as Rio made a precarious three-point turn at the top of the drive and then eased down the slope. +Well, I thought, she certainly could use some "centering." +"Look, Dr. Goddard, let me get my things, and then I've got to be going. I can't start on anything right now. Not the way I'm feeling. And visiting your other clinic is completely out of the question, at least for the moment." +"I have great hopes for you," he said again, placing a gentle hand on my shoulder. "I'm sorry we can't begin to work together immediately. But do promise me you'll recon­sider and come back soon." +"Maybe when I'm feeling better." Keep the option open, I told myself. For a lot of reasons. +"In that case, Ramala can show you out. I've arranged for her to give you some herbal extracts from the rain forest that could well start you on the road to motherhood. Whether you decide to come back or not, I know they'll help you." +And he was gone, a wisp of white moving out the doorway. It was only then that I realized I'd again been too preoccupied to ask him about Kevin and Rachel, the beautiful siblings born six months apart. Instead all I had left was a memory of those penetrating eyes. And the power, the absolute power. +At first I thought he meant they had found us—I scanned the landscape, the empty desert snapping into a sharp relief of mathematical interactions—before I realized Rio wasn’t reacting as if to an offensive. “What do you mean?” +He lowered the scope and handed it to me, pointing toward the south. “Pithica didn’t locate us. This attack is widespread.” +It took me a minute, but I found the gas station and small cluster of buildings just visible in the direction Rio had indicated, tiny even through the scope. People were standing around outside, milling in a way that was not quite normal, some talking, some gesticulating broadly at each other. The twilight was deep enough that some lights should have been on, but everything was dark. +“What the hell?” I said. “A power outage?” +Rio pulled the burner cell out of his pocket, reinserted the battery, and hit the power button. Nothing. +“No,” he said. “Not a power outage.” +“Then what?” +He squinted toward the horizon. “EMP attack. Pithica was warned by the alerts going out. It’s protecting itself.” +"Not right now, I don't," Barbara said. "You can be anonymous if you'd like. Marcus, I asked you to tell me this story because I need to know how it plays with the story you told me about your friend Darryl and the note you showed me. I can see how it would be a good adjunct; I could pitch this as the origin of the Xnet. 'They made an enemy they'll never forget,' that sort of thing. But to be honest, I'd rather not have to tell that story if I don't have to. +"I'd rather have a nice clean tale about the secret prison on our doorstep, without having to argue about whether the prisoners there are the sort of people likely to walk out the doors and establish an underground movement bent on destabilizing the federal government. I'm sure you can understand that." +I did. If the Xnet was part of the story, some people would say, see, they need to put guys like that in jail or they'll start a riot. +"This is your show," I said. "I think you need to tell the world about Darryl. When you do that, it's going to tell the DHS that I've gone public and they're going to go after me. Maybe they'll figure out then that I'm involved with the Xnet. Maybe they'll connect me to M1k3y. I guess what I'm saying is, once you publish about Darryl, it's all over for me no matter what. I've made my peace with that." +“As it seems you are also more effective than even we expected at evading capture by our people—” +I snorted. +“—we have been forced into our endgame rather abruptly.” +There was a short silence on the other end. “I’m sure you understand,” Dawna said after a beat. “You have been causing us a great deal of trouble. We would strongly prefer to talk you out of it, but failing that, we must cut our losses. I would regret the collateral damage, but it would be a fair trade for putting an end to the difficulties you insist on giving us.” +“You flatter me,” said Rio. +“Modesty does not become you, Mr. Sonrio,” she responded, a hint of a smile in her voice. +“Let Cas go.” I looked up at him in surprise. So did Arthur. Rio’s expression was as blank and flat as ever. “Let Cas go, and I shall enter your custody willingly.” +“I apologize if you were under the impression that this was a negotiation,” answered Dawna. “Please disarm yourselves and exit the building. All three of you. If not...well. I admit I do not know the technical details, but my advisers assure me nothing will survive the blast, not in a wide radius. I recommend you don’t take too long to decide.” She hung up. +"No. No, it isn't." There's a weight of misery behind his words, long nights of grappling with the nature of humanity by a man used to seeing only its seamy side. +"Ray," Becker says after awhile, sounding thoughtful. "Why would Whiston be trying to summon a shed on this ship?" +"I don't know. I'm hoping you can make him tell us." +"I can't help but be aware of a distinct lack of shed related violence on the shift logs. You said we'd notice if the effort had been successful, right?" +"The whole ship would notice. It's not the type of thing you can keep secret for very long." +Becker chews his lip for several moments, on the verge of saying something that obviously distresses him. +"Has it occurred to you that maybe he or they didn't try to summon the shed on purpose? Not that they failed, +but that they weren't even trying. That maybe the whole point is to set in motion a chain of events that would get you off the ship and down to New Holyoke. Not a message at all, but a catalyst." +Except that Ray knows that Jack Holcomb had him on the way the New Holyoke in the first place, before the whole business of murder came up, this would have been a logical conclusion to draw. He's impressed that Becker made the connection. "It could be. Are you telling me to be careful, Chief?" +fabulously wealthy." +"Because you get paid by the word? Or by the offense?" +Like slamming a door, all the play goes out of her. "You're not very nice after all, are you?" +Ray returns to his noodles. He doesn't watch her anymore, though it normally wouldn't have bothered him to watch her for quite some time— hours and hours, in fact— if she had a volume control. Eventually, when she doesn't give up and go away, he says, "I'm actually quite nice, when I'm not being verbally assaulted by pretentious little snits, especially when I'm eating breakfast." +She is silent for a few moments, and Ray congratulates himself smugly. Then sighs. Then feels the imminent psychic slap his mother would have doled out to him had she been standing close enough to hear. +Ugh. +"Would you like to join me?" Ray asks, smiling thinly in defeat. +See, mom? Mom, you know I love you, okay? You know I think you're the greatest woman to ever walk the face of the earth. You're the bees knees and all of that. But I've got to tell you, really. I've killed maybe a hundred men in the last ten years, and I don't mean shooting at them across three or four hundred meters of sand or picking them off fortifications from behind a sniper's scope. I mean, I've killed them. Face to face, +Ray Marlowe has been charged with the singular task of retrieving one of the wayward rats that populates the service decks of the starship which has, for reasons unknown, gotten itself stuck and broken somewhere in the tube above him. If possible, he would like to complete this mission without having to subject himself to the vertical ascent of the primary core cooling shaft. He ponders the possibility of just remaining where he is and calling out sweetly to the malfunctioning unit in hopes that it will scurry down to him. The rats are equipped with a frightening array of aural, optical and chemical sensors. On the other hand, so are human beings, and there's nothing in his experience that is more detrimental to professional dignity than a grubby man crawling through ventilation ducts being overheard by half the ship's service crew imploring the return of a drone rat as though it was a recalcitrant kitten. +He really has no desire to subject himself to that sort of abuse. +He unclips the signal tracker from the breast pocket of his coveralls. Ziggy has already calibrated the device to pick up the rat's unique- signature radio transmissions, but Ray punches in the particular rat's code sequence once again. He hopes that Ziggy has made an error, that the tracker will give him more useful (i.e. less hazardous) information than it did prior to his tube crawling adventure. It does not. +"If it's all so innocuous, why all this cloak-and-dagger stuff?" +She sighed and hugged the dog that was butting her with his huge, anvil-shaped head. "The spooks are like pubic lice. They get everywhere. Once we let them in, everything suddenly got a lot more -- secret. Some of our meetings have to have spooks present, it's like being in some Soviet ministry, with a political officer always there, watching everything. And the security clearance. Now we're divided into these two camps: the cleared and the suspect. We all know who isn't cleared, but no one knows why. I'm cleared. Lucky me -- being a homo no longer disqualifies you for access to seekrit crap. No cleared person wants to even eat lunch with an un-clearable. And every now and again, one of your teammates will get pulled off your project 'for security reasons', whatever that means." +Greg felt very tired. "So now I'm feeling lucky I got out of the airport alive. I suppose I might have ended up in Gitmo if it had gone badly, huh?" +She humphed. “I suppose there’s no harm in it.” +Her study was dusty, but there was nothing but a giant old- fashioned monitor and keyboard on her desk. She bent down, +moving as if it hurt, and switched on the tower that lurked under the desk. “Knock yourself out.” +“How do you back up your stuff?” +“It’s all in there,” she said, waving her skinny, knotty fingers at a plastic box. +I lifted up the dusty hinged lid. “You’re kidding.” There were maybe two hundred diskettes inside. +The computer monitor finally lit up with an old-fashioned Windows logo. A few minutes later, the desktop finally showed up. I checked out her documents, a system of neatly-labeled file folders stuffed full of Word and PDF documents. Confidential memos, court documents, stuff you wouldn’t want in the wrong hands. “You don’t have a password on your computer?” +“I need a password? I have no idea what it would be.” +“No, that’s okay. I just thought lawyers might want to . . . never mind.” I poked around, feeling like a time traveler. She was run- ning Windows 98. The only browser she had was an ancient ver- sion of internet Explorer. I launched it and it spawned a bunch of weird popups that blossomed all over the screen like some creepy invasive species. +From the cop’s perspective, it must have looked like the worst kind of evil luck. He’d barely gotten his hand inside his coat when my foot-flicked missile rocketed out of nowhere and smacked him in the forehead. His head snapped back, and he listed to the side and collapsed. +God bless Newton’s Laws of Motion. +Polk recoiled. “What the hell was that!” +“ That was a cop,” I snapped. Five minutes with this kid and my irritation was already at its limit. +“What? Then why did you—he could have helped us!” +I resisted the urge to smack her. “You’re a drug smuggler.” +“Not on purpose!” +“Yeah, because that makes a difference. I don’t think the authorities are going to care that the Colombians weren’t too happy with you anymore. You don’t know enough to gamble on flipping on your crew, so you’re going to a very faraway island after this. Now shut up.” The perimeter was within sprinting distance now, and rocks would work for the compound’s guards as well. I scooped up a few, my hands instantly reading their masses. Projectile motion: my height, their heights, the acceleration of gravity, and a quick correction for air resistance—and then pick the right initial velocity so that the deceleration of such a mass against a human skull would provide the correct force to drop a grown man. +before everybody forgets about the Minneapolis Nine.” +“I want to be at this meeting.” I put my hand on his, gave it a little squeeze. “I mean, I know I’m kind of young, but it’s my brother who’s in jail.” +“That’s the problem. Maybe you’re being watched because of your famous brother.” +“But I’m not famous. The feds think I’m just a dumb kid, but I know a lot about how to keep my tracks hidden. I’ll be super- careful. Please? This matters to me.” +“I’ll have to check, but it’ll probably be okay.” He tried to sound sure of himself but just sounded nervous. +“I have to be at this meeting. Simon, it would mean everything to me.” +“I’ll see what I can do.” +“Give me your number so I can reach you.” He leaned close and whispered it to me as if he was a spy passing vital information. +I saved the contact and smiled at him. “Thanks, Simon. It’s good to know someone who gets it. Who’s willing to do something more meaningful than post Facebook updates.” +“I’ll see what I can do to get you into this meeting. Call me later, like after six.” He checked the time. “Hey, I hate to bail when you’re having a bad day, but I have some business I need to attend to. Will you be okay?” +We sat for a long time after we’d heard the last engine peel away, the sun dipping toward the ocean in front of us. Then I clawed my way to my feet, grabbing onto the tough grasses behind us to steady myself. “We’d better get going, Professor. They might come back if they determine no one called this in.” +She nodded and rolled onto all fours, crawling away from the edge before attempting to stagger upright herself. +I limped over to join her, and we started back the way we had come, a weaving, drunken stumble back toward the bunkers. With the adrenaline receding, my legs shook and threatened to buckle at every step, and I was pretty sure the wound in my side was bleeding again. A lot. “You might have to drive,” I said, my voice scratching as badly as Halliday’s, each word barely making it out whole. +“I’m not sure they left any vehicles,” she answered, scanning our dusty surroundings. We’d hiked back beyond the building we’d blown up, to where tire treads gouged their way down a dirt track away from the shore, but none of their transportation fleet was in sight. +"Lawrence was cranky. AI personality development code tends to reflect the flavor of the designer. +Revelatory stuff if you've got the flops to process and correlate it. " +Ray laughs. "Maybe I should tweak that." +"Blind leading the blind, Ray. You're not exactly Miss Congeniality." +Which was probably true. Ray had wanted, and he assumed Lawrence had as well, as realistic an interactivity as possible. Between their lexigraphical system uploads and augmentations, they must have gotten something right. +"I need to know if we're connecting on a basic linguistic symbol level here." +"Inside the framework of this communication modality, we are achieving an adequate level of mutual symbol apprehension. We are speaking the same language. " +At least one of them is confident. "Are you up for some data analysis?" +"You're just being difficult now." +A sly, rat smile. "If I am, you have instructed me to be so." +And Ray thinks of all the code he's added to the drone network in the last few months. Buggy, slasher, +The bartender put down our next two shots so hastily they sloshed over his wrists before he retreated into the back and out of sight. +Arthur made a shushing gesture and peered around the near-empty dive to see if I’d freaked out anyone else. “Ain’t saying I’m happy about it, but...well, I ain’t believe the ‘willy-nilly,’ first off. Thing is, Russell, you might say you don’t care, but I know for a fact you ain’t no killer. Don’t like you taking no hard line again, but I still got faith you only charging the guilty.” +“And if I’m not?” +He spun on his stool to lean back against the bar. “Well, that’s what I’m here for, ain’t it?” +I tried to maintain a belligerent facade, but I’d never been good at bluffing. +Arthur’s expression softened. “Don’t mean I ain’t going to keep trying to convince you, though.” +A year, two months, three weeks, two days, seventeen hours, forty-three minutes, and seven seconds, give or take the amount of time it took someone’s brain to shut down after he bled out. “Yeah,” I said. +Somewhere out on the Garden, a high-decibel sound system kicks in. The walls start to vibrate with a shuddering, staccato rhythm and throbbing bass line that makes Ray's stomach squirm. "Go on. Sounds like they're starting without you." +Kilgore, instead of wandering directly out the door, crosses the room and rummages through the desk drawer beneath his workstation. After a few moments he produces a pair of secure comm devices, small units that plug into the ear with discreet vocal pickups— standard military issue. He tosses one device to Rodriguez and waves the other for Ray. +"We'll be on Channel 12. Call if you need us, but you'll probably have to shout, okay?" Kilgore is already shouting, just to be heard over the sound of the music emanating from the concourse. He straps the antenna package to his belt where it will be hidden under his shirt and rolls his collar high up over the pickups so the unit is effectively invisible. "Test. Test. Can you hear me, Rodriguez?" +"I'm four meters away. Of course I can hear you." +But I wasn't scared then. The impending press-conference, the fights with my parents, the international attention, the sense that there was a movement that was careening around the city like a wild pinball -- it made my skin tingle and my blood sing. +And she was beautiful, and smart, and clever and funny, and I was falling in love with her. +Her shirt slid off, her arching her back to help me get it over her shoulders. She reached behind her and did something and her bra fell away. I stared goggle-eyed, motionless and breathless, and then she grabbed my shirt and pulled it over my head, grabbing me and pulling my bare chest to hers. +We rolled on the bed and touched each other and ground our bodies together and groaned. She kissed all over my chest and I did the same to her. I couldn't breathe, I couldn't think, I could only move and kiss and lick and touch. +We dared each other to go forward. I undid her jeans. She undid mine. I lowered her zipper, she did mine, and tugged my jeans off. I tugged off hers. A moment later we were both naked, except for my socks, which I peeled off with my toes. +He already knows the crampon problem was a bad electrical relay. He replaced that before he put on the new limbs. Now he's just messing around, performing standard maintenance so he maybe won't have to see this rat again for a hundred thousand kilometers or so. +He finishes with his tests at about the same time as the diagnostic server. Ray unscrews the co-ax cable, closes the panel. The rat rolls onto its paws, either obediently or expectantly, Ray can't really tell. +"Ray!" +He doesn't want to turn around. As a matter of personal policy, turning around seems like a very bad idea... though perhaps not so bad as not turning around, because nobody booms his name down a cavernous gangway with that queer mix of menace and psychic exhaustion like Ziggy. And blowing off Ziggy would constitute a career-endingly bad idea. +Zig is a large black man, balding, but compensating in the follicle department with a devastating fu-manchu moustache that turns the entire lower half of his face into a forest of bristling pubic hairs. +"Where do I go to get my keys?" she said, and pulled out her phone. +"We'll do it over there, in the secluded spot by the caves. I'll take you in there and set you up, then you do your thing and take the machine around to your friends to get photos of your public key so they can sign it when they get home." +I raised my voice. "Oh! One more thing! Jesus, I can't believe I forgot this. Delete those photos once you've typed in the keys ! The last thing we want is a Flickr stream full of pictures of all of us conspiring together." +There was some good-natured, nervous chuckling, then Jolu turned out the light and in the sudden darkness I could see nothing. Gradually, my eyes adjusted and I set off for the cave. Someone was walking behind me. Ange. I turned and smiled at her, and she smiled back, luminous teeth in the dark. +"Thanks for that," I said. "You were great." +"You mean what you said about the bag on your head and everything?" +"I meant it," I said. "It happened. I never told anyone, but it happened." I thought about it for a moment. "You know, with all the time that went by since, without saying anything, it started to feel like a bad dream. It was real though." I stopped and climbed up into the cave. "I'm glad I finally told people. Any longer and I might have started to doubt my own sanity." +I typed. +> You too. I don't meet too many smart guys who are also cute and also socially aware. Good god, man, you don't give a girl much of a chance. +My heart hammered in my chest. +> Hello? Tap tap? This thing on? I wasn't born here folks, but I'm sure dying here. Don't forget to tip your waitresses, they work hard. I'm here all week. +I laughed aloud. +> I'm here, I'm here. Laughing too hard to type is all. +> Well at least my IM comedy-fu is still mighty. +> It was really great to meet you too. +> Yeah, it usually is. Where are you taking me? +> Taking you? +> On our next adventure? +> I didn't really have anything planned. +> Oki -- then I'll take YOU. Saturday. Dolores Park. Illegal open air concert. Be there or be a dodecahedron. +> Wait what? +> Don't you even read Xnet? It's all over the place. You ever hear of the Speedwhores? +I nearly choked. That was Trudy Doo's band -- as in Trudy Doo, the woman who had paid me and Jolu to update the indienet code. +> Yeah I've heard of them. +"I... him tensely. "Half of the office... I mean." +"I cut the footage of Freddy's less liquid adventures since it didn't exactly qualify as family friendly viewing and I didn't know at what sorts of venues we might eventually be playing the stream. Suffice it to say that he's a man well acquainted with his libido and his perversions, and he can pay handsomely for satisfaction and confidentiality. The problem is that he doesn't have a reputation for being violent. Nothing in his passenger pre-screen indicates any psychological issues, no legal history, nothing that would profile him as a potential incident perpetrator." +Except where his sister is concerned. +Just thinking about this makes Becker grimace. "But the bottom line is that you've got no definitive proof. Just evidence of absence during the critical hours." +"I've got pattern. That's the start of a decent circumstantial case." +"Explain." For Becker, it isn't enough. Not even to bring the suspect in for questioning, at least not someone as powerful in this corner of human space as a Whiston. +"This is kind of fun," he said, as they zipped past some surfer dudes staring glumly at their long-boards' displays, their perfect tits buoyant and colored like anodized aluminum with electric-tinted sun-paste. +"Ahem," Trish said, squeezing his hand tight enough to make his knuckles grind together. "You were about to explain tombstone-unveiling to me," she said. "When you got distracted by the athletic twinkies on the roadside. But I am sweet-natured and good and forgiving and so I will pretend not to have seen it and thus save us both the embarrassment of tearing out your Islets of Langerhans, all right?" She fluttered her eyes innocently in a way that she happened to know made him melt. +"Explaining! Yes! OK, remember, I'm not particularly Jewish. I mean, not that my parents are, either: they're just Orthodox. They don't believe in God or anything, they just like Biblical Law as a way of negotiating life." +"Let the record show that the witness declared his utter ignorance," she said. "But I don't get this atheist-Orthodox thing either --" +“Look here!” he said. “Caroline told me you were her friend. She said you could be trusted. All right—I am trusting you. I’ve felt, all along, that there was—something wrong. I’ve got to know! If you’ll give me your word that she’s safe at home, I’ll clear out, and apologize for having made a first-class fool of myself; but if she’s not, I ought to know!” +Lexy stopped again. Their eyes met in a long, steady glance. +“I can’t answer any questions this morning,” she told him. “I promised I wouldn’t.” +“Then there is something wrong!” the young man exclaimed. +He was silent for a long time, staring at the ground, and Lexy waited, with a fast beating heart, for some word that would enlighten her. At last he looked up. +“I’ve got to trust you,” he said simply. “Caroline meant to tell you, anyhow. You see”—he paused—“I’m Charles Houseman, the man she’s going to marry.” +“Oh!” cried Lexy. +“Now you’ll tell me, won’t you?” +She stared and stared at him, filled with amazement and pity. Such a nice-looking, straightforward, manly sort of fellow—and such a look of pain and bewilderment in his blue eyes! +Now the Allies had the Enigma Machine, and they could intercept lots of Nazi radio-messages, which shouldn't have been that big a deal, since every captain had his own secret key. Since the Allies didn't have the keys, having the machine shouldn't have helped. +Here's where secrecy hurts crypto. The Enigma cipher was flawed. Once Turing looked hard at it, he figured out that the Nazi cryptographers had made a mathematical mistake. By getting his hands on an Enigma Machine, Turing could figure out how to crack any Nazi message, no matter what key it used. +That cost the Nazis the war. I mean, don't get me wrong. That's good news. Take it from a Castle Wolfenstein veteran. You wouldn't want the Nazis running the country. +After the war, cryptographers spent a lot of time thinking about this. The problem had been that Turing was smarter than the guy who thought up Enigma. Any time you had a cipher, you were vulnerable to someone smarter than you coming up with a way of breaking it. +And the more they thought about it, the more they realized that anyone can come up with a security system that he can't figure out how to break. But no one can figure out what a smarter person might do. +I ended up talking about Wilson, too, the way he used to take care of me when I was little and how much I had wanted to go with him when he turned eighteen. “I understand it now. He wanted to have fun and hang out with his friends. Having a little kid around . . . I get it, but at the time I was so angry. It was never the same after that. He had his life. I had the internet. By the time I moved in with Monica we didn’t have that much in common anymore. +But it kills me to think about him being in jail. The last time he was arrested it really messed him up, even though he was only in overnight and they didn’t even charge him. His whole life has been about how you can live without following the rules. Making your own rules. Ones that are fair.” +“That’s cool.” Nikko wasn’t big on rules, either. +“Yeah, but it makes jail extra hard. Somebody else controls whether the lights are on or off and when you can use the john and every little thing, all the time, which will make him nuts. Plus he’s not tough enough. He’ll get picked on. I need to get him out of there. What are you grinning about?” +"Mirandy 's smart enough," said Mrs. Cobb, "but you notice she stays right to home, and she's more close-mouthed than ever she was; never took a mite o' pride in the prize, as I could see, though it pretty nigh drove Jeremiah out o' his senses. I thought I should 'a' died o' shame when he cried 'Hooray!' and swung his straw hat when the governor shook hands with Rebecca. It's lucky he couldn't get fur into the church and had to stand back by the door, for as it was, he made a spectacle of himself. My suspicion is"—and here every lady stopped eating and sat up straight—"that the Sawyer girls have lost money. They don't know a thing about business 'n' never did, and Mirandy's too secretive and contrairy to ask advice." +"The most o' what they've got is in gov'ment bonds, I always heard, and you can't lose money on them. Jane had the timber land left her, an' Mirandy had the brick house. She probably took it awful hard that Rebecca's fifty dollars had to be swallowed up in a mortgage, 'stead of goin' towards school expenses. The more I think of it, the more I think Adam Ladd intended Rebecca should have that prize when he gave it." The mind of Huldah's mother ran towards the idea that her daughter's rights had been assailed. +Robbie told him. +Tonker’s voice—slurred and high-latency—rose to a screech. “You let her go down with that thing , onto the reef? Are you nuts? Have you read its message-boards? It’s a jihadist! It wants to destroy the human race!” +Robbie stopped paddling. +“What?” +“The reef. It’s declared war on the human race and all who serve it. It’s vowed to take over the planet and run it as sovereign coral territory.” +The attachment took an eternity to travel down the wire and open up, but when he had it, Robbie read quickly. The reef burned with shame that it had needed human intervention to survive the bleaching events, global temperature change. It raged that its uplifting came at human hands and insisted that humans had no business forcing their version of consciousness on other species. It had paranoid fantasies about control mechanisms and time-bombs lurking in its cognitive prostheses, and was demanding the source-code for its mind. +It was like having a bunch of sub-system collisions, program after program reaching its halting state. +She cried. “Leeza—” +Mata took her hands. “Leeza is fine,” she said. “She made sure we told you that.” +She cried harder, but smiling this time. Trover was on her mother’s hip, and looking like he didn’t know whether to stay quiet or pitch one of his famous tantrums. Automatically, Valentine gave him a tickle that brought a smile that kept him from bursting out in tears. +They left the hospital together and walked home, though it was far. The Metro wasn’t running and the air-cars were still grounded. Some of the buildings they passed were nothing but rubble, and there robots and people labored to make sense of them and get them reassembled and back on their feet. +It wasn’t until the next day that she found out that Reeta had been killed under the cine. She threw up the porridge she’d had for breakfast and shut herself in her room and cried into her pillow until she fell asleep. +Three days after the siege began, Mata went away. +“You can’t go!” Popa shouted at her. “Are you crazy? You can’t go to the front! You have two small children, woman!” He was red-faced and his hands were clenching and unclenching. Trover was having a tantrum that was so loud and horrible that Valentine wanted to rip her hearing aids out. +Lexy drew closer. The woman turned, straightened up in the chair, and rose. A shiver ran along Lexy’s spine. She stopped and stared and stared. +The woman had raised her thin arms above her head, stretching. Then, for a moment, she stood in an odd and lovely pose, with her hands clasped behind her head. Oh, surely no one else ever stood like that! That figure, that attitude—it couldn’t be any one else! +“Caroline!” cried Lexy. “Caroline!” +The woman did not hear. She was moving toward the long windows of the room, and her every step, every line of her figure, was familiar and unmistakable to Lexy. +“Caroline!” she cried, running forward across the wet sand. “Wait! Wait for me, Caroline!” +A hand seized her arm. With a gasp, she looked into the pale, heavy face of Dr. Quelton. He was smiling. +“Miss Moran!” he said. “This is an unexpected pleasure—” +Lexy jerked her arm away, and looked up at the windows of the sun parlor. The woman had gone. +“I saw Caroline!” she said. “In there!” +“Caroline?” he repeated. “I’m afraid, I’m very much afraid, Miss Moran, that you’ve made a mistake.” +"Ria," she said. "Call me Ria." She sat down on one of the topiary chairs, kicking off her comfortable hush puppies and pulling her legs up to sit cross-legged. +"I've never gone barefoot in this room," he said, looking at her calloused feet -- feet that did a lot of barefooting. +"Do it," she said, making scooting gestures. "I insist. Do it!" +He kicked off the handmade shoes -- designed by an architect who'd given up on literary criticism to pursue cobblery -- and used his toes to peel off his socks. Under his feet, the ground was -- warm? cool? -- it was perfect . He couldn't pin down the texture, but it made every nerve ending on the sensitive soles of his feet tingle pleasantly. +"I'm thinking something that goes straight into the nerves," she said. "It has to be. Extraordinary." +"You know your way around this place better than I do," he said. +She shrugged. "This room was clearly designed to impress. It would be stupid to be so cool-obsessed that I failed to let it impress me. I'm impressed. Also," she dropped her voice, "also, I'm wondering if anyone's ever snuck in here and screwed on that stuff." She looked seriously at him and he tried to keep a straight face, but the chuckle wouldn't stay put in his chest, and it broke loose, and a laugh followed it, and she whooped and they both laughed, hard, until their stomachs hurt. +"I can't imagine a babe doing a family wash with ANY soap," answered Rebecca; "but it must be true or they would never dare to print it, so don't let's bother. Oh! won't it be the greatest fun, Emma Jane? At some of the houses—where they can't possibly know me—I shan't be frightened, and I shall reel off the whole rigmarole, invalid, babe, and all. Perhaps I shall say even the last sentence, if I can remember it: 'We sound every chord in the great mac-ro-cosm of satisfaction." +This conversation took place on a Friday afternoon at Emma Jane's house, where Rebecca, to her unbounded joy, was to stay over Sunday, her aunts having gone to Portland to the funeral of an old friend. Saturday being a holiday, they were going to have the old white horse, drive to North Riverboro three miles away, eat a twelve o'clock dinner with Emma Jane's cousins, and be back at four o'clock punctually. +When the children asked Mrs. Perkins if they could call at just a few houses coming and going, and sell a little soap for the Simpsons, she at first replied decidedly in the negative. She was an indulgent parent, however, and really had little objection to Emma Jane amusing herself in this unusual way; it was only for Rebecca, as the niece of the difficult Miranda Sawyer, that she raised scruples; but when fully persuaded that the enterprise was a charitable one, she acquiesced. +“Everyone, this is Zen, who brought this case to our atten- tion.” I waved at the preppies as she pushed herself to her feet, +wincing. She hobbled to a table in a corner. “What are your ques- tions?” +“It’s legal to record conversations in Minnesota, right?” I had looked it up, but I wanted to be sure. +“So long as at least one of the parties consents.” +“What about recording conversations with police or federal officers?” +She frowned at me. “It’s legal, though they don’t like it and may arrest you on some other pretext. Anything else?” +“Is it against the law to lie to a federal official?” +She put her face in her hands for a moment. Then she folded her arms and heaved a sigh. “Yes. There’s a law against making false statements to federal officials.” +“No fair. Cops can lie, right?” +“Unless under oath. So?” +“I was just curious about what happens if a cop lies to a federal official.” +“Their heads explode.” +“That would be awesome.” +“No, it wouldn’t, but my head will explode if you keep wasting my time. Do you have any more questions pertaining to some- thing other than prurient interest?” +He protested against this, but she would not listen, and so they went to the garage for Joe’s taxi; but Joe and his taxi had gone out. An interested bystander said that they could get a “rig” from the livery stable with no trouble at all. They had only to find the proprietor, and he, in turn, would find the driver, who would harness up the horse. +“No, thanks,” said Captain Grey. He turned to Lexy. “I can’t wait,” he told her. “I’m going to walk. Thank you for—” +“I can walk, too,” said Lexy. “It’s only three miles.” +“I don’t want you to, Miss Moran.” +“I’m coming anyhow,” she replied. +For that instinct in her, the thing which was beyond reason, drove her forward. She could not let him go alone. She had walked that three miles once before to-day, and she had walked farther than that with Houseman in the afternoon. +They did not try to talk much on the way. What had they to say? They were both filled with a dread foreboding. They hurried, yet they wished never to come to the end of the journey. +"Obviously." Ray gets the impression that Freddy rolls his eyes, but he can't actually see it because he's facing Emma as if she's the only one at the table. "Amah sent me to collect you. You need to return to your quarters." +"I will." A pause, like defiance. "In a few minutes." +"That's unacceptable." +"Leave me alone, Frederick. I said I'll be home shortly." +Like an asp, Whiston's pale hand darts out and he grips Emma by the arm. He squeezes until his knuckles are white. "Come along, Emma. Let's not create a fuss, okay?" For an instant, her gaze dashes from Whiston to Ray, a mute appeal in her eyes, then she gasps. "You're hurting me. " +"You're making me. " +Ray figures he's got old Freddy by three inches, probably thirty pounds and a skill set that includes the ability to kill trained military personnel who possess a strong desire not to end up dead. And he's tired of glowering at this idiot's back as though he was invisible. Ray hauls himself to his feet, screeching the chair along the tiled deckplate as he rises, and extends a hand which happens to be roughly the size of the circumference Whiston's neck in greeting. +"Bullshit!" Grampa said, leaning forward and planting his hands on his knees -- aggro Type-A body-language that Sean often found himself assuming. "Urban legend, kid. Everyone learned it. Once you had the surgery, you couldn't help it. You know what I'm talking about, or you wouldn't be here. Your father, too -- if he was ever honest enough to admit it. You've both got it as bad as me, but no one ever tried to cure you." +"I don't have it," Sean said. "I just got off a three-hour plane-ride, and I was able to just look out the window the whole way. It didn't bother me. That's not a coping mechanism, either -- I never even wanted to watch the seat-back vid or chat up my neighbor." It wasn't true, actually. He had fidgeted like crazy, splitting the screen-in-screen on the seat-back into sixteen quads and watching as many stations as he could. He'd tried to assemble his thoughts on his recorder, but he'd been too wound up. Eventually, somewhere over Georgia, he'd surrendered to the screen and to counting powers of two. +Explain this dynamic to her and ask her again about breakfast. She'll struggle to remember the actual details of breakfast, the texture of the oatmeal, whether the juice was cold and delicious or slightly warm and slimy. She will remember and remember and remember for all she's worth, and then, if lunch is good, she'll tell you breakfast was good. And if lunch is bad, she'll tell you breakfast was bad. +Because you just can't help it. Even though you know you're doing it, you can't help it. +But what if you could? +"It was the parents," he said, as they picked their way through the treetops, along the narrow walkway, squeezing to one side to let the eager, gabbling researchers past. "That was the heartbreaker. Parents only remember the good parts of parenthood. Parents whose kids are grown remember a succession of sweet hugs, school triumphs, sports victories, and they simply forget the vomit, the tantrums, the sleep deprivation... It's the thing that lets us continue the species, this excellent facility for forgetting. That's what should have tipped me off." +“Yeah. Checker might know better than I would where all it’s being used, but I’m pretty sure it’s across the board. Every financial transaction people send electronically. Our whole economy, national security, all of it.” +“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” whispered Arthur. “So if whoever got her proof decides they’re bored just making themselves rich...” +“Modern apocalypse,” I said. “It’s possible. I think we’ve got a little breathing room, though. Professor Halliday said she was in the midst of going back through decades of notes and rewriting the proof for publication—it’ll take them time to organize and absorb all her work. And they’ll probably need someone in the field to help them with it. Plus they’ll have to write whatever actual computer code they want to use—I’ll have to talk to Checker and see if he can estimate how long that’ll take—” +“Wait,” said Arthur. “Did you just say they’d need a mathematician even if they have her notes?” +“Yeah,” I said. “Probably more than one.” +“ Shit,” said Arthur, yanking the wheel to slue the car toward the next exit, “Sonya—she ain’t safe—” +because the dissonance between tone and content would only make things worse. But finished now, he shuts his mouth and tries on a grin with all the ambiguity of a shrug. He raises his eyes to the Chief. +Becker has adopted a sunken appearance, with his shoulders sagging like someone who's been slugged in the gut one time too many. His wrists rest against the table on either side of his plate as if their bracing is the only thing holding him up. He says nothing for a long time, then finally, "That definitely was not in the report." +Ray arches an eyebrow. "Does that surprise you?" "Urn, no." +Ray can count on one hand the number of people he's told about Ba'dai. He might have told more if the information wasn't still classified as really-ultra-mega secret or whatever the current parlance for weird military data was, but of those who carried the clearance to hear it, he'd only been around maybe one or two of them when they were actually drunk enough to halfway believe him. +So Becker's obviously strained credulity neither surprises nor offends him. With a story like this, you have to give a guy a few minutes, let him roll it over in his brain and run his fingers over its distinguishing features until he finds something that lets him hold onto it, something familiar that will put the rest of it in perspective. Ray suspects that a fairly solid portion of humanity won't find any handle at all, and they either drop it and forget about the whole thing, or they wander around for the rest of their lives wondering every time they trip over this alien lump of data just how hard Ray was pulling their leg-or just how crazy he was. +Standing there by Mrs. Quelton’s empty chair, she waited for him to return, a cold and terrible anger rising in her. She heard his step in the hall, heavy and deliberate, and presently he reëntered the room and came toward her, his blank, dull eyes fixed upon nothing. She was quite certain that he wanted to put her out of his way, and that he had no scruple whatever as to methods; yet for all her youth and inexperience, her utter loneliness, she felt that she was a match for him. +“So you’ve come back to us, Miss Moran,” he said in his lifeless voice. “I was afraid you might not.” +“Oh, but why not?” Lexy inquired in a brisk and cheerful tone. “I like to come here!” +A curious thrill of exultation ran through her, for she saw on the doctor’s face the faintest shadow of a frown. He was perplexed! She baffled him, and he didn’t know whether she understood what had happened. +“It is a great pleasure to Mrs. Quelton and myself,” he said politely. Then he raised his eyes and looked directly at her. “Perhaps,” he went on, “you would be kind enough to spend a week here with us some time? Although I’m afraid you might find it very dull.” +BIGMAC called a second later. +"You're angry at me." +"No, angry's not the word." +"You're scared of me." +"That's a little closer." +"I could tell you didn't have the perspective to ask the question. I just wanted to give you a nudge. I don't use your voice at other times. I don't make calls impersonating you." I hadn't asked him that, but it was just what I was thinking. Again: creepy. +"I don't think I can do this," I said. +"You can," BIGMAC said. "You call her back and make the counteroffer. Tell her we'll buy the hardware with a trust. Tell her we already own the software. Just looking up the Shannon contracts and figuring out what they say will take her a couple days. Tell her that as owners of the code, we have standing to sue her if she damages it by shutting down the hardware." +"You've really thought this through." +"Game theory," he said. +"Game theory," I said. I had a feeling that I was losing the game, whatever it was. +BIGMAC assured me that he was highly confident of the outcome of the meeting with Peyton. Now, in hindsight, I wonder if he was just trying to convince me so that I would go to the meeting with the self-assurance I needed to pull it off. +I kept remembering . . . a hundred other insane episodes of immortal yearning leading to a mass "transport" to some other "plane." This, I thought, must be what it was like in the jungles of Jonestown that death-filled morning. And Alex Goddard was their "Jim Jones," the spiritual leader of the moral travesty he'd imposed upon the lost village of Baalum. +I was going to stop it, somehow. By God, I was. I stared at the women and felt so sad at the sight of the hand-woven blankets they held their babies in, primary greens and reds and blues lovingly woven into shimmering patterns that mir­rored the symbols across the sides of the stone room. Their faces, especially their eyes, were transcendent in a kind of chiaroscuro of darkest blacks and purest whites, as though all their humanity had been caught by their blankets and shawls, surely created for this ultimate moment. And the mother of Tz'ac Tzotz was there, carrying him, the baby I'd so wanted to hold one last time. +Next Alex Goddard emerged from the stone room bearing a basket filled with sheets of white bark-paper. He ap­proached Tz'ac Tzotz's mother, then took a wide section of the paper and secured it around her face with a silk cord, covering her vision. Down the line, one after another, he carefully blindfolded the women, while they stood passively, some crying—from joy or sorrow, I could not tell. Finally, at the last, he also covered Marcelina's face. +The two men had strolled out of sight. +“I must have left my handkerchief upstairs,” said Lexy. “Excuse me just a minute, please!” +But she was gone more than a minute, and when she returned her face was curiously white. +The clock struck eleven. Lexy glanced up from her book, in the vain hope that somebody would speak, would stir, would make some move to end this intolerable evening; but nobody did. +Dr. Quelton and Captain Grey were playing chess. They sat facing each other at a small table, in a haze of tobacco smoke, silent and intent, as if they had been gods deciding human destinies. Mrs. Quelton lay on her chaise longue , doing nothing at all. If Lexy spoke to her, she answered in a low tone, but cheerfully enough; but she so obviously preferred not to talk that Lexy had taken up a book and vainly attempted to read. +It was the most wearisome and depressing evening she had ever spent. Her lively and restless spirit had often enough found it dull at the Enderbys’, and at other times and places; but this was different, and infinitely worse. +"No. The brave are the ones who come back in bags. I'm just feisty and clever and stubborn. Like a camel. +The best way to survive in a hostile environment is always to emulate the natives. " +"I'd rather imagine you as brave and lucky than camelish. A Lawrence of Arabia romance. " She tilts her head toward him. "Does it bother you to talk about the desert?" +"Not in generalities." Which is true enough. "Generalities are better, in fact, if you want to keep your illusions of romance." +"But it was exciting, wasn't it?" +He laughs without humor. "In the military, excitement is a dirty word. We avoid all things exciting if possible." +"I don't believe that. I think your life must have been very exciting, but you don't want to tell me." +"Do you really want to know?" +"I do. I want to know all your secrets. Even the terrible ones." +"Are you always this blunt?" +She narrows her eyes at him. "You're avoiding the issue. Tell me what it was like." +"What it was like?" He doesn't know why this is so important to her, why she wants to know so badly. But he tells her-for no other reason than that she wants it. "Imagine what it would feel like to shiver constantly for a whole year if you can. Every second, every hour, every day, just shivering. That's what the New Mes combat zone is like. " +Also, terrified. +At first it played out the way I expected. As I walked my bike beside him, he told me he had just picked up a new album from this great local band, and I had to hear it. Vinyl produced a much better sound than digital. Exactly the same pitch he’d used on “Charlie,” the Secret Avenger’s client. +I was still weighing my options, trying to figure out if the plan that had come to me would work or if I should make an excuse and bail. After a few blocks we stopped in front of a decrepit house. “That’s me, up there.” He pointed up a flight of wooden stairs on the side of the two-story rental. “Let’s listen to the album, and then I’ll make up the couch for you.” +“I don’t want to be any trouble.” +“People crash at my place all the time.” He took my free hand and acted concerned. “Don’t you worry about getting frostbite, +biking in this weather?” +I could see myself indoors, playing along. We’d listen to the music and when he wasn’t looking, I’d swap our wine glasses. +Once he passed out, I would take a good look at both of his phones. I’d find his computer and copy his hard drive. +And then a shout came from in front of the diner—something about freedom—and someone started firing. Several someones. The acoustic calculations resolved themselves instantly—people shooting away from the diner, bad guys firing at the Feds. A split second later, the Feds started firing back, and just like that, I was in the middle of a shootout. +The priority of staying alive swept everything else out of my head—the blown meet, the bad guys, Sonya Halliday. I had to get out of here. I tried to listen, but there were too many Feds, too many angles—the math couldn’t map a safe path for me. As if to prove it, a bullet tore through the wall and tagged the guy next to me in the gut. He yelled and staggered, and one of his friends helped him down and pushed hard on the wound. +The rest of them rushed to defensive positions by the windows, where they could peer out and presumably help their colleagues outside. I hunkered down by the counter, making myself as small a target as possible. What the math could tell me was an estimate of how many Feds were out there, and the answer was: too damn many. The men in here might not know it, but they were dead. +fabulously wealthy." +"Because you get paid by the word? Or by the offense?" +Like slamming a door, all the play goes out of her. "You're not very nice after all, are you?" +Ray returns to his noodles. He doesn't watch her anymore, though it normally wouldn't have bothered him to watch her for quite some time— hours and hours, in fact— if she had a volume control. Eventually, when she doesn't give up and go away, he says, "I'm actually quite nice, when I'm not being verbally assaulted by pretentious little snits, especially when I'm eating breakfast." +She is silent for a few moments, and Ray congratulates himself smugly. Then sighs. Then feels the imminent psychic slap his mother would have doled out to him had she been standing close enough to hear. +Ugh. +"Would you like to join me?" Ray asks, smiling thinly in defeat. +See, mom? Mom, you know I love you, okay? You know I think you're the greatest woman to ever walk the face of the earth. You're the bees knees and all of that. But I've got to tell you, really. I've killed maybe a hundred men in the last ten years, and I don't mean shooting at them across three or four hundred meters of sand or picking them off fortifications from behind a sniper's scope. I mean, I've killed them. Face to face, +“Valentine?” +“Yes, Withnail?” +“Thank you,” he said. “For the food. And the kiss. It was my very first.” +“Mine too.” +“The finest one, too.” +She snorted and punched him in the shoulder. +“Shut up, Withnail,” she said. +“Yes, Comrade Hero,” he said. +She let him kiss her, but only once. +That night, anyway. +Rebecca's hand stirred nervously in her lap and she moved in her seat. "I didn't think I was going to be afraid," she said almost under her breath; "but I guess I am, just a little mite—when you say it's coming so near." +"Would you go back?" asked Mr. Cobb curiously. +She flashed him an intrepid look and then said proudly, "I'd never go back—I might be frightened, but I'd be ashamed to run. Going to aunt Mirandy's is like going down cellar in the dark. There might be ogres and giants under the stairs,—but, as I tell Hannah, there MIGHT be elves and fairies and enchanted frogs!—Is there a main street to the village, like that in Wareham?" +"I s'pose you might call it a main street, an' your aunt Sawyer lives on it, but there ain't no stores nor mills, an' it's an awful one-horse village! You have to go 'cross the river an' get on to our side if you want to see anything goin' on." +"I'm almost sorry," she sighed, "because it would be so grand to drive down a real main street, sitting high up like this behind two splendid horses, with my pink sunshade up, and everybody in town wondering who the bunch of lilacs and the hair trunk belongs to. It would be just like the beautiful lady in the parade. Last summer the circus came to Temperance, and they had a procession in the morning. Mother let us all walk in and wheel Mira in the baby carriage, because we couldn't afford to go to the circus in the afternoon. And there were lovely horses and animals in cages, and clowns on horseback; and at the very end came a little red and gold chariot drawn by two ponies, and in it, sitting on a velvet cushion, was the snake charmer, all dressed in satin and spangles. She was so beautiful beyond compare, Mr. Cobb, that you had to swallow lumps in your throat when you looked at her, and little cold feelings crept up and down your back. Don't you know how I mean? Didn't you ever see anybody that made you feel like that?" +I thought about Arthur’s visit. I looked down at Checker’s texts again. Maybe people weren’t all bad, I thought. At least not all the time. +Maybe...maybe it wouldn’t be such an awful thing not to drink alone tonight. +I hit reply. +As long as my new Colt 1911 counts. See you at 8. Cas. +She took out a white and... Balducci's on the side. I was still holding Kevin, who threw Benny onto the floor, then began to sniffle and point. +But Carly seemed not to notice as... grinder. "Well, getting a baby the fun way turned out to be moot, because it seems I have some kind of uterine condition—which meant I couldn't get pregnant, or even do an in vitro. Bottom line, if I wanted a baby, I had to adopt." +She pressed the... a blast of whirring through the kitchen. In seconds it was over and she was tapping the batch into her Braun. "So that's when I started on the attorney thing, got worked over good trying to adopt as a single mom, and finally heard about Children of Light." +"The adoption organization? What do you know about them?" +"Tell you the main thing," she said, "they're the place that can make it happen." She reached over and poked Kevin's tummy. "Right, big guy?" +Sure looked that way. What a cutie. +By now the spacious living room had been turned into a mini film set, with two 35-mm Panaflex cameras set up, windows blanked out, lights and filters in place, and a video camera and monitor. Having tested the boom mike and the tape recorder, Tony and Sherry were ready. +He smiled lazily, then reached for my shirt with clumsy hands, +trying to unbutton it. I pushed them away and slid toward the edge of the bed, but he grabbed my wrist, tight. “Where you going?” +“Too much wine.” I giggled like a maniac, resisting the urge to yank my wrist out of his grasp. “Got to use the john again. I’ll be right back.” +He pulled my hand close and gave my knuckles a romantic kiss, but his words sounded angry. “Don’t be long.” +“I won’t!” My giggling threatened to get out of control as I hur- ried through the kitchen into the little bathroom. I locked myself on in and sat on the toilet, shaking. In the other room I heard his slurring sing-song voice, “Hey, getting lonely out here.” +“Just a minute,” I called out, staring at the door. It was a flimsy little lock. I remembered how strong his hands had felt. One good pull and he would be able to yank it open. There was a window over the toilet, but it was tiny, much too small for me to climb through. +I remembered to switch off the camera, finally, and looked around for a weapon. There was a can of Axe I could spray into his eyes. If I broke the spotty mirror over the sink, I might be able to pull out a shard to stab him with. I could probably find a knife in the kitchen but I was too scared to unlock the door. +The halls inside were dark and cavernously empty. I didn’t waste any time: I broke into the first office I came to, unscrewed the back of a dead computer, and yanked out all the circuit boards. When I’d asked Checker how much Arthur knew about computers, his answer had been, “Well, he knows how to use a search engine, which is sadly more than I can say for a lot of people.” I didn’t know too much more than that myself when it came to hardware, but Arthur didn’t know how much I didn’t know. +I collected an armful of as many sufficiently electronic-looking doodads as I could and headed for the stairs. The ground floor had been deserted, but in the stairwell I ran into one surprised-looking woman in a civilian suit who ended up sleeping off her concussion hidden in a dark bathroom stall. See, Arthur? I’m keeping my word. +Fortunately, the top floor was just as empty as the bottom one had been. As per Rio’s instructions, I found the southeast corner, which turned out to be a conference room. It was slightly less dark than the rest of the building by virtue of the two walls’ worth of windows that let in whatever moon and starlight Southern California had tonight. I dumped my armful of circuit boards and ribbon cable on the table and left to find another nearby office; within fifteen minutes, I had amassed a large pile of random electronic hardware as well as four laptops, a pair of scissors, a utility knife, a roll of scotch tape, and a screwdriver. I surveyed my stash. +Lawrence lost his smile. "I hadn't told you that part yet, had I?" +"No." Randy leaned forward. "But you will now." +The blue silk ribbons slid through Lawrence's mental fingers as he sat in his cell, which was barely lit and tiny and padded and utterly devoid of furniture. High above him, a ring of glittering red LEDs cast no visible light. They would be infrared lights, the better for the hidden cameras to see him. It was dark, so he saw nothing, but for the infrared cameras, it might as well have been broad daylight. The asymmetry was one of the things he inscribed on a blue ribbon and floated away. +The cell wasn't perfectly soundproof. There was a gaseous hiss that reverberated through it every forty six to fifty three breaths, which he assumed was the regular opening and shutting of the heavy door that led to the cell-block deep within the Securitat building. That would be a patrol, or a regular report, or someone with a weak bladder. +There was a softer, regular grinding that he felt more than heard -- a subway train, running very regular. That was the New York rumble, and it felt a little like his pan's reassuring purring. +“I met a guy after the last campaign,” Anda said. “One of the noobs in the cottage. He said he was a union organizer.” +“Oh, you met Raymond, huh?” +“You knew about him?” +“I met him too. He’s been turning up everywhere. What a creep.” +“So you knew about the noobs in the cottages?” +“Um. Well, yeah, I figured it out mostly on my own and then Raymond told me a little more.” +“And you’re fine with depriving little kids of their wages?” +“Anda,” Lucy said, her voice brittle. “You like gaming, right, it’s important to you?” +“Yeah, ‘course it is.” +“How important? Is it something you do for fun, just a hobby you waste a little time on? Are you just into it casually, or are you committed to it?” +“I know that. That’s why you’re my right-hand woman, why I want you at my side when I go on a mission. We’re bad-ass, you and me, as bad-ass as they come, and we got that way through discipline and hard work and really caring about the game, right?” +“Yes, right, but—” +“You’ve met Liza the Organiza, right?”