Yes!
KIM? Tonya pinged her, and without thinking, Kim shared her workspace.
The gigantic multidimensional fan of displays, graphs, pictures, and tables enveloped Tonya. There was no horizon, and it thundered with a pattern that she was getting closer to recognizing . Kim only realized it might be a bit disorienting when Tonya gasped and fell to her knees.
“How do you make sense of any of this?” Tonya shouted as she got back up.
“Right now?” Kim reached into the center of the maelstrom, and the volume cranked down to a sibilant hiss. “I don’t. It’s too much for Edmund to work through alone.”
She’d sent Edmund into the depths, partly because he was good at it, but also because it was fun to listen to him grouse.
“My every route is strewn with data droppings from the devil’s own satanic servers” was a really choice one. Kim didn’t expect to see him again for at least another hour.
“Edmund?”
“An AI from my Rage days. The data streams will eventually make sense. It’s already a lot better than when I started.”
She reached into one of the new streams that stretched upward into infinity. It had the consistency of warm pasta and was just as delicate, except breaking this would give her a nasty shock and make a huge mess. She’d put on the gloves of her catsuit, which allowed her to use the hypercube extensions. It made things easier, even though her hands looked like Escher’s own bendy straws.
“Doesn’t that hurt?” Tonya asked, motioning at Kim’s arms.
“Not really.” The construct slipped, and she flinched when a blast of discordant music crashed out through the columns.
Tonya shook her head and vanished as she exited into realspace.
I NEED TO GO GET STUFF, she sent. CAN I HAVE THE KEY TO THE CAR?
SURE, Kim replied from her perch on the couch, and the token transferred. Out loud she said, “Ping Mike with the bill. Trust me, he’s good for it.”
“What am I good for?” Mike asked behind her. She heard his bedroom door close.
Kim was startled when Tonya flopped down onto the chair next to her. She was staring behind Kim with her jaw hanging open. Kim paused things and peered over her shoulder.
Okay, wow, that was a distraction she didn’t need. “Mike, pants, please, pants!”
“What? These don’t count as pants?” He held his arms up and turned.
Tonya whimpered softly.
“No, Mike, those are boxer briefs,” Kim said.
The bruises on his back were yellowing away. The madness of the night before was an echo of shame now. Her mind tossed up a bunch of ways to make it up to him. Ways denied her.
Not now, not ever.
She blinked hard and shook her head. “Go put your pants on.”
The door shut behind her. Tonya was still staring, so Kim threw a pillow at her head.
“Oh my gosh, Kim!”
The room had gotten uncomfortably hot. “Don’t you have errands you need to run?”
“Sorry. Right, errands.” She cocked her head. “What size pants do you think he wears?”
Tonya left with a few sly glances Kim absolutely ignored. The OutLock was behaving now, which meant it was the sieve array’s turn to cough itself inside out for no damned reason.
Mike cleared his throat twice before Kim even noticed he was there. She turned around. He had pants on now, but nothing else.
“Better?” he asked.
Kim had too many things to do and could not be distracted. She lied. “Much better.”
He flopped onto the couch, one cushion over from her. “Mind if I stare?”
She wanted him to do exactly that.
He stammered, “At your work, I mean.”
He gazed at her with those big brown eyes. His face was so open and so trusting. Tonya had just left. There was no way Kim would get any work done wound up like this. Something crazy broke loose inside her; a hope the heat let slip through her defenses. Spencer had rescued Mike from the hospital, and that kid was prepared for anything. It was a mad gamble she wanted to win.
Kim took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and asked, “Do you have a condom?”
“WHAT?”
She wasn’t looking for sex. Well, not the way normal people thought of it. But they were alone together. It was an opportunity she could not pass up. Her hands shook, her breath caught, and she didn’t want it to stop. Kim was in control and yet wasn’t, not exactly.
After searching the suite, they settled on a small plastic trash bag they found folded in a bathroom cabinet. Mike double wrapped his hand in it, and she faced away from him on the couch, leaning over so just her lower back was exposed.
This was insane.
There was no way it would work, but the crazy urge kept kicking her forward, kept forcing her to take each new step.
“God,” she breathed out. “I haven’t done this since I was fourteen.”
She looked over her shoulder. “Except he really did have a condom on his hand.” Well, a condom on his fingers. The thought of Mike’s fingertips made the need grow worse. This had to stop.
She wouldn’t stop.
“You don’t have to do this,” he said, white as a sheet.
“Yes, Mike, I do. I’m not allowed any of this the way I am. You need to understand that, and I need to understand it too.”
Another wave of panic crested as she pushed her head against the armrest.
“You made sure the toilet seat was up, right?” She didn’t want to puke all over everything.
There was a long pause as the air danced chills across her bare back.
“Yes.”
“Okay.” The need for this rush through her again. No turning back now. Four days ago she was a has-been managing a Taco Bell, and now she willingly exposed herself to an impossible person who drove her mad, and what was taking so goddamned long?
The rustle of the plastic bag as he stripped it off his hand unleashed panic and even more heat.
“Mike?”
“If we’re proving things, let’s prove things.”
Kim closed her eyes as her heart pounded and uncontrollable shivers started. She caught her breath.
This had to stop; it was crazy.
The thought of his bare hand on her back…
“This is the least sensitive part of the body, right?”
“Sellars,” she said. Kim felt the warmth of his hand against her back, very close. She bit her lip and stifled a groan. She could feel his breath blow against her skin, something alive that didn’t hurt. It was soft and warm, and he was so close. There was no scrabbling madness. This was actually going to happen.
“Sorry, guys, forgot my purse.” Tonya said as she crashed through the door. She jumped when she saw them, then grabbed her purse with a snatch so hard it flew out the door behind her, and then shouted, “Goddamn it!”
The door slammed shut with a muffled thump.
They both sat up.
Mike stared at the floor, because he couldn’t understand what it all meant. She did.
He wasn’t frightening anymore.
She thumped the cushion he was sitting on, as close as she dared. “Hey.”
He looked up, and her heart flipped somersaults at the way his smile came out.
“That wasn’t a disaster?” he asked.
A new wash of emotions so unfamiliar she couldn’t name them hit her. Fear, panic, the raw need of it all. After a deep breath she asked, “How close did you get?”
“To your back?” He pulled his thumb back and exposed what he could of his nail. “About this far? Close. Really close.”
It was what she’d hoped for most of all.
“When I was fourteen… His name was Alan. He only got this close,” she said, spreading her finger and thumb as far apart as they could go. “It took two weeks before they cleared me from the psych ward. I never told my mom what really happened.”
“Did he hurt you?”
“Hurt me? No, not
in the way you mean.” She laughed. “I may have scared him off women entirely. That was some trauma for a fourteen-year-old boy to work through.”
Finally, her heart had calmed to a normal beat, but she refused to ignore what his painless not-quite-touch could mean. That said, there was still a world to save. She certainly couldn’t let Watchtell tear apart the place Mike lived in now.
“I have a ton of data to search through, and I could use your help. You willing?”
While they worked together, she realized most of the problem was her pushing him away. Now that she stopped, the results were, well, fun. Kim barely noticed the time passing as they exchanged jokes and flirting smiles.
After they solved yet another null reference exception, he shrugged. “Okay, I have to admit it. I don’t get this.”
Kim cracked open a secure store, filling the space around them with a new set of thundering data columns.
He had to yell over the noise. “How do you manage to get access to all this secure stuff?”
“Mark called it the locksmith’s dilemma,” Kim shouted back as she buried her arms through six dimensions up to their elbows in the raw data stream. The volume decreased until it was just a minor buzz. “As long as it’s people locking things up, there’s no such thing as perfect security. There has to be more than one way to get in. People lose or forget keys, passwords, tokens, all of it, all the time.
“Sometimes people die, and their heirs have to get into a lockbox they didn’t even know existed. If things were perfectly secure, in twenty years half the world would be lost forever, stuck inside boxes with no keys.” She shrugged. “I just happen to be really good with locks.”
“I’d say scary good.”
Kim laughed. “Okay, fair enough. And it’s not just electronic ones, either. I’d open a locksmith business in a second if it didn’t require a background check. You wouldn’t be able to help me with that, would you?”
“Not enough to trust your life with it. I can only reach what’s connected to the EI, and not everything is.”
A mile-high tower of data wobbled wildly enough she threw her hands over her avatar’s head, but then it settled as he steadied it from wherever he was in realmspace. Mike had skills.
He continued, “Local police use the EI because it’s cheaper than owning their own stuff, but I can’t be sure of reaching anything higher than that, and fixing half of it would be worse than doing nothing. Not to mention the international stuff, and your Bolivians don’t rely much on paperwork.”
There was a knock on the door. Tonya asked through it, “You two decent in there?”
They smiled at each other, but the feelings were too intense for her to stare at him for long, especially with Tonya right outside. When this was all over, there would definitely be some exploration going on.
Mike got up to answer the door. “We were decent before.”
Tonya stared up at the still-shirtless Mike and closed her mouth with a clack. She lifted her hands up, but after a look at Kim, dropped them to her sides. “Well, okay then.”
Edmund pinged her with a priority alert higher than he’d ever used before. She couldn’t ignore it, so she left Tonya and Mike to empty the car. When Kim manifested back in the workspace, Edmund’s grim face meant whatever the news was, it was very, very bad.
“What have you found?”
“The answers, milady. All of them.”
Edmund had found Watchtell’s private correspondence from five years ago, back when he’d been White House chief of staff.
Their journey to Bolivia, their betrayal, her desperate attempt to get Juan to pay attention, all unfolded in front of her. Watchtell had been behind it all.
Except this time, there wasn’t a break in the footage outside the freezer.
Mike set a sack down on a table and asked her a question she couldn’t hear over her own pulse.
God, Mike.
Tears streamed down her cheeks. The picture of Watchtell arm-in-arm with a dead man unrolled across her vision.
“You son of a bitch.”
There was no time. Watchtell was in the middle of it but there was no time to find out how deep it went. She locked everything down tight. If Mike found out the truth, he’d just try something stupid or heroic. She couldn’t risk losing him now.
“Kim? What’s wrong?” he asked.
This was too big, and they were right on the edge of launching Project Havelock.
“I need to contact the FBI.”
Chapter 55: Aaron
The attack happened around one in the morning. He’d spent two hours in the emergency room, and two more in debrief. Just getting home was an effort. He’d just fallen asleep when the clock rang him back to the world. It felt like he’d been set on fire and tossed down a stairwell, but that was better than being chunks of roasted kosher meat scattered all over a marina.
Lefla was gone. It hurt so much. She’d saved them all, and he couldn’t even put her in for an accommodation. To the bureau, she was just property, a thing that depreciated. The rest of the team would dribble out of the hospital over the next few days while bone-knits and cell gens did their work. It was better than anyone could’ve hoped for otherwise.
The smell of tomato and paprika wafted into the bedroom. Whenever something went wrong, his girlfriend Keila set to cooking. The worse it got, the more Israeli the dishes became. Shakshuka was a silver lining to this particularly nasty cloud. He could only hope it was the start of a better day. He wouldn’t tempt fate by thinking it couldn’t get any worse.
Aaron groaned and hissed getting out of bed, trying to figure out the right combination of movements that kept stitches and bandages from grabbing or pulling. When his phone interfaced with realmspace, a fuzzy obstacle course confronted him.
Aaron had met Keila when he spent a summer in Israel after high school graduation. They were both deeply interested in the sophisticated AIs that populated realmspace, but where he was a practical hands-on end-user, Keila was an avant-garde artist. She was also an inveterate cat rescuer, and whenever one was fading out, heading over “the rainbow bridge,” there Keila would be—gently comforting, tears pelting down, setting up scanners.
He didn’t have the brainpower required to change the fidelity settings of her projections, so he had to dodge a dozen virtualized cats as he made his way to the bathroom. They yowled and bumped him as he passed. Keila wrote their brain patterns into a custom-designed unduplicate lattice. Not all of them were successful, but she claimed the ones that were had started a new life. He had no reason to doubt her, because they were realistic enough to trip him up even in the best of times.
This wasn’t the best of times.
He levered the one remaining realspace cat, a three-legged barnacle named Goblin who was too evil to die, off the toilet lid and relieved himself. A quick mirror check showed actual battle scars.
Hi, guys, his next e-mail to the family would go, I got blown up last night.
Aaron had forgotten about the pajama-clad demon that occupied the guest room until the den’s TV detonated with an old Adventure Time episode. It seemed like a great idea to take his sister’s son for an extended weekend. A kind of training run he and Keila thrilled themselves with. Because, you know, all Aaron had was a desk job, some dusty thing following behind an agent chasing a ghost. No action there, no sir. Why not think about starting a family? Aaron reached for the extra remote to turn down the TV, and his teeth clashed together as the stitches on his arm pulled tight, which made the bruised rib flex.
“David,” Keila called, “breakfast!”
The little boy jumped into the seat next to Aaron. He was finishing up his first virtual design course, the final project for third-grade realm programming.
“Uncle! Look!” A miniature landing pad drew itself into existence over his nephew’s bowl of cereal as David shared his augmented reality. A helicopter about the size of Aaron’s palm bounced into existence and whirled to life. Its motor sounded like a metallic mo
squito as it flew around the table.
It did a flip right over the center, but then fell victim to being part of their house’s realm, the one shared with Keila’s ghost cats. Half a dozen of them scrabbled onto the table, and then watched it intently, heads bobbing and tossing. Just as the helicopter passed them, three jumped up. There was a slap, and they all tore away like thieves.
David groaned as bits of the tiny virtual chopper rained down on the table below, evaporating just as they hit.
Aaron smiled as Keila’s food slowly brought him back to life. “It’s okay, Dave, that was pretty good. The damage model is really well done.”
Today would be exhausting, but mostly spent on paperwork. Just answering questions would be one hell of an improvement over these past few days.
Lefla’s channel sprang to life with a call alert. He had this mad hope that she’d somehow backed herself up, but the signature was wrong. It was worse than wrong, because that channel should never have activated again without it. It had to be one of the other unduplicates calling to pay their respects. But it wasn’t.
Aaron forgot all about his war wounds when the message typed its way across his vision.
ALICE HAS FOUND A MOST CURIOUS THING. WOULD THE HATTER LIKE TO JOIN HER FOR TEA? THE BARD IS A WUNDERFUL SINGER—A. R.
Chapter 56: Adelmo
When Adelmo did the math, he couldn’t believe it. It’d been thirty-five years since his last genuine arrest. The cops he’d encountered last night hadn’t even been born yet. Gangsters should never grow old. It was so déclassé.
“My client has gone above and beyond what’s required of even an upstanding citizen,” his very expensive and comparatively moral attorney said, “and if you have anything you can actually charge him with, please proceed to do so.”
The trick was to just shut the hell up. Back when he and his brother were mere soldiers in another man’s army, all he did was imagine giant gold letters slowly spinning across the walls. YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT. It worked just as well now as it did then, which was fortunate. He had a very long road ahead of him. Getting out of this courtroom wasn’t much, but it was a start.
What helped more was his short-circuit of Manuel’s betrayal. That, and the secret Cayman Islands bank accounts Adelmo always kept full of cash. Brutus may have been too noble to raise money by vile means, but Adelmo was too practical to do anything else.
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