Runaways (2001)

by Clancy, Tom - Net Force Explorers 16

  "Yeah." Megan gave him a look. "You," she said to Buddy, "are nothing but a collection of potential cans of dog food flying together in close formation. Do you know that?"

  The horse regarded her with an expression of complete unconcern and tried to start chewing on the rail again.

  Wilma looked at this with mild concern. "Maybe it's his diet," she said.

  "It's about as likely to be sunspots," Megan said, unconvinced. "He gets every vitamin and mineral supplement known to humankind as it is. And more than he needs to eat, if you ask me."

  "You suppose that's the problem? Too much grain? It's late for grass bloat."

  Megan shook her head. Her suspicions were far worse. "I doubt it. I think it's the modeling that's gone wrong somehow."

  "I don't know if it's that wrong. The real one is doing the same thing."

  "Cribbing?"

  "Yeah, but not just that. The rail problem, too. All yesterday afternoon." Wilma's expression was eloquent of annoyance as severe as Megan's. "I was mortified."

  Megan leaned on the rail. "You know, you might be right, though," she said. "If it's some obscure muscle or bone thing... the supplements wouldn't necessarily be enough to put him right"

  "Maybe it's why he keeps cribbing," Wilma said. "Minerals."

  Megan sighed. "Without getting bloods drawn on him and having them sent for an analysis, and the figures fed into the model, there's no way to tell that for sure. If the model is doing what the real horse is, then the chances are that it's something weight- or motion-based. Which is unfortunate for us ..."

  "... Because it makes it look like we're doing something wrong, instead of him."

  "Please," Megan said. She was desperately tired of the way the model was behaving, but the Region One Young Riders Championship of the U. S. Dressage Federation was only four days away, and she dared not waste any possible practice time. The championship was a dream that had been some time coming, for Megan was not the kind to compete at something without a suspicion that she might actually make some kind of decent showing. She and Wilma had together been working with Buddy for the past year, and a respectable score in the championships had actually started to look possible. So together with various other kids from the local riding club, they had filed their statements of intent, paid their entrance fees, and had successfully ridden the qualifier test, the FEI Prix St. Georges Freestyle. Now they were in the final stages of preparation for the trials to be held at the dressage center at Potomac Valley. And all this would have been just wonderful, except that Buddy seemed suddenly and inexplicably to be losing several very basic skills which he and his riders were nonetheless going to be expected to exhibit in the ring, and as a result, both Megan and Wilma both now seemed doomed to be horribly embarrassed in front of thousands of people. Everybody who saw them would (as was only to be expected) assume that the horse's poor performance was something to do with the inadequacies of the rider, and she and Wilma were both going to die hundreds of deaths. Or at least so it seemed to Megan.

  "Why didn't we go in for some kind of virtual sport," Wilma muttered. "One where you can just create yourself giant muscles and perform like a demigod, even if you don't actually have the equipment."

  "Because any sport like that would be a dumb sport, one without challenges and suitable only for idiots," Megan said, "and we thought we were made of better stuff. Able to handle a sport with some rules to it, some rigor. We thought!" She laughed helplessly.

  Buddy stamped and snorted softly. They both turned baleful looks on him. "Rules it's got," Wilma said, sounding grim. "Especially the ones that say it's too late to pull out and get our fees back."

  "Who cares about the fees? What I care about is attempting to ride a twenty-meter circle on an animal who appears to have forgotten how to go in any direction whose path can't be laid out with a ruler!" Megan sighed as she leaned against the rail. "You want to give it a try?"

  "I'll just kick him," Wilma said. "I did yesterday."

  "You can kick the model if you like," Megan said. "It just complains about illegal instructions."

  "I've had worse." Wilma swung up into the saddle. She looked good in the arena gear they were both wearing: black jodhpurs, black jacket, the regulation white cravat and black riding helmet. Megan sighed at Wilma's pulled- together appearance, for she was never sure that she herself looked like anything more than a female version of a popular lawn ornament, and the top hat that they would both be wearing in the ring on Saturday, for Megan, just made the feeling worse.

  Wilma was settling herself in the saddle, and now began to walk Buddy in an "informal" warm-up circle, which to Megan's sudden rage the model now did perfectly. "I hate him," she said. "In a sport where the one thing you ask of the creature is that he do the same thing at least twice in a row, he just won't."

  "Mmh hhhmmm," Wilma said, and continued to ride the circle. Megan looked at her thoughtfully. Her seat wasn't great-she was slumping a little-and she wasn't looking ahead of her. Bad signals, Megan thought, and nearly said out loud, but then she stopped herself. There were enough other things going on at the moment in Wilma's life which also involved rather confusing signals.

  "Anything from Burt this morning?" Megan said. It was a question she had been avoiding asking for nearly two hours now, one which her annoyance at Buddy had helped her put aside.

  "Huh?"

  "Burt. You remember. Tall guy, blond hair, supposed to be practicing with us, canceled out at the last minute."

  Wilma flushed red and reined Buddy in, finally looking straight out over his ears, but not at anything that had to do with the competition arena. "No," she said.

  Megan looked at her sympathetically. "You should ditch him," she said. "He's making you nuts."

  "It's not like he doesn't have reason," Wilma said. "You should have heard his folks-"

  "I understand that his parents don't seem to be the world's best," Megan said, "and I feel for him, but, jeez, Wil, he passes twice as much of the grief on to you as he gets himself! I hear him when we're out together.. . and it's more than I'd put up with."

  "You don't feel about him the way I do," Wilma said, in a rather small voice.

  Megan restrained herself mightily from saying Thank God! Instead she said, "Look. He could at least message us, or send a virtmail, if he's not going to make practice. This isn't a big matter of the heart, it's just, you know, life and death stuff."

  Wilma had to laugh at that, though the sound was pained. "I suppose. I'll mention it to him."

  "Sounds good. So go ahead, let's give it a try. Track right, turn down the centerline at A, leg yield left D to S, then come back and halt at X."

  "Right. Put the aids up?"

  "Oh, sure. Workspace-"

  "Listening."

  "Guides on, please."

  "Guides on." Immediately, faintly burning red letters of the alphabet, A through S with some omissions, and the letter X, now manifested themselves around the edges of the competition arena, and in a straight line down the middle of the sawdust, hanging in the air about a meter and a half high. These were the markers that told you where to start a move or series of moves and where to stop them. In competition it was your business to know exactly how long it took you to get from one to another, and how many steps your horse needed to take between them; before every competition, you would see all the dressage people draped over the rails and searching intently for some twig or leaf or post-mark in that particular arena that corresponded to the lettered spots in the arena in their heads.

  "Okay," Megan said. "Go."

  Buddy moved smoothly forward. That's the way it should look, Megan thought, no obvious moves, no obvious weight shift, everything subtle, the horse going smooth. At least the model was behaving at the moment.

  This had been her own project, on and off, for the better part of the last six months: building a virtual "model" of Buddy, doing the necessary physical and mass metrics to allow her Net workspace to construct a horse that looked, acted, and
rode exactly like the real thing.

  It was a useful adjunct to your (admittedly invaluable) practice with the horse you were actually going to ride, especially when there might be four or five other people qualified to team with the same horse, and all fighting to get enough practice time... of which there was never enough even if there was just one of you. With a model, though, a simulated horse, you could at least make sure your own moves were right. And you could ride the sim for hours at a time without stopping, if you overrode the "reality" constraints ... one of the minor advantages to practicing virtually. You could ride it in the middle of the night if you liked, a process to which a normal horse would object violently.

  The only problem was the actual design of the sim itself, which ran into big money. Megan had looked into the cost of professional character and movement profiling by some dedicated firm like eQuines Unlimited or The Horseman's Word, and had come away horrified. It was just too exorbitant to even think about, even if the family had been rich, which (as her father constantly reminded her) it was not. So Megan had started building the virtual Buddy herself, learning entirely too much about the art of simming live creatures in the process. He was a work literally in progress, and the only problem with it all was that Megan was an amateur, and wasn't ever entirely sure that she was getting it right.

  She still wasn't sure. More, from the expression on Wilma's face, she got the feeling that Wil wasn't sure either. She reined in, stopped. "I'm not sure about the way he's moving. You want to turn him clear?"

  "No problem." Wilma started to ride him back to the point from which she would once again begin the pattern. "Workspace-"

  "Listening."

  "Model change. Transparent mode."

  "Transparent mode enabled."

  -and suddenly Wilma was riding a horse made of brown glass. At least it looked that way. The skin was hardly there, and the inferred organs inside were just vague shadows, but the details of the horse's musculature and bone structure could clearly be seen as he went. Megan got lost in watching this, and stood in the middle of the arena, turning and turning again as Buddy went around with Wilma on his back, watching the bones and muscles move, watching the nature of the motion itself, looking for anything uneven, anything that would reveal where the problem lay.

  "Leg yield?" Megan said.

  "Okay."

  Wilma started the move, choosing the version which was usually done in the First 3 series of riders' tests, straight from the rail to the center line of the competition arena. Megan could just see her giving the signals: outside leg, inside rein, just a touch of each. Buddy had been walking straight forward. Now, keeping his body parallel to the rail, he began to walk at a thirty-degree angle from the fence, heading for the center of the arena. He ys doing this right, anyway, Megan thought with some slight relief, for he had performed it correctly for her as well. At least something's behaving consistently. . . .

  "Keep going?" Wilma said.

  "Sure, why not? Take him through the next part, the traverse. Maybe you can sneak up on him with the circle and get him to forget to go straight."

  Wilma didn't comment, just kept going. Buddy began to follow the rail in a way that was correct for once, haunches out, progressing forward though his body was turned sideways. Smooth, Megan thought. She's really got the touch. If I can get her to show me that a few more times, maybe I can solve our problem-

  The air filled with a phone-ringing noise. Megan rolled her eyes up in annoyance at the blue "sky" and said, "Megan O'Malley-"

  There was no image, only voice. "Megan, honey, hi, it's Mrs. Christensen."

  "Hi, Mrs. C., Wilma's here...."

  "No, it wasn't Wilma I was looking for-"

  That was moderately strange. Wilma reined in. "Mom?"

  "Hi, honey. I was looking for Burt."

  "Uh." Wilma's face went taut with annoyance. "He's not here."

  "No? I thought he was supposed to be with you girls."

  "Uh, no, Ma. We thought he was going to be, but he stood us up." Wilma's expression got even grimmer. She swung down off Buddy.

  "Oh. All right." Wilma's mother didn't say anything further for a moment, and there was something strange about the way she didn't say it, so that Megan said, "Was someone looking for him?"

  "Uh, yes, his mother," said Wilma's mom. "She called me.

  "And she didn't know where he was, either?"

  Another of those odd silences. "She said he was gone," said Wilma's mother.

  Wilma blinked at that. " 'Gone?' Gone where?"

  "She said he had taken some things and just left, and- Well, I don't know, she sounded kind of upset, and from what she said, Burt had been talking about leaving home, and, you know, kids say things like that, but they-"

  "Oh, no," Wilma whispered. Megan looked at her and was astonished to see that she had suddenly gone absolutely pale. In the bright sunlight it looked bizarre. At first she thought Wilma was going to faint, but then she realized the paleness had nothing to do with any strictly physical condition. It was fear.

  "I've got to go," Wilma said. "Mom? Hang up, I'll be right there-"

  The call from "outside" clicked off. "Uh, okay, sure," Megan said, confused. "But listen, Wil, practice tomorrow-"

  "I don't know if I can. I'll call you."

  And Wilma deactivated her virtual-experience implant, and vanished.

  Megan found herself standing there in the middle of the arena, alone in the sawdust except for the virtual Buddy, who stood there by her and then very gradually leaned over to start cribbing at the fence again.

  "Workspace," Megan said.

  "Listening."

  "Shut down the Buddy model, please."

  "Default save from this point, or save from other time/ place point?"

  "Default save."

  "Done." The horse vanished, and a second later the competition arena was swept clear of his footprints, as if he'd never been there.

  Megan stood there, her mind filling with awful things that she very much wanted to say, except that none of them would help the present situation, and besides, she could just hear her mother's voice saying reproachfully, "And after that, what will you have left to say some day when you hit your thumb with a hammer?"

  "I can think of a few things," Megan muttered under her breath. "Never mind."

  "Listening. Was that a command?"

  "No. Sorry," Megan said, and then smiled, a wry look. She might think about all the rude words she liked, but she still caught herself apologizing to the computer, which, however smart it might be, wasn't that smart. "Revert to default configuration."

  The arena, the sawdust, the sunny day, all vanished. Suddenly she was standing in her workspace as it normally appeared, as an ancient, worn, white-stone amphitheater, fifty rows high, perfect right down to the worn seat numbers still to be felt shallowly graven into the seats. But the landscape surrounding it was no olive- overgrown Greek hillside or dusty Roman plain. Methane snow, blurring into near-invisibility when the wind picked it up and blew it, lay powdered bluish-white all over the surrounding cratered landscape of the satellite Rhea, only going tarnished gold near the horizon where the light of a swollen, setting Saturn shed a cold, white-gold radiance over everything. Sharp white points of stars burned down out of the blackness, and the little pallid Sun away off to the left, just past the spot where the curve of the amphitheater ended, threw long sharp shadows behind the rims of the nearest craters.

  Megan sighed, for once in no mood for the beauty, and walked past her desk, which stood in the middle of the "floor" of the amphitheater. It was covered and sur7 rounded with little geometric solids, some of them hovering in the air and oscillating for attention, changing color or squeaking piteously for attention. Megan took a close look at a few of them, recognizing designs or color schemes that indicated mail from this friend or that. Right now she couldn't care less about answering any of them. She didn't see anything urgent... at least, nothing as urgent as the complete screwing up of t
he coming weekend.

  "Save and break out," she said to the computer managing her Net workspace.

  "Saved," said the computer. "Ending session."

  -and then there came the familiar sensation like being about to sneeze, and having the sneeze fail, and then Megan was sitting in the family den, in the implant chair, from which, through the Venetian blinds of the nearby window, she could see the afternoon shadows fading toward dusk. She had missed dinner, to no particular result as it turned out, and now her stomach was growling.

  Megan sat there for a moment recovering herself and looking around at the bookshelves, the piles of books on the desk and laid face-down and open on the chairs-her dad was deep in research on something, and had plainly hit that point in the cycle where he was going to be untidy about it for a few days. She got up out of the implant chair after another moment or two, stretched, and found herself not as sore as she might have been. The chair's passive muscle-exercise routines were working better than usual for some reason. Then she headed out of the dimness of the den, down the hall and into the kitchen.

  Dinner proper was over-assuming there'd been one. Everything was cleared away, and the dishwasher was running, in sonic cycle at the moment to judge by the faint chronic jingling coming from the silverware drawer next to it. However, the fact that there had just been a meal didn't seem to have changed one of the verities of life in the O'Malley household. One of her four brothers was in the kitchen, looking for something to eat. In this case it was Sean, all six feet of him. But about two feet of the six seemed presently to be missing, because they were shoved into the fridge. The rest of him was wearing a very trendy-looking black sliktite that made Megan suspect he was getting ready for a hot date.

  "You done in there?" Sean said.

  "Done," Megan said, "yes. Finished. Through." She plunked herself dispiritedly into one of the wooden chairs by the scrubbed-oak kitchen table and briefly dropped her head into her hands, rubbing her eyes. "Everything is going to pieces, and the world is coming to an end."