Runaways (2001)

by Clancy, Tom - Net Force Explorers 16

  "Very well. Waiting for an answer."

  Megan stood up behind the desk. A moment later she found herself looking at another desk, in a handsome office done in mauves and grays, colors she suspected had been picked for their restful qualities. Behind the desk was sitting a handsome middle-aged woman, conservatively dressed in a dark business jacket, a woman whose face reminded her a little of her mother's: high-cheekboned, with eyes slightly slanted, the skin around the eyes and mouth a little lined, but in ways that made Megan think of authority rather than age. "I'm Donna Killester," the woman said. "How can I assist you, Miss, uh, O'Malley?"

  "I'm looking for my friend Burt Kamen," Megan said. "I understand he was staying with you until earlier today."

  "He was," Ms. Killester said, "but I'm afraid I can't tell you anything about where he's gone. We've already had a couple of inquiries about him today, but I'm afraid I couldn't help them, either."

  A couple? Interesting. Did his folks finally get off their fundaments and do something? "You can't tell me," Megan said, "or you won 7 tell me?"

  She tried hard not to sound too challenging as she said it. Ms. Killester smiled just slightly and said, "Obviously there are confidentiality issues involved. But in this case, I mean 'can't.' Mr. Kamen didn't leave any indication of where he was going, or when he might be back, if indeed he intends to come back at all, since he didn't leave any personal effects deposited with the facility where he was staying."

  "He can come back, though, if he wants to?"

  "Of course he can," Ms. Killester said. "Our charter is very clear on our responsibilities to any young person who comes to us. We turn no one away unless they're chronically violent, or chronically involved in criminal activities ... in which case other social services organizations get involved, as you might imagine."

  Megan nodded. "Is there any way I could leave a message for him, in case he does come back?"

  "Yes, of course. His Net access and virtmail accounts here are still active, so that friends and relatives can get in touch with him. They stay that way for a year. Or even longer, if a review indicates the extension is warranted. It's a very basic part of our service, one that's easy for us to provide, and it's not one we would cut off without good reason."

  "All right." Megan thought for a moment. "Is there anything you can tell me about who else might have been in touch with him recently?"

  "I'm sorry, but that would come under the heading of information we have to keep confidential."

  Of course it would. "Right," Megan said. "Ms. Killes- ter, I appreciate your help ... thanks a lot."

  "Thank you," Ms. Killester said. "I'm sorry not to be able to be of more help to you ... but I appreciate your concern for your friend. Should he turn up again, of course we'll encourage him to get in touch with the people who've been trying to reach him."

  "Thanks again," Megan said, and touched her desk in the spot which signaled to her workspace manager that she wanted to kill a connection. Ms. Killester vanished.

  Megan sat there for a moment, considering whether "the people who've been trying to reach him" was a slip of the tongue confirming what she'd said about several attempted contacts, or just a general plural. No way to tell, she thought. And I'm not sure whether it matters right now.

  She sat there thinking for a few moments more. "Please restore all the research material I had in here earlier," Megan said.

  "Restoring from Save."

  It all appeared again, the various text sources and interviews frozen in midspeech, people in suits sitting or standing and talking earnestly. One of them was the Breathing Space founder, Richard Page, a tall handsome silver-haired man with a cultured accent. He was an immensely successful businessman who had decided to turn his "spare money" into something that would live on after him and do good, and who spent all his spare time (when not riding steeplechasers) shaking down other rich people for their spare money, to be applied to the same cause. Megan walked out into her space and stood there looking at him for a moment.

  Then she said to her workspace, "I want another Net connection."

  "Please specify."

  "Contact the same Breathing Space facility I visited Sunday. I want to try to reach a client calling himself 'Bodo.' "

  "Working on that for you."

  She turned her back on Richard Page and looked up at the white tiers of her amphitheater, running up to the black sky. A moment later her workspace said, "The client has flagged himself as available for a limited time."

  "Great. Open an access."

  "Opening. Please note that this access is controlled. All access to the space is by express permission of Breathing Space Inc., and unauthorized accesses or attempts to enter or exit the space by other than officially sanctioned means will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law-"

  "Yeah, I just bet they will," Megan muttered under her breath as her system read out the disclaimer. There were serious holes in this system. That was an issue that someone was going to have to raise with the Breathing Space people after this particular patch of dust settled. Net Force, probably, Megan thought. When Burt has sorted himself out, I want to go have a talk with James Winters about this....

  "Do you agree?"

  "Yes, of course I agree, let's go!"

  Her doorframe appeared in front of her, and the door part of it winked out. A low buzz of conversation came from the far side.

  Megan walked through the door and found herself in a place as utterly unlike the peace and quiet of the previous "mountain" landscape as could have been imagined. Once again, though, once she was through she had to just stop and stand there and stare around her in admiration of the skill, the sheer love that some virtual-experience designer, or team of them, had lavished on this space. Megan seemed to be standing in the middle of a big broad plaza in the middle of a city, a handsome sunny space through which the occasional green tram passed, dinging in gentle reproach at some pedestrian crossing the tracks down at the plaza's far end. The gray stone paving of the central area was completely surrounded by old six-story buildings in some beautiful golden stone, with shutters at all the high windows and windowboxes with red and pink flowers spilling out of them. And it looked as if the bottom floor of every one of those buildings had a cafe in it, because tables and chairs spilled out in front of every one of them, well into the middle of the plaza. Hundreds of people sat there eating and drinking in the warm sunshine, and the whole place buzzed softly with their conversation, a low soft rush mirroring the sound of the river flowing by not too far away, at the bottom of the little "plateau" on which the plaza and the rest of this part of the city sat. Away in the distance, past the river and the nearer hills, a white line could be seen against the bottom of the blue, blue sky-more mountains.

  Someone whistled at her from behind. Megan turned and smiled just a little, for there, near one of the cafes at this end of the plaza, was a sculpture of a giant wooden bear, and leaning against it, his arms folded, was Bodo. "Looking for somebody?" he said.

  "You know who," Megan said, going over to him. She glanced around her as she came up to him.

  "He's not here."

  "I know that," Megan said. "That's what I want to talk about."

  "I don't know where he is," Bodo said.

  "That's not what I'm interested in," Megan said.

  Bodo looked at her thoughtfully for a moment... then said, "Come on, let's sit down. It's summer here ... you get hot standing around."

  They headed toward the nearest cafe. "Quite a place," Megan said, looking around her.

  "No one wants to be alone all the time," Bodo said. "Sometimes you want to be with people."

  "How many of them are real?"

  "You mean other Breathing Space refugees? Enough," Bodo said. "Some of them are worth talking to. But a lot of these are just recordings of normal people. Some of us forget what those are like, after a while...."

  Megan nodded. They went to an empty table, sat down. After a few moments a tall thin waiter
in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and black pants and a black apron, came along and paused by the table. "Gruezi," he said, nodding to them.

  "Hi, there," Bodo said. "Got a Rivella?"

  "Red or blue?"

  "Blue."

  The waiter turned to Megan. "Mademoiselle?"

  "Uh, a Coke."

  "Right away." He headed off again.

  Megan looked at Bodo, raised her eyebrows. " 'Blue'?"

  "You'll see." Bodo gazed away across the plaza.

  "Bodo, look," Megan said. "You hardly know me. It's nice of you to take the time to see me, and so late in the day."

  "I don't mind," Bodo said. "It's not a problem; I'm not doing anything today."

  "I'm gladBut, Bodo, I'm really worried about Burt ... and his girlfriend, Wilma, is going to be frantic if she doesn't hear from him pretty soon."

  "I don't know if that's likely to happen," Bodo said, sounding a little morose. "I don't know him all that well, but he was pretty eager to get out of here."

  'That's what I want to talk to you about." They paused as the waiter came back with a tray, a couple of glasses, and a couple of bottles. He put down the glasses and poured their drinks. Megan's Coke looked as she had expected, but Bodo's drink wasn't blue at all. It was a pale golden color like a good ginger ale. They lifted their glasses.

  "By the way, just so you know. This isn't real food," said the waiter.

  Megan smiled half a smile in amusement at the statutory warning.

  "Don't you get tired of saying that all day?" Bodo said.

  The waiter looked at him, quizzically. "How could I? I'm a computer. Enjoy your drink." He went away, drying his hands on his apron.

  Megan drank some of her Coke, and then put the glass down. "Listen, do you mind if I ask you a question?"

  "Ask me, and I'll tell you if I mind."

  "What brought you here?" Megan said.

  Bodo gave her an odd look. Then he leaned on his elbows and watched the world go by for a moment before answering. "It was a custody thing," Bodo said. "My mom and dad were divorcing. It was messy, there's a lot of money involvedDad is rich from inventing and licensing a virtual-environment-managing concept. Mom has a lot of money of her own, old family money. They've spent the last couple of years fighting over which of them made the other more successful while they were married."

  He took a long drink of his Rivella. "And one of the biggest prizes in the divorce was going to be me." Bodo's smile was sad. "Not that either of them particularly wanted me, you understand. My dad hates the way I look ... my mom hates the way I think. But it didn't matter, because I was a prize, you see? When I was a kid, and they were still living together but not really being together, my mom and dad would fight to see who could give me the biggest present, or to get me to go on holidays with one or the other of them. Whoever got me to go with them, won. Now that they were finally divorcing, the game just changed a little, and both of them wanted to 'have' me because winning custody of me would really piss off the other one. They were just about to start their second year of fighting over me in family court when I decided I was tired of it all. I took a few things in the middle of the night, sneaked past the security systems around the house, and left for a Breathing Space facility in another country. And I've been in one or another of them ever since." He looked up, his eyes glinting with humor, but the humor had an edge to it. "This way neither of my parents gets me. Neither of them gets to spite the other one. I win . .. they lose. For once in my life."

  "Oh, God, Bodo ... I'm sorry."

  "Don't be!" Bodo said. "I'm doing okay. I've put aside a little money. Enough that I can take 'holidays' from here and go other places. I stay in youth hostels and so on.... I look like some kid going on the Backpack Grand Tour. You know: 'See the world cheap before you get down to business.' " He chuckled. "No one looks twice at a kid in their 'transitional year,' if you go to the traditional places and do the traditional things. In six months I'll no longer be a minor in the-in my home jurisdiction. Then I can even go back home, if I want to, because my folks won't be able to fight over me anymore. All the rest of their 'stuff,' yeah, let them pull each other's heads off about that all they want. Their lawyers love it. And if my parents don't want me around anymore, because I've lost any value as a bargaining chip, that's okay, too. Being rich is really overrated, especially if you don't know how to use it so it does somebody some good... and you can meet some really nice people when you're 'poor' and on the road."

  He had another drink of his Rivella, while Megan sat there and thanked whatever powers moved above her life that she had somehow escaped this kind of adolescence.

  "Bodo," she said at last, "listen. This work that Burt's doing ... what is it? I have to know."

  "Why are you asking me about it?"

  "Because you know. Because you've done it. Haven't you?"

  His eyes rested on her for a long moment before he answered. "Burt's girlfriend," Bodo said, "if that's what she is-he's really worried about impressing her, you know?"

  "I think 'Burt's girlfriend' is exactly what she is," Megan said, "though I'm not sure Burt's clear about it as yet. If he wants to impress her, it's not because she's particularly demanding or anything. But worried ... that she definitely is."

  "He's short of money, too," Bodo says. "The two conditions don't go together well... needing to look successful to someone, and being broke and on the street. He decided he was going to do something about it."

  "Meaning he was going to do what you did."

  Bodo looked at Megan.

  "Tell me about it," she said.

  He studied his drink for a few moments. "If you wait around one of the 'street corners' in Breathing Space long enough," Bodo said softly, "you meet people who want small jobs done for them. They visit on and off for several days, usually, interviewing. Mostly they want packages carried places. Generally you don't inquire about what's in the packages. You get a strong feeling it might be better not to. The payment's good-real good, for such short- term work. These people slide in, ask around to see who's available, size them up ... and make a deal. You leave the facility, make a pickup. .. make a drop somewhere else. That day a credit account that you've specified suddenly acquires a positive balance with some serious zeroes before the decimal point... the kind of figure you might take a year to see if you were working behind the counter in a convenience store." Bodo turned his glass around on the table.

  Megan sat there looking at her Coke. "And you told him about this-"

  "He asked me about it!" Bodo said. "Don't blame me for this, Megan. If he hadn't found out from me, he absolutely would have found it out from somebody else here pretty fast! It's hardly a secret. And I know what Burt's going through. It can be really hard not to have any money. They make you as comfortable as they can, here, they try to get you set up in work/study programs and that kind of thing if you're sure you can't go home... but those take a long time to pay off. When something presents itself that can make you good money, fast, for just a little work, you're likely to jump at it."

  Megan swallowed. "Sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to sound like I was blaming you."

  "Yeah, well," Bodo said. For a few moments they were both quiet, looking in different directions in the bright spring sunshine.

  "How often do these 'recruiters' come through?" Megan said.

  "Every few months/' said Bodo. "The word in the Space goes around in a hurry. There's someone here, 'scouting ...' And if you're interested, you go meet with them on one of the 'street corners.' Some kids get good at this line of work. They do it all the time. Some of them we don't see again...."

  A chill went down the back of Megan's neck, nothing to do with the wind off the river. "They never come back, you mean."

  "Why should they? If the work's good, if they like it and do enough of it to buy themselves an apartment somewhere, or even a house somewhere cheap, what would be the point?"

  Megan had another drink of her Coke to try to colle
ct herself.

  "Burt got lucky," Bodo said. "The first of the 'lookers' arrived just a few days ago. Must have been the night after he came in ... something like that. I'd mentioned it to him in passing, but when he heard the word from someone else, he was hot to get involved, kept talking about what Wilma would think, how great he'd look when he turned up in his home neighborhood again, how happy it would make her that he didn't ever have to go home again. He went off to his meeting with-" Bodo waved his hand in the air, plainly not wanting to mention names. "Whoever they are. He came back saying they liked him, they were going to get back to him. I guess they did."

  He had another drink of his Rivella. "I last saw him last night," Bodo said. "We're in the same facility, physically. He was packing up his stuff, not that he'd brought an awful lot with him to start with. Said he was going to be meeting someone in Ch-meeting someone nearby. And then this morning he left."

  Megan swallowed, her mouth suddenly having gone dry despite the Coke. She was realizing that she had been phrasing her questions to herself about Breathing Space incorrectly. Not 'what kind of employer would hire these kids.' But instead, Tor what kind of employer would these kids be perfect?'

  Someone who doesn't want people who have family ties.

  Someone who wants people who are already missing ... and wouldn 't surprise anyone if they never came back.

  ... I've got to find him!

  She turned the Coke bottle around and around on the table. "If I wanted to do work like this," Megan said, very softly, "who would I ask for?"

  Bodo stared at her. "Oh, come on, you're not-"

  "Bodo," Megan said, "please."

  She looked him in the eye and would not look away.

  Finally he glanced down at the red-and-white-checked tablecloth. "There's a guy named Vaud," Bodo said, hardly above a whisper. "At least, it's a male persona he wears when he's in here, and that's the name he uses."

  "And what 'street corner' does he hang around?"

  For a long time Bodo wouldn't say anything. Megan just sat there and looked at him.