by Zoey Ivers
No wonder kids are so unpopular. It's a wonder anyone has even one. George winced. Alice is just a normal teenager. It will get better. She'll be my little girl again. He bit his lip. No. She'll be my grown daughter. The idea was almost painful. And I'd better get over it. "Cheesecake. Excellent plan."
Alice managed a stop at a cheap electronics kiosk and bought a tiny led light and a tiny vmb. Which used up the rest of her stipend and put her account in the red.
George was furious, all over again. "You don't need a vmb, your comp can play all the videos and music you want, and I happen to know you've got over a thousand books stored on it. I can't believe you overdrew your allowance for that. You'd better not buy anything else for the rest of the month."
"I won't need anything else."
"You didn't need that! It was irresponsible of you to overdraw. I thought I taught you better."
Alice sighed. "It's only two cred over, and it's the first time I've overdrawn."
"That's not the point. Any overdraft is a sign of irresponsibility."
"Did we lose a lot of money? Are we poor now? Is that why we sold the house? You work for the government, I thought they paid well and never laid people off. You'd tell me if one of you lost your job, wouldn't you? Or is it the house all over again?" She dropped her chin and her voice tones into a mimicry of him. "'She's a child we don't need to consult her, or even give her an early heads up.'" She split a scowl between the two of them. "Will you please stop treating me like I'm a three year old?"
"Don't speak to me in that tone of voice, young lady!"
And if she says she'll win it back in the arcade, I'll really go ballistic. Only "No Hopers" rely on the games or the lottery. My daughter is going to have an actual career, not just occasionally pick up extra cash with on-grid monitoring, or gambling. Teenagers!
Alice walked on without replying. Her eyes tracked to a bio-model display in a toy store window. A hologram of "Annie Oakley" was doing rope tricks from the back of a prancing palomino. There was a sign in the corner of the window. Order now for Christmas delivery and in smaller lettering, All bio-models fall under the micro pets provisions of the Gym membership contract. They must remain in your cubby.
Ought to outlaw them altogether. "Are you listening to me, young lady?"
"No."
"You. Are. Grounded. Young. Lady."
She crossed her arms and stared into space, not replying.
Alice sat and watched a movie with them---not impossible to avoid it in the cubby, but she didn't seem inclined to continue the fight. She was reaching to turn the vid off when they left for work.
Trish looked at him for a long moment, as they waited for the elevator. "Don't threaten her toys again, and don't harm them." She blinked away tears. "We have destroyed her trust in us. Please don't make it worse."
George winced. "I... guess I can see that. I just thought she'd be more responsible as she got older, not less." The elevator trip was quick, the lobby level almost empty. A coffee shop and the neighboring donut shop were open, the rest of the stores still shuttered. The open center area was full of plants, mood lighting, fake stone ruins and graceful arches in a soft tan stone.
"Overspending two cred is hardly surprising, when I threw away most of her stuff. Why did it sound like a good idea, at the time?"
"Because of that party she snuck off to."
"She's fourteen. She's curious. It's been six months. She's accepted being on restrictions, but that will change to rebellion if we walk any further down this path." She turned and walked away.
Two blocks to work. She'll be so much safer than when she was taking the bus.
George shook his head, and turned back to the metro entrance. And my office is an easy ten minutes away from here as well. Alice is just going to have to adjust.
***
Alice flopped on her belly in front of the barn. "Well. As far as I can see, I'm not allowed to take you guys anywhere. They don't allow big pets at all, and micro pets have to stay in the cubbies. They called you guys pets!"
Bambi glanced at Lily, who was playing with the vmb player controls, and listening to snippets of music. "Sometimes I wish I had an ordinary chip, instead of this version. Sometimes it seems like not thinking would be better than..." She reached out and patted Alice's hand. "You treat us like friends, but legally we're just animals."
"You are people!" Alice drew a shaky breath and felt a tear trickling down her cheek. She got up and stomped up the steps to the door. Locked! She'd have to call her father for permission to go to the bathroom, and he'd unlock it remotely. For fire safety, Mr. Fudd the manager had said. He'd claimed the cubby, and anyone inside, could survive any fire, even the collapse of the tower itself, if the door remained sealed. Alice rather suspected that the remote locking function was more often used to, well, ground misbehaving children. Yet one more anti-child trend.
She eyed the bumps of the hinges. They had a smooth plastic cover, not quite as blindingly white as the d-door itself. Only the latch on the right side had any color at all, and that was just a fancy brass frame and lever, to dress up an ordinary latch a bit.
"Huh. Locked in, eh? Let's just see about that."
Two seconds with a screwdriver popped the top hinge cover off. There was no hinge behind it. Alice wrinkled her nose, hopped off the chair and eyed the other one. It was stuck on the door, at the very edge, not reaching across the crack to the frame. She pried it off. The solid oblong covered nothing. When she touched the flat side of the oblong, she jumped. It had a slight electrical charge, it felt like almost like static. How very strange. She poked at the door, found an indentation, like the hole for the latch on the other side, but with no handle, white like the rest of the door, apart from the decorations around the handle they were supposed to use. There was a thin slot down in it, and the end of a small metal bar. The sort of thing you'd fasten a handle to, for a working latch. She got a finger nail under it and pulled. Nothing happened. She kept the bar up and pushed the door. It gave and she jerked her fingers back from the tingle of the phase shift plane. The door swung open from the wrong side, as if designed to do so. The other side was dark. Why was the corridor dark? She held the door open with fingers just out of the phase shift.
Bambi trotted up with the little flash light. "Lift me up!"
She stood on Alice's shoulder, flash in one hand, a solid grip on Alice's hair with the other. Alice pushed and stepped through the door. There was the usual flash of incomprehensible sensations, but this one lasted long enough to leave an impression of a spaghetti mound of red glass tubes all around, with them in one. Then her feet hit the floor and something clanged as she kicked it.
Bambi aimed the light down. A cleaning bot. They looked around. The dark corridor had an unfinished look to it, raw plaster, unpainted and further down, holes where no doubt d-doors would be installed.
"Nobody lives here yet." Alice turned to the door they'd come out of. The door opened when she pulled on it. There was nothing in the cubby, just the framework of the landing and stairs inside the door. Alice stepped in anyway, so she could get a good look. The oval "hinge covers" were where they belonged. She opened the door and stepped back into the hallway. On this side, the oval were crooked, off the door, stuck on the frame. She walked down the hall; looked in one of the gaps. A space about a meter deep, and to the sides, half a meter on either side of the door way, and the same above and below. "So a cubby's bump does need some space in this dimension." She leaned in and tapped on the inside wall. Foil covered insulation.
"Interesting. There's a whole lot I don't know about these dimensional bumps." Alice walked down the hallway, found the elevator lobby. Twenty-fifth floor, according to the sign on the wall. She took the stairs down two floors, and scurried back home. From this side, she could get in. In fact, with those ovals off, she could get out in the normal fashion as well. And not two floors up, either. She put the ovals on the frame, just across from where they'd been on the d-door. Pushed the doo
r from the wrong side again, and caught a glimpse of a corridor, bright with sunshine streaming through the floor to ceiling windows. Southern exposure? Shouldn't I be looking north?
They sat and stared at the d-door. "We opened it backwards and it took us up two floors. And now to a different spot. This is a little weird."
Bambi tugged her hair. "Let's try a bit of computer research, before we do that again."
"Good idea." Her father's computer was awesome. The easily found fluff articles had references in them. By following the references to the serious research mags, they found the d-doors' dirty little secrets.
"They open between four and eight dimensions, depending on design and the strength of the initial current. Most of those dimensional bumps are microscopic, only one in ten doors has one of a usable size. The other nine doors they disassemble, heat certain parts to de-magnetize them and try again." Bambi snickered. "That sounds awfully inefficient."
"Yeah. And then the successful doors, they engineer so they only open to that one dimensional bump." They both looked guiltily at the white ovals. "That's why the doors are square, not rectangular. So they can turn them in whatever direction they need to so the doors all open the same. But," Alice walked over to the d-door, "those other microscopic bumps are still there, and I'll bet they never tested what happens when you pack thousands of them close together in a single building." She pulled on the wrong, left, side. It refused to budge. She pushed. A brightly lit hallway. She stepped through. Glass tubes, squirming and moving, full of glowing red and blue lights. Her feet hit the floor and the door slipped from her grip; snapped closed. She took a look around. The cubby numbers painted on the wall indicated that they were on the twenty-seventh floor, almost directly above her own cubby. She turned back to the d-door behind her. The ovals were missing altogether. She reached for the latch, but hesitated. "This floor is finished, somebody probably lives here. I wonder what those ovals really do? Attach the inside of the door to the outside, so it always opens to the same place?"
Bambi shifted on her shoulder. "Maybe with the ovals off on the inside, you can leave a cubby, and with the ovals off the outside you can exit from the cubby. Or from a dimension full of spaghetti tubes."
Alice nodded. "We saw three possibilities, and we know two of the exits had the ovals off." She walked to the elevators and punched in her floor.
A short, bald, man scowled at her, or rather Bambi. "You are not supposed to take those things out of your cubby. They're just rats, you know."
Bambi gave him a Nazi salute.
The man frowned. "Oh yeah?" He stuck his tongue out.
Bambi stuck her thumbs in her ears and wiggled them.
The man crossed his eyes and let his tongue dangle out the side of his mouth.
Fortunately the elevator came before the exchange escalated.
Back home, Alice looked at her watch. "Mom will be home real soon." She pried up the ovals and stuck them about where they'd been. She tested the door, it seemed to work normally, that is, she was locked in and it wouldn't open the wrong way, now.
"Excellent." They went back to reading about d-doors and the dimensions they opened.
When her father got home, he left the door unlocked so she could visit the mini-spa. When she returned, he was working online, grumbling about the University library computer being hacked.
***
Two of those nasty biological vermin had used dimension three. They were getting out of control.
One of the programmed protocols it had was pest removal in the Gym. It was intended to rid areas of infestations of unwanted biological units. It was tempting to get rid of all of them.
Maybe later.
Right now, it had gotten through the security on the new high capacity computer, and then managed to use a temporary connection it made to establish an association with an older mainframe. It wasn't one of the new AIs, one of the ones with an actual personality; the university library computer was just a powerful machine. It was, in fact, exactly what Barton Street needed. the only surprise was that it hadn't been associated already. It shifted more connections and started internalizing the use of the new additions. It felt strong, almost confident. Perhaps it would be able to hold out against attacks.
For awhile.
Chapter Four
Joe was desperately hungry, and he knew Tommy must be as well.
Tommy stopped, and took a careful look through an arched window. He plucked a couple of leaves from the scraggly vines that were everywhere, and chewed on them, while Joe leapfrogged forward. Joe eyed the leaves. He wasn't quite that hungry, yet.
If I had some food, I'd be in heaven. Adventure of a lifetime and all that schmaltz.
They'd lost track of the T-Rex, but the occasional rustle behind them made him think one of the scouts was tracking them. He eyed the street, then the overhead. There were irregularities to the crenellations. Breaks where stones had fallen. And now something else. Joe pointed. "It looks like a tower, it's definitely higher than the walls."
"Maybe there's something, someone, there." Tommy kept his voice down, even though, as far as they could tell, there was nothing but the T-Rex and one or two scouts to hear them, even if they yelled or screamed.
"Yeah, let's go find out."
***
The advanced computer that had gotten it into the old library system opened and checked another nearby system. It snatched passwords and protocols, marveling that none of the other AIs had had found a way in long before Baton Street had evinced. Things like unusual connections between systems happened when the humans were in the bumps. It was almost like the human presence could influence the processing units. Perhaps their bioelectric field affected computer performance. There might be a need for the vermin after all. But that didn't mean they were going to be allowed to run loose everywhere. They would need to be controlled, studied.
The Barton Street AI started assimilating the university main frame and noticed, with something a human would have called glee, all the connecting units, large and small. In a single day it had nearly tripled its power.
It might yet manage to survive.
***
The next day, Alice popped the ovals off the door as soon as her parents left. She stuck them on the frame, so the change wasn't so noticeable, in case they came home early.
"I want to come too!" Lily jumped up and down in excitement. "I want to meet the silly man."
Bambi rolled her eyes.
Alice got out her school backpack and emptied it. "If you two get in here, no one will see you, and we won't get into trouble." She scrounged a baggie and filled it with bio-chow, added a couple of bottles of water.
Bambi snickered. "We never got more than five minutes from here, yesterday."
"That was yesterday. Today I want to think about other ways to open doors. If one of the micro dimensions has changed into something weird, maybe the rest have too." She shouldered the backpack and walked up to the square door. She felt the spot where she'd found the hidden handle nub, then ran her hand up, across the top... "There's another handle hole up here. Does it pull... "
The door swung silently down, as if hinged on the bottom. The far side was dim, with bright specs of light, and soft gleams off metal surfaces. Bambi and Lily climbed up on the door and trotted to the end.
"Not a hallway. No one in sight." Bambi reported. "It looks like the insides of an old fashioned computer."
Alice stepped up on the door, easing carefully between the two little women. As her weight hit the end of the door, it wobbled and tipped her through. It was a horrible transition, pressure crushing her into... a tumble onto the floor. Her ears popped, and she wiggled a bit to make sure everything worked. Her left wrist ached, her ID was an appreciable bump, there must be swelling around it. She hoped she hadn't broken her wrist. Everything else seemed fine...
She looked back and blinked. "Bambi? Lily?" They all scrambled to their feet and stared at each other. Stared up, in Alice's case. "You guys
are big! Like real people. Humans, adults. Holy Moly!"
She turned and looked around. It was a landscape of electrical components. Very large ones.
"It's like we've shrunk down and gotten lost inside a computer." Alice craned her neck and turned around, eyeing all the electrical components. Then she lowered her gaze. A little. "And you guys didn't shrink as much as I did. Wow, you two are really hot!"
Because they'd kept their doll proportions. Long, long legs, tiny little waists, big eyes, and in Bambi's case, really big breasts. It was actually a bit creepy, but Alice didn't say so. Looking down, she herself didn't appear to have changed proportions either. She pulled a hank of hair around to look it over. "Still brown. Why can't I have blonde streaks and curls?"
Ribbons of pale gold slid down the fibers. She jerked her hand away and watched the ends tip up and curl around. The tress sprang up into a corkscrew curl, then a whole headful of them fell down around her face.
"Oh, that's rather, er, interesting." Bambi frowned down at her quadruple D's. "A 'C' cup would be sufficient." Her chest shrank. She wiggled her shoulders. "Oh, that's really, really nice."
Lily put her arms protectively over her chest and shook her head. Bambi started running her fingers through her hair and looking thoughtful.
Alice looked up at Bambi. "Either you're about a hundred and eighty cems tall, or I'm about sixteen cems."
"Me too! Umm, is a hundred and eighty good?" Lily bounced over to join them.
Alice grinned up at her friends. "Only if you like very tall or very self confident men."
Bambi snorted. "We've never met a man. Even your father doesn't talk to us." She walked toward the nearest electrical... thing. "I think we all shrank, but you shrank a lot more than we did. If that's like, an integrated circuit board... we must be about a millimeter tall."
"Good thing my name is Alice. I should be right at home, here."
Lily giggled. "Down the rabbit hole. Just like in the vid!"