by Zoey Ivers
And now, with these vermin, these human friends of mine... can I actually win? Not just survive, but win?
And what of this "superstrand opticable?" Are there other AIs out there, even larger than the T-Rex?
I don't know why the T-Rex likes to be an Avatar, but I know why I do.
Being "real."
Connections.
Friends.
***
Alice's mother stayed home with her the next day. She was pale and upset, despite Alice's best efforts to down play the danger. The news media, of course, played it over and over.
And after lunch, the police wanted to talk to her again.
They wanted a walk though in City Hall. Councilman Finn was there, indignant on Alice's behalf.
"She was very brave, kept her head. She's the one who unlocked the door. And she let everyone out ahead of her."
Alice felt her face flush. "Actually I was mad at Lupe, and shoved him through first. I saw police in riot gear, and started sending everyone through as fast as I could. After Mrs. Cumming's went through, I thought about my comp, we'd had it out on the floor by the data port, and the door closed when I grabbed for it. I ran around real quick to make sure everyone was out, grabbed the comp and left. My eyes were stinging bad by then, I couldn't see much, and I didn't know City Hall, anyway. I just listened and turned away from the noise. I thought about it, this morning. Maybe that was the police taking everyone out, and I went exactly the wrong way."
The policeman doing the investigating had introduced himself this time. Inspector Haskell. He gave her a dubious look, and looked around the hallway.
"So you came out of that d-door?"
Alice looked at it, and shrugged. "It's a d-door. They all look the same, and so do all these puke green hallways. Did you look inside? Did any of us leave stuff behind? Is that the right closet? I don't know." She looked over at the Councilman. "Can you open it?"
He walked over and waved his wrist at the door and pulled it open.
"Don't touch anything." Haskell growled.
Alice and Councilman Finn stood back from the dimensional shift plane and looked at the room.
"It looks perfectly neat and clean." Alice shrugged. "What other closets are there, that we might have been in?"
Haskell folded his arm and looked annoyed. "Do you want to check them all?"
"Sure." Alice looked both ways. "Where's the next one?"
The fourth closet was the one they'd been in. Messy, a couple of backpacks abandoned. No doubt about it. Two corridors down and around a corner from where the Inspector had started them.
Haskell looked at it in irritation. "Right. It looks like the SWAT teams with their fancy numbering system outsmarted themselves. "Thank you Councilman, Miss Brown. Apparently it quite easy to become disoriented in smoky, drab, identical corridors." He gestured to an officer. "Please escort Miss Brown home. I need to speak to the actual cops who saw the hostages coming out of the closet."
Alice followed the young man to a car. She kept her hands to herself and let her eyes rove. Shook her head. "Unmarked police cars are totally boring."
The officer grinned, and dropped her off at the front doors of the Gym.
Safe.
She stepped into the elevator and reached for her floor button. A man stepped in and her alarms all went off. She pushed fifteen. The busiest public floor. My father has raised me to be paranoid, he's just some guy, not a rapist.
"That was an interesting trick you pulled, yesterday."
She eyed him. Medium tall, dark brown hair, light brown eyes, almost hazel. Good tan or naturally olive skinned. He didn't look particularly Italian or Hispanic. Tanning booth, she decided.
"You knew what you were doing, you knew when it was safe to go out. How?"
Policeman? Or DWLF. She didn't remember him from yesterday, could he have been one of the... his nose was swollen. The man with the bloody nose. Not that she would have recognized him if he hadn't brought himself to her attention. Not that she truly recognized him now. The elevator stopped at fourteen and he shoved her out.
She caught the edge of the door, spun and kicked, he dodged and she dived back into the elevator. He jumped for her, and she swung her back pack off her shoulder and into his face. There wasn't much weight in it, but it didn't matter. The doors shut. The elevator jolted and rose. He swore and dived for the emergency button. Alice rammed him, knocked him off balance. The elevator halted and she dived for the door.
Bumped a fat man, dodged around him and ran.
"Stop her, she's got my wallet!"
Alice got her phone out and dialed emergency. "This is Alice Brown, I was one of the hostages yesterday at City Hall. A man just accosted me in the elevator, very hostile, asking questions. I think he belongs to that group."
The answer to her breathless declaration was mechanical. "A camera survey of your area reveals no threat characteristics."
"This needs to be reported to Inspector Haskell, along with all elevator and elevator lobby surveillance recordings. I need camera escort to my cubby."
"A camera survey of your area reveals... " Alice hung up and called her father. That got things hopping. And her father requested that she remain home.
She ground her teeth and did.
Her mother hustled home early, with dinner in a bag.
Her father looked tired when he finally got home. "None of the other hostages knew who the man was, all they'd noticed of his appearance was the bloody hanky, and that he hunched a bit so they weren't even sure of his height."
Alice nodded. "That's all I noticed, too. And this guy had a swollen nose, but so what? I don't really know if he was the guy with the bloody nose."
"The cameras in all the elevators had sticky tape over them, no fingerprints. I think it was a deliberate attempt to at least talk to you." His fists clenched. "He didn't leave the elevator at fifteen, none of the people waiting for an elevator got on with him, none of them had a camm or otherwise took a picture." He slumped in his chair. "Your mother and I both need to go to work tomorrow. So you're coming with me."
Alice shut her mouth. Thought fast. "Is that all right? I mean... won't you be busy?"
"Mostly on the computer." He smiled wryly. "If all else fails, if I need you out of my office, I'll lock you in the supply closet across the hall."
Alice swallowed. "I'll, umm, load up some new books to read... drat. Biographies for that wretched historical figures comparison report, actually."
"Good girl."
Is this a good omen, or a bad omen? I'll be right inside the T-Rex's home territory.
"Umm, am I allowed to call friends and let them know I'll be missing another day of school?"
Her father sighed. "Yes. Thank goodness tomorrow is Friday. We ought to be able to play tag-team guardians all weekend, even if we get called in to work."
Alice nodded, and eyed her mother worriedly. "Are you in trouble because of taking this morning off?"
She shrugged. "Who knows? My boss is bipolar and I swear he's been off his meds for the last two months. He may decide one of my projects is behind schedule---which they aren't---and call me to come in and work half a day. Although I suspect half my boss's temper tantrums are due to the city grid problem you're investigating." She smiled over at her husband. "At least e-mag layouts are less fraught than terrorists under our noses."
"And less likely to go sideways on you. I told Halloran to stop shooting more tear gas in, that the media people had good enough scanners to hear the DWers yelling that we were killing the hostages. He just kept saying the cubby closets were the safest place there."
"Oh. Now I think I'll skip tonight's news."
"Wish I could." Her father reached for the head phones.
"I want to watch, too." Alice bit her lip. "I want to hear what they have to say."
Her mother nodded reluctantly.
So over dinner they got the whole story of the SWAT teams disoriented in the hazy corridors, the authorities' criminal ig
norance of the d-doors permeability to the tear gas, their disregard of the DWers' warnings, and otherwise criminal incompetence.
"Father? If the thing with the d-doors and tear gas isn't known... how did the terrorists know? That guy in the elevator, if he was one of the hostages, or rather, pretending to be, he could have told his buddies about it, when the gas started coming in."
Her father's slump straightened abruptly. "Indeed. If he had a comm with a sub-vocal mike... "
He headed for his computer; she could hear his voice and the slight crackle of replies from whoever he was speaking to. She glanced at her mother, wiping tears as they covered the funerals of the murdered hostages. Alice grabbed the control and flicked the screen off.
"Don't transfer, Mom. I was fine. Those three hostages that died, they were all old with health problems. I would have been fine."
Her mother sniffed and wiped her tears. "Of course. Now, how about desert? I grabbed a cheese cake from that bakery on seventeen."
"Yeah, they do them just right." Alice jumped up and grabbed paper plates. With no plumbing connection, dish washing didn't happen. Disposable plates weren't bad, but her mother usually drew the line at flimsy plastic knives and forks. "And perhaps instead of volunteering to wash the forks, after, I should walk down to the mini-spa with you and wash them and shower and brush teeth and the works."
"Yes, we'll go together."
***
At school, no one was talking about anything except the attack.
And Alice.
"Hey, Joe. Tell your scrawny little friend my Dad doesn't do criminal defense, but Lupe's does."
Joe eyed Richard. "Why would she need a lawyer?"
"What, you don't watch the news?" Lupe grinned, "Alice was all over it, crying her eyes out as she was hauled off in handcuffs."
Joe snickered. "You were all crying, the place was full of tear gas, after all. And she knew when it was time to escape, didn't she?"
Lupe scowled. "I think she tried to kill me. How did she know the police were there, not the Displaced Workers?"
Tori and Jenni crowded up, next to the other two. "And why didn't she come too?"
"She said she and that Councilman were on her comp, listening in to what was going on just outside the door. So she knew when the DW guys retreated and the cops were there. She said she grabbed her computer and took a quick look around, in case someone had passed out. Then she came out, but the cops had already taken you lot away, and so she wandered around trying to avoid the bad guys until she found a door out." Joe paused for a breath. "So it wasn't any big deal. The cops sent her right home with her dad."
"Ha!" Jenni looked smug. "I heard the Browns had to move here, into the gym, when her father lost his job."
Tori nodded. "I'll bet he was one of the terrorists."
Richard frowned at her. "Don't call them that. They're the Displaced Workers Liberation Front."
Tori rolled her eyes. "Riiiight, like they didn't have guns? Didn't threaten to kill us? Aren't trying to change public opinion through almost random acts of violence? Even I can see that they fit the official description of terrorist, Junior Lawyer."
"That won't stop them from suing you." Richard tried to make his voice deep and ominous.
"Not to mention speculating about someone being a member." Lupe said. "So, don't do it."
Jenni sniffed. "Mrs. Bilkiss said she heard that Alice is a trouble maker. She says her father's grounded her twice since they moved in, and it's only been two months."
Joe wrinkled his nose. "That's hard to believe, she's smart, seems nice to me." He tried to look indifferent, uninterested in their gossip. Poor Alice!
The rest of the morning was much the same, with kids he hadn't even met asking about Alice, with eager expressions that fell as he kept indifferently saying that she seemed smart and nice.
At the last lunch shift, Joe heard the teacher saying something about Alice stealing a man's wallet on the elevator. He sought a quiet corner and accessed the news. Nothing. He emailed her a warning about the talk circulating.
By the time he headed home, Alice had transformed into "That little girl on twenty-three, can't believe what she's done!"
Her reply was brief. "Juicy gossip. I'm going to ignore them, anything else and it will linger, or even grow. For now though, you might want to act as if you barely know me.
"Over protective parents hovering tomorrow; my father is taking me to work. I might do something interesting, if I happen to get the chance. Weird stuff going on right here, watch your back."
Not exactly reassuring.
His dad came home late, again, looking tired. "The City Police are about to catch hell for their bungled SWAT raid. They got lost in the annex, and thought the hostages were in a different hallway. Not that it actually made any difference, that was the bunch that got away. But the media won't let it look that way."
"Ouch." Joe watched his words carefully. "Everyone at school is gossiping about Alice Brown. They seem to think she's in trouble."
His dad snorted. "I heard from one of the guys that she's alert, smart, able to argue logically, and unflappably controlled. He was impressed; unfortunately the City Police are impressed the wrong way. If she'd acted like a hysterical school girl, nobody'd doubt her for a second." He shot a glance at Joe, and shut his mouth on some further comment.
Joe looked at him, a bit surprised. "So... not falling apart in a crisis is a sign of guilt? The gossip is that her dad's lost his job and might be a member of the DWLF."
His dad choked, and tried to hide a laugh in a cough.
Joe eyed him.
A smile snuck out. "Nice to know you don't tell anyone about my job. Alice's dad is my boss."
Joe boggled. "Oh... Brown is such a common name, and you've mentioned his long commute a couple of times... I didn't connect them at all." He frowned suddenly. "So Alice can't come out and say where her dad works, and kill half the gossip, can she?"
"Nope. George is about to have a cow. Poor man, bit of a control freak, and not reacting well to being ordered to move in closer. And as a frantic father of a headstrong teenage girl?" His dad shook his head. "He's going to have an ulcer by the end of the week." The smile crept back. "And we'll have to force him into an autodoc."
"Huh." Funny how adults see kids. Alice seems decisive, dependable... I'll bet if she were thirty instead of fourteen, everyone would think she was a real heroine. Joe looked over and met Tommy's gaze. The bio tended to get out of the way when his dad was around, putatively so Joe could have some good Father-and-son time. Joe suspected his dad's impulsive movements and clumsiness had more to do with it. But this was relevant information, and Tommy had a legitimate need-to-know.
If Alice is grounded, or under parental supervision, she won't be able to help Barton Street beat the T-Rex. Except... she said...
"At any rate, George is going to take Alice to the office tomorrow, and watch her like a hawk all day. Poor girl."
As Alice would say, Holy Moly! She'll be right inside the T-Rex. Joe cleared his throat. "I expect she'll spend a lot of time in the Ladies."
His dad burst out laughing. "Sorry, but I can picture George pacing up and down the hall outside the door, steam issuing from his ears."
Joe grinned back. "Yeah." Now how do I get away to tell Barton Street something might happen tomorrow?
***
First stop in the FBI headquarters was with a sketch artist. Between her deliberate study of the man, the computer and the lady, they produced a good likeness of the swollen nose man. Then their facial recognition programs delivered a selection of photographs. None of them looked quite right. Inspector Haskell showed up and sent minions off to check them out.
The Inspector approved of her being here and safe all day. Or perhaps he approved of her being under control all day.
She pulled a chair into a corner of her father's office and started reading nine biographies. Taking notes. Childhood similarities, educations, early careers, marriages
and children, reaction to fame, consistency between what they said and how they lived. What they did in retirement. As a method of study it was rather chaotic, and she wondered how many times she'd get them mixed up. So long as I don't have George Washington ODing on a toilet, the teacher ought to be impressed.
She got good at shutting out her father's rustling around and talking on the phone, and jumped a bit when he touched her shoulder and suggested she come to lunch.
She met some of his colleagues while wolfing down a sandwich. The guy, Henry Stephanopolis, from her first interrogation was there. Without the SWAT helmet she recognized him. "You live in our Gym, don't you?"
He blinked. "That's why you looked familiar. You're the kid with the Bambi doll that gave me a Nazi salute. Hideously funny. Hard to believe they're really rats."
"They have the same chips that they use to rehabilitate brain damaged humans. They're very smart."
"For rats." Her father eyed her. "And I'm sure that was before I grounded you for taking them out."
"Yes, Father. In fact it was about the second day after we moved in, before you grounded me for the first time. We were exploring."
Mr. Mata nodded. "They make good pets, better than a hamster, at any rate."
Mr. Stephenopolis was grinning. "You moved in, what, two months ago and you've been grounded twice already? Surely not more?"
Her father growled a bit.
"Actually I was three quarters through a grounding when we moved in. So, two extensions of that in two months. So far."
Mr. Stephanopolis turned red and coughed a bit.
Mr. Mata turned to her father. "George, are you coming to the planning session for the switchover? Victor wants the whole team."
Her father stopped glaring at Stephanopolis. Sighed in exasperation. "I guess we'd all better go. Since we'll be the ones tracking down any security glitches."
Alice swallowed. "Are hackers going to try to get into the superstrand beta test? Umm, is that what you're talking about?"
Mr. Mata, who looked like he ought to be Professor Mata, answered. "Yes. The superstrand opticable is a high profile project. The hackers are already circling like hungry wolves. They each want the glory and notoriety of hacking something this big."