Chapter 20
The next morning, I raced through breakfast; I wanted to return to the lab before Li Lin-fa woke up. Mike snagged my arm as I was leaving the kitchen. "Nice work grabbing Lily yesterday," he said. "I assume you have her under control now?"
I nodded. "It took a bit of doing, though."
"How is she coming along?"
"Well, she was dirty, half-starved, dehydrated, and exhausted when I got her," I said, "and she had some minor injuries as well. Those bastards at Enclave sure don't know how to take care of her. I made sure she ate and drank something yesterday; I left her last night after she fell asleep."
"So Bill's suggestion worked?"
"Like a charm."
"That's good. Were you planning on going over there now?"
"Uh huh. I want to make sure she has breakfast and gets herself cleaned up. And you might recall that she's got a self-heal command; I thought I'd start her healing up her bruises and sprains."
Mike nodded. The last time we had captured Lily, she'd had a broken jaw. Shelley or Mike had given her the self-heal command then, and Lily had been as good as new less than twenty-four hours later. Not as fast as one of our healing comas, but still pretty damn impressive.
"Don't spend too long," he said. "Prime Commander tells me she wants to run a debrief on yesterday's mission sometime this morning."
"I'll do my best."
Lily was sitting on the floor outside the door to her cage when I teleported in. She didn't look up as I approached her, although she must have known that I was there. Her eyes held that thousand-yard stare that told me she was currently in operator mode. That was disappointing; I would have liked to say hello to Li Lin-fa.
She definitely looked better than she had yesterday. A full tummy, some water to replenish her fluids, and a good, long night's rest had worked wonders for her. While I wouldn't ever describe operator-mode Lily as "chipper", she was the closest thing to it. She was still dirty, though, and I could tell she still needed a shower and a change of clothes. Funny, I hadn't noticed any of that yesterday when Li Lin-fa had been kissing me.
I stared at her for a moment, thinking; it occurred to me that JB Swift probably didn't oversee every aspect of getting her up every morning. Perhaps Lily had some sort of command to cover her morning toilette, although if she did, I didn't recall what it was off-hand. "Lily," I said, "what do you do after you wake up?"
Lily, still staring off into the distance, gave no sign that she had heard me. As well she might, because I suddenly remembered that she did not respond to questions, only to direct commands. "Lily," I ordered, "tell me what you do after you wake up."
This time, her response was immediate. "My morning routine is to perform any needed bodily eliminations, to shower and otherwise clean and groom myself, to put on fresh clothes, and to prepare and eat a meal. To get me to perform my morning routine, say 'Perform your morning routine.'"
Yup, just like I had thought. "Lily, perform your morning routine."
"Performing . . ." Lily murmured as she moved to obey.
While Lily went about her business, I prowled around the lab, familiarizing myself with the place. By watching where Lily came and went, I figured out where the bathroom and kitchen were. I hadn't really thought about it before, but it looked like JB Swift needed to eat just like anyone else. At least, I found food in the cupboards which most likely wasn't meant for Lily, who normally ate some sort of vegetable paste and drank only water. There was also a second room with a bed, which was probably where he slept, and what looked like a small gymnasium. It wasn't as nice as ours, but was probably adequate for what Lily would need.
When Lily finished her breakfast and cleaned up afterwards, she settled herself in the same spot she had been, cross-legged on the floor just outside the door to her cage. "Lily," I said, "show me where you normally go when you self-heal."
"Showing . . ."
She led me over to what looked like an examination table somewhere in the middle of the large room. I had seen this particular table, or its counterpart in another lair, once before when Lily had been dying from hypothermia. At my command, she lay down on it. I said, "Lily, tell me how long it would take you to heal yourself."
Lily was silent for nearly a minute. I was just about to repeat the command when she blinked twice and said, "Parsing command . . ." Another minute went by. "I have never had to estimate time-to-heal before. Estimating . . ." Another minute, and then she blinked twice more. "Given the current state of my injuries, I estimate time-to-heal as two hours with a margin of error of three hours."
Great, I thought. It would take her somewhere between minus one hour and five hours to fix herself up. Still, I decided that was better than no estimate at all. "Lily," I commanded, "self-heal."
She closed her eyes and murmured, "Self-healing . . ."
I remained where I was for another few minutes, looking down at her. She might have been asleep, except that operator-mode Lily never slept. Her breathing was deep and regular, and she appeared completely relaxed. Peaceful, even.
Eventually, I shook myself out of my reverie. We had her, she was safe, and there wasn't much chance that she would get away from us again. There was no sense in hovering over her like some lovestruck guardian angel, so I asked Wizzit to teleport me home.
When I arrived, I half-expected to find everyone impatiently waiting for me in Shelley's office. Instead, Mike and Trina were in the common room talking and I could hear Angie banging around in the kitchen, humming to herself. I couldn't see anyone else. "What gives?" I asked Mike. "Where is everybody? I thought we'd be all ready to start the debriefing."
"That's been postponed until the afternoon."
"Why is that?"
He shrugged. "I'm not sure. First I heard about it was when Nicolai came charging out of the weapons room, all excited about something or other, with Padma on his heels. They grabbed Shelley, and a few minutes later, Shelley grabbed Toby. I even heard her ask Wizzit to see about getting Bill in here, too. They're all in the weapons room right now, talking up a storm about something."
I frowned. I knew that Toby had been Nicolai's tech assistant before Padma came along, although he hadn't had anything to do with it for nearly a year now. It sounded, though, like Shelley was getting everyone who had ever done tech work for us involved in whatever Nicolai was all excited about. "Any idea what it's all about?"
"Not a clue. She just said they would be busy until sometime after lunch."
Trina said, "I would imagine that it has something to do with the readings Wizzit took on that Unity field generator yesterday. But what exactly, I would have no idea."
"Wizzit?" I said to the ceiling speakers, "could you explain what's going on with Shelley and the others?"
"He's no help," Mike put in. "We've been asking, and he's not telling."
"So we're just waiting to hear," Trina concluded.
I looked at the clock. There were still a couple of hours left before lunchtime, and there was nothing to do. Well, almost nothing. "Have either of you ever installed microsensors?" I asked.
Trina shook her head. Mike said, "Sure, Shelley and I put 'em in the stronghouse the first time we captured Lily." He raised an eyebrow. "Do you reckon we should start installing them in JB Swift's old lair?"
"Wizzit said he would have Nicolai and Padma do it," I said, "but as long as they're tied up and we don't have anything in particular to do, why not?" I looked up at the ceiling speakers. "Hey Wizzit, do you mind if we start installing microsensors in the lair?"
"That is an excellent suggestion, Trevor," Wizzit said promptly. "I will have Nicolai pull four packages; he'll have them for you in the weapons room in just a few minutes."
I glanced at Mike and Trina, frowning. "Four packages?"
"Your sister?" Trina suggested with a smile.
"Oh, right!" And I went off t
o the kitchen to collect Angie.
Wizzit's microsensors are these nifty little gadgets that let him monitor pretty much anything he wants to in any place they're installed. Each microsensor is sort of a combined microphone and 360-degree camera, all contained in a little blob of putty not much bigger than the head of a pin. A single microsensor by itself won't do much, but if you stick a whole bunch of them on the walls of a room, along the ceiling, on the underside of chairs and tables, and pretty much anywhere else you can think of, then the composite image they present can be clearer and more detailed than the sharpest video camera you can imagine.
So that's what we did, all over the lair. It wasn't hard work, and Trina and Angie picked up the nuances right away, but it took us a while to get through the entire lab, even with Wizzit telling us when we had enough of the little guys in a particular area and pointing out where he still had blind spots.
I was just putting up some of the little blobs on the walls of what I had decided was JB Swift's bedroom when I heard Angie calling to me. I stepped out into the main room and found her over by Lily's healing table.
"Is this her?" she asked me, staring down at my favorite lady minder. (Actually, I probably shouldn't call her that any more; Lily would not be baby-sitting any more Enclave monsters ever again, not if I had anything to say about it.) "I mean, I recognize that it's her, but . . ."
"Uh huh. It's Lily."
"Is she asleep?"
"Sure looks like it, doesn't it?" I replied. Actually, I thought she more resembled a vampire resting in her coffin -- eyes closed, face expressionless, lying flat on her back with her legs straight and her hands folded across her lower belly. All she was missing was the fangs. "But no, she isn't really sleeping. She had a fair amount of bumps and bruises when we brought her in, so I gave her the self-heal command."
"You mean, like a healing coma?"
I shook my head. "Not exactly. Our force shields provide our healing comas, and she doesn't have anything like that. What she does have is a built-in command that does sort of the same thing, only not as efficiently."
Angie looked down at her for what seemed like a long time. "What other commands does she have?"
"I lost count somewhere around two dozen," I said, laughing. "I think Wizzit has the complete list, if you want to ask him about it sometime. The main thing to know about her, though, is that she has four of these mental states she calls 'modes': Operator mode, where she basically sits around waiting to be told what to do; commander mode, when she's ordering Zoinks around; attacker mode, where --"
"Yeah, I know all about attacker mode," she interrupted me wryly. "I can still feel the bruises from the last time she attacked me."
Well, okay, I knew that was an exaggeration, but I laughed anyway. "The fourth mode is something she calls companion mode. It's just a bunch of pre-built personalities you can have her assume for a period of time."
"You say it's called companion mode?" she repeated. "Does that mean she's supposed to keep you company or something?"
"Uh huh. Something like that."
"Okay, so . . . what kinds of personalities do you get to pick from?"
"Well, let me think for a minute . . ." I tried to come up with some of the more innocent-sounding ones that Lily had listed when I had originally asked her about it, but I couldn't remember any. Perversely, the only one that came to mind was "teenage prostitute". "There's, um, let's see . . ."
Seeing my hesitation, Angie crossed her arms and fixed me with a suspicious eye. "This companion mode -- it's really all about sex, isn't it?"
"No!" I said hastily. "I mean, yeah, there's that aspect to it, but you don't have to use it that way. If you want, you can ask her just to be someone to talk to."
"Uh huh," she replied skeptically. "And how many times, big brother, have you used companion mode just to have someone to talk to, hmm?"
I closed my eyes and gave myself time to take a breath, then let it out again; she had touched a sore point with me. "You sound just like Joy, you know that?" I said, giving her a tight smile. "I'll have you know, little sis, that no one has ever fired up Lily's companion mode, not as far as I'm aware. Not even me. And no one ever will."
"Never?"
"Never. I mean it. Sure, I like the idea of having someone as pretty as Lily, you know, do things, but not like that. Not when she doesn't have a choice. That'd be too much like -- like rape."
I dropped my gaze a little. "Mainly, I just want her to turn out okay, little sis. Her life is going to be messed up enough as it is, assuming she'll ever be able to have something like a normal life. I don't want to do anything to make things harder for her, especially something that could be as emotionally damaging to her as companion mode."
The disbelieving look Angie was giving me changed subtly to one that I couldn't interpret. Then she abruptly turned away and swiped at her eyes, almost as if she were wiping away tears. "You're no fun to tease!" she muttered softly. "Dammit, why does my big brother have to be such a nice guy all the time?"
We finished putting up the microsensors a little past mid-morning. Things got a little more complicated after that, because Wizzit also wanted us to install a few sets of speakers in strategic spots in the main room and at least one set in Lily's cage, but between the four of us, we more-or-less managed to suss it out. And by the time we got to the crowning glory -- plugging in a little doohickey that was designed to let Wizzit assume control over the computer systems and remote-manage the vid screens and such -- it was nearly time to go back to HQ for lunch.
When Shelley and the others emerged from the weapons room over an hour later, they found Mike, Trina, Angie, and me waiting for them in the kitchen. Shelley sniffed the air. "Something smells good," she commented.
"I made soup," I said. "Chicken noodle with vegetables -- your favorite. A big pot of it, and from scratch, too, not a can."
"Great, I'm starving!"
She started eagerly toward the stove, but I stepped in front of it to block her. "Uh uh, not just yet," I told her. "You have to earn it first."
Shelley raised her eyebrows. "Okay, what do I have to do to get some?"
"Nothing much, Commander," Mike said, leaning back in his chair and studying his nails. He breathed on them and casually buffed them on his shirt. "Just tell us what the hell the five of you have been doing in the weapons room for the past four hours."
Shelley turned slowly to look at the other three who had followed her into the room. Nicolai shrugged; Toby and Padma looked blank. Shelley said, "You mean Wizzit didn't tell you?"
"He wouldn't say a thing," Trina said.
Angie added, "Which is why we've been forced to resort to blackmail by food."
"I thought it would be premature, Commander," Wizzit piped up. "I decided to wait until we had come up with a plan of action."
Shelley looked up at the ceiling speakers. "And the idea that it would be fun to hold out on them never crossed your mind?"
"Never!" Wizzit did a good job of sounding shocked. "Commander, I have only the best interests of the team at heart."
Angie might have believed that, the poor naive child, but I doubt anyone else did. Shelley began to chuckle. "At any rate, it's a situation that's easily remedied. Let's all sit down and we'll tell you about it."
"So, this Unity belt can be used for more than just turning off our force shields?" Mike said a little while later.
"That's right," Shelley replied. She accepted the bowl of soup I handed her. "Thanks, Trev. That's the reason Bill and Nicolai spent so much time trying to make one a few years ago."
"Where is Bill, anyway?" Angie asked.
"He's due to give a lecture in . . ." She glanced at the clock. ". . . about half an hour. He had Wizzit teleport him back to his office."
"The reason we're interested in the Unity belt has to do with divisibility," Nicolai said. "Our force shields are al
l based on prime numbers because prime numbers are strong. Each Prime's force shield can be successfully compromised only by a number which divides it -- either the prime itself, which can't happen, . . ."
"Or unity," Trina finished for him.
Nicolai gave her a grin. "Exactly. Which is how Lily's device was able to affect us so readily." He slipped a spoonful of soup into his mouth, and after a moment he looked up, surprised. "This is really good," he said. He furrowed his brow at me. "You made this?"
"Oh, come on! I just told you I did, didn't I?" I said indignantly. "I do know how to make more than just second-rate Chinese food. Trevor Chiao is a man of many talents and many cuisines. Plus, I found a pretty good internet cookbook."
"Well, wherever you found this recipe," Shelley declared after her own first spoonful of the stuff, "don't lose it. This one's a keeper."
"But why exactly do we want something like this Unity belt," Angie asked, "if all it does is attack us Primes?"
"Good question." Nicolai paused for another mouthful of soup. "Think of it this way. Suppose you were wearing a suit of armor, and then suppose there was someone who could somehow extend their hand inside this armor and reach your most sensitive, most vulnerable areas. That hand could represent the fist of an enemy, striking you down, but it could also represent something quite different, could it not? Say, the gentle caress of a lover?" He smiled almost dreamily when he said this last and reached out to take Padma's hand.
Nicolai's a good guy, but he's also kind of a nerd, and I think his romance with Padma (or whatever it is; no one's quite sure) sometimes leads that giant brain of his down some unexpected paths, such as a tender moment right in the middle of a technical discussion like this. There was an awkward silence during which everyone else in the room did their best to look away from the two of them. Padma's skin is so dark, it's impossible to tell when she's blushing, but I'd have bet a penny that her face felt red-hot right about then.
Mike was the first to speak. "Yes, well, thank you for that mental image of a lover caressing your most sensitive areas, Nicolai," he said dryly, "but to get back to the matter at hand --"
"To get back to the matter at hand," Padma jumped in, eager to change the subject, "the point is that the Unity field can certainly be used to attack our force shields, to disable them, but it can also be used instead to strengthen them, to bolster our powers. Or that's the theory, at least."
"Bolster them how?" Trina asked.
"It's unclear," Wizzit told everyone. "I have been studying the effects of force shields on human anatomy for only sixteen years, after all. I don't know everything yet."
"We think -- or rather, Bill thinks -- that any of several things could happen," Shelley said. "It could be a straightforward power boost -- more strength, more speed, faster reflexes for everyone. Or it could make special powers like the shock wave more accessible to some of the junior members of the team. Or it could facilitate a smoother energy flow from the power grid, giving us a faster recharge time when special powers are used."
"Or it could be something completely different," Nicolai said with a shrug. "We're not sure. But one thing it will not give us is a full-scale force shield for whoever wears the Unity belt."
I frowned. "Why not? Because Lily had a full-scale force shield just a couple of days ago, or I'll eat a bug."
"Well, she did and she didn't. It depends on what you mean, exactly," Nicolai explained.
Toby snorted. "This is the part where they started to lose me," he muttered to me behind his hand. "Sounded like a bunch of double-talk, but he and Padma and Bill seemed to understand it."
"Why did they have you in there, anyway?" I asked him. "No offense, but you're not in the same league as they are."
He shrugged. "I'm not sure myself, mate. I think I was what's sometimes called back-fill. Bill has some side project he and Wizzit have been working on, but he's too busy to build the damn thing. So he handed me a bunch of schematics and told me to get to work. That much I can do, although it's going to take some time to shake the rust off."
There was silence when he stopped speaking. I looked up to see everyone staring at us. "Uh, sorry," I said, grinning. "Just a little sidebar. Please continue."
With a noncommittal grunt, Nicolai went on, "The number one, you see, is too . . . hmm, I don't really have the words to explain it to you. It's too bland, too colorless to provide a force shield. Not enough . . . umm . . . personality, I guess you could say."
I have to admit that, for a non-native speaker, Nicolai really has a good command of the English language. Still, his math-to-layman skills often leave something to be desired. I turned to Padma. "Could you translate that, please?"
She looked thoughtful. "I'll try. Let's use you as an example, Trevor. Your prime number is eleven. When you activate your force shield, the use of the number eleven adds a certain prejudice to the way you interact with the world."
"Prejudice?" Mike repeated. "It turns him into a bigot?"
"The word Bill used was 'bias'," Shelley explained, "not 'prejudice'."
Padma looked blank. "The two words have the same meaning, do they not?"
Shelley held up her thumb and forefinger about a centimeter apart. "Slight difference. Trust me, the word you want is 'bias'."
Padma shrugged. "Very well, it adds a certain bias to your interactions."
"You view the world in an asymmetrical way," Nicolai added. "From your perspective, it's partitioned into two camps: things which are divisible by eleven, and thing which are not. Of course, that's a gross oversimplification, but it represents the basic idea. And it is by exploiting that asymmetry that the force shield is able to allow some things to pass through and to prevent others, which is how it performs the functions to which you are accustomed."
"And that's why Lily couldn't really have a force shield," Shelley concluded. "There's no asymmetry to exploit. You can't use the number one to partition the world because everything's already divisible by one."
"But she did have a force shield," I insisted. "She had to have. You guys saw the vid. How could she have broken that stone if she didn't have a force shield?"
"To put it in the plainest possible terms, she was hijacking yours, Trevor," Wizzit said.
Nicolai looked pained. "Well . . . it's not exactly . . ."
"Of course, that's a gross oversimplification, but it represents the basic idea."
I blinked. It was Nicolai's voice I was hearing, but Nicolai hadn't spoken. It took me a moment to realize that Wizzit had simply replayed the remark he had made earlier.
Nicolai chuckled good-naturedly. "I certainly can't argue with my own brilliant words. Very well, she was, in essence, using your force shield against you. But not just you; the device appears to have been set up to steal from anyone, provided they were close enough."
"So now, all that remains," Shelley said, scraping the last noodle from the bottom of her bowl, "is for us to build our own Unity belt and see what it does. At the very least, its presence will prevent Enclave from deploying a similar device."
"But I thought we had tried to create one and failed," Trina said. "What has changed?"
Nicolai made a disgusted sound. "It was a stupid thing. The asymmetry I mentioned earlier also serves to stabilize our force shields. Without that asymmetry, the Unity belt was extremely unstable; used at any reasonable level of power, it would have destroyed itself within seconds."
"Doesn't sound so stupid to me, mate," Mike put in. "Sounds quite dangerous, in fact. How did Enclave manage to solve the problem?"
Nicolai looked away; it was obvious he didn't want to reply. Instead, Padma answered, "The solution is an obvious one. You simply don't run the Unity field for more than just a short period of time. The device turns itself off and on again very fast, somewhat like a fluorescent light. That way it doesn't have time to become unstable, and yet it stil
l provides all the benefits one would want. And the faster the field blinks off and on, the more powerful it can be."
"It's so simple, I should have thought of it myself, years ago," Nicolai muttered. "I hate to say it, but it's quite an elegant solution."
"The Enclave device would cycle itself approximately once a millisecond, and it had a range of a little over five hundred feet," Wizzit explained. "We could easily increase that to one megahertz, or a million times a second. That would let us increase the field strength by a thousand times, using a power supply such as that found in our Emeriti devices, which would in turn give us a ten-fold range increase in every direction. To benefit from the Unity field, you'd simply have to be somewhere within a mile of the person wearing the Unity belt."
"But of course, there is still much work to be done," Nicolai said. "And to do it, I need more chicken soup."
Attack Doll 5: The End of Lily Lee Page 20