Kim’s drama naturally stepped all over his win. But he also recognized the opportunity it presented.
“I have to go to the plant,” he said, sitting at the boardroom table of the conference realm they’d rented. “You guys have shit to do. Sons to rescue.”
They all shouted at him at once over that. But for fuck’s sake, it was true. He was the only one who could go. The crew at the power plant, the Yellowstone Project, the YP, didn’t trust anyone else.
He’d hoped Kim had raised hell in the YP’s network, and boy did she ever. The log files they sent him showed it had been torn up seven different ways from Sunday. They were forced to use an unduplicate to do fucking basic ops. It was like strapping a Ferrari to an agricultural pump and hoping for the best.
“No,” Kim said, “he’s right.” She was a sunken, pale version of herself. The neuroBlock they put her on kept her functional, but that was about it. His crack about her son didn’t seem all that funny anymore. “Spencer goes west, we go south. That’s the last place Emily and…”
Your son.
She swallowed, and Spencer was glad he kept that one on the inside. She continued, “and Will were last seen. Spencer does the scouting while we figure out where they are.”
With Kim on his side, there would be no arguments. He got to take point.
“Yes!”
“Settle down, Beavis,” she said. “You’re not going alone. I need to make some arrangements. Get your stuff together. Mike will meet up with you before it’s time to leave.”
***
As usual, his mom was the one who got in the way of his plans. Fucking parents never understood anything.
“This is your father’s doing, isn’t it? I knew letting him spend more time with you was a mistake.”
Mom always blamed everything on Dad, and Dad always blamed everything on Mom. Sometimes it was useful. It made it easier to play them off each other when he needed cigarette money. There were other times, though, when he didn’t have the energy to juggle their craziness.
This was one of those times.
“No, it’s not,” he said. “It’s not anybody’s doing. I saw an opportunity, and I took it. It’s only for a week. They’re sending me my homework. It’s work-study, Mom. A tremendous opportunity.”
Thank God this had all gone down just as the term was ending. He’d spun it as a work-study vacation that caused him to miss a week of school. If it worked out, he’d be back before Christmas. If it didn’t, then it wouldn’t matter. They had all seen the plans. Nobody would care if he failed. They’d be too busy being dead.
But Spencer wasn’t going to fail. This was going to be motherfucking awesome.
Assuming he could get past Mom.
“You never talk these things over with me,” she said. “This is worse than when you got lost in China. Why did I ever agree to you running off with that friend of yours?”
If it hadn’t been for Mike, Spencer would have driven off a bridge to get away from this little town. Mike gave him a for-real job that made for-real money. He didn’t have to worry about scholarships anymore. Financial independence from his parents would be the best graduation present he could ever give to himself.
But she never focused on that. It was always about Dad’s screwups and how she couldn’t protect her only son.
“I came back then, Mom, I’ll come back now. Besides, you’ll get to spend more time with Horace.”
Mom had started dating not long after the divorce settlement had been signed. Horace was a drinking buddy she picked up at the Pendleton Inn, a tin shack of a place right next to the Arkansas River. He was a giant, rough-looking white guy with a beer gut and a brand-new Harley that shook the house every time he pulled into the garage. When Spencer first met him, all he could think was meth dealer. What the hell else could the man be?
He was wrong, though. It turned out Horace was legit, a mechanic from nearby Dewitt who’d gone to high school with Mom back in the day. He was scary intense, but Spencer was starting to think he might be good for her. Mom was making an effort to clean up, not only herself but the house, too. He hadn’t seen a full ashtray in months.
“Spencer, you’re sixteen years old. Do you know what my mother will say when she finds out you’re gone again?”
“I don’t care what Maw-Maw thinks.” Her gasp was loud, but he kept going. “I will never have an opportunity to work with unduplicates like this again. It’s so rare.”
The work-study thing was horseshit, but the opportunity was real. He had looked up June du Plessis as soon as the YP had told him that would be his contact. She had big time cred. Mike had found evidence of three unduplicates in the logs. Three. That only happened in story books.
Mom caved like he knew she would. “Spencer, I don’t like this at all. You call me every day to let me know you’re okay.”
“Absolutely.” He set up an automated scrivener agent to make the calls and an AI to write the notes. “If I can.”
“Oh, no. No if. You’re still my son, and you’ll do what I tell you.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He bent down and kissed the top of her head. She wasn’t very good at her job, but she was still his mom. “Every other day.”
She hugged him. He could still remember burying his face in her belly when she did that, but now she was tucked under his chin. Sometimes growing up sucked.
“I may not have married well, but I ended up with a great kid.” She looked up at him. “Be careful, please?”
“I promise.” It wasn’t a lie. Well, yeah, it was a lie. Horace would take care of her. That’s what mattered.
Mike called not long after and went over the details of their plan. Kim had altered the deal. In a good way.
“You’re kidding, right?” Spencer asked him.
“Not at all.”
“Edmund has to work with me?” Edmund was the most annoying person, AI or otherwise, Spencer had ever met and… “He has to do everything I say?”
“Don’t push it.”
Spencer had known since he was seven that realmspace, and especially AIs, would be his ticket out of small-town hell. He wasn’t a math whiz, which had worried him for a long time. Scholarships went to kids who could master calculus, while Spencer was still spinning his wheels against algebra. Then he met Fee, who introduced him to Mike, and then all hell had broken loose. It turned out Spencer had a natural talent, not only with realmspace, but with the creatures that inhabited it.
And now he’d be in charge of Edmund. “Kim agreed to this?”
Mike rolled his eyes. “Yes, she’s agreed to it. Stop being such an asshole. It’s crazy over here. We’re chasing down every lead we can find about Will.”
Spencer knew it wasn’t about Kim’s kid, it was about them white-knighting off to another rescue. Which was fine as long as it gave him an excuse to get out of town.
“Be careful, Spencer.”
“I’ve pulled your butt out of the fire how many times now? Two? Three? Don’t sweat it, man. I got this. I promise I’ll wear clean underwear and brush my teeth after every meal. Now can I have the access tokens?”
Spencer grabbed them, cut the connection to Mike, and then transitioned to Edmund’s realm. This time around, it wasn’t some sort of hovel from the Middle Ages. It was an upstairs apartment from the Middle Ages.
“God, Edmund, what is that smell?”
The AI came around a corner, futzing with the white lace that stuck out from under the sleeves of his black overshirt. “I sent the servants for their annual bath. God, the screams. They’re in storage for now, though. I was getting the stench out of the furniture, and then you came along.”
Edmund’s realms were always realistic, including the avatar he forced Spencer to use. The stink made his eyes water in realspace. “Well, if you didn’t live in the fucking Dark Ages, I’d be able to take a bath, too.”
“This isn’t the Dark Ages, you little twit. It’s the sixteenth bloody century. You know, the Renaissance? The potato
is all the rage. Indoor plumbing is right around the corner. Queenie is lopping heads off left and right.”
Spencer could shut him up with a command now, block the avatar Edmund forced him to wear forever, but he didn’t want to. Edmund worked better with fewer commands and restrictions. All unduplicates did. The access Kim granted him did allow him to ditch the clothes, though, and the smell. He punched the root password in and changed the wardrobe contracts to allow modern stuff. Simulated T-shirt and blue jeans, at last.
Edmund paled. “Do I have a new master?”
“Nah, man. We’re fucking partners!”
He threw his duffel into the back of the BMW. It was exactly what he’d done when he rescued Mike and Kim, turning his life inside out and upside down. It was even the same model SUV, a replacement for the one a bizarre computer glitch sent sailing into a lake less than a year before.
After he got on the road and headed in the right direction, Edmund gave him a realm address. “Put the car on autodrive. It’s time for your first lecture.”
He’d hoped to catch up on his realmComics. “Lecture? I don’t need a stinking lecture.”
“Master Spencer, you are trying to disguise yourself as an AI expert coming to help a real AI expert. You forget I am a researcher. Dr. June du Plessis is possibly the only person who exceeds Master Mike in knowledge of that field. If you show up prattling on like a peasant who’s just fallen off the turnip cart, she will spot you in an instant.”
He had a point, but Spencer would never admit it out loud. “So?”
“It is time to go to class.”
Spencer accessed the realm. The setting wasn’t exotic: a small modern classroom, very close to what his high school used. But there was another student. She was a tall, gangly girl, with long dark hair and big brown eyes.
Oh hell no.
Just as she started to push a lock of hair behind her ear, Spencer cleared his throat and said, “Command: simulation stop. Exception: moderator.” Ten years would fill her out, but he could already see the woman she would become.
Edmund was also subject to a moderator exception. Spencer hadn’t had time to change that, so he wasn’t frozen.
The unduplicate slapped a hand over his eyes. “You would take the one action guaranteed to set her off. I’ll have to restart the bloody simulation.”
“She’s my classmate?”
It wasn’t Kim. Nope, that would be too easy.
This was Angel-fucking-Rage.
Spencer checked the contract signature. Edmund had created a spun simulacrum AI. She was less sophisticated than Edmund, but that was like saying an X-wing was less sophisticated than a Star Destroyer. Plus, she had to have all of Edmund’s memories of Kim from that time period, captured in a level of detail only an unduplicate could achieve.
“Can I shake her hand in here?”
“Only if you want your arm torn off. You’ve grown far too used to being the smartest person in the room. At fifteen, and simulated, Mistress Kim will make you feel like a dog with half a brain. It will be an astounding improvement in your case.”
“She’s fifteen?” Right after Rage + The Machine got on the map.
Mike’s girlfriend was Kimberly Trayne, a grown woman who had put her career as the greatest cybercriminal in history behind her. This was Angel Rage, his hero, at the top of her game. For the next three years, Rage + The Machine would terrorize corporate America with epic raids that had never been equaled, could never be equaled.
Still, he had known the real thing for most of a year now. How different could she be?
“It’s okay, Edmund, you don’t need to reset the realm. I can handle her.”
“Spencer, this is Kim when she was a teenager, when she got the name Angel Rage. The simulation is as accurate as I can possibly make it. It would be extremely unwise—”
“It’s okay, Mom, I got this.”
Edmund sighed and moved behind the lectern at the front of the room. “Very well. Command: simulation continue.”
She shook her head and took a step back. A fire flew into her eyes, but it was the tone in her voice that set off warning bells. “What, I wasn’t real enough to be included in your little pause? He did explain how accurate I am, right?”
“Kim, it’s okay. I always wanted to meet you when you were this age.”
“I bet you did.” She closed her eyes and flinched.
That was what real Kim did when she did her unlock all the things thing. Surely this AI wouldn’t be able to—
Spencer wasn’t in realmspace anymore; he was in the truck staring at a window into the realm. “What the shit?”
The only functions on his phone that worked were the window in front of him and basic voice messaging. He had to use the goddamned external microphone in the truck to talk to them.
Edmund chuckled. “You see, Spencer, when I informed the mistress about my class plan, she wanted to be certain, well…”
New Kim sat on the desk beside Edmund’s lectern. “Real me wanted you to get the full experience of what I was like when I was your age.”
“But…you can’t…that’s not…” He was older than her! “Hey, you’re only fifteen!”
“I’m a hell of a lot more mature than you, and root codes to your phone work like the talent real me uses. Now, are we gonna have any more problems with private conversations? Think carefully, Spencer, otherwise you won’t be able to pay for dinner tonight.”
She was right. This New Kim had locked him out of his own bank account. “Okay, you win, you’re the boss.”
She rolled her eyes. “I don’t want to be the boss.” The phone unlocked and dumped him back into the realm, stumbling into a desk. New Kim got a haunted look he knew all too well from the original. “I never wanted to be the boss.”
She blinked, and then a real smile came out. “Never mind. Okay, Edmund, let’s all find out what ten years of progress has done for realmspace.”
After an hour spent on emergent AI protocols, Spencer knew Edmund was right. New Kim was smarter than he was. Once he got over the intimidation factor, it wasn’t half bad.
Chapter 21
Kim
A child. Her child. Kim kept thinking about it. A piece of her was out there somewhere, turning into a new person. It seemed appropriate when she thought about it. Kim had lived a rock star’s life, and now she had a rock star’s hangover: a kid she didn’t know about. That was never supposed to happen to a woman. Comedians had been making jokes about it for decades.
Kim had always harbored a secret desire for kids. Mama never married after Dad died, so as an only child, Kim had been an oddball in her extended Greek family. Everyone else had at least two brothers or sisters. Some had four or five. The moms always had this glow about them, and they looked so happy holding their babies. As an adult Kim knew it was more complicated than that. Big families were hard to manage, and the stress could be brutal. But that childhood impression of rightness had stuck with her.
Yet now that she had a kid…intellectually she knew a coincidence of biology meant very little in the grand scheme of things. She was not his mother, and if the universe made any sense, she never would be. It shouldn’t matter.
But it did matter. He had the same syndrome. Kim had an enormous store of strategies and tactics for survival. She knew what would and would not work on a child that young. What she couldn’t remember herself, Mama would be able to fill in. What to tell Mama about all this was too big a question to answer right now. Will was a child who had the same syndrome she did. DNA research would be awkward, but that was a long way into the future.
They had to find Will first.
They couldn’t go directly to law enforcement. Kim wasn’t an ex-con, but that didn’t matter much in the minds of a lot of cops. It was why she provided her services gratis to them any time they asked for it. That generated good will in her local community, but it would count for nothing in Richmond, which was where Will and Emily were last seen.
Plus, she h
ad better resources than they did. Mike could get into any realm, and she could hack the quantum fabric. As long as they were careful, it made for a powerful combination. Careful was proving to be a challenge, though. Flattening Trilogy could’ve put them all in jail. Thank God nobody had gotten hurt. The explosion had given the feds an excuse to search their compound, and kids opening presents don’t ask if Santa is still around. The theory they seemed to be settling on was that hauling the propane tanks up those logging trails had compromised them. Kim and her gang of misfits had gotten lucky, and only fools counted on luck. But she’d take it when she got it.
Spencer had already set out for Yellowstone, so now it was time for them to chase down their first lead on Will. It was obvious, and terrifying.
It also required a long road trip. The custom neural blocker the hospital had given her interfered with her ability to use realmspace—the conference yesterday had given her a brutal headache—so she was reduced to watching old movies on a virtual screen created by her phone and occasional checks of her TwitterBook to see what Mama was doing as they drove down to the interview. It was either that or stare at the road as it rolled by for more than six hours. There was no way she’d take a nap. With this looming in front of her, the nightmare was inevitable, and she didn’t want to wake up in the car screaming her head off.
Because only an idiot would think that Matthew Watchtell didn’t have anything to do with his own daughter’s disappearance.
The permission request to put her on his visitation list was printed on paper and physically mailed to her less than a week after he’d been put in prison. Kim shook when she realized what it was, who had touched it—she came close to dropping the thing. At the time she thought it was a way for him to spit in her eye, make her too frightened to think.
She filled it out and sent it back that very same day, never dreaming for a second she’d make the trek down to USP Lee, the high security federal prison in southwest Virginia.
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