Runaways nfe-16

by Tom Clancy

  "Not always," Bodo said. "Some of them were drilled out from the inside. For one thing, there's more than one way in and out of here."

  Megan raised her eyebrows, trying to conceal how worried she was feeling. "That's not what they say."

  "Shows what 'they' know," Bodo said. "But there's always a back door… that's what the programmers say. With a little practice, a little ingenuity, you can always find one."

  "But why?" Megan said. "If the whole point of this place is protecting the kids using it-"

  "Oh, yeah, it's good for that," Burt said. "No one's going to deny it. But at the same time, sometimes things can get a little.. stifling. You know? All the counselors, monitoring your every word to see if you're coming along.. Oh, of course they do, Megan, it's in the contract, we all know it. It's the one tradeoff they do require, a little. Privacy for safety."

  "And sometimes," Bodo said, "some of us find a way around it. Not obviously, mind you. But there are little pockets in this system that its sysops and programmers don't know about, and some of us have found ways to exploit them. 'Quiet' spots, like the reverse of the whispering spots under a dome-places where you can't be heard. This is one of them… Or else people devise ways to get 'out' into the Net without the monitors catching us and monitoring what we do or where we go."

  He smiled. It was an unusually angelic smile from someone whose looks proclaimed him as being on the outer edge of things, or at least headed that way.

  "It's like in the old days," Burt said, "and like it is now. If you can't meet other kids your age at home without being eavesdropped on, you go out and meet them on the corner. There are little 'street corners' here and there, scattered around Breathing Space…" He swallowed, for once looking just faintly nervous. "Megan, look, I can't go into a lot of details," Burt said. "But the door swings both ways. There are people who know about the street corners… and they meet you there and talk business. It's good business, and it pays enough to be interesting. It's nothing dangerous, nothing illegal. And that's all I'm going to say about it. I may have said too much as it is… "

  "I think you're okay," Bodo said, "but better drop it. The walls have ears around here." He looked resigned. "Come to think of it, even the air has ears."

  Megan sat there looking around them and the deceptively tranquil surroundings, her mind racing. She very much doubted that the Breathing Space administrators themselves, having gone to considerable trouble to set up a place where vulnerable kids would be safe from attack, would be in any way responsible for these covert recruitments to… what? There was no telling, and she thought it was unlikely she was going to get any more out of Burt on the matter. "So you're going to vanish all of a sudden," she said, "is that it? And I'm supposed to tell Wilma that this is all right, and there's nothing to worry about?"

  Burt had the grace to look slightly guilty. "I won't just 'vanish,' " he said. "I may drop out of sight for a few days at a time. I might do that anyway, you know. We're not prisoners here, they don't try to keep us against our will. Lots of kids come and go from the physical Breathing Space facilities every day without anyone getting all upset about it."

  This isn 't just anyone! This is one of my best friends, and your girlfriend, if you could just bring yourself to admit it! But plainly he couldn't. Megan looked down at Burt, sitting on his rock, and said, "Burt, I think this is a really bad idea. I wish you'd reconsider."

  He looked up at her with an expression that hardened as she watched it. "All my life," Burt said, "people have been telling me that my ideas were bad ones. Okay, sometimes they were. But even the good ones, they would claim were bad ones because they didn't agree with them. This is just more of the same."

  He got up. "I'm telling you, so you can tell her. Don't worry about me. I'll be fine, and I'll come back in better shape than I left… a lot better."

  Burt turned his back and headed off, up the slope of the next hill. Bodo glanced after him, then over at Megan. It was a surprisingly commiserating look. "I'll stay with him," he said. "As long as he lets me, anyway. He's a nice guy, even if he does kinda have a temper."

  "Uh, thanks," Megan said. Bodo sketched her a little salute, and went off after Burt. She watched them vanish over the next hill-literally, 'vanish'-first Burt, invoking the optional "invisibility" that the Breathing Space provided, and then Bodo, in his wake.

  Megan stood there silent for a moment or so. He's just angry, he 's taking it out on the people around him, he 7/ think better of it eventually and stop this kind of thing, Megan thought.

  But she doubted he'd do so very soon. Maybe that was her bad opinion of him talking. At the same time he obviously hadn't thought about the effect his actions were going to have on Wilma… or if he had, Burt didn't care.

  I can't let this just happen. I can't. It would be like letting someone drive drunk. Anything that happens to Burt, or to anyone who gets caught up in whatever he's going to do, would be on my head… and I couldn 't stand it afterward.

  Megan turned and made her way back to the doorway to her own space. Once there, she vanished the doorway and sat down at her desk under the hard back sky of near- Saturn space, leaned on her elbows, laced her fingers together, put her chin down on her hands, and thought hard.

  "Workspace manager…"

  "Listening, Megan."

  "I want all the information you can find about the history, management, and structure of the Breathing Space youth refuge facilities."

  "Finding that information for you now. Limiting parameters?"

  "None." It was going to land a terrible amount of information on her desk to be sifted through. But Megan had a feeling that buried somewhere in it all could be a hint of exactly what Burt was getting into, something that could help her help him.. and she wouldn't know what it was until she saw it.

  Her first and simplest impulse-to go straight to the Breathing Space people and 'blow the whistle' about what was happening-Megan had already rejected out of hand. All she had at the moment was hearsay evidence, and even though she felt certain Burt was telling her the truth, that wasn't going to count for much with the administrators of Breathing Space. She would at least need evidence of one of these "street corners," and an indication of how it worked, and she had neither. She might have to think about adapting a "mask," a false virtual identity, to see if she could find anything out that way. But that was very much a last-resort idea.

  "Ready," said Megan's workspace. "Warning: material comprises the equivalent of some four thousand typed pages."

  Megan smiled grimly. "Let's go."

  Rhea went around Saturn at least once while Megan sat there, reading window after window of text that scrolled through the air in front of her in hanging windows, watching flat movies and stereo screenshots and fiill-virt interviews and pieces of documentaries play themselves out on the floor of her amphitheater. She plowed through all kinds of data; description, commentary, interviews, editorials, testimonials, even precis of court cases-for there had been quite a few of these over the years, people trying to get at their estranged kids by (for instance) claiming that the Breathing Space people had brainwashed them, or even kidnapped them. Other people had tried bribery, or even blackmail, to subvert Breathing Space staff and get them to reveal the physical locations of runaways, so that they could be snatched. The environment itself had been hacked into spectacularly once in the very early part of the century, when virtuality as people knew it now was just getting started, then it had been briefly and disastrously exploited by a ring of criminals specializing in child slavery, and worse. Since then, the Breathing Space organization had made the reorganization and security of its virtual spaces its highest priority, next to the care of the kids those spaces sheltered. The Breathing Space "sheltered environment" was now as watertight and secure as anything could be these days… or so it was publicly claimed.

  But Bodo was right. Where there was a will to make an alternate way in, or out, someone would manage it. If hacking talent had ever been hard to acquire
since computers began, it certainly wasn't now. Most kids knew a whole lot about the guts of the Net at a very early age, since so much emphasis was put on it in school, both as a learning tool and a way to help you with your homework… not to mention all the rest of your life. A lot of kids, like those who got seriously into simming, learned a great deal about systems analysis and how to best exploit the hardware/software interface for their own hobbies and pursuits. It wouldn't take that much time, Megan supposed, to find out a fair amount about how to subvert the kind of safeguards that Breathing Space must have around its virtual territory. And like any guarded space, Megan thought, it would be most vulnerable to attack from within. From the very people it's supposed to be protecting.

  The problem is that nobody really likes to admit they need protection. She put her head down on her hands again for a moment. It implies that you're weak. Pretty soon you're looking for ways to prove you don't need any protection after all, you can take it, you're just using this place to get a little rest… and meanwhile, you 're bending the rules, and the system structure, so that you can do things your way.

  Control… it was all about control. "The great adolescent dilemma" was the phrase used by one of the editorial writers who'd experienced Breathing Space from the inside, briefly, and talked to some of the kids there. Well, maybe he was overdramatizing. But there might be something to it. No teenager Megan knew had been able to avoid moments when they thought they would just burst, or go crazy, because of pressure from parents or teachers not to assert themselves, not to do something unique or even slightly dangerous that they really wanted to do. The urge to get away on your own, ideally with enough money to make it pleasant, the urge to run your life… it seemed, sometimes, that as it got stronger and stronger with the approach of adulthood, your parents stepped on it harder and harder. Even the relatively light rein on which Megan knew her parents "rode" her sometimes irked her out of all proportion to the actual control. She had never left home, but there had been times when the thought had crossed her mind, all right. How much more was someone like Burt going to feel the urge…?

  Meanwhile, none of this solved the basic problem. What was this "work" that Burt was so interested in?

  And why would anyone be offering kids in Breathing Space work? Though Breathing Space itself as a charitable organization was a wonderful idea, Megan very much doubted that any altruism was behind these offers. The world was just too full of people busy taking advantage of other people, and the fact that the approaches were being made in secret made Megan even more suspicious. Surely anyone legitimate would simply go to the environment's administrators and offer to help employ their clients when they got out. It would be wonderful publicity… for anyone who wanted publicity.

  Well let's try to approach this logically. Just what has Breathing Space got?

  Runaways.

  No, she had to be less judgmental about it. Good strategic analysis meant taking a concept apart into its smallest possible pieces, not trying to work with a large emotive whole. Troubled kids, Megan thought, usually under legal age. Sometimes, people who've been declared missing persons, or are otherwise in some kind of trouble with the law.

  … Not exactly your optimum employees. These kids might not have a fixed address, and might not want one. They probably wouldn't have much of a work record… sometimes might not have documentation, or might not even be eligible to work, depending on where they are.

  Now what kind of employer-

  "Megan?"

  She looked up at the sound of her father's voice, one of the exterior outputs for which she allowed her workspace to interrupt her. "Yeah, Dad?"

  "I've already eaten lunch twice," said her father's voice, with a slight echo around it that made him sound a little like the Great and Powerful Oz. "I would do it one more time just for the heck of it, but then your mother would start calling me 'The Gut That Walks' again. So can I please have my office back?"

  "Oh, jeez, sorry Dad, I forgot where I was!" Megan got up from the desk, glanced around at the litter of frames, frozen videos and virteos, and still and solid images littering the floor of her amphitheater. "Workspace manager, save everything… "

  "Saved." The voice then added, "This is a prescheduled reminder." And in her own voice it said, "Answer the mail, Megan, it's lying around all over the place!"

  She sighed. "Later," she said. "Shut down-"

  She blinked her implant off and found her father sitting in front of her and off to one side, in one of the few chairs in his office that wasn't covered with books laid out open and facedown. The sun had moved around the house, so that it was starting to come in these windows now; her father had drawn the blinds against the hot afternoon light. "Heavy session?" he said. "Or just catching up on the mail?"

  "I wish," Megan said. She stretched, feeling a sudden ache in her back that hadn't been there before. "Dad, does this chair need to have its massage machinery checked?"

  'They just tuned it last month, honey, when the support people came around to do the usual maintenance." He looked thoughtfully at her. "Any possibility that it's just stress?"

  " 'Possibility'!" Megan said, and laughed, but there wasn't much humor in the sound.

  "Anything you care to talk about?" her dad said as he sat himself down in the chair.

  Megan took a deep breath, then shook her head. "Not until I know for sure what I'm talking about," she said. "Is the other machine free?"

  "For a miracle, yes," her dad said. "Your brothers both decided to go out at once… the place has been unnaturally quiet. But, Megan, why not have some lunch first. If you're going to worry about things, there's no point in doing it on an empty stomach."

  Her stomach growled emphatically. "Yeah," Megan said, "not a bad idea… "

  The simple fact of hunger distracted her more than Megan would have thought. Even when she was done eating a sandwich that would have astonished even Mike, she didn't much feel like going virtual again that afternoon. It was partly that Megan was conscious of spending a whole lot of her time in the Net lately, more than usual, but also an acknowledgement of a feeling of discomfort with Burt's basic problem. For all her occasional problems with her brothers and her parents, Megan was troubled by the concept of home as Burt must see it; as a place you didn't want to be, somewhere you wanted at all costs to escape from. Maybe if I'm going to figure this out, she thought, later that evening, while curled up with her father's immense copy of The Complete Dickens in a chair in the living room, I'm going to have to try to think more like someone who doesn 't see home as the center of life, the safe place… There were certainly enough people in Dickens' writing who felt that way, and Megan spent the rest of the evening immersed in David Copper- field, trying to get a handle on the insecurity and the pain.

  The next morning was Monday morning, and for Megan, Burt's business and the matter of whatever was going on at Breathing Space retreated somewhat into the background, especially after she left a virtmail for Wilma about having seen Burt, and Wilma didn't answer it, though her system acknowledged that she'd read it. Maybe he's been in touch with her, finally, Megan thought. Maybe things have gone off the boil, a little… Which would be good. While the school year was fast winding down toward summer, there were still final exams to think about; in particular, the upcoming advanced- placement math final was giving her the creeps. She had been doing all right in classwork, and much to her relief had finally been getting to grips with the parts of calculus that had been eluding her, these last couple of months. But now, with the final exam only two weeks away, Megan was starting to get nervous. She left the virtmails piled up on her desk for the next couple of days, and spent practically all her free time immersed in integrals and other associated discomforts, telling herself that she would never need this junk once she was working for Net Force as a strategic operations analyst. And when that day comes I'll toast marshmallows over my burning math books…

  It was fairly late Wednesday evening when she looked up from her fourt
h attempt to solve one particularly knotty integral and glanced at where Saturn was in the sky. She did a quick calculation in her head. My God, it must be eleven-thirty, Megan thought. Why am I still here torturing myself like this?

  She looked down at the integral on the math-workbook datapad on her desk. "Oh, go on," Megan said in annoyance, "show me the answer."

  Her handwriting on the surface of the pad disappeared, to be replaced by the tidy print of the workbook program's output. Megan leaned down to look at the result, started to swear, and then stopped herself. Too damn simple, she thought. Why do I always go at this stuff the complicated way? Sometimes it's genuinely easy. Why do I have trouble believing that?

  She straightened up, and at the same moment heard the sound of someone "knocking" for admission to her workspace. "Yeah?" Megan said.

  Wilma stepped suddenly out of the air into her space. That surprised Megan. Wilma wasn't terribly good at staying up late. "Wil? What's up-"

  But immediately, from the look on Wilma's face, Megan knew. "Have you heard from Burt at all lately?" Wilma said, urgent.

  "Uh, no, not since Sunday. I've been sort of busy-"

  "He's gone," Wilma said.

  Megan let out a long breath. "Gone where?"

  "I don't know. I tried to get in touch with him a couple of times. Monday, Tuesday… He was there, but he wasn't available. I left him virtmails. No answer. And then, a little while ago, I queried them again… " Wilma shook her head, and her face was a study in shock, the face of someone coming to terms with something she'd been trying hard to believe wouldn't happen for a long while yet. "He took all his things this afternoon, they said, and left Breathing Space… "

  Megan swallowed. Oh, God, did I make this happen sooner than it might have otherwise? she thought, flushing first hot and then cold with fear. So this is how you keep him from "driving drunk99? Hey, nice work.

  "Megan, what am I going to do? We've got to find him!" Wilma said.

  "Yeah," Megan said. "We'll find him." But she had no idea how.