"But I can explain—"
"You'll get your chance." She frowned before continuing. "Then you have this relationship —sorry but I don't know what other word to use—with the boarders, who besides saving my life appear to be no more than hyped-up gangbangers with a death wish."
"They're much more than that," he protested.
"I'm sure they are." Rebecca paused again as she tried to work out the emotions that were boiling within her. "But what I'm not sure about is what you are, or what you want with me." She stopped at that point, her emotions about ready to explode from her. She'd be damned if she'd allow him to see how scared, lonely and out of her element she really felt.
"Panchet, me and David were old friends," he began. "We went to UC Davis together. We worked on a lot of the same projects. We had the same ideals. Like you, Bec, we thought the ID, what has become of the World Wide Web, should be extra-territorial and not subject to any one society's regulations. David and I went one direction, Panchet went another. But the ideas merged in ideology, if not application."
"The boarders? You said they're more than mere gangbangers. Why do they follow him?"
"Because he's their deity."
"Because he has no legs?"
"No. Because he chose to have no legs. Panchet represents the ultimate in choice. He could walk if he wanted to, hell, I wouldn't be surprised if he had a pair of electronic legs in a closet that worked better than yours or mine. No, Panchet prefers the hover life. He chose it, and by doing so earned the respect of the board gangs."
"Is that it?"
"Oh yeah. I almost forgot. He was responsible for unifying the Cheng-Li Gauge Theory with the Irwin-Jones Twin Spin Theory."
She raised an eyebrow.
He clarified. "Panchet invented gravBoard technology."
"Then why is he working in the back of a porn shop? Why isn't he rich beyond all reason?"
"Because he was working for Lasing Industries at the time of his discovery and they took all the credit. Product of work and all that."
"Ahh, one of those."
"Yeah, one of those."
"But how does that explain your 'merged' ideologies?" she asked, her fingers making the double-quote sign as she said merged.
He leaned forward and placed both elbows on the table. He used his hands to accentuate his points. "You see the gravBoarders as gangbangers, going from place to place, guarding their turf or whatever. They wear colors, so they must have turf, right?"
She raised an eyebrow.
"Wrong." He grinned excitedly. "You're in a special position to understand who and what they are. Once you understand, you'll get a kick out of it." He waited to see if she was going to interrupt, then continued when she had nothing to say. "Let's think in terms of 2020 technology so that you can understand the implications. When you were caught chaos hacking your sniffer worm into the Pentagon, it was because the powers that be were able to track you back to your home computer through IP addresses. Right?"
"As good a summary as I've heard."
"The servers you routed through were stationary, some in basements, some in business offices and some cryogenically stored in server facilities. No matter where they were, no matter what layers of security they had, there was one thing they all had in common. They didn't move."
"Yeah."
"So tell me, Rebecca, what would be the benefit of having one of the servers in that chain move constantly?"
"Well, in order to trace a transmission, they'd have to do it prior to the server's IP address changing. Unless there was a pattern of change, once changed —once the server moved—it would render the sender invisible."
"Exactly."
She shook her head. "But I don't see how that relates to the gravBoarders."
He grinned madly. "Rebecca. The gravBoarders are the servers."
She looked long and hard at him, trying to make sense of what he said. If each gravBoarder represented a server, and information was passed through the server, by constantly moving about and accessing WIFI transponders placed at strategic locations throughout the city, the sender would be rendered invisible as their ID address changed and changed and rechanged. By increasing the number of gravBoard servers, the invisibility of the sender increased exponentially. She chuckled to herself. If she'd had that back in the '20s, she never would have been arrested. "And Panchet choreographs this?"
"Ah. You understand that magnitude. Yes, he choreographs it. So far the system has remained undetectable. But with the policemen today came the idea that we'd been burned."
"By one of the boarders?"
"Never. Either you caused it, or some extremely sophisticated surveillance."
She was about to say that she didn't do it, but then she was no longer aware of her own body. Could she have informed the police and didn't know it? "Maybe we were followed to Panchet's. Did anyone check?"
"That's being checked out now."
"What about cameras? If someone knew where to look, they could track us down much faster." She snapped her fingers. "They did know where to look. They followed the transponder on the collar, then reached the area."
Andy didn't look like he bought it. "I don't know. They showed up right beside us. Much too coincidental for my book."
"Do you think they cooperated with the Black Hearts? They can still track me through my organs, right?"
"Yeah. There's a scrambler in the safe house, but out on the street there are certain transponders that track and process the information for the levy owners."
"Then that's my bet. In fact, if the Black Hearts didn't want to act in public, what better way to get to us than through the authorities?"
"We're still not one-hundred percent sure the network isn't compromised."
Rebecca grinned evilly. "Then feed them information. Make it hard, but put out that we're at a different location. Then if someone shows, you can guarantee the net's been blown."
"Panchet's doing that right now."
"Oh." She sat back.
"Give him a few more hours to be sure, then we can go." Andy nodded at the couches that lined each wall of the house. "I don't know about you, but I'm exhausted and could use a few hours shut-eye."
Rebecca agreed, then chose a green couch with an Old World paisley pattern, the fabric worn smooth from thousands of uses. As soon as she lay on it, her body began to shut down. She was past the point of exhaustion. Her eyes slammed shut. The last thing she remembered before she was dragged off to a dreamland free of Black Hearts and gravBoarders was that Andy hadn't answered all of her questions.
Chapter 7
The fearsome chaos of the day soured her dreams. Half of her sleep she ran from the police and the Black Hearts, always on the verge of death, desperation fueling her flight. Psychedelic gravBoarders swarmed her like man-sized mosquitoes. Music blared from everyone's eyes, the discordant orchestration numbing her thoughts.
Finally she'd found a safe place inside the hotel room where she'd first met Kumi. But now dogs played poker around the table. Her brother spoke from the mouth of a bulldog. "Come on, Sis. Join us."
"Is a dog eat dog world," Panchet Rao said from the mouth of a Collie.
"Dogma I am God. Dogma I am God," chanted Kumi. Her piggish Pekinese face covered with lipstick and makeup as if she were human.
The bulldog growled as a man walked out of the bathroom with a needle. "Watch out, Sis. Here they come."
The pain of the needle woke her from one dream to the next. A pair of inVid zombies hauled her from her cell down a series of long corridors the cognitive part of her recognized as San Berdoo Max. They marched her to a sterile white room. Her escorts halted at the door, turned and faced outwards, drool lacing from their lips. She plodded numbly toward a line the color of dried blood that had been marked on the otherwise colorless floor. She stopped just shy of the line, looked up at an immense blank monitor that took up one wall, and waited.
She'd ceased wondering what the officials wanted of her long ago. Sh
e'd been here countless times. Sometimes they'd laud comments of goodwill upon her. Other times they'd browbeat her for accidental missteps that should have been ignored. But in a place where rule prevailed, any sign of disorder, even the most minuscule indication of chaos, must be removed.
Finally the screen blurred as the pale blue background was replaced with the face of Andy. His handsome features seemed twisted. His lip curled into a sneer. His eyes were arctic.
"Criminal Servant Rebecca Mines," he said. "You are hereby released from the San Bernardino Maximum Security Prison at Crestline after serving the majority-term of a twenty-year sentence for crimes against what was then known as the United States of America. After approved release by the Medical Evaluation Prospectors, you will be assigned an indentured representative who will assist you in societal reintroduction. Failure to abide to the articles of your parole will result in activation of autonomic inhibitors and the subsequent levying of organic functions to the Pacific Autonomous Resource Allocation Syndicate per Section 17 of the Singapore Autonomic Transfer Treaty of 2037. Do you understand everything that I have said to you, CrimServ Mines? Do you have any questions?"
Rebecca awoke to find Andy sitting on the couch rubbing her shoulder. She jerked away from him, but settled herself as the dream strands dissolved to reality. Her mouth tasted like a pit. Her muscles ached. She propped herself up on her elbows. "How long was I out?"
"Six hours."
"Jesus. It feels like six days." And it did. Her body ached like she'd been through a Triathalon. Or worse, a five round ear-biter with Mike Tyson. Everything she'd done, even walking, had been more than her body had been prepared to do after spending half a lifetime in a fifteen by fifteen foot cell. She sat up and groaned. Her calves were balls of steel-filled agony. The torture of her lower back hurt only half as bad as her upper back. If she were a home for sale, she'd need a thirty day overhaul.
"You hungry?"
"Famished. Let me clean up and then we'll talk about breakfast." She pushed herself off the couch and limped into the bathroom. The mirror told her the tragic truth. She looked all of her forty-four years. Pasty skin hung loose under her eyes. Her matted hair had lost its sheen. Drained of color, her lips were only slightly darker than the surrounding skin. Her blue eyes looked washed out grey. If she'd been back in prison, she'd have left it that way. After all, who was she going to impress? The guards?
But she'd been out for twenty-four hours. A day of freedom and she looked like ten miles of bumpy road. Who did she have to impress now?
Nobody.
The whole world.
And Andy.
For some reason she wanted to show her best face. So, she did what she could with water and soap. She'd kill for some make-up. With mascara and lipstick she might have hope. She began checking the drawers and cupboards which had been used as storage for wires, chipsets and other unidentifiable electronics. She found what looked like Vaseline, some chap stick and what might be like mascara. She was able to spike her hair and wash her face, but the mascara brush couldn't be more alien. Instead of what she was used to, this appeared to be nothing short of a stylus. No matter how many times she dipped it in the slim bottle and applied it to her eyelashes, nothing happened. Finally she tossed it back in the drawer. This was as good as she was going to get. How good was it? A long look in the mirror told her more than she wanted to know. She ignored reality and Hepburn-pretended, striding confidently back into the room.
Andy stood as she entered, looking just as good as he had the night before. He'd manage to find another T-shirt, and his jeans were wrinkled but clean. He looked her up and down. "Wished I cleaned up as well as you." He proffered a plastic tube about a foot long. "Here. All they have is old gamer grub."
Ignoring his flirtation, Rebecca accepted the food and read the directions on the side. She tore open an end and squeezed free an inch of what promised to be blueberry pancakes and sausage. Andy sat on the couch across the narrow room from her and only after he'd inhaled half of his did she take the most tentative of bites. It was delicious. She sat back on the couch and squeezed out more. Closing her eyes, she ate the rest of it in silence, pretending that she was sitting at a table in a normal kitchen doing normal things eating normal food. She could even taste maple syrup.
When she finished Rebecca got up, tossed the wrapper in the trash, then returned to the sofa. "Got one filled with coffee? I like mine with three sugars and two creams."
"No, but we can get you some java real soon."
"We can leave? What did Panchet tell you?"
"It was as you suspected," admitted Andy. "The network wasn't broken. You were followed."
"How do we keep from being followed again?"
"There's nothing we can do, really. We have at least two stops to make, Olga's and your grandmother's. We just need to make sure you aren't at either one of them for very long."
"I've been thinking," Rebecca said. "Do you think that those Black Hearts had something to do with David's death? I think it's too much of a coincidence that they were there right after he died. Almost as if they were waiting for me."
Andy nodded grimly. "I thought about that too. And you know what? I can't argue with your logic. But I still can't fathom why they killed him to get to you. They're into retrieval and espionage, not assassination."
"Yet they attacked like they were assassins."
"That they did." He smiled humorlessly. "I wished I had the answer, Bec. I really wish I did. If it helps, I spoke with Panchet and he's also working on it. It's only a matter of time before we figure this out."
Sometime between when she'd gone to sleep and now, Rebecca had remembered that she had some questions she needed answered. She had a problem with the drugs. She still didn't understand the relationship with the boarders. Panchet had created the technology. Andy was Panchet's friend. But what else? That couldn't be the whole tale. How would she broach it? Where she came from a person didn't just walk up and ask Are you a drug dealer?
She jerked as she heard a noise from the other room.
"Just a couple of boarders crashing out." Andy told her. "They need some down time."
She frowned. "Is it the drugs? Is that why?"
"Are you a prude, Bec?" Andy's eyebrows caterpillared. "Things are different now. The stimulants they need are legal."
She hated that word—prude. How dare he.
"Listen. I could tell you were wondering about this earlier, so let me come clean. Do I provide the drugs for Panchet's boys? Yes. Does that make me a drug dealer? Yes." He held out a hand. "But let me explain, okay?"
Rebecca nodded slowly. She wondered if she really needed to know. It wasn't as if she and Andy were going to become an item. Or were they? She'd known plenty of men in her life who'd done drugs. College was filled with them, programmers among the worst abusers. She'd even known a few who'd hooked-up their friends and had, arguably, become drug dealers themselves, depending on your point of view. But to think that Andy dealt drugs...why did that bother her so much? A week ago she wasn't even thinking of him. A day ago they'd just met again after twenty years. Rebecca reminded herself that Andy was the first man she'd talked to at any length since her incarceration. Maybe what she was feeling was familiarity.
"Live fast, die young boarders don't grow on trees. Neither do they advertise on the vids," Andy explained. "Those who want the life aren't the types who hang out in the places regular folk go. There are places where they hang, bad places, places where you never want to go alone. Many of them are already hooked, running from one law enforcement agency of another, unable to return wherever they came from. Remember those men in the hooded robes we saw in the alley on the way to Panchets? They're the worst kind of pusher. They're chip heads who push free augmentations to any boarder, hacker or inVi-designer who'll have them. On the surface it seems like a good idea, but they cause more problems than they solve. Sure you can think more clearly and process more efficiently if your brain is coupled with micro-process
ors, but with each loss of humanity, there's a longing that can only be quenched by very special drugs. Drugs that they sell for the price of a soul." He lowered his voice and watched the door separating them from the pair of boarders sleeping in the next room. "We don't go that far. We won't. We only provide the drugs these kids need to operate, to survive. I know it sounds bad, but we need them more than they need us. Most are already junkies when they arrive, cashed out, bombed out, needing to feel the rush of a new fix.
"And we provide it for them. In exchange they do our bidding, the drugs fueling their systems to perform normally impossible feats of dexterity. I'm not proud of the drugs, but I am proud of the network we've created, and without the security of such a network, let me just say we wouldn't have been able to move to the next step."
"The end justifies the means." She'd heard that one enough times.
Andy nodded. "In this case it does."
"What is this end? You said 'next step.' Next step in what?"
He smiled like a kid caught with a cookie. "I can't tell you yet, Bec. I want to, but now's not the right time." Seeing her expression, he hurriedly added, "Trust me. You're going to like it. More—you're going to be amazed by it."
Too much subterfuge. Rebecca watched him as he sat and smiled at her. She should know better by now. So far, every time she'd gotten an answer for a question, it had created two more. She shook her head. She hated it when people said 'trust me.' Her father had said that if a person had to remind you to trust...they weren't trustworthy to begin with. But what was she to do? She had her grandmother to save and she needed a place to stay. Looking around the house, Rebecca doubted this place would be available for much longer. And she liked him. Against her judgment she liked Andy.
She decided to let it ride. As a virtual Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, there were a lot of things she didn't understand. For all she knew drugs were legal now. So much had changed. She didn't know what was lawful and what wasn't. She was convinced she'd be surprised at some of the things now against the law. Spitting could be a misdemeanor. Jaywalking could be a felony.
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