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S.I. (original/SI)

Reader mode
5.10
  • Threadmarks
    • *Chapter Ten: Co-worker*

    It was a very unhappy bunny who sloshed into the warehouse.

    Minerva hurried over. "Bunny, I'd like you to meet the Professor, who runs this-"

    I held up a hand to interrupt, glancing briefly at the man with a grey moustache and black top hat. "Did either of you tell anyone we were coming?"

    The man shook his head, and Minerva said, "No."

    "Then we may have a few minutes of leeway. Professor, please excuse me, but I have details I must attend to. Please allow us our privacy for a time."

    I continued walking to the five remaining carriages of Munchkin, Minerva drawn along in my wake. In a low voice, I said to her, "From what I remember, the destroyed car was a cargo one, and nobody was supposed to be in it. Did anyone change the plan and get hurt?"

    She shook her head, and a certain amount of tension dropped from my shoulders. I hadn't wanted to use the walkie-talkies more than absolutely necessary - radio direction finding equipment wasn't /that/ hard to build. Plus, water blocked such signals rather effectively, and Pinky hadn't swum in a direct route to get here.

    In short order, we were back among the group. Not particularly caring about the proprieties, and wanting to relieve at least one sort of pain, I settled into a chair, called over Pat and Max, and opened my shirt to give them a feed.

    "We have a problem," I said, restating the obvious, but regaining the focus of those who'd looked away from the nursing. "I am... /moderately/ sure that none of you had an opportunity to leak the meeting. Maybe there's a spy in the Royal Mail. Maybe the squiddies have a leak. Maybe Melvin anticipated me going to the embassy, or had someone watching it. But the short and long is, we don't have the resources to figure out which. And explosives are a lot messier than a knife or crossbow - Melvin seems to be getting less worried about collateral damage. Since I'm pretty sure none of us want to die, the main choice seems to be staying in Erie and hunting Melvin to keep them from making any more attempts, or leaving and continuing the Great Work of x-risk reduction elsewhere. Secondary questions involve sticking together or splitting up. I'd rather not invoke formal rules of order, so please don't start shouting over each other - I still have a headache." At that, Denise stepped over, leaned over to peer into my eyes, and continued examining me from there. I tried to ignore her as I continued, "The floor is open."

    Toffee declared, "/My/ bleeping city. /I/'m finding who's throwing bombs around the place."

    Sarah asked, "Is this," she gestured around us, "a target? Should we leave Munchkin behind?"

    I answered her, "If it comes to that - all the carriages are waterproof, can float, and the legs can paddle. Not as fast as they can walk - something under a tenth of its top land speed - but there's nothing stopping us from just heading out into the lake. There are certain things aboard that I really don't want to fall into the hands of people who aren't ready for them... if we really want to get away from Munchkin, I could program it to make its own way to somewhere it could do no further harm." I was thinking of the little canyon near DeCew Falls, with enough radioactivity to keep Munchkin out of everyone's hands from then on.

    Bunny Joe asked, "What if 'Melvin' follows, and attacks again?"

    I shrugged, and the kids complained, so I put my arms around them to quiet them back down. "Then we'll have learned running won't work, and that Melvin has a larger reach than just this city, and it's either do something about Melvin or die."

    Denise stood up. "No concussion or shrapnel - just some bumps and bruises. And you should dry off before you get hypothermia. And I hate to say it, but no paycheck is worth dying for."

    I nodded at her. "If you think quitting and going back to your vet practice is more likely to keep Melvin from doing anything to you than staying with me, and whoever else stays with me-"

    "I will," Sarah added.

    I managed to smile and nod at her in thanks as I continued, "- then I wish you luck. However, before you head home, I suggest you take the time to really consider your odds of survival, with whatever mental tricks you need to do it as objectively as you can. Munchkin's walls are fairly bullet-proof, if not bomb-proof; we've got the auto-doc's tools to help with injuries, a lab to brew medicines, the fabber to make tools and weapons, and cash to buy what we can't make. And at least a few other warm bodies to take up the slack - everyone needs to sleep sometimes."

    Denise crossed her arms and looked away. "And it's got a great big target on every wall."

    "And it's a great big target," I agreed. "But will you /stop/ being a target if you leave? I think we have to try to figure out now - what are Melvin's most likely goals? What are the effects of its actions?"

    Minerva frowned and said, "Well, it's putting us - well, those of us who stay - with our backs to each other, us against the world."

    I scratched behind an ear. "Blowing us up to drive us together? Seems likely to have a high failure rate - any of us /could/ have been on that one carriage, if we'd been a little less paranoid."

    "Trial by fire?" She looked around, then shrugged. "Okay, so it's more likely they're /trying/ to split us up. Well, even more likely they're trying to kill us."

    Toffee interjected, "Us, or her?" She hooked a thumb at me.

    I pointed out, "Would have been almost as easy to stab me as Human Joe. Seems to me like they're not fond of any of us."

    Toffee tried again, "Maybe they're after one of the toys you're trying to hide."

    "Hrm," I hrmed. I ran my mind through some of the more interesting inventory - the fusion generator that could make a rather large bang if set to do so, the boxed Berserker, the computer cabinet from the robo-fac which might have more November files, the explosive-lactation retrovirus, the snake-oid genetic data... any of them could potentially be worth killing for, by someone who knew of their existence. "The trouble with that is, just about the only people who know about any of those 'toys' are standing right here."

    Denise inquired, "If you do run - what are you going to do? Other than running."

    "With luck, what I've been hoping to do since you un-froze me, but I've been too benched to get around to. Pick one of the loose strings that's connected to the Singularity, and tug on it as safely as possible, to try and start untangling what happened back then... at least enough to know how to keep it from happening again."

    Denise frowned. "What, exactly, do you mean by a 'string'?"

    I gestured at the two foxtaur cubs. "Somebody had to invent a genome for a whole new class - they may be vertebrate, but they're not mammals. I want to see if there are any clues in their DNA." Sarah didn't look happy at the prospect, so I continued, "Transformation zones use tech beyond what was available before the Singularity - I want to find out how they work, and where they came from. There's those weird towers in nearly all the old cities - what's their function? What are they connected to? What made them? There are a few post-Singularity AIs around - do they use any techniques beyond the state of the pre-Singularity art? Why does Toronto shoot down everything in its airspace? Where did the 'spirits' of the Great Peace come from?"

    I didn't add aloud a couple of more personal questions: Who'd made Bun-Bun, and why had I been revived in the first place?

    I continued, "And those are just the more obvious ones. There's some trickier ones, too - like how can /anyone/ convince a whole population to wear the same colours without any obvious prompting, or affect a whole city's memory, or keep even larger areas from wanting to talk to each other? The trouble with those is that there's no obvious thread to tug at." I paused, then amended, "Unless you want to count Melvin's assassination attempts, but there's some obvious issues in /trying/ to trace /that/ back to its source." I frowned. "Might not be able to avoid those issues in the end, but it's not my first choice of projects."

    Bunny Joe said, "You are one woman, and those are many things to research."

    I nodded. "True - but there's you folk, there's the squiddies, I hear I have some sort of cult... and if all else fails, I suppose I could go talk to Technoville. I don't like them or their politics, but they've got a good resource and tech base, and a technocratic tyranny is better than extinction." I got a /lot/ of funny looks, so I defended myself, "What? Tyrannies can get overthrown, eventually; extinction is forever. I'm not going to use that plan unless all the others are worse - I'm just saying that it /is/ an option."

    Toffee grunted. "Maybe for you it is," she crossed her arms. "From what I hear, they come here, and I'm just as out of a job as if I tried pushing your stupid bleeping charter."

    "That reminds me," I commented, "have you figured out a way to test if Melvin's gunning for you? I've got a few more bun-bots - do you have any body-doubles willing to take the risk?"

    "Maybe. Not that it's any of your bleeping business."

    "I think it might be. If someone's going to start sniping at you, or blowing up places they know you're going to be... can you still hold onto being big boss at all?"

    "Once you're dead, or leave, I'll 'hold on' just fine."

    I hesitated. I was bad at reading subtexts, but Toffee's text didn't seem all that sub. "Does that mean if I leave, you're staying?"

    "Even if you stay, I'm bleeping leaving. The only reason I haven't, is nobody's willing to open the door long enough to let me go."

    "Toffee - we disagree on a lot of things, but I think we can still help each other. Is there anything-?"

    She was shaking her head, and I sighed. I looked around. "Without saying anything, does anyone but Minerva know where we are right now?"

    I got a lot of shaken heads, but Toffee threw in, "I know we're not far from water," she gestured at the puddle that had formed under my seat, "but in this town, that doesn't say much."

    "Alright." I closed my eyes a moment. "Toffee, I'm thinking of putting you in the other cargo carriage, sending it off to wander around a bit, not getting anywhere near a place Melvin would think to set up an ambush, and then let you go. That seems safer for us than letting you accidentally lead Melvin here, and I can't think of how it puts you in significantly more danger than you already are. Does this plan meet with your approval?"

    "Does it mean I can finally get back in touch with the Civil Guard and take control of whatever bleep-ups they'll have gotten into?" I nodded. "Then it bleeping meets with my bleeping approval."

    "I'll set that up, then... uh, as soon as I get out from under these two."

    Sarah silently handed me some new absorbent pads to put into my nursing bra, and I want through the rigamarole of getting myself all tucked away again. While I did, I told Toffee, "There's at least one thing I want to emphasize, so you don't forget it: Someone's been manipulating you. Not overtly, not dramatically, but slowly, over months and years, nudging you to become what they want you to be, instead of who you should be. I can't tell you how - but at the least, you should start looking for new sources of information, unconnected to whatever you're doing now. Heck, maybe just head out into the street and ask random citizens questions. If you can't think of anything to ask - you could at least try sidestepping the whole union structure, and finding out directly if the people in general, instead of the union bosses, would support that charter of rights I've been pushing you. And if you can think of something more important for you to know, go for that."

    "You about done?"

    "Afraid so."

    "Then let's get going."

    --

    Once Toffee was gone, I settled down half on top of Bear Joe, resting the back of my head on his shoulder and inhaling his scent. Sarah stretched out next to us, and Bunny Joe, Minerva, and Denise took new seats nearby.

    I glanced around. "Does anyone else want to leave? I'd rather not work out where to go next, only for someone to decide to stay behind and leak that to Melvin."

    Denise grumped, "I don't understand how you can just /sit/ there when someone just tried to /kill/ you!"

    "I think Bun-Bun still has my adrenaline turned off."

    "... Okay, that could explain it."

    "By the way, Doc - I'm going to have to insist you hand over my heart-rate controller."

    "You don't know how to use it safely."

    "Which is more dangerous, my not having full knowledge of the ins and outs and maintenance schedule of a piece of electronics - or me not being able to actually make my blood pump faster when somebody's trying to kill me?"

    "I can't, in good conscience, let you hold on to that controller without proper medical supervision."

    "... Does that mean you're staying?"

    "That, and the fact that my house is probably filled with land-mines by now."

    "Fair enough." I breathed for a few moments, then added, "There is /some/ good news out of this attack."

    "I didn't think you were a 'silver lining' kind of person."

    "I'm a 'grab every advantage and try to win and cheat if I have to' kind of person. Thinking about it - assuming that Melvin was trying to blow me up... he /failed/. He doesn't have perfect information about all the preparations we make in private; he doesn't have unlimited resources; he isn't willing to kill off a whole town to achieve a single goal, like the Berserker was. He's not omnipotent - he has /limits/. Which means that, whatever those limits are, it's possible to leverage them."

    Minerva asked, "You think we can win?"

    I lifted my head to look at her. "/Can/, yes. /Will/, maybe. And to be honest - I don't know if I'm comfortable with you anywhere near me, and whatever attempts Melvin makes in the future."

    She offered a hesitant smile. "Seems late for that, doesn't it? If he knew who was visiting you, then my foster home is as dangerous as Ms. Black's clinic."

    I turned to Bunny Joe. "I don't suppose I could get rid of you if I tried, could I?"

    "You have a greater chance of finding Melvin than Toffee. His hand was on the knife in my other self's heart."

    "Uh... huh." I sighed. "Then cards on the table - I don't plan on staying in Erie any longer than I have to. Just about any city will do, to look at zones and the towers and so on. Maybe Buffalo, maybe Metropolis... there's at least one piece of data I want before I decide: I met a, uh, unusual ship's captain while at the Embassy, who offered a ride. I didn't have the opportunity to find out what that would involve. I don't think Bunny Joe or Sarah or I could show our faces without Melvin finding us pretty quick - but you humans," I nodded at Denise and then Minerva, "could get lost in the crowd pretty easily."

    Minerva perked up. "The Professor is good with disguises." I felt my ears twist in surprise, and she explained, "He does acting, sometimes. On a stage, I mean. Just for wigs, he's got at least a dozen."

    I nodded. "That's good - I should probably go out and start talking to him soon. Denise - how about you head to the ship, the Travelling Matt, officially about their dinner invitation to work out any issues of precedence and protocol and politeness, unofficially to find out how much cargo room I would have available to squeeze in some portion of Munchkin's inventory?"

    "You're abandoning it?" She looked around the room.

    "Like you said - it's got a big target painted on it. I'd like to know what my options are.

    --

    "Sarah, Bunny Joe - I'd like to talk to Minerva for a couple of minutes."

    I took off my glasses, cleaning the lenses on the bottom of my shirt as the remaining two adults moved off to the kitchen, talking quietly to each other, the last thing I heard before they were out of earshot being something about bulk shampoo discounts. I put my glasses back on and wriggled back up against Bear Joe.

    Minerva asked, "Do you have a job to send me away on, too, so you can leave me behind without saying goodbye?"

    I blinked, then shook my head. "If I'm going to leave you behind, I'll just tell you. I've got too much to deal with to try to come up with clever plans just to avoid emotional whosawhatsits." I pointed at her bag. "I thought we might start with your paperwork."

    "Oh." She hugged the backpack tighter for a moment, then let go enough to open the top, and look down inside. "Um. Yeah."

    "I'm guessing you didn't write them, or draw them."

    She shook her head. "I didn't go looking for them, either. But some of the people in the Conspiracy, they wanted to know more about you, and started bringing these in..."

    "Right, the Conspiracy. That's the other thing I wanted to ask you about. But let's focus on the papers first. Uh - do we need to have the sex talk?"

    "/Please/ no. I know what's in them isn't real, isn't like what's real, and that I'll have problems if I try to have a relationship or, uh, sex, based on what's in them. I don't /like/ what's in them. I brought them so you wouldn't just shoo me away when I told you about them."

    "Minerva, if I ever try to shoo you away, you have my advance permission to kick me in the shins. Now - do you know who wrote or drew the papers, or where they came from?"

    She shook her head. "The guys I got them from wouldn't talk to me about that."

    I rubbed the back of my neck, awkwardly. "Without you going anywhere that Melvin might have left a landmine - do you think they might be willing to talk to /me/?"

    --

    Once Minerva was off to the Professor for a quick disguise and then an errand, I thought about what she'd said earlier - and seriously considered trying to come up with excuses to send Sarah, her kids, and Bunny Joe out of Munchkin, and just leaving. Maybe north - Sudbury might be a nice place to settle in for a while, to try turning the old mines and such into a personal factory-fortress, hiding from the world, with just Bear Joe to cuddle with and Boomer and Archie to have high-falutin' intellectual conversations that improved my mind...

    Don't blame me for fantasizing; I'd been having a stressful few days.

    I let the dream-fortress fade, to become nothing more than, perhaps, a pattern for a new memory palace, and tried to turn my mind to more practical matters. But I couldn't concentrate; when I tried to come up with a plan, my focus skittered to Captain Shatter's uniform and to the school in Buffalo. When I tried to sort out recent events, up cropped games from my old Commodore 64 computer and wondering whatever had happened to my favourite authours.

    I sighed, patted Bear Joe in thanks for his services as a piece of warm, breathing furniture, and pulled myself up to something resembling a standing position. With vague thoughts of tea, I wandered back to the kitchenette, and puttered a bit; my mind drifted to consider that, not too far away, vast forces had been put into motion, creating magnetic fields of such strength that atoms in existence since the Big Bang were now forced to change the natures they'd had for billions of years, becoming something new - all so that the energy released could be captured in a heat engine, shoving electrons along strands of purified metal, all so that an unexceptional mammal could try to feel a bit better by having a cuppa.

    When you took the time to /really/ think about it, the universe was a pretty strange place.

    As I added a bit of honey to the final product, Bunny Joe and Sarah wandered forward from the lab. The former, looking around, observed, "No more humans?"

    I shrugged, sipping my beverage, and deciding 'tea' was too good a name for it - maybe 'herbal tisane', or 'boiled leaf broth'.

    She asked, "What will we do now?"

    I didn't have an answer, and took another sip.

    Sarah, bright-eyed and tail wagging, offered, "Furry orgy?"

    Classic spit-takes are astonishingly annoying to clean up, particularly when fur is involved.

    While we shared that task, Sarah elaborated, "I was there when the Doc opened up the factory car." I thought back to the 'distraction bed' I'd whipped up on a whim, and my pink facial fur took on a rosier hue. "So I know you've got a sex drive, no matter how good you are at hiding it." My mind was focused, laser-sharp on trying to figure out how to explain that I'd never touched anything in that part of that carriage in a way that could be believed. I didn't /succeed/, but I was very focused. "Pat and Max are asleep and locked tight and safe, Bear Joe won't talk, and I think Bunny Joe has a thing for you." She hooked her thumbs on her vest, tugging it to better show off her cleavage. "So what do you say?"

    My tongue seemed stuck to the roof of my mouth, but before I could even think of what I might say with it, Bunny Joe commented, "She is from the old people, and they had very particular ideas about sex. If Bunny still thinks that way, you should have asked for just the two of you, not all four of us."

    "Oh," Sarah said. "Okay. Want to have sex, Bunny?"

    "Ah..." I managed to get out.

    Bunny Joe came to my rescue. "Also, they usually had several dates - shared activities - before they got around to having sex."

    Sarah nodded again. "Seems silly to me, but what do I know? Jeff and I didn't stay together long. Would you like to go on a date, Bunny?"

    I finally managed to speak for myself. "I would be much more comfortable with a date than a, uh, orgy. But even for that - someone tried to kill me just a couple hours ago, so I think I need to focus on dealing with that."

    Sarah offered, "When death's so close, when's a better time to live?" I just shook my head, so she looked at Bunny Joe. "What about you? Do you have to have a date first?"

    "I don't /have/ to; I just haven't met anyone I want to have sex with since the spirits made me a woman, this time. And maybe I can teach you a few things about rabbits, so you'll know what to do with Bunny later." They turned around and walked back into Munchkin's rear carriages, shutting the doors between them.

    Once they were out of sight, something clicked in my head, and I remembered that they'd had something like three years to get to know each other - and they'd just been huddled together, chatting. Had the whole conversation been some sort of prank? Maybe a set-up, making an offer far in excess than what I'd accept, so that when Sarah pulled back to just a 'date', I'd be more willing to agree? Was I overthinking things by even considering such notions?

    My rabbity ears twitched up at some noises - and I interrupted my next attempt at tea to hurriedly get Munchkin to improve its internal sound-proofing, my face aflame.
     
  • Threadmarks
    • 6.1
  • Threadmarks
    • *Book Six: Pro-*


    *Chapter One: Pro-fessor*

    /Thunk/.

    My thrown blade embedded itself into a rather embarrassing part of the foam target - purely by accident, I assure you.

    /Thunk/.

    /Clank/.

    From a mere ten feet away, I missed the human profile entirely, the knife bouncing off of Munchkin's hull, which I was using as a safety berm. I crouched down, and stretched out on my back, feet facing the target, threw again - and got a knee. I figured that if things got higgledy-piggledy enough that I actually needed to throw the things at someone, odds weren't all that great that I'd be able to apply a perfect throwing form from a standing start; so at least once every five throws I used my off hand, and at least once every ten throws, I sat down, or crouched, or lied down, or turned around, or did something else to make my life harder.

    I grunted as I got up from the warehouse's concrete floor, threw a couple more, then decided I'd depleted my stock enough, so went to collect and re-sheathe them.

    When I turned around, the Professor was leaning on a support pillar just past where I'd been standing. His grey moustache twitched as he said, "I can see you need the practice. But I don't think you'll get better fast enough for whatever plan you're thinking of."

    I shook my head, and took position again. I slid one knife out of my right sleeve, and let it rest in my hand for a moment, just gauging its weight and feel; a flat piece of metal just over six inches long, sharpened on one side and to a point, enameled in black to reduce reflections, with a curved back that fit naturally inside my finger and palm, and holes in what would usually be called the handle - not to put fingers in, but just to lighten that part of the knife, so it would act more like a tail to the heavier blade. It was no Bat-a-rang, but I seemed to be doing better with this model than any other knife design I'd tried so far, or even the spikes of bo shuriken.

    I wound up, a bit like for a pitch, and let loose, my fingertip just brushing the handle to keep it from spinning end-over-end. (Boomer had more data on knife-throwing styles involving spinning the blades, but since that involved picking exactly the right number of spins to have the knife land point-first, I'd decided that was less useful than going for something like dart-style.) There was a /thunk/ as I hit the target's shoulder.

    "Not part of a plan," I told him, nibbling my lip as I tried to figure out what I'd done wrong on that throw. "I just need to take a break, think about anything but what I /have/ to think about, so maybe my subconscious will have some fresh insight when I get back to it."

    "And of all the activities you could try, you choose hurling?"

    "I have a harmonica, but since you're at least an ally, I'm not going to inflict it on you." I turned to face him, and offered my hand. "I don't think we've been properly introduced. I'm called Bunny."

    Instead of shaking, he went for the swoop and kiss. "The Good Queen Bunny, from what I hear."

    As I recovered my limb, tucking it into a pocket to discreetly rub it clean, I said, "'Queen', maybe. 'Good', that's really up for debate."

    "I'm certainly not going to call you the /Mad/ Queen Bunny - at least, not within your considerable earshot."

    "Probably for the best. What should I call you?"

    "'The Professor' is all that's needed to identify me in these academically-challenged days. 'Harry' suffices for informal yelling, such as to duck, while 'Harold T. Quisenberry' is suitable for placement on any documents conferring knighthood or other titles that you happen to wish to sign."

    "Sorry - you're probably thinking of a British queen. The Canadian monarchy doesn't really go in for titles. A grant of arms, I could do, if you want one. Goodness knows that I owe you /something/ for offering us what's frankly a place to hide out from our enemies."

    "I'm certainly not going to argue against any sense of obligation you might feel in my general direction, but decorum requires me to inform you that I feel similarly inclined towards you, for-"

    "Oh," said a cheerful new voice, "put a sock in it, Prof." A girl with blonde pigtails and a gingham dress skipped over, and it took me a double-take to realize it was Minerva. "Just because she likes all the same fancy words you do doesn't mean you can go around /using/ them."

    I raised my eyebrow at her, and she stuck her tongue out at me before smiling wider and saying, "Don't mind me, I'm getting into character. These days, everyone thinks blondes are dumb, so nobody'll pay attention to me if I'm what they expect..."

    The Professor patted her on the shoulder, fondly. "Be careful, my dear. I wouldn't want to lose the best bottler I've had in years just because you missed a cue."

    "You could just go back to using Toby - she's not as good as me, but you can split the take in your favour a lot more."

    I didn't want to interrupt a good bit of banter, but I was already getting lost. "'Bottler'?" I inquired, of either one of them.

    Minerva got to an answer first. "When he performs, I go around to get the audience to pay as much as I can. I get them to put the coins in a 'bottle', with a narrow neck, so nobody can scoop and run. Hey, Prof? If she needs to take her mind off things, why not do a show for her?"

    "A splendid idea! Now, you have your own mission to perform, but don't worry - I'll have a captive audience, so even my meager skills will be enough to keep her in place until she pays. Now run along, so you can be back quickly."

    Minerva skipped around the corner of Munchkin, heading towards the warehouse doors. The Professor waved me to follow him deeper, toward what turned out to be an office full of boxes and half-repaired junk.

    "Now then," he said, poking around one shelf or another, "What do you think of clowns? Nevermind, you don't want to wait for me to get into whiteface. A stunning display of mentalism by Mesmero the Great?" He turned around, with a spinning spiral disc on the front of his top-hat. I must have grimaced, for he said, "Perhaps not - which I suppose rules out the illusions of Harrotini, as well."

    "Actually," I managed to break in, "I've nothing against magicians. Learned a lot from the Amazing Randi, Houdini, Penn and Teller..."

    "I'm afraid I'm no Houdini." Without turning from his shelves, he stuck his fist out at me, and was suddenly holding a long-stemmed rose, which he set into my nonplussed hand. It looked like a real one - smelt like one, too. "Just a fellow with a handful of tricks."

    I saw a feline face looking down at us from one of the shelves not being rummaged through, so tucked the rose into one of my longer pockets and stepped over to introduce myself. It sniffed my finger - then the Professor dropped something, and, startled, it leaped out - using all eight of the tentacles it seemed to have instead of a torso to climb up and out of sight.

    I blinked, even more bemused than a moment ago. "Er - Prof - do you have a, uh, cat-topus? Uh, octo-kitty?"

    "Ah, I take it you have just met Toby the Dog. She's harmless, except to small rodents."

    "I have to ask the obvious question; 'the Dog'?"

    "Every good Punchman needs a Toby the Dog - but only a few have a live one. Ah, now there's the ideal distraction for you: a Punch and Judy show!"

    "Puppets?" I asked, dragging what scraps of memory I could that were brought up by that name. I shrugged, with a somewhat dismissive "Well, I suppose a distraction's a distraction, right?"

    "A distraction? /Just/ a distraction? My dear woman, this is /Punch and Judy/, the show that has entertained millions for centuries, which descends from the noble Italian /commedia dell'arte/, and itself is the ancestor of the Three Stooges, the Warner Brothers, and any Britcom you care to name! Why, calling it just a /distraction/ is like calling a cheeseburger a mere /sandwich/! ... Now, where did I put that shoulder theatre?"

    In a few moments, he'd pulled out a box almost the size of a luggage trunk, put apparently much lighter. From within, he retrieved a small, black notebook, in which he paused to scribble something.

    "Idea diary?", I hazarded a guess.

    "A/B testing logbook," he countered, snapping it closed and tucking it into his jacket. "I keep notes on every performance." He pulled a couple of panels from the trunk, out of which dangled a striped, bedsheet-like drapery. "The things I can't really control: weather, time of day, audience composition. The things I can: location, the strolling booth or the rigid one, which warm-up routine, whether I call him Punch or Punk or Pinch, whether I use the Devil or the Dragon or neither, when I stay squeaky-clean and when I go blue. And after, how many laughs I get, and how much Minnie collects. When I have time, I try to figure out the patterns."

    "What sort of patterns?"

    He flashed his teeth at me. "Show an interest in performing, and I just might share. Here's one for free: vertical stripes on the booth garner just about as many people as a solid colour, or a pattern - but horizontal stripes just seem to turn people right off. Diagonal ones don't seem to do too well, either. When I get the right fabric, I'm thinking of trying symmetry - instead of spiraling all around, having the left ones point one way and the right ones the other."

    Distracted by the conversation, he'd finished setting up his little theatre before I'd even realized it, and hauled it onto his shoulders - he was entirely hidden within.

    --

    Can you describe a 'Tom and Jerry' cartoon... in a way that appeals to your audience as much as the original did? If so, you're a better raconteur than I.

    Sure, I can describe the elements of the plot: Punch and Judy danced and kissed, then he babysat, then he sat on the baby and then threw it out the window, then he and Judy traded blows until he killed her, and so on. But that doesn't do anything approaching justice to the performance.

    It was a cartoon - not just like a cartoon, or the inspiration for a cartoon, but /was/ a cartoon. Sure, there were more technical limitations than a show where you could paint anything you wanted onto a cel, and only two hands and one voice... but the Professor seemed to have inherited all the traditions of all the performers in the past to get around those limits. Punch's voice wasn't anything that a human voicebox could produce - and yet his catchphrase of "That's the way to do it!" was as clear as any other character's. The action was frantic, the dialogue was frenetic, and most importantly, the Professor was good enough that even after the day's events, I was drawn into the show, calling back "Oh no it isn't!" on cue. (Which is at least one thing a puppeteer can do that even the best cartoons can't.)

    I found out later that the particular version of the show I saw was a very classic version. After killing Judy, Toby the Dog the octocat appeared, along with her in-universe owner, the very Baron-Munchausen-like Scaramouche - which was one of the ways the Professor managed to have more than two characters on stage at a time. He eventually got his head knocked clean off by Punch's slapstick (which is the very stick that the comedy genre was named after), and via all sorts of dialogue and ditties, duels and digressions, Punch worked his way through (and whacked) a whole series of characters, from his bimbo mistress and a Changed mouse servant through a doctor and a law enforcement officer to his would-be executioner and a great big fire-breathing horned ultimate bad guy... and despite all his shenanigans and misbehaviour and outright misdeeds, Punch made it off as scott-free at the end as Bugs Bunny ever did.

    --

    When the proscenium and puppets were all packed away properly again, about all I could say was, "Well, that was certainly... something. Very archetypical. If I had change and you had your bottle, I'd definitely pay for your lunch."

    He nodded, adding a few notes to his logbook. "I'm glad I remembered as much as I did. These days, I usually do rolling shows - set up shop where a lot of people pass by, maybe they stay for five minutes, and just keep on going. No plot, just lots of business and /lazzi/ and gags to catch the eye. Need a good bottler for that, though - someone who can get a penny out of the hardest-hearted watcher, and can keep track of a crowd and not try and squeeze the same stone twice."

    I sighed. "I know, but as much as I'd like Minerva - Minnie - to stay here, it's just not safe right now-"

    The Professor shook his head. "That's not what we should be talking about right now. While I do have you in my nefarious clutches for a little while... How would you like to see a show with a puppet version of you?"

    I ran my memory back over the show I'd just seen, with enough cartoonish violence to satisfy a fan of 'Itchy and Scratchy'. "I'm not fond of seeing even fictional versions of myself dying."

    The professor twitched his moustache. "Why not? Everyone dies. Victorians seemed to be positively obsessed about being reminded of that, with /memento mori/ in various forms."

    "Discomfort with mortality is certainly one reason."

    "Ah, but when you put it that way, that's not your real reason."

    "It's silly and irrational. You'll laugh. Or be confused. Or both."

    "And that is enough to keep you from speaking?"

    "... There's a very hard-to-calculate chance that, at some point in the future, whoever's still alive will want to know more about people of the past - and will investigate them by simulating them in such detail that those simulations will be just as much persons as the originals. But there's only so much data they'll have to go on-"

    "Ah, so you fear your future siblings will be based on whatever stories of you remain - so you wish those stories to be of you enjoying yourself?"

    "Not exactly, but close enough for government work."

    "I know a woman who simply doesn't like the idea of dolls that look like her staring all the time, with dust settling onto their eyes - gives her the shivers. Everyone has fears and discomforts that need no justification."

    "Maybe - but I try to have a reason for everything I do."

    "Do, maybe you can manage. Feel? If you can control that, you are truly inhuman."

    "Don't let the fur fool you."

    "One thing art can do, that few other things can, is let you delve into your feelings, those parts of your mind that you usually cannot face, those fears and drives you'd rather not acknowledge - and, facing them, learn more about how to deal with them."

    "You make it sound like getting a young child to go out on Halloween to face the scary monsters."

    "A very apt comparison! But emotional holidays could make this conversation last for hours, so getting back to puppets - in the Punch and Judy shows I prefer to put on, only two characters avoid dying: Punch himself, and the clown. His wife, his neighbour, the government official, even the Devil himself get beaten, beheaded, eaten, or worse."

    "Okay, then..." I started trying to think of alternative ideas, such as non-Punch shows, but the Professor held up a finger to interrupt me; I let him.

    "The classic clown of Punch, Joey, is actually based on a clown who really lived and breathed, a couple of centuries ago. He fit very well into Punch's stable of characters, and so more and more Punchmen used him, until he was a staple. However - he is not the only clown."

    I raised an eyebrow. "You want to make a clown of me?"

    "He is not the only /type/ of clown, either. Many of my books suggest that Punch shows derive from Italian performances called /commedia dell'arte/, which had a variety of /zannis/ - one of whom became Punch, another of whom formed the basis of Joey's original."

    His hands started sifting through various scraps of fabric, darting and weaving, as he spoke. "I don't think you would wish to be a second /zanni/, who were called /lo stupido/, you can guess why. You don't strike me as an all-trusting Pierrot, anyway. Even though Joey Grimaldi's character, the Clown, started out as a second /zanni/ to Harlequin, Joe Grimaldi turned him into a first /zanni/ in his own right. Hm... Brighella? Too cruel. Tartaglia? Too fat, and you don't stutter. Pedrolino is a prankster; Harlequin dances around; Columbina is the only one who has two brain cells to rub together-" He glanced directly at me, and smiled. "Ah, so that's what appeals to your vanity, is it?"

    I shrugged, a bit embarrassed. "My brain's about all I've got going for me, these days."

    "Well then, let us see what we can see. 'Columbina' means 'little dove'; 'little rabbit' would be, hm, 'Coniglia', I believe."

    "Is this - kosher? Whipping up a new character like that?"

    "Are you familiar with the cartoon character, 'Porky Pig'?" At my nod, he continued, "He /is/ Tartaglia, as that character exists in a world of talking animals. Every character varies, and is adapted by each performer and into every medium. Some versions do better than others, and become established in their own right - others become failed experiments. I am now imagining an experiment that never happened: that one of the many variations of Columbina was Coniglia, and that, through some odd sequence of events, that /zanni/ was the inspiration for the clown in Punch and Judy, rather than Joey. Coniglia's too long a name, of course - Coney, maybe, or Bunny? What would make her stand out? A trick puppet, maybe with floppy ears like Pretty Polly's swinging arms? No, a one-trick puppet wouldn't have lasted so long as a frequent foil to Punch... Someone who tricks Punch? Punch himself is the Trickster, and that seems too much of an overlap... someone who /manipulates/ Punch? Ah, that might have potential. Everyone tries to get Punch to do something, with orders or force or law, but always coming a-cropper in the end. But would that be enough of a hit with the audiences for Coney to have lasted as long as Joey? Everyone knows what clowns are, so any Punchman can improvise something for Joey. What would make an audience laugh at Coney? Well, we're inventing her to be a character that doesn't die - so perhaps we turn that up to eleven, and make her someone who'll do anything to keep from dying? That could make her something of a cross between Columbina and Scapino..."

    He kept talking, getting further and deeper into theatrical and artistic terminology that I'd never heard of, all the while he bent pieces of wire, sewed bits of coloured fabric, and shaped fur. After a while of that, he stopped, and held up the result to me: a rabbity head, as pink as my own if somewhat more blockish and simplified, on top of a white-and-blue dress. (Or should I call it a sleeve?)

    "Here we are, the very first Coney puppet that has ever been. Would you like to try her on?"

    I felt oddly reluctant, but put that down to the same instinct that made some people distrust photographs and held out my hand. He slipped my counterpart onto it, and I frowned; then I twitched her little arms, bobbed her head - and without even planning on it, I'd had her reach up and pet her ears into place.

    The professor smiled at me beatifically. "I could jabber on about brain structures and mirror neurons and mind-projection - but the long and short is, they come alive to us, whether we mean for them to or not. Shall we see how she does on stage, in a proper Punch and Judy performance?"

    Coney and I turned our gazes from each other to him. "Would it be one? A 'proper' one, I mean, if you use her," I nodded at Coney, who waved at him, "instead of Joey?"

    "Punch was performed long before the human Joey was even born - and many performances don't include him at all. It's a very philosophical question - is Punch and Judy still Punch and Judy if Punch loses to the Devil at the end? If there's no Beadle enforcing public order, but there is a Policeman, or a City Guard? If he's called Punk? If he wears blue instead of red? If he's a marionette or a cartoon instead of a glove puppet? I like to think there is a /pattern/ to Punch and Judy, instead of a border. The more of that pattern that any show encompasses, the more true it is that it's a Punch and Judy show. No particular element is vital - but the more elements that are lost, the less of a Punch and Judy show it is, until, at some indefinable point, it isn't. Outside of the titular pair, characters come and go, waxing and waning over the years and lifetimes. In fact, trying out new puppets is, itself, part of the Punch and Judy tradition. Of course, so is leaving them out if they don't make the audience laugh. I've already had a few ideas about how Coney might make you laugh - how about we see if they're good enough for her to last, maybe not all the way to your strange future ancestor-simulator people, but at least to the weekend show?"

    I looked down at Coney. She shrugged up at me. I shrugged back, then pulled her off my hand, and handed the soft bundle back to the Professor.

    --

    "Well, that was a little different," I said, trying (and failing) to suppress my grin. "Even if I kept trying to think of her as me, or me as her, or however that works, I think she's more clever than I am. ... Of course, she's got a few advantages over me, like only getting into situations you already know a way to get her out of."

    He waggled his moustache dramatically. "I expect you have more Scapino in yourself than you realize. After all, I like to think I still have more Arlecchino left in myself than Il Dottore."

    "Ah," I used his own exclamation back at him, "is that why you just happened to have some scraps of fur already dyed to match my own shades?"

    "That's the trouble with being a /zanni/ in real life - it takes a lot more work to set anything up than just waving a magic staff."

    "Mm... I've got a few canes and walking sticks that are pretty close to magic. Can't do any card tricks, though - never even learned how to riffle shuffle."

    "You, at least, know what to expect out of a card trick - or a play's plot. Do you have a favorite Shakespeare play?"

    I nodded once. "'Midsummer Night's Dream'. Couldn't name the four lovers if I tried, but Bottom and Peaseblossom and the fairies, and the play-within-a-play, Pyramus and Thisbe, always did stick with me. Didn't mind the 'Scottish Play', either."

    "I have to admit a certain fondness for 'King Lear' and 'Hamlet', myself... I've even tried to adapt them for puppets, though it's been a challenge. The very fact that you and I can have a conversation about these classics makes us nearly unique amongst a people who seem more interested in the catch of the day than the culture they are the surviving heirs of."

    "A lot of Shakespeare had to be translated, even in what I think of my day, just to make the dialogue understandable, let alone the allusions or the plots."

    "Alas!" Yes, he really used the word 'alas'. "I have /been/ adapting and updating, where I need to, with my trusty logbook as my guide to what I can keep and what has to be tossed by the wayside. Nobody has even heard the word 'beadle', let alone have an idea what one is; and 'police officers' are as much a historical curiosity as 'index funds' or 'France'; so for anyone /but/ you, yourself, Your Most Ancient Majesty, I have had to update such characters to modern comprehension, in the form of the Civil Guard. The Dragon that can eat whole cities in single swallows used to be merely the Devil - a much less scary figure, in these days when whole cities /have/ been eaten in one gulp, perhaps not even metaphorically."

    I tried to avoid wincing. He knew Minnie, so had to know about my involvement in the end of Buffalo. I dredged up a recent memory, of someone telling me that sometimes someone talks about a problem just to share it, not to try solving it, so I tried commiserating with him. "A lot's been lost, both quickly and slowly over the years. I suppose that makes what remains all the more important to hold onto - for the time when there'll /be/ more people who care not just about whatever cultural bits have evolved with the times, but with what they evolved from."

    "Yes!", proclaimed the Professor with a shout and raised fist. "You /do/ understand!"

    I blinked. "I do?"

    "I had whole speeches prepared to try to nudge you to that point - but a good authour must be willing to murder their darlings, when it's time to."

    "... I'll have to take your word for it. I'm guessing you have something your murdered speeches were going to lead to?"

    "Of course, of course. I started by trying to remind you of the power of art, however illogical it may be - and my planned finish was to remind you of your power /over/ art, to request that whatever reward you might wish to offer me, you instead be a patron of Art in general, instead of relegating it to the trash-heap of irrational ideas and useless tools."

    --

    "One advantage Coney has over me," I mused aloud to Boomer while skimming back through her recording of the puppet shows, "she doesn't have to spend her time trying to figure out who her puppet-masters are..."
     
  • Threadmarks
    • 6.2
  • Threadmarks
    • *Chapter Two: Pro-sciutto*

    Minerva returned first, handing me a slip of paper. "They're disappointed they're not going to meet you in person," she told me, "but understand with the bomb and all. There's an address in Metropolis - they send money orders there, and comics and books get sent here."

    "I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that /any/ network, not just the Internet, is for porn... but I'll add this address to the list of possible Melvin puppets."

    --

    When it was Denise's turn to report, she had a rather more positive result. "Their biology is /fascinating/," she gushed. "If it's possible to turn a regular canine or feline into a full-fledged sapient and sentient and sophont /person/, without using a zone, then who knows where the limits are? Giving myself magnetoception was child's play compared to what's possible!"

    "That's all very nice," I observed, "but did you investigate their cargo area?"

    "No - but their captain said he'd like to talk to you directly about that. Oh, I hope you don't mind, but to help with security, I suggested we move your dinner up to tonight. That's not going to be a problem, is it?"

    "Not really. You don't mind taking these messages to the heliograph office to send, do you?"

    "That's... a lot of messages. What are they all?"

    "Press releases, mostly. 'After a vile and treacherous attempted assault, Queen Bunny's security procedures worked as intended, she is in good health and spirits, investigations are continuing', that sort of thing. For further background, please contact the nearest embassy or consulate from the Dominion of Lake Erie,' and so on and so forth."

    "Is that all?"

    "Not even close. But apparently I need to dress for a formal dinner earlier than I expected to; they speak English, have they kept the difference between white-tie and black-tie levels of formality?"

    --

    The culture the crew of the Travelling Matt came from did not, in fact, have nearly as many levels of formality as were to be found in the vintage etiquette guidebooks I'd offhandedly snagged from the university library three years previously - but part of their 'mission' was to learn about foreign cultures, and if possible, how to adapt to them. Denise's focus on their implants and upgrades meant I was saddled with a full white-tie state dinner... which could be traced to me being at fault, having sent her off without sufficiently clear instructions about my preferences.

    Fortunately for both my sanity and my balance, in various parts of Munchkin's library and the AIs' memories, there were a number of pictures of Queen Elizabeth the Second attending such formal events, in attire rather less ball-gown-y than the public domain texts described; so I did have a certain amount of leeway. I found the ear clip and tiara I'd worn to the Nine Nations' Council meeting, set the clothes fabber to put together a sparkly white dress and blue sash, and tried to get one of the bun-bots to move a little less zombie-like so I could at least have the option of pulling a Padme body-double stunt, among other security measures.

    I tried convincing the micro-factory that local laws really did permit the manufacture of firearms, but didn't have enough time to figure out the format of the update files. I couldn't even manage a one-shot zip-gun. What I was able to manage to do was temporarily link the factory to Munchkin's navigation system, to convince it that it was in American jurisdiction rather than Canadian, which let me tell it to produce air guns. The super-metal stuff that my Halloween armour was made of was also strong enough to hold a good deal of pressure with astonishingly thin walls, and we already had air compression gear for the cryonics setup that could be adapted. I skimmed over some of the designs in the mini-fab's mini-database; and when I came across an entry for something with a calibre of .12, I figuratively rolled my eyes at its puny size compared to the .177s, which could barely do significant damage to a paper target, let alone a .22 or anything with bigger numbers.

    In fact, I really did skip over it, and the only reason I went back to look at it wasn't because I remembered that the calibre number was only a roughly-correlated substitute for the real values I was trying to optimize for, but because I was curious what such a small round /could/ be used for. When I saw that the range was roughly that of a shotgun, and the lethality of the rounds somewhere in the vicinity of a flintlock musket's, I again almost closed the entry to look at other options. And what stopped me was, again, pure curiosity; the scrollbar next to the 'additional notes' sub-window indicated there were a /lot/ of notes, and I felt a vague impulse to find out why so much more was written on this particular design than any other.

    It turned out that, while I'm sure nobody really /wanted/ to be shot with a three-millimetre-wide needle travelling at up to the speed of sound, the 'Beretta 3mm Mouse' was designed to be something more like a blowgun, in that the needles were meant to be more of a delivery system than lethal in and of themselves. I dug around and found a list of compatible payloads, compared it with my memory of Munchkin's inventory, and to my surprise, found a match: aconite toxin. Even better, the main counter-agent to aconite was atropine, the same drug I'd been getting experience with using for nerve gas.

    I looked closer, to make sure enough safeties were in place in the airgun pistol design to make accidentally shooting someone (ie, myself) a nigh-impossibility. Parallel with that, I read up on how quickly aconitine killed, and how - and paused my multi-tasking to read deeper, when I read that the main mechanism of death was by inducing ventricular tachycardia, ventricular fibrillation, and cardiac arrest. While my heartlessness didn't mean I was immune to all the other symptoms - including life-threatening respiratory paralysis - I was about as safe handling the stuff as a (mostly) organic being could be.

    Given how well so many details of the whole weapons system matched my available resources and needs (or, more accurately, could be made to match them), I set the fabber to making a single "Beretta 3mm Mouse" and accessories as fast as the metal powder could be sintered, to be followed by a number of others while I was out. As an example, one such accessory involved having the fabber make a three-dimensional scan of the signet ring I'd just gotten, and making a copy - only this one contained something like an RFID chip, which the Mouse checked for with a tiny radio pulse, as both an additional safety and a security measure. Given how life could become complicated, I also made sure I not only had another ring for my other hand (I went for a snowflake design on that one, instead of the over-ubiquitous maple leaves), but that I knew how to bypass that particular safety measure, in case I lost the rings.

    I spent a few spare seconds considering whether to give the thing a name, since 'Mouse' was kind of generic. I let myself wiki-walk for a bit, and learned that the Greeks thought that aconitum had sprung from the drool of Cerberus, whose name originally meant something like 'Spotted one', so for a few moments I entertained the notion of 'Spot-Spit'. But what I settled on was to continue in the tradition of 'Kahled-voolch', and call my personal version of the Mouse-gun 'Karn-wena', after King Arthur's personal white-hilted dagger.

    As all that was being taken care of, I went back to the clothes fabber to make a few adjustments to let me carry my new (untried, untested, unpracticed, and thus untrusted, no matter how well-matched to me it might be in theory) backup bit of self-defense. (Which wouldn't actually help against another sniper, or another landmine, or nerve gas, or poisoned food; but which I just couldn't convince myself would /de/crease my odds of surviving.)

    It might not have been the best possible use of the limited time I had to prepare; but it was the best use I was able to think of at the time.

    And soon enough, that time ran out, and I had to leave. Denise had arranged for the Travelling Matt to undock and be offshore for the duration of my visit; so I made my own way to the shoreline, stepped into a glorified plastic bag to stay dry, and let Pinky ferry me over in the usual squiddie style.

    --

    During my first visit to the Travelling Matt, I got...

    ... a tour.

    After the amusements of dealing with doors and passages designed for crew who were generally half my height or less, I observed, "I was under the impression that space is at a premium on most seagoing vessels."

    Captain Shatter nodded his fully animal head, which, even with my experiences with various species so far, I still couldn't help seeing as an animal's head instead of the animal-shaped head of a person. He answered, "The squid-folk informed us that you would likely be, reluctant, to travel without your vehicle. We have been taking our time, in dock, to rebuild. The stern opens, now, and you should have no troubles moving all six carriages aboard."

    "Five," I muttered, looking away, feeling embarrassed for no reason I could make out.

    "Five," Shatter agreed equitably. "As our security cover, we have responded to inquiries that we are upgrading our ice rooms, to a refrigeration device."


    ... background explanations.

    Captain Shatter said, "No, the Travelling Matt is the fifth of her class. First was the Undertaking, which, under Captain Church, went east to try to explore Europa. The Endeavour, under Captain Jameson, went south, along the American coastline. The Pursuit, under Captain Tibia, southeast, to Africa. The Venture, under Captain Williamson, north, to see if either the Northwest or Northeast Passage still allow travel to the Pacific."

    I sipped my juice and commented, "'Travelling Matt' doesn't seem to follow quite the same naming scheme," while I expanded my estimation of the resources required to follow the scheme as far as I'd just heard described.

    "Her hull started out as the Experiment, so that our shipbuilders could learn the techniques and issues of this class. But they did so well, that the Pursuit was sent to Africa instead of along the Saint Lawrence River, the mistakes that were made on the Experiment were fixed, she was christened with a real name, and a new crew drawn from the ranks of the home fleet."


    ... abstract philosophy.

    Commander Nimble, who turned out to be a 'folf', a half-breed between a fox and a wolf, opined, "My current theoretical framework for understanding human and human-derived cultures focuses mainly on the creation of 'plausible deniability'. If one man covets another's wife, but cannot consummate his lust without upsetting his neighbour, then a great many social conventions come into play allowing him to pretend he does not feel what he feels, from the wearing of clothes that conceal inappropriate erections to the institutions of marriage, prostitution, and adultery. This appears to have started several million years ago, after the split between the /homo/ and /pan/ genii, when hominid females ceased to present consciously-observable signs of ovulation..."


    ... proud displays of their voyage so far.

    I examined the caged creature from several angles; it looked like a sparrow attached to the back half of a mouse-griffon-style.

    Doctor Kettle explained, "Some of us seem pretty fussy about what we eat, but it's because we get tummy upsets if we have to change from birds to fish, or fish to mice. This little fellow might feed two kinds of diets with just one animal, which could help reduce how much time, money, and effort we have to use in raising the things, which could let us spend more time doing other things."

    "By any chance," I considered aloud, "have you ever heard what happened when rabbits made it to Australia?"

    "Can't say that I have, Your Highness, can't say that I have, but it sounds like you have a tale. Would you care to have a sip of something while you tell me about your fellows?"

    "Er - it wasn't that kind of rabbit..."



    ... and the makings of a rather severe diplomatic contre-temps.

    "I can't say that I recognize the taste," I said after swallowing the first bite of the roast meat. "It's kind of strong - the closest I can think of is when I went to a hunting club's dinner, and tried bear, just because."

    Shatter, to my left, was more than happy to expound, "It is panther cub," he somehow held up a fork with morsel from his own plate. "In fact, it is from Miss Neckline's most recent litter. This is a special occasion, after all."

    I very carefully did not freeze, but turned my head to look at the black feline who'd just been named, several seats down. She nodded agreeably, and popped her own fork into her mouth, chewing with every indication of happiness.

    I looked away from her, in case she could read lips, and mouthed the words without even breathing, 'Bun-Bun, no puking.' I turned back to Captain Shatter, and said in as normal a tone of voice as I could pretend to have, "By 'litter', you mean...?"

    "She gave birth three weeks ago."

    I carefully set my fork down, and my mind whirred as I tried to figure out what to do next. What I wanted done, and what ways were available to get there. "It appears that there are certain, um, cultural differences which Doctor Black did not have an opportunity to review," I carefully hedged. "To try to simplify a great deal, one rule of thumb that you will likely wish to observe in the future, is that local cultures consider it such a bad idea that it doesn't even need to be mentioned aloud, to, uh, eat anything that could have ever asked you not to, if any other food, no matter how distasteful, is available."

    Doctor Kettle, just across from me, said, "Oh, you don't have to worry about that, none, Your Majesty. Like he said, they were only three weeks old - they hadn't been baptized yet."

    I was confused. "What does a dunking in water have to do with it?"

    I was getting confused looks in return. Doctor Kettle replied, "I don't know, what /does/ a dunking in water have to do with anything?"

    Commander Nimble broke the resulting pause by stating, "Your Majesty - you appear to be connecting the term 'baptizing' with immersion?"

    At least slightly relieved that /someone/ seemed to have an idea what was going on, I nodded. "That /is/ what the word means - though there are derived terms, such as 'baptism by fire'."

    Commander Nimble nodded once, then explained, "We appear to have found a discontinuity between our otherwise similar languages. While Miss Neckline can cover the connotations better than I can, we apply the word 'baptism' to the process where our offspring become persons."

    My forehead wrinkled. "That's, at least arguably, the reason behind the local ritual."

    Captain Shatter interrupted, "Baptism is no mere ritual - it is when God gives us our souls."

    I started to speak, to repeat what something like what I'd just said, when Nimble took the lead again, "By which he means undergoing the surgeries to start having our extra brains implanted. Without that intervention, our offspring remain mere animals for their entire lives."

    I released a simple, "Ohhhhhh..."

    Doctor Kettle threw in, "I don't know how it works for you folk. You humans - sorry, Your Majesty, and human-like species - are impossible to get to talk about sex. We can only build up our population so fast, and since most of our species have litters at least annually, we've got a lot of cubs we can't afford to turn into people, and can't afford to let grow up and eat all the same things we do. So we give 'em the best send-offs we can, and bring 'em back into us for the next go-round."

    Feeling a tad helpless, I asked, "'Go-round'?"

    Kettle waved his fork. "The next litter. When Miss Neckline heard you were coming aboard, she very generously offered to spread her litter through the command staff - and to you, of course. She'll probably want a few words with you before you go, about female stuff, suggestions for names when you give birth, that sort of thing."

    "Birth?" I blinked and shook my head. "I'm afraid that's not likely to happen in the foreseeable future." In an instant, I was the focus of the staring eyes of /every/ sharp-toothed and sharp-clawed carnivore at the table. I was abruptly conscious of the locations of every trick, trap, and weapon I'd been able to stuff into my outfit and small handbag. I felt a need to elaborate. "I don't know what Doctor Black or the squid-folk have said, but due to - complications - I would need to undergo significant surgery, or some equivalent process, before I could give birth."

    About half the gazes turned from myself to Miss Neckline. For the first time since I'd come aboard, she spoke. "But you /can/ have such surgery?"

    I felt like I was walking on eggshells. Blindfolded. With a few landmines thrown in for good measure. What was supposed to have been a simple investigation into a taxi service had become this whole... thing... in which I couldn't even tell if what I was about to say would make the whole crew want to rip my head off, or worse. I couldn't even guess what answers would be more likely to turn these people back into the friendly bunch they'd been up to now, so the only guideline I had to go on was that old standby, the simple truth. I took a few moments to try to figure out what that truth was. "To be honest, Miss Neckline, I have not investigated that in very much detail. However, given what I know about my biology, and the technology involved - the only groups who seem likely to be able to do so, are groups that, due to political reasons, I am loathe to ask."

    The collective heads swung back to Neckline. She seemed to be thinking. Finally, she nodded. "Alright," she agreed, without explaining what she was agreeing to, "if she wants." After a moment, she added, "Politics change, and we're exploring."

    Suddenly, forks were scraping on plates, and dishes were clattering. The tension had mostly vanished, replaced with low conversation, and a number of surreptitious glances my way.

    I looked down the table, then back at the power trio I was in the middle of. "If I want... what?"

    Captain Shatter gently said, "To carry the spark of life she carried, until you bear it."

    I looked down at my meal. I ran my mind back to my goal-tree, and its related method-tree, and thought about how my actions in the next few moments would improve or worsen those trees.

    I picked my fork back up, and with every scrap of propriety and respect I could call up, ate everything on my plate.

    --

    It was only /after/ the meal was over that it occurred to me to treat the religious-seeming claims with the same respect that I did for Joe's claims about the spirits of the Great Peace: that they might be referring to a real, physical phenomenon in religious terms. Unfortunately, I didn't have any real idea what 'spark of life' might mean in this context. Nor did I have any instruments to look into it - for electronics, I'd only brought Boomer and the walkie-talkie; and even if I'd brought the tricorder, it was only really good for analyzing chemicals in a direct line-of-sight... the sonar probe seemed to be nearly useless to find anything interesting about what I'd put into my GI tract... and so on.

    The private conversation with Neckline was unproductive. My attempted forays into asking about sparks of life, and related topics, only elicited circular definitions. (As close as I could make out, all living things had sparks, and eating them transferred the sparks from eatee to eater, lesser sparks combined into greater ones, which were transferred again during the procreative acts, until they died and either were eaten in turn, or dissolved and spread their combined soul out amongst the plants again. I wondered if whoever had come up with the whole thing had watched the "Lion King" a few too many times.) The only tangible details I was able to elicit were that she'd appreciate if my first-born could have a name based on her parents - Lychee if a girl, or Simile if a boy.

    Less tangible, but still interesting, were her own questions, which kept coming around to her asking, more than once, if I /really/ had never been in estrus.

    The conversation came to an inconclusive conclusion when I asked, "Do you have no other ways to control your population levels?"

    She tilted her head. "What other ways are there?"

    "Many. Well, at least before the apocalypse there were; but some require less technology than others. Once the reproduction cycle was understood, humans figured out how to interrupt it at nearly any stage." The discussion so far had been frank, so I didn't really hesitate to describe some of them. "Certain hormones could be taken to prevent ovulation; the mens' /vas deferens/ could be severed, or blocked; physical barriers made out of thin rubber could prevent the transfer of fluids..."

    I trailed off as I heard an odd, rumbling sound - which I soon identified as coming from Neckline's chest. It wasn't a purr. Her tail was flipping back and forth in what appeared to be agitation, or at least unhappiness, though her ears weren't turned back yet.

    I hastily backtracked, "Or even just timing intercourse to avoid fertilization." I decided to add, "Some of these methods were more acceptable than others, for various reasons. And, of course, they were designed around human biology, and the cultures of the day had time to adapt to the existence of such possibilities. Some cultures accepted them; others did not."

    Given how upset she'd seemed over the mere mention of the pill and condoms, I decided I'd wait until she seemed less likely to take my head off before bringing up the topic of abortion. Maybe wait until she was declawed. And defanged. And put in a straightjacket with all-point restraints. And if that never happened, then just politely ignoring the entire subject seemed most conducive to keeping myself alive long enough to keep working on the larger issues.

    --

    Before I left, I asked Doctor Kettle if he might provide a blood sample from one or more members of the crew, "so that I can use my instruments to look for infections that might easily pass from one of us to the other." I got my sample, for the low, low price of a sample of my own blood in return.

    Back in Munchkin, I fed both the blood sample and myself into the autodoc - which I told to examine the contents of my stomach.

    The results were... unusual, but inconclusive. At least to me. I spent a good fifteen minutes puzzling over the readouts over a heavily-honeyed cup of tea (I suspected the autodoc's anesthetic might have started breaking down in storage) before admitting that whatever expertise I had lay elsewhere, and seeking out Denise.

    "I don't understand what you want me to look for," she groused.

    "I don't, either," I admitted. "Basically, anything that indicates something other than regular animal flesh - an unusual element distribution, or non-feline chromosomes, or hints of strange enzymatic activity, or... well, that's about as far as I can think to look for."

    She flipped through the printouts, eyes flicking rapidly. "I don't know about enzymes, but there's one obvious thing."

    "Yes?" I leaned forward, eager and nervous.

    "One thing I like about your body - your biology - is whoever designed it put everything it needed into one species. No mussing about with commensal populations of microorganisms in the gut, that change depend on what you eat or who you interact with. Not having to worry so much about sepsis if I nicked something really made operating on you a lot easier."

    She left off, so I prompted, "And?"

    "And now, looks like you've got a bunch of commensal bacteria. At least dozens of species. Maybe hundreds by the time you're fully colonized."

    "I don't like the sound of being 'colonized'. If I didn't have them before, then I obviously don't need them - can we get rid of them?"

    "Tricky," she frowned. "I'd have to look up some references, but from what I remember, these sorts of germs are resistant to every antibiotic I can get my hands on. I suppose we could start growing colonies of them, and testing drugs for efficacy, but that would take a while."

    "Wouldn't it be faster to just run up their genetic sequence?"

    She lowered her chin and gave me an 'are you stupid?' look. "The border between us and the university is closed. Even if you manage to build the machines to produce the genetic sequence, we don't have the machines analyze it."

    "Um... could we transmit it to Clara to analyze, over the heliograph?"

    "A single bacterial genome starts at around a hundred fifty thousand base-pairs, and can be a hundred times that large. How fast can you flip a mirror?"

    "Head to Lake Ontario, head on shore in the middle of what used to be the city, where the Nine Nations haven't really colonized yet?"

    She sniffed disdainfully. "You're the queen - if you want to provoke an international incident, that's your prerogative."

    "Last I heard, I'm Queen of the Quebecois, so it hardly seems international."

    "You know what I mean."

    I sighed. "I do."

    "Besides, I'm not sure that will be necessary. Whoever designed your anatomy doesn't seem to have been an idiot. You had to have been exposed to other invading bacteria by now, but none took hold - I expect your immune system is more than capable of fighting off whole ecologies."

    --

    Apparently, whoever designed the Acadian carnivores knew a few tricks that whoever designed Bun-Bun didn't, since in the morning, the autodoc reported my upper and lower intestines now had their own fully-functioning ecologies. After my breakfast of shredded wheat in cereal, my stomach felt a little off, but I couldn't really tell if that was from the bacteria, or just my own thoughts about the hordes of things floating around in there.

    I wasn't panicking. I was very carefully and conscientiously not panicking. Human Joe getting stabbed was a more significant recent event, and I hadn't panicked then, so I reminded myself that an infection with no symptoms was nothing to get worked up over. Repeatedly reminded myself.

    "I'm thinking of paying Clara a visit," I said to the gang, post-breakfast. "She's got more than enough space and tools to keep Human Joe safe, until we find someone with a good chance of bringing him back."

    Denise gave me a sharp look at that explanation, but didn't object.

    "Plus," I added, "I want to get in touch with the Nine Nations in a peaceful, non-confrontational way, in which none of the Joes have to go into a spirit pool if they don't want to."

    It was at this point that Minerva re-entered Munchkin, having gone out in drag to pick up the local morning newspaper, so that I could see how my press release had been treated. "Uh," she said, "before you make a plan, I think you need to see this..."

    I unfolded the paper to behold the headline. "Plague in Metropolis!", I read aloud. The subtitle was even worse: "Furry foreigners at fault?"
     
  • Threadmarks
    • 6.3
  • Threadmarks
    • *Chapter Three: Pro-biotic*

    I took off my glasses so I could do all the eye-rubbing and nose-bridge-pinching I could. (It probably didn't really help, but trying to /not/ run through those near-instictive actions would have been a distraction.) "If it's not one thing, it's another," I finally said.

    Sarah brought up the fact that, "Papers lie a lot."

    "True," I agreed. "But whether or not there's really an epidemic in Metropolis, there's still the fact that the public /here/ /thinks/ there is."

    Denise thought aloud, "Think Toffee's going to start a quarantine?"

    I frowned. "I feel less worried about what Toffee's going to do than I am about what any local mobs might take it into their head to do."

    Bunny Joe flattened her ears. "You believe they will try to kill us?"

    "Maybe," I admitted. "But we've got ways to defend ourselves, from Kahled-voolch on down. I'm thinking of all the Changed, the non-humans, and any other group who might get swept up and be blamed."

    Denise, bluntly, asked, "What's that to us?"

    I managed not to growl, and kept my tone steady. "Every random person who dies is one more person who doesn't have a chance of helping with the Great Work," I hooked my thumb at the to-do lists on the walls. "And if that's not a good enough reason - think of all the good PR that comes from protecting the innocent from angry mobs."

    Denise didn't flinch. "That's only a plus if people actually /like/ us for helping that group. If we're really going to be dealing with mob justice, that means most of the people will /hate/ us for helping. Are you sure you're not just looking for excuses, because they're like you?"

    I started to say a retort - but then I /listened/ to her question. And closed my mouth, so that I could at least consider it. After a couple of seconds, I said, "Before I got bunnified, I thought pretty highly of Enlightenment virtues. I still do. By those virtues, even if the whole city is of the same mind, it's still the right thing to do, to try to save people who've done nothing wrong."

    Denise continued, "It may be /virtuous/ to do that, but does it /actually/ advance your goals?" It was her turn to point at the big to-do lists.

    Sarah added, "Don't forget Melvin. Maybe he started a disease. Maybe he got the paper printed. Maybe he didn't, but is trying to guess what we will do to get us."

    I drummed my fingers on my thigh. I didn't /want/ what they were saying to be true. But I didn't have enough information to definitively refute their points. "What we need," I was able to conclude, "is more information. If there's really a plague. What groups are most at risk from what dangers; and what dangers we have the capability to deal with." I nodded towards the back of Munchkin. "Maybe the best thing we could do is make up as many masks as we can for everyone in Metropolis, to reduce the spread."

    Sarah said, "Most everyone in Metropolis already wear masks."

    I felt a little confused. "You already read the article?"

    Sarah looked a little confused. "No. People in that city wear masks. Some hide eyes, some mouths, some whole face. They just... do. You did not know this?"

    I pulled my glasses back off for another bit of eye-rubbing. "No, I did not know this. Still - it just highlights our lack of info. Fine, fine, /my/ lack of info. And I can think of at least one source that might be able to answer all the relevant questions. Doc, how about we get my heart charged back up all the way, in case this takes a while?"

    --

    As soon as Pinky's tentacles set me down, I started removing the latest version of my squiddie travel suit. A few moments later, another set of tentacles set a similarly suited figure beside me. As she started stripping off her outer duds, Denise said, "I am /never/ going to do that /again/."

    As I patted my pockets flat, I commented, "Melvin's probably watching the embassy's front door."

    "... I am /only/ ever going to do that /once/ more."

    "Any particular reason?"

    "I was /swallowed/ by a giant squid!"

    "Yeah, and?"

    "Bunny - the only time I am supposed to see the inside of anyone's gastrointestinal tract is when I'm operating on it."

    "So now you've gotten a new perspective on things. What's wrong with that?"

    She didn't respond for a few moments, while we walked down to the translation room. Eventually, she said, "Bunny, I like you and all, and I'm glad I was able to keep you alive. Even more than just the paycheck. But if someone wasn't trying to kill us all, I'd have already quit."

    "If someone wasn't trying to kill us all, are you sure you'd still want to?"

    "Okay, maybe not. But I'm letting you know that I'm not happy being stuck with you and your... weird ideas."

    It was my turn to be silent as I thought for a few seconds. "If that's really true - how would you like to be the new head of a revived Canadian Red Cross society?"

    "What?"

    "Okay, maybe it was Red Cross and Crescent by the time of the Singularity, or Red Crystal, or whatever - I don't want to turn Boomer back on just yet - but there should still be /some/ cultural memory of the institution."

    "I /know/ what the /Red Cross/ is. Was. But - you've never mentioned you were bringing it back before."

    "We might be dealing with a pandemic. Having a Red Cross group might be helpful."

    "Well - I mean - I'm just a vet, not an... administrator? President? I wouldn't know where to /start/!"

    "You can check with Boomer or Alphie, and Munchkin's library, and even get Clara to start transmitting manuals for policies and procedures."

    "Is that what you really want me to do, or are you just trying to get rid of me?"

    "Denise - if you really want to leave, then you can take the job and go anywhere the squiddies or Acadians can take you, denounce my policies and ideas as much as you like, and do the best you can at whatever you think is worth doing. That could very well take you off Melvin's hit-list. If you think that what I generally work toward is worth working for, then you're the one who has to decide whether you can help more by sticking with me or going elsewhere. If you /don't/ think it's worth working for, then I'd rather you weren't stuck somewhere against your will."

    "I'm not sure what to say."

    "It's an open offer. When you've got a chance, take at least five minutes by the clock to think over pros and cons."

    "How very generous of you."

    "I can probably find another trauma medic. What I /want/ is someone who can provide ideas I can't think of - and I can only get that sort of thing if you really /want/ to help. For now, let's see if the squiddies can tell us exactly how screwed we are."

    We were more screwed than I'd hoped for, but less than I'd feared. Through the interpreter, Pinky informed us, "The newspaper article is not a complete fabrication. The embassy in Lake Erie has believable data that a disease is significantly affecting the people in Metropolis. However, the Acadians have not yet travelled to that city, nor is there any significant anti-Changed sentiment there."

    "Which implies," I mused, "that that's something that was added to the story locally." I tapped my fingers on my thigh. "I suppose that changes the question to, who in Erie tweaked the story? The editor? The owner? Someone who had enough political influence to push the change?"

    I shook my head, suddenly feeling frustrated. Denise put a hand on my shoulder; I twitched in surprise, but kept my reaction down to that.

    "It's okay, Bunny," she said. "Maybe you can't find that out - but not having an epidemic is a good thing, right?"

    My mouth tightened, in a sour smile. "Doc, I'm going to admit that I had something of an ulterior motive in bringing you here. One of the lessons of the twentieth century is that if a country, or politician, wants to be assured of some real good karma, it's to offer sanctuary and safety to a population that's suffering discrimination."

    Pinky spoke through the interpreter, "We thought you were an atheist. Karma is a highly religious topic."

    I turned to look through the viewing window. "It's also useful shorthand for some secular ideas. If you need me to spell them out - something along the lines of providing good PR for the long term, plus the potential economic and scientific boom from the rescued people, plus positive feelings from your own mirror neurons when you think about the positive differences you've made in all those lives. Compared to the relatively modest economic expenses in such a rescue, and the annoyance of whatever neighbours or internal groups who still don't like that group, it's a no-brainer even for the most self-interested politician... well, as long as that politician is interested in the long-term instead of the next election."

    I turned back to Denise. "In short, I had at least a half-formed plan to send you off to Metropolis, to do whatever you could for the Changed there to keep an extermination pogrom from happening, and so you wouldn't have to be stuck with me because you didn't have any other option." I rubbed the back of my head. "Now, with that idea derailed, I'm looking at all the possibilities of what I /could/ do, and, well, am having trouble picking any one over the others." I shrugged. "So I might as well ask you, Denise - if you had a completely free choice, what would you /want/ to do?"

    She was eyeing me carefully. "Your speech has started speeding up," she observed.

    "So I'm hitting a manic phase again. Bun-bun's got my adrenaline clamped, and my heart-rate isn't going to change unless one of us dials it up, so it's not going to kill me. Now, how about your goals?"

    She shook her head, crossing her arms and looking away. "I'm not sure what you're asking."

    "My own example, then. If someone I trusted took over the whole existential risk prevention gig... I think I'd be happy spending most of my time reading comics. Which is a shorthand for everything /that/ implies - that there is a broad enough culture that a good number of other people are free to make them, and comm networks to move them around, and cultural values which prize storytelling. Maybe I'd even try scripting my own, and looking for an artist to convince to draw them, once I thought I'd learned enough to have something worth expressing." I shrugged a little. "So there you have it. The cryonicist turned survivalist turned queen turned whatever-I-am-now, really just wants to try to come up with a new idea. So how about you?"

    She didn't answer for a few seconds, and I didn't rush her.

    Finally, she said, "What I /want/... is to learn more about what can be put in a body, other than it started with. Like your skeleton and heart, and the Acadians' brains, and my magnetoception. I want to know what's possible and what's not, and how new senses change how people think, and... so on."

    I nodded. "That's probably better than my own want." I waved in Pinky's direction. "I've got a certain amount of influence over a national budget, as long as I don't draw enough from it for them to toss me out on my ear. It shouldn't be hard to convince them to start a Red Cross, and put you in charge of the landward side of things, with enough resources to work on the research you feel is most important."

    Pinky spoke up, "We are not Christians. It would be easier to convince the relevant politicians to use the non-denominational Red Crystal variant."

    I nodded once. "You heard the lady," I said to Denise. "Red Crystal beats cross. And come to think of it, that might even give you enough time to set up some real procedures to deal with pogroms before they get started, which is all to the good."

    Pinky added, "Do you also wish to revive the Blue Shield?"

    "Uh... I can't say that I'm familiar with that one."

    "It derives from the nineteen fifty-four treaty, the 'Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict'. A particular emblem marks cultural sites, monuments, museums, libraries, and archives, and efforts are made to avoid damaging them even during war."

    "That... Given how much pre-Singularity culture is already gone, that seems like an extraordinarily good idea."

    Pinky stated, "I will have it added to the relevant agendas. I anticipate that you will wish Brock University to be among the first sites so designated."

    "Um," I wrinkled my forehead as I had a thought, "Does that mean the Dominion of Lake Erie has jurisdiction over Brock University?"

    Pinky responded, "That question does not have a definitive answer. The entity who occupies the university believes the Dominion of Canada is in control, but that Dominion's government appears to be inactive, except for yourself. The Nine Nations of the Great Peace have implicitly claimed that territory through the borders they claim, but according to the heliograph messages we still exchange with the university, they do not appear to exercise any authority over the university itself. The squiddies of Lake Ontario claim that it is part of their watershed, but there are issues with the university being land-bound, and the Lake Ontario system of contract-based interactions can be argued to not qualify as a state. The Dominion of Lake Erie has been negotiating with our neighbours to establish reasonable boundaries to avoid armed conflict, but the Great Peace has not responded to inquiries for two years; through experimentation, as long as we do not touch any ground-based plant or animal, they do not appear to object to us using their waterways, including the route to Lake Moodie, next to the university. And then there is yourself, whose limits to sovereignty and levels of authority over Canada, the Nine Nations, and Lake Erie are not clearly defined."

    Denise seemed surprised at a particular detail. "You've been swimming /into/ Indian Country, after they closed the border? And coming back /out/?"

    Pinky seemed unperturbed, both in her own person in the water and through the interpreter's body language and tone. "That is correct. Does that affect your plans?"

    With a quick shake of her head, Denise negated, "Not /my/ plans." She looked at me significantly.

    I sighed. "Well - if we went there, it would certainly make it hard for Melvin to get close enough to try to kill us. Of course, there's still the minor issue that the Great Peace might try to turn you into a flock of birds or a goat or something, but it's an option; and I've been meaning to get in touch with the Nine Nations anyway. So it's pretty high on the list of options to consider."

    Denise looked up and down at me thoughtfully. "/Is/ there anything higher?"

    I paused, running through the places we could go, and the tree of reasons influencing which was better than any other. "Bunny Joe and Bear Joe wouldn't be happy about going there, so that's a negative - I don't know how I'd sleep without either Bear Joe or sedatives, and I'm not happy about drugging myself to sleep for the foreseeable future. There are a couple of zones I know enough about to want to investigate... I suppose that could be done from Brock as a base, or on the trip there... another option is to do something like the Travelling Matt is doing, and just heading out into the unknown to look for something useful..."

    I trailed off as another shape appeared in the water next to Pinky, which soon resolved into a slightly smaller squiddie. They flashed rapid patterns on their skins at each other for a few moments, then Pinky went back to changing her patterns on the side of her facing us. The interpreter spoke, "I have just received word, there has been another explosion in the city."

    My ears rose as my stomach dropped. "The warehouse?"

    "No. A collaborative workspace in a light industrial zone."

    She gave an address, and Denise inhaled sharply. "I know that place. It's where Minerva's little math club meets."

    I took in a breath - held it - let it go. "Well," I stated flatly. "That simplifies things a lot. We might not have to worry about preventing a pogrom in Metropolis - but we've got lives to save right here."

    --

    A couple of very short code-word transmissions (to try to reduce the chances of any radio-direction-finding gear having a chance to pin down the warehouse) over the walkie-talkies confirmed that Minerva herself was both unharmed, and unaware of the new explosion.

    I was feeling rather uncomfortable. Whatever my attempts at aspiring rationality led me to conclude about the best course of actions, what I felt was a lot messier, more complicated, and downright mysterious to me than that. I'd never met anyone in that group save for Minerva herself - but they'd started with ideas I'd promoted, and had built from that; and now, /because/ those ideas had come from me, their lives were in danger. I had no idea of their names or faces or even personalities; but I desperately wanted to do everything in my power to make them safe. Even if doing so put every other long-term plan I had at risk.

    I clicked the radio back on. "Dot Matrix to Principal Office," I hailed, using the newest set of codenames. "Those papers we discussed? How many of your friends have a similar outer folder ready to go?"

    "Andraia to Dot. I'd say, uh, fifteen percent. That is, one five percent." I translated that via the nines complement routine to get ninety-five percent.

    "Dot to Andraia. Is there a checkpoint, like Charlie?"

    "Andraia to Dot. No - I mean, negative. Are you going to, uh, repeat what you did for me and Gramma? Wait, does she have a code name?"

    I sighed, but answered. "No, no code name - and yes, repeat if I can. Mouse will deliver details. Dot out."

    Denise asked, "I still don't know what I have to do with mice."

    "Absolutely nothing. That's why it's a /code/ name. Anyway - I want you to work with Minerva on how to get as many of those kids as possible to safety. I'll give you some authorization codes for Munchkin, in case the best plan you can come up with is to take out one or more of the cars."

    "Best plan /we/ can come up with? Aren't you going to oversee everything?"

    "I've always heard that a good leader knows when to delegate."

    --

    Once Denise was sent off (in a different squiddie's stomach), I focused, not on Pinky, but the human in the room.

    "Miss translator," I said to her, and she blinked at me, still typing. "It's obvious that the squiddies trust you with moderate levels of secrets, and are able to keep you safe from regular threats. However, I have some things I wish to discuss that would put both of us in greater danger by you knowing them. Have you anticipated this request?"

    "Of course, Your Majesty," she answered, rising to her feet. "I have a book of updated translation protocols for your electronic assistant to view, and your original interpretation machine has been upgraded and improved. If you'll please follow me?"

    In short order, I was installed in a much smaller room, still with the window to underwater; and Boomer was installed with a new set of robotic tentacles, and now, some sort of color-changing surface. (Boomer might not have been quite as integrated into me as the Acadians seemed to think, but she already knew more than enough of my secrets that whatever she heard today wouldn't make any significant difference, security-wise.)

    I peered into the blue-tinted water. "You there, Pinky?"

    A few familiar tentacles slid into view, and Boomer spoke for her. "I am here, and security curtains have been raised."

    My range of vision in the water was short enough that I hadn't thought about that detail, which didn't make me any more confident about the rest of my current ideas. Still, I was only in the planning stages, and the whole point of this conversation was to get more information. "There's at least one option that will likely get whoever's trying to kill me to stop: if they have sufficiently persuasive evidence that I'm dead."

    Pinky countered, "Are you certain that your own death will be sufficient for your goals? The second explosion appears to indicate that those connected to you are also targets."

    "I know." I took off my glasses to rub them clean of the condensation forming on them. "But if I'm out of the picture, then it should be a lot easier for my people - including you - to regain normal lives, one way or another."

    "Are you intending suicide?"

    "Not at all. Which means that providing sufficient evidence of my death to convince the public, let alone someone intent on making /sure/ I'm dead, is going to be tricky. One method I'm considering is to stop being a bunny - finding a transformation zone to turn me into something reasonably acceptable, and arranging for my supposed death to be impressive enough not to leave much of a body. But I don't know enough about zones to say if that's even feasible, let alone likely. You seem to be pretty on-the-ball; do you have a summary of how they work?"

    "I regret that I do not. Such zones appear to be built to defy analysis. Cameras positioned in different locations will record incompatible events happening at the same moment. Instruments sent within either come out without any data, or do not come out at all. There is generally no obvious power source, no obvious device to perform the massive amount of computation required for even the simplest alteration, and many of the known transformations should produce sufficient heat, simply from the motions of the molecules being rearranged, to boil the targets. Our current investigations primarily consist of cataloguing the inputs and outputs, and drawing what conclusions we can from that data."

    "What sort of conclusions do you mean?"

    "The favoured method of capital punishment in this city is what they call the 'bimbo zone'. The local authorities have allowed us to perform simple experiments with animals of lesser ethical value than humans, and to observe their executions. The changes are simple to identify, and appear to be consistent among all vertebrates: a change to female sex; exaggeration of secondary sexual characteristics; a permanent state of estrus; a reduction in pigmentation levels that is unassociated with albinism; reduction of adrenal glands and stress hormones; certain cognitive deficits; and some more subtle changes to the ears and jaws, which appear to be unobserved by the local human population. This appears to be the combination of two primary alterations. The first maximizes the feminine characteristics of the subject. The second appears to be 'domestication syndrome', which in untransformed animals, involves mild deficits of neural crest cells. This zone appears to determine how the subject would have developed if they had started with that deficit, and then arranges for those particular alterations."

    "... Okay," I finally said. "Note to self - don't go through the bimbo zone. Second note to self - run a bulldozer through that zone if I get a chance to."

    "That zone does not appear to significantly affect machinery."

    "'Bulldozer' was shorthand for 'blow the place up to keep it from being used'."

    "You have several issues to deal with. Do you wish us to take care of that for you? Or is the point your personal involvement in its destruction?"

    "The /point/... is that lobotomization is not an acceptable criminal punishment." I rubbed the back of my head, as I thought about that. "There's another issue to consider for that one, too. Um - are you aware of Minerva's discovery, about, uh, local perceptions of the numbers of bimbos?"

    "We are aware of the strange behaviour. We are as baffled by it as we are by how zones work."

    I nodded, slowly. "I'm worried about some link between that zone and the minds of the local citizens... but I can't think of a good way to shut the one down that doesn't carry some risk for the other. Maybe instead of simply destroying the zone - can it be blocked off, kept from being used on any person?"

    "We have commercial interests in several local construction companies. It would not be difficult to arrange for concrete barriers to be produced and emplaced, and would not be much more difficult to do so in a way that minimizes local understanding that a blockage is being installed."

    I nodded, more firmly. "That sounds like a good start. Do that, and if something awful starts happening to the locals, it can be undone."

    "I will make arrangements. In the meantime, do you wish to locate another zone?"

    I drummed my fingers on my thigh. "If a zone can extrapolate that much about its target, and can tinker with the brain like that - I'm not sufficiently confident that if I ran into any zone, even one that hadn't been observed to affect the brain, that I'd be the one who ran out the other side. I think if I do have to fake my death, I'm going to have to do it the old-fashioned way. Well, kinda - I could always amputate a limb or two to provide physical evidence that it was really me who died. Since you mentioned you've got construction companies here, I'm guessing you've got some elsewhere; and I've got some bun-bots which I'm having trouble getting to work properly; which gives me another idea. Ever heard of the 'Kansas City Shuffle'?"

    --

    While resting inside Pinky's gullet on the way to Munchkin's new hideaway - I'd started getting concerned that Melvin had the opportunity to gather more and more bits of information narrowing in on the Professor's warehouse - my mind ran over some of the things I'd recently discussed with my betentacled steed, and a correlation came to my mind.

    After running the idea back and forth, including polling my directional sub-personalities, I concluded that it seemed to be a bad idea for me to be a /domesticated/ rabbit.

    "Bun-Bun," I whispered into the dark, "Maybe it's time to let my adrenal glands start working again, and see if I can handle that..."

    --

    As soon as I was back inside Munchkin, Denise hustled me into the autodoc. "Lord knows who you're going to replace me with," she told me as she started running scans. "Last time you went looking for a research doctor, you ended up with a vet. But you're still my patient, and even if I can't tell you who to hire, I can at least make sure your file is as complete as I can make it."

    After a few moments of looking at readouts, she commented, "That's funny."

    "I don't think any patient has ever wanted to hear their doctor say that."

    "Oh, don't whine. And hold still. It's nothing major - you've just gained a pound."

    "That sounds about as minor as it can get. People's bodies change weight all the time," I nodded.

    "Hold still. Most people's bodies - yours is as stable as a clock, once I take into account your solid and liquid inputs and outputs."

    "Any chance it's increased muscle mass?"

    "According to the machine, it's pretty much all fat cells."

    "Uh - I haven't gone through a winter yet. Maybe I'm starting to store up for then?"

    "Possibly."

    "You don't sound convinced."

    "I'm not."

    I sighed. "It's those Acadian microbes, isn't it?"

    "Most likely. Clara has both your genomes. While you were frozen, she mentioned that your body has a cute trick - when it's absorbed enough calories, your intestines stop absorbing. No matter how much you eat, you don't gain weight."

    "Sounds... interesting. And maybe dangerous, in lean times."

    "In lean times, that doesn't come into play. Anyway - if you've gained fat, then that trick isn't working any more. I haven't got the tools Clara does, to analyze every biochemical interaction - but it looks like your new gut ecology somehow keeps feeding your body calories it doesn't need, so... a pound of fat, to store it."

    "I'm going to have to start paying a lot more attention to my diet, aren't I?"

    "And exercising more."

    "Well - I suppose there are worse infections to have. And if I could adapt to everything else, including a self-propelled tail, that's not nearly as big a change to my lifestyle. In fact, I should be doing that anyway, other than the whole 'recovering from cryopreservation and heart surgery' thing."

    "I'll write down some notes on a rehabilitation program for you, for once I'm gone."
     
  • Threadmarks
    • 6.4
  • Threadmarks
    • *Chapter Four: Pro-bability*

    While Denise proceeded with poking and prodding my physiology by proxy via the autodoc's precision paraphernalia, I was pleasantly puzzled by a pussy's pate perambulating into the picture.

    I was somewhat more puzzled, and less pleased, when the rest of the kitty failed to materialize - only a set of tentacles, which the critter used to walk - if that was the right word - along the edge of the autodoc, staring down at me - more specifically, at Wagger, who appeared to be looking up from between my legs with equal interest. Before I could decide whether to try petting it or get ready to set Scorpia on it, Minerva hurried over and scooped the pseudo-feline up. "Sorry," she said, "I haven't taught Toby Junior what's off limits yet."

    Denise muttered something about data being as good as she was going to get, so I sat up (and pulled my skirt back down over Wagger). I reached over, and, in the standard cat-polite manner, offered a finger for it to sniff. The feline head stretched over, did so, then shoved its head under my knuckles. I obligingly scritched - contact had been made. "Is it a he or a she?"

    "We, uh, haven't figured out how to tell. But there's more important things to deal with." Toby Junior reached a couple of tentacles around my wrist, and swung its - I decided to go with 'her' - her surprisingly light weight onto my arm. I instinctively cuddled her against my torso, since even though it looked like she couldn't fall unless she wanted to, it took less effort to bring my other arm up to continue the scritching.

    While I dealt with that, Minerva continued, "I spread the word to the rest of the Bayesian Conspiracy - and a bunch of them are now heading off to visit relatives, or go camping, or the like. But nine thought that staying as close to you as possible was better than their own plans, so I've got them all in the cargo car, and I hope you're not mad at me for letting some go and having some stay, or for keeping them out of your personal rooms, or for-"

    I held up my scritching hand to stop her. (Toby Junior took that as a cue to clamber up that arm, holding onto my wrist with all eights and shoving her head back into my scritching-fingers.) "That's fine," I reassured her. "Monkeys survive the unexpected by doing all sorts of different things, like curling up and running away and running towards whatever upsets them. There's good reasons that that sort of meta-strategy survived millions of years - probably the same reasons it's often worth buying insurance, now that I think of it. And now I'm the one who's getting off track."

    I clambered out of the auto-doc, and called up a recliner to settle onto instead. Wagger poked her head back out again; other than tucking my skirt to preserve any modesty I might happen to still have left, I let her and Toby Junior start working out who was scared of who on their own. I just kept an eye on them to make sure neither tried to eat the other.

    While that was going on, I commented, "I suppose I should go meet them soo - wait, hm. That's how politeness would usually work, but /is/ that a good idea?"

    Minerva was watching my tail-snake interact with the octo-kitty, and from the twitching at the corners of her mouth, I guessed she was trying to hide how funny she thought it looked. "Why wouldn't it be? I'm pretty sure none of them are going to try to kill you on sight."

    "That wasn't what I was thinking of, but now that you bring it up, that's another reason keeping my distance might be worthwhile. What I was thinking of was... hm, it dates back to what I think of as the 'classic' computer hackers - they didn't care what you looked like, or your sex or clothes or anything like that, just the quality of your computer code. When the internet still existed, I noticed that I treated people differently when I just read what they wrote than when I also found out what they looked like. The pictures didn't improve how I treated their text, so I got into a habit of not looking for faces."

    Wagger yawned, and Toby Junior stuck a couple of tentacles into her mouth. When Wagger started slurping them up like spaghetti, I reached down to pull the kitty out of the tail-snake.

    Tony Junior immediately stuck another tentacle into Wagger's mouth. Remembering Max and Pat's earlier shenanigans, I muttered, "Does everyone on this trip have a-" I interrupted myself as I discovered that, instead of trying to be eaten, the octo-kitty was wrapping her mantle around Wagger's head, which I felt getting pulled inside her. The squiddies kept their beaks and mouths there, so despite the mouth on her feline head, I guessed Toby Junior was trying to turn the who-eats-who tables.

    "Sorry," Minerva said again. "I haven't fed her in a while - I've got a sausage to give her. Toby, food!" The kitty immediately leapt from the chair to Minerva's shoulder. Wagger hid herself inside my skirt without any further prompting.

    "Okay," I tried bringing things back to some semblance of sanity, "Let's see about meeting this nonad without actually meeting them..."

    --

    Minerva handed me nine sheets of paper, each with a few typewritten sentences.

    --

    My favorite color is blue. My favorite animal species is a wolf. The most interesting project I have been working on is investigating my family heirloom. It looks like a skull made of black wood like ebony but it gives advice. I figured out it is solar powered and it helped me design an air compressor to make dry ice for our cryonic project.

    I am >99% sure my favorite color is blue and >95% sure my favorite animals are horses. I want to be a horse. I tried magic and it didn't work. I found out how anything can happen in different quantum realities, so tried to be happy that there are universes where I just turn into a horse. I don't want to lose my mind and I'm at least 10% sure that the people who come out of zones aren't the people who go into them, so I'm trying to convince my parents to let me join a zone research crew.

    I like purple and cats. I don't understand the purpose of these questions. If it's a psychology experiment it doesn't seem to be very good one. Do you have cameras watching us? Are you finding out which of us are willing to follow pointless orders you give? What secrets we're willing to share? I don't have any projects I think you think would be interesting. I have projects that aren't interesting, like trying to figure out how bimbos like my mom are different from other people, but that's not what you asked for.

    I prefer blue and I like rabbits. I want to learn everything I can about computers. I asked Clara what computer you learned how to program on, and sent her a collection of local biological samples in exchange for a computer that worked just like yours.

    red wolf the people in charge here are all liars and phonies and hate when i show them they hate electricity so i make music with it i brought my tape deck and sample tapes if you want to hear some

    Purple, Foxes. I am working out a full propertarian constitution that I am confident will make another Singularity impossible anywhere it's in effect.

    My favourite colour is purple, and my favourite animals are skunks. I was quite impressed at your application of the principles surrounding the Crown and Parliament Recognition Act 1689, that a de facto monarch is competent to summon a Parliament even in the absence of a Parliament to confirm their accession to the throne, and your various efforts to establish your sovereignty de jure. I am one of the consultants hired by the Lake Erie squid to offer a human perspective on their ideas, and have helped keep them from trying to offer thousand-page treaties where two-page ones would work better.

    Green is good, and so are dragons. (I haven't seen one in years, though. At least in my current memories, of this timeline.) Your network design for the heliograph has a few vulnerabilities that I'd like to show you.

    Favorite color: Green. Favorite animal species: Wolf. Interesting things I've done: I don't know how interesting it is, but I'm sure that the only long-term solution to ensure humanity's survival is to get back into space, and anyone who thinks hard enough will come to the same conclusion, but I'm still trying to figure out how to convince people who haven't spent enough time thinking about it on their own.

    --

    Fortunately, none of the color-species combinations collided, so it was easy for me to stick appropriately-shaded animal heads into a mental tic-tac-toe grid. At least for me, it was a lot easier to remember 'purple skunk' and from there recall 'constitutions and treaties' than I usually managed with names and human faces.

    "Welp," I said to Sarah, as she massaged my shoulders, watching as Minerva sorted through the trunk-theatre the Professor had apparently given her at the same time as the octocat, "we've spread the warnings to everyone in danger; we've offered shelter to those who want it; and if I'm lucky, Toffee isn't going to lobotomize anyone else. Seems to me like it's time to hit the road. Am I missing anything?"

    "Of course you are," she grinned down at me. "From the way you talk about things, anyway. But let's go anyway."

    In short order, Munchkin was on its way to the docks. However, as we neared the pier the Travelling Matt was berthed at, Munchkin automatically started slowing down, due to the crowd of people in the way... all of whom were wearing the red coats of Erie's Civil Guard. And unlike their puppet counterpart, I rather doubted they'd let me get away with bonking them on the heads with a slapstick.

    I started giving Munchkin new orders, to turn south and back into the city, only to see teams of more red-coated men dragging barriers across the streets: sawhorses and barrels and what looked like whole tree trunks.

    I guessed that Toffee had never had a chance to read Munchkin's specs; as long as everyone inside was strapped in, it could push itself over obstacles at least three metres high. But if Toffee /thought/ that she had us trapped... then simply going right over her barriers could be a Plan B to the Plan A of talking. (Going right over the guardsmen was only around Plan H or so, given how much weight Munchkin's long, sled-like feet would put on each one who didn't get out of the way.

    I keyed open the internal intercom to get everyone's attention. "It appears our leaving may have complications. Melvin may take the opportunity to try to blow us up again. Please prepare for possible rapid evacuation, which may be during combat conditions."

    I turned off the intercom and started calling out orders. "Joe - go turn on all the bun-bots and send them forward, to here. Denise - figure out whether Human Joe can be moved. Sarah - grab the first-aid kits from the lab. Minerva - uh, hunker down until I need another pair of hands."

    Munchkin was practically at a crawl, so I brought it to a halt, to have a steady platform to look from. After a moment of thought, I remembered that Munchkin's software had a 'riot mode', so I called that up; the main result was to electrify a significant part of its surface, like an electric fence, to keep anyone from trying to sneak underneath or on top or anything of the sort.

    The guards seemed to be focused on building up their fence line between the buildings, and in front of and behind us between the buildings and the waterfront. "Minerva, come here for a second. I'm going to go grab a few things in back - if they get any closer, press your hand here, and that'll send us into the water."

    In short order, I returned with Kahled-voolch slung over my left shoulder, and my go-bag over my right. (I didn't have to be paranoid and crazy-prepared to be a queen, but it helped.)

    "Okay, Minerva, I'll take over again. Opening external intercom... Is somebody out there going to tell me what's going on, or am I going to have to guess?"

    The guards continued their shuffling around, and nobody seemed like they were about to talk, so I double-checked the external speakers were on, and tried again. "Do I need to point out that this is a diplomatic vehicle, which you are prohibited from interfering with the conduct of?"

    "No it's not!" came a voice. Munchkin had some rather user-friendly software to focus its cameras in on such a person; and this particular such had a few more shiny things on their jacket than the others, so I guessed they were, if not in charge, at least a spokesman.

    "I'm a head-of-state in a foreign country," I responded. "Pretty much by definition, by the Vienna Conventions on Diplomatic Relations-"

    The speaker spoke again, interrupting me. "Erie never signed any Vienna Conventions, so they're not in effect here!"

    I thought to myself that I should have expected, during my three-year nap, for somebody to figure out the biggest hole in my bluff. Still, talking was better than not talking, and I felt my inner Foghorn Leghorn voice coming to the fore again. "Now trust me, son, you don't want to violate such a long-standing international tradition. There are international laws which don't depend on treaties, things that are called 'peremptory norms', and if you take it into your head to violate them, why, every other nation who hears of it would feel absolutely no compunction in waging war against you to knock some sense into whoever called /that/ shot. Now, war is a terrible thing, especially over a minor misunderstanding, so as long as whatever this particular misunderstanding is remains minor, I expect I could be persuaded to overlook it. For all I know, I happened to blunder into the middle of your annual log-and-barrel festival's festivities. But, I feel that I shouldn't have to point this out yet still have to anyway, I can't blunder out of your little shin-dig unless you move a few of your party-favours aside for a few moments, so how about you get on that and we can all go on with our business?"

    The fellow I'd been talking to - well, at - pulled a paper from inside his jacket. My hopes dropped drastically; official paperwork was rarely-to-never a good sign, especially when there was a bunch of people in uniforms with weapons nearby.

    "I have here," he shook the papers in the air, "a warrant for the arrest of a woman who calls herself Bunny Waldeinsamkeit, a self-proclaimed autocrat; anyone in her vicinity; and the seizure of her vehicle and possessions. Open up and prepare to be boarded!"

    I felt remarkably calm. I reflected on that for a moment, pulled out my heart controller, and got my blood pumping faster.

    "On what charges?"

    "Does it really matter?"

    "Son," I returned, "do you happen to know, to have the faintest inkling of any idea at all, /why/ that Vienna Convention was put down on paper in the first place? Countries need to negotiate with each other, otherwise they'll just stay at war forever and wear each other down and let someone else walk in and take over, which is bad for business for everyone but the newcomer. And to be able to negotiate, countries have to be able to keep some secrets from each other, starting with what each government tells its diplomats to try to haggle for. Each side letting the other have its little secrets is a small price to pay for peace, but the thing of it is, those secrets aren't just as important as a life-or-death situation, they're as important as /lots/ of life-or-death situations."

    A few moments after I fell silent, he asked, "Was there a point to that?"

    "A fairly simple point, son, a fairly simple one. Try and board and all sorts of death and destruction will be dealt, on both a tactical as well as a strategic level. Most likely on logistic and economic ones, too - after all, merchant marines and ports have been valid military targets for thousands of years, and from what I understand of your economy, you'll have some mighty lean winters if you and your people can't go out and collect all the fish that you're used to noshing on."

    He waved his paper again. "If you do not open up, we will be forced to open fire."

    "Now that would be a bad idea all around, since I don't think I could convince myself that such an act would merely be part of exceptionally high-spirited celebrating. Also, in case whoever gave you that paper you seem to attach so much importance to didn't mention it, my vehicle is quite resistant to bullets, and wouldn't even notice arrows."

    "We have rocket-propelled grenades."

    I turned my heart up another notch. I knew that I /should/ be feeling afraid at /that/ threat. I retorted, "I have a certain lack of compunction about overrunning soldiers threatening to blow me up with grenades. Oh, and I have lasers." That last bit was arguably a lie - I had at least /one/ laser, which was of questionable use during actual combat.

    "We have hostages to ensure your good behaviour."

    "Son - are you a good man?"

    "What? Of course I am!"

    "I'd like you to reflect a moment before you take that answer too seriously. Here I am, an innocent woman going about her business, and you're threatening to lock her up, lock her friends up, blow up her property, steal what's left, risking outright war, and now you're adding to the list, threatening innocent civilians. So, if you were to take the outside view and consider how someone else who took those actions would be considered, in a moral and ethical perspective, I ask you again - are you a good man?"

    "I'm a good soldier. Since you don't seem to understand what that means, I'll put it in terms you understand: if I don't follow /my/ orders, I get to enjoy a court-martial. Or worse. So, with all of these men as witnesses, I have to prove that I made every reasonable effort to follow my orders to bring you in. Do you understand?"

    I paused for a few moments; there was something about that answer, comparatively long compared to what he'd said so far, that was niggling at me. I tried to draw things out longer while I tried to figure it out. "If that's the case, then you've already made a slight blunder, in that you haven't tried very hard to convince me that I /should/ willingly let you, as you put it, 'bring me in'. You haven't even stated who gave you those orders, or what treatment I might expect after the bringing."

    He shook his head. "It's an order from the Office of the Mayor to bring you into custody for investigation. I have the authority to summarily execute one Jeff, husband of Sarah; the foster-parents of Minerva Harriet Tubman Joshi; and several acquaintances of Doctor Denise Black."

    I was silent for a long moment. Pretty much every story-book and cartoon I knew stated that this was the moment for me to reluctantly surrender, in order to later perform a daring escape or get rescued by some convenient deus ex machina. However, this wasn't a story-book, or a cartoon. Whether or not I was really a head-of-state, one thing I recalled from every real-world hostage situation was that I had three realistic choices: surrender, which, given the casual approach to life being displayed, meant my probable death; performing my own rescue of said hostages, which I had neither the resources nor training to manage; or treat them as already dead.

    I abandoned truth and went for the blatant lie. "Son - did your 'superiors', loathe as I am to call them superior to anything more valuable than fungi which grow in various rather embarrassing places of the body, happen to tell you what the last person who tried using hostages on me finally said to me?"

    The spokes-guard took a moment to flip through his papers before saying, "There's nothing here about that. What did he say?"

    "'You killed my hostage!'" I turned towards Minerva while swiping at the external mike control, and said to her, "Don't worry about your foster parents. Lying is a much smaller sin than killing, so it's a lot more likely that they're lying about having hostages at all."

    She stopped biting her lip long enough to ask, "But what if they do? Have them, I mean?"

    "Like I said, lying is easy - if they're willing to take hostages, then much more likely than not, they're going to kill them no matter what we do. Nothing any of us can do has any measurable chance of changing that."

    "How very cynical of you," came the spokes-guard's voice.

    I whipped my head to the controls - I hadn't turned the external intercom off at all, and he'd obviously heard what I'd just said. "Crap," I muttered aloud, for the benefit of all involved, "I thought I turned that off." This time, I double-checked that I did, before sitting back. Speaking mostly to myself, but letting everyone hear over the internal intercom, I mused aloud, "Something funky is going on here. Something below the surface. Toffee knows Munchkin can ford streams - but there's no one blocking off the water. I could pop my head out and wave at the Travelling Matt, if I wanted to risk snipers. Someone's trying to do something other than whatever's on that warrant. If they really do have RPGs, and want us dead, why not use them already? Maybe they don't have them? Or maybe they're just not here - there's lots of places they could have set up similar traps - and they're stalling us until they arrive? That doesn't explain the empty water side, though. Maybe they're trying to provoke us into a particular action, which benefits them in a non-obvious way? Driving us into the water... maybe they have underwater mines? No, I'm pretty sure the squiddies would have mentioned if they had those. We are near the Travelling Matt, and there was that odd newspaper article fomenting frivolous fear for furry folk..."

    Nobody was talking, but movement outside derailed my monologue. I kept talking anyway, in case that gave somebody enough info to offer a useful idea. "Horse-drawn hay carts? Almost anything could be hidden in there... but I'm just about certain it's nothing good for us. Okay, time to get out of here before we find out they're full of explosives. Everyone hang on, it's going to be a bumpy ride."

    A couple more icon-swipes, and Munchkin's external speakers sounded off with a lorry's air horn, or a reasonable simulation thereof. Another press, and the sled-feet took a single step forward, with a similarly faked hiss of a locomotive's steam pushing things into motion. A second step. The guards directly in front of us were looking rather nervous. Two more steps, and we were moving slowly and relentlessly, and speeding up. I gave the air horn a double honk.

    I honestly didn't know how willing I was to run over them if they didn't move.

    Fortunately for my conscience, they took the better part of valor, scrambling away from their hasty barricade... and Munchkin simply stepped right on top of their tree trunks and barrels, catapulting me onto the floor (and creating an unhappy amount of crashing noises behind me from insufficiently secured gear).

    Getting back to my seat, I observed that, still at its pier, the back of the Travelling Matt was opening, a pair of Munchkin-sized doors swinging left and right. While Munchkin /could/ go over water, it couldn't go fast, and on the lake it wasn't stable enough to avoid rocking rather unpleasantly. A few swipes on the wall's maps, and we aimed straight for their dock, and in moments slid right into the hatch, the walls bare inches from either side. Munchkin's rear cameras saw the doors closing behind us, with room to spare in front of us as we came to a halt - we had, of course, lost a carriage.

    In that empty space, I saw a familiar, black-furred feline face peeking around a corner - Miss Neckline, who, as an interpreter, I presumed had few duties related to casting off.

    "Okay, people," I sent over the intercom, "we're aboard ship, so if you start feeling ill, give a shout and we'll get you a bucket or something. I'm going to go talk to the captain about courses and ports and such. Cultural warning - I recommend you ask what any piece of meat is before you try it."

    I gave Wagger a quick pat, apologizing for landing on her, straightened out my outfit a bit, and stepped out onto the wooden floor to greet Neckline.

    However, as soon as my hoof was on the deck, I made an unpleasant discovery: a rifle whose business end was being held three point seven centimeters from my nose, held by a human in a red coat.
     
  • Threadmarks
    • 6.5
  • Threadmarks
    • *Chapter Five: Pro-bation*

    I'll give this for Erie's civil guard: when they stripped me, they had a checklist to make sure they didn't miss anything. They got every gadget and weapon that I'd hidden in my clothes, as well as the clothes themselves - everything from my fur out was taken, including my glasses. They even had a female redcoat check the usual orifices.

    That meant that all they missed were the tiny, flat lock picks glued to the keratin on my feet; the flexible straw in Wagger's gullet; and the fact that Bun-Bun could lay eggs containing anything from knives to drugs.

    I was deposited in a small room containing a cot (hard), a pillow (harder), a guard (of uncertain hardness, but at least sixty percent likelihood of femaleness), and a set of overalls (grey, baggy, and quite ugly). I completely ignored the latter and sat down on the cot.

    "Get dressed," said the guard.

    "Why?"

    "You can't be naked for your interview."

    "But I am not 'naked', I am merely not wearing clothes. I could try creating a pun about your organization's 'naked aggression', but I don't think I can pull it off. I'd probably do better attempting a pun about wearing a fur coat."

    She snorted, but didn't press the issue. I reminded myself of a piece of advice that applied to almost any social situation: 'Stay classy'. I still had my dignity, my pride, and my self-respect, and from what little scraps I'd heard about interrogation techniques, holding onto those, onto my /self/, would likely improve my chances of coming out of this in one piece.

    I felt an urge to check my wrist for the time, but they'd taken Scorpia; so I could only estimate how long my battery would maintain enough charge to keep my blood flowing. I hadn't even had a chance to turn it down to its usual rate, so its nominal 'sixty hours' was probably going to be shortened by an unknown amount. Given the circumstances, it seemed unlikely that anyone would be willing to cryopreserve me if I ran out of juice, so I had somewhere under two days before I simply dropped dead and stayed that way.

    Since my first revival, I'd been in a few situations that were arguably worse - but not many.

    I crossed my legs and assumed a position of meditation, and prepared to spend some time in thought.

    --

    "Mealtime," the current guard announced, and opened the door. Head held high, I stepped into the hall, watching for any scrap of useful information (though without any significant hope of sufficient incompetence to let me make a break for it). I was directed to a cafeteria-like room, lit mainly via barred windows, and apparently empty of people. A single tray of white stuff, green stuff, and brown stuff was already set out.

    As I neared it, I discovered I wasn't alone - poking out from behind a table was a gray-furred feline rear end, with a black tuft on its - her - lion-like tail. Even if I'd had my glasses, that wasn't enough to tell if I'd met her on the Travelling Matt, so I changed course to round the table and approach her front end.

    Her fur was gray - but her feathers were black. I found myself standing in front of what appeared to be a full-fledged griffon, who had her own meal tray on the floor in front of her. She licked some gravy from her beak, and asked, "And who are you supposed to be? The mad queen?"

    "Why does everyone keep calling me 'mad'?"

    "Most people would say something about you walking around nude, but I can't throw a stone about that. You'd better eat fast - if you're not done when they say it's time, you don't get to finish."

    "I can stand to lose a pound. How long have you been here? Do you know what's going on?"

    "Now I know I'm in trouble - usually, the first question everyone asks is if I can fly."

    "Unless you're nothing but muscle and hollow bones, I'd be surprised if you can even glide."

    "Hah." She unfolded one wing and waggled it around. "All these are good for are looking nice and staying warm at night." She grabbed a chunk of something red in a talon, examined it from several angles, then bolted it down without chewing. I took the time to sit down next to her. Once her mouth was clear again, she said, "Been here since yesterday morning. Word is they're pulling all the Changed into quarantine together. So we'll probably get a lot more company for the next few weeks."

    "I have confirmation from other sources that that's a big fat lie. Metropolis has a disease - Changed aren't involved."

    "Figures. Unions probably just want to thin out the competition." She wiped her claws on her chest-feathers, and held it out. "Brenda Miller. My zone got wiped after I went through, couple years ago, so I'm the only catbirdbutt I know."

    I shook. "Bunny Waldeinsamkeit. More complicated life."

    "I can see that," she waved a claw at Wagger, who was sniffing at a table leg, and then at my hoof. "Maybe you can tell me about it sometime."

    "Probably not. Somebody's been trying to kill me the past few days. If I'm still here that long, I expect my cell will have exploded. Not to mention, not one guard has acknowledged when I told them my artificial heart is going to need to be recharged soon, or else I'm dead anyway soon enough."

    "And here I thought hauling mail through the wild was a tough gig. I think I'll skip my next round of complaining about sore feet."

    "Eh, there's sore, and then there's sore. I'm lactating, and I don't know how long that's going to take to stop without any toddlers emptying them. ... Mail in the wilderness, you say - do you know a blue fox-centaur named Jeff?"

    "Sure, she's on the Buffalo run-"

    Our conversation was interrupted by a guard yelling, "Time!".

    Brenda stuffed her face into her tray and started gulping down piece after piece, and I grudgingly pulled myself back to standing. In a low voice, I said, "If you're in touch with any other Changed - there's good odds if we don't escape, none of us are getting out of here."

    --

    I did eat dinner that evening, and then breakfast, exchanging some hurried words with the monochrome griffoness in the process, and spending most of the intervening time either meditating, looking like I was meditating while I was thinking, or sleeping, always under the watchful eye of at least one guard.

    After breakfast, what seemed to be the start of a simple daily routine was interrupted. Cuffs were slapped on my wrists and ankles, gags were fitted for me and Wagger, and one guard heaved me over his shoulder. In short order, I was tossed into a hay-cart. Fortunately, it was full of hay. Perhaps less fortunately, Brenda was trussed up at least as thoroughly as I was. We looked at each other, shrugged, and that was about all we managed before the cart-driver called the horse into motion.

    I'd just barely finished getting across the idea of the standard prisoner's tapping code - a five by five grid, with A being one then one tap, B being one then two, up to Z being five then five - when we came to a halt. Guards tied a long rope to my handcuffs, and another to Brenda's talon-cuffs, then unlocked our rear limbs. I didn't fancy being dragged on the ground, so allowed them to lead me off the wagon.

    Without my glasses, I couldn't make out the faces of any of the guards standing more than a few feet away; and I never had spent enough time memorizing any maps of Erie to be able to figure out where we were by any of the blurry landmarks in sight. Nevertheless, when Brenda's eyes widened enough for me to make out that her irises were actually golden-brown, and she started struggling and thrashing and yelling incoherently, I had a suspicion. When I saw that our leads were being tied to long ropes, which disappeared through an irregular hole blown through a recently-constructed wall, that suspicion was more of a sinking stomach.

    Brenda's rope tightened, and she was pulled, kicking and screaming, across the ground and into the hole. After a few moments, her repeated "Ohgod ohgod ohgod ohgod" abruptly cut off.

    The guards were, as far as I could see, very relaxed and unconcerned.

    Inside Wagger's gut, the closest I had to tools useful in this situation were a ceramic scalpel blade, which was sharp but rather small, and a flexible saw, which needed a certain amount of leverage to work. So, in the silence, I started noiselessly whispering to myself, "Okay, Bun-Bun, time to help me if you can. Hysterical strength to break the cuffs, or bite through the rope, would be good. Or if you can lay an egg with a nice knife or saw. I'll even take dislocating or breaking or, if we have to, amputating our thumbs to get out of these cuffs..."

    Before I could come up with any even less palatable suggestions, a form came around the corner of the building - from the size and color, it could only be Brenda. She wasn't screaming, or tied up - she was bouncing, practically prancing, until she arrived next to the hay-cart again.

    Brightly and cheerfully, she called out, "Hi!", looking around at everyone.

    One of the guards took some paper out of a pocket, and appeared to read. "Brenda, you are a bimbo."

    "Oh!" she said, happily. "Do I get to live in city hall now?"

    The papers rustled. "No, Brenda. Only human bimbos live with the Big Boss."

    "Oh." The mindless cheer seemed to dim a notch - just a small notch. "Whose bimbo am I? A pimp's?"

    "No, Brenda." If I didn't know better, I'd have said the guard sounded like he was trying to be kind. "You're /her/ bimbo." He pointed at me.

    "What!?" I squawked.

    "Oh!" Brenda's cheer went back to full glow again. "Hi!", she said again, turning to me. "You look familiar! Have we met?"

    The guard coughed, and Brenda turned back to him. "Brenda, that's Bunny. You love her very much, and want her to be happy, and would do anything for her."

    "Oh! That sounds nice of me. Hi, Bunny! You don't look happy. I'm happy. Do you want to be a bimbo too?"

    I squinted at the guard to try and focus my eyes to get some idea of what he actually looked like. "What," I said to him. "The. /Fuck/?"

    "Oh!" Brenda piped up. "Do you want to fuck?"

    The guard said, "Brenda, go lie down in the hay and take a nap."

    "Okay!" she agreed without a qualm, and jumped into the cart.

    The guard who'd been doing the talking put his papers away. In a remarkably casual and conversational tone, he said, "Sleeping finishes up the imprinting process. When she wakes up, she'll be 'set'. Nobody's found a way to change that."

    I felt my teeth gritting. I managed to move my lips enough to ask a single word. "Why."

    "Word is that you had to be given a demonstration. What had happened, and," he kicked at the rope that looked like it could yank me right where Brenda had gone, "what can happen to you."

    After a moment, I unclenched my jaw. "And for this /demonstration/," I had to pause to unclench again, "you had to take an innocent-"

    The guard barked a laugh. "I don't know what she told you, but she's hardly 'innocent'. Convicted of embezzling thousands and thousands of dollars."

    "And for /that/, you /mind-wipe/ her?"

    "No, for that, we /imprisoned/ her. /You're/ the reason we had to do this demonstration, and she was the most expendable. Doesn't even have hands."

    "And /what/. Is this demonstration. Supposed to get me to do. That /asking/ wouldn't?"

    The guard shrugged. "Hell if I know, ma'am. Above my paygrade. What I am supposed to do is offer you a choice. Start cooperating, or we start the winch your rope's tied to."

    "Cooperate with /what/? None of you have even /asked/ me anything since you /grabbed/ me?"

    He gestured at the cart driver, who pulled a bundle out of the hay and tossed it at my feet. It was the ugly gray overall.

    "Did you," I grated, "mind-wipe her just to get me to wear your stupid /clothes/?!"

    "Of course not. But if you're so indifferent to social pressure that you'd rather walk around in the buff than do even that, then I'm guessing whatever the higher-ups want you for is out of the question." He pulled his papers back out, flipping through them. "Oh, yeah. I'm also supposed to mention that there's lots of other Changed we can turn into bimbos. And lots of things we can imprint them with, like-"

    I was spared whatever he was about to say next by the crack-rumble of an explosion, not much further than the one that had taken out the carriage of Munchkin.

    The guards sprang into action - and my rope sprang into the air, pulling me off my feet and toward the bimbo zone. The talky guard gave orders about stopping one thing or another, and as I rolled onto my back one of the guards jumped onto me, his weight pressing me down onto the pavement... but not slowing me down.

    When my hands were pulled through the wall, the guard on top of me rolled off, and I was yanked into darkness.

    I was pulled along what felt like a smooth floor instead of concrete or cement.

    I remembered what it had felt like just dipping my foot into a transformative pool, and curled up into a fetal ball in anticipation of that pain, multiplied over my whole body; my eyes scrunched shut, Wagger tucked against my belly.

    After a few moments of just more sliding, I relaxed a tad, and my mind cleared enough to start entertaining thoughts about gnawing on that rope...

    ... which is exactly when I got pulled into a wall of jello.

    I started thrashing again, and my conscious mind was able to note that my hands weren't shackled together again. Of course, that also meant that I wasn't being pulled /through/ whatever I'd been embedded in.

    I came up with the idea that swimming might be more effective than wild, random limb-flailing. I couldn't tell what direction was up, my closed eyes couldn't detect a spark of light; so I just started breast-stroking in the direction I was pointing.

    As I tried to swim, the semi-solid substance engulfing me became thicker, harder to push against, until, finally, I couldn't twitch my smallest toe. My thoughts quickly turned from trying to come up with an appropriate pun based on 'fly in amber' to how long Bunny's mammalian diving reflex would let me remain conscious without fresh air.

    --

    At roughly this point in the proceedings, I can no longer guarantee that what I remember experiencing bears any resemblance to what might or might not have actually happened. But as there might be some causal connection between my recollection and the events, and said memories did influence my subsequent thoughts, I feel obliged to recount them.

    After thirty mississippis of simple immobility, the gunk changed its behaviour again. To put it politely, it pushed into all my body cavities, starting at my nostrils and finishing at Wagger's, including everything in between. The stuff went down both pipes in my throat before hardening like the remainder - and while I couldn't even try to inhale, with every one of my alveoli held rigidly, after another sixty mississippis I noted that I wasn't feeling any discomfort from lack of air.

    For three hundred mississippis, nothing else seemed to happen.

    Then my eyelids opened against my will... through the rather disconcerting mechanism of being attached to my skin, which, through some sourceless light, I observed being slid off my entire body, in large, regular pieces. There was no pain, not even any numbness, just a continued sensation of floating in a body-temperature liquid.

    I would have screamed, if I was able to vibrate my vocal cords, when most of my internal organs were floated out in front of me. Digestive tract to the left, liver and kidneys to the right, lungs above and uterus below, blood pump and batteries smack-dab in the middle.

    /Then/ I lost consciousness.

    --

    I came to curled up, on a smooth floor, my hands clutching the fur on my legs. I felt dizzy, and bloated, and off-balance, but my pelt was still in one piece, and I seemed to have at least a majority of my major organs where they should be.

    I struggled to stand, and as I did, I discovered at least one change - instead of being just one pound overweight, I was significantly heavier, by at least twenty pounds. It was still dark, so I couldn't tell if my fur had been bleached - though, when I thought about it, Brenda's hadn't been - and picking the number three hundred fifty six at random, I was able to figure out that the square root was eighteen point eight something. I didn't feel especially cheerful, or interested in following orders. Wagger pressed her head into my hand when I petted her, as usual. All in all, I made a first guess that Bun-Bun's unusual chromosomes had thrown off the zone's usual results, said guess to be subject to heavy revision given any more evidence at all.

    Noises were echoing about the place, confusing, hard to make out - voices, rumbling, sharp cracks, hisses. A stream of dust tickled my nose, and I sneezed. I made another guess that there were procedures in place to deal with bimbos who didn't bounce right out, and this might be my one-and-only chance to escape; so I decided to get myself moving before someone else came to move me somewhere I wouldn't find pleasant.

    I held my hands out, taking a step forward - and recoiled instantly at the feeling of jello. I turned right around, and started shuffling the other way.

    In short order, I found myself approaching the inside of the irregular hole I'd been pulled in through. This confused me a bit, since Brenda had exited a different way; but I put that aside to focus on the moment, pulling my ears back along my head to reduce my profile, and slid just enough of my head into the opening to get a view of the outside.

    I was, once again, confused. The red-coated guards were to my right, hiding behind the wagon, nearby trees, and so on, from the group to my left. About all I could say about them was there were at least a dozen, all wearing all-encompassing body-suits, not completely unlike the getup that 'Darth Idiot' had been wearing at my first revival. More to the point, they were also all carrying combat rifles, which were being used to shoot at the redcoats - or, at least, at the things they were hiding behind.

    When I'd had about five seconds to take that in, the hole was blocked, and I pushed myself back, but not in time to avoid... being glomped by Brenda.

    "What are you doing /here/?" she chirped as she hugged me with all six limbs, while I was on my back. "The exit's on the /other/ side, and I've been /waiting/ for you, but you took so long I thought you might have bit through your rope on this side and here you are!"

    I cleared my throat, and she snapped her beak shut, looking down at me with enormous, /interested/ eyes.

    I asked what seemed most relevant, "Who are the guys with guns?"

    "No idea!"

    "Did they shoot at you?"

    "Nope!"

    "... I'd rather not be captured by the Erie guard again. Think we can just kind of sneak out?"

    The hole darkened again, and Brenda chirped a "Nope!" as a gas-masked head leaned in.

    In a muffled voice, he - or she, or it for all I knew - said, "Ma'am? We're here to extract you."

    Brenda stopped hugging me, and jumped up to all fours, straddling my body, facing the figure with spread wings and lashing tail. "You can't have her!"

    The man started to reach for his weapon - well, now that he was closer, I noticed I had to clarify that as his /main/ weapon - and I hissed, "Brenda, calm down." I figured that whatever had been done to her head, she didn't deserve to get shot for it. She looked down at me, head cocked, then helped me as I started trying to roll upright. While I got my feet under me, I asked the man, "Who are you?"

    "We are operating under the authority of Lake Erie. Pinky offered the recognition code, 'You're seven spans tall and weigh seven stones'."

    "I think I'm up to eight," I grumped, my mind flashing back to my first attempts to communicate with the squiddies. "But it's the best offer I've heard all day. Okay, let's go."

    "Do you wish the quadruped to come with us?"

    "Of course I am!", Brenda had no doubt.

    She'd been a fellow prisoner, and the Erieans had forced her to imprint on me, as an example to me; I certainly felt a certain amount of responsibility to her. "What she said," I agreed.

    He pressed a hand to the side of his helmet. "One additional subject to extract, codenaming it Birdbrain."

    "Hey!"

    "Additional note: Primary subject requires minimal jostling, we were not informed of her advanced pregnancy."

    "My /what/?" I looked down at myself in the light from the hole. The extra twenty - okay, more like thirty - pounds weren't spread out as a layer of fat, but were concentrated right in front of me.

    --

    "Well, Doc?" I looked up at the figure, eager for answers.

    The first soldier had wrapped a blanket around me, escorting me and Brenda out of the building and along the wall, behind the similarly-clad figures. He kept up a constant patter of 'watch your step' and 'keep your head down' and 'mercenaries based out of Youngstown' until we were efficiently packed away into a horse-drawn, covered wagon, and sent on our way. The new figure, who was dressed identically to the first, asked about injuries while quickly but efficiently checking our limbs were all in the right order.

    In answer to my question, he rubbed the back of his helmet, as if he were scratching his head. "Well, I'm pretty sure you're not pregnant," he said. "It's a solid mass, not amniotic fluid. If I didn't know better, I'd say it was a straight-up watermelon."

    I closed my eyes and let my head fall back. "Or an egg."

    "Suppose it could be," he agreed. "But I don't think anything's laid eggs that big since the dinosaurs."

    "I do /not/ want to deal with trying to... pass something that size. What would it take to get an abortion?"

    "Well, I /could/ try and come up with something now, ma'am, but with the moving and the tools, I'd recommend you wait until we arrive."

    "Arrive where?"

    "Out on the peninsula. The other platoons are recovering your ship, equipment, and companions."

    "My ship? I don't remember ever owning a ship."

    "The 'Travelling Matt', ma'am?"

    "Ah. I was going to ride on it, but it was Acadian, not mine."

    "As you say, ma'am. We're supposed to meet it at Horseshoe Pond."

    "What then?"

    "Then we get the second half of our pay and go back home, ma'am."

    "Hm. I don't suppose you'd be interested in any sort of longer-term employment?"

    "You'd have to take that up with the captain, ma'am, but probably not. We've already been away from home longer than she's usually comfortable with."

    "Why'd you accept this job, then?"

    "We were already in the area, Erie have been good employers, and they made an offer the captain really liked."

    --

    Despite the fact that the peninsula was a dozen kilometres from base to tip, and we were travelling at horse speeds, that was about all the useful information I got from my rescuers during the trip, for the simple reason that despite having all sorts of things to try to think about, I simply fell asleep.

    I woke to my shoulder being shaken by the medic, and discovered Brenda was also napping, using me as a pillow. "Captain wants to see you, ma'am. We have your clothes - would you like to get dressed?"

    "However much they /fit/," I rested my hand on my enlarged belly, "that would be nice." My Windsor outfit wasn't among the pile I was presented with, so I was soon draped in my Commander-in-Chief uniform, via the simple expedient of leaving it unbuttoned and my gut protruding. Hardly the epitome of formality, but I decided that if there was one perk of being royalty, it was getting to declare my own uniform's standards in non-standard conditions such as being unexpectedly egg-heavy.

    While I was perched on the back of the wagon, deciding how best to get down while I couldn't trust my balance, another figure indistinguishable from the other mercenaries stepped over. "Bunny Waldeinsamkeit?" I nodded, and she offered a handshake, which I accepted. "Captain Bravo, of the Youngstown Free Company."

    "It's a pleasure to meet you, Captain," I fell back on the meaningless pleasantries. (Of course, I only had their word to go on that she /was/ their captain. Or even a 'she'.) "I'd be a bit happier if your men had arrived fifteen minutes sooner," I rested one hand on my womb, the other on Brenda's head, "but at this point, I'm not going to quibble about details."

    "In that case, we should be able to finish this up and get you on your way. All the people you were captured with have been extracted, and are being escorted to the city's docks. Your ship's jolly-boat is in the pond here, and we should be able to get you all together and out the harbour's entrance channel. After that, you're on your own; we're not equipped for significant water operations, and that's as far as our contract extends."

    "I don't suppose I might be able to entice you to extend that any further?"

    "No, ma'am. We're already overdue for downtime and training. I refused the first offers your government made, and if they hadn't sprung for the city-killer, I never would have accepted."

    "... Pardon?"

    "We just need you to identify the item that destroyed Buffalo, so we can collect it and be on our way."

    "... Captain, I think there's been a significant misunderstanding."

    "I don't see why. If you regret your purchase, we'll be happy to return you, your people, and your vessels to Eriean custody. Well, maybe not /happy/, but we /will/."

    "If you don't get me back in touch with my people soon, all you'll be able to return to Erie will be a corpse. I require very specialized treatment every few days to stay alive."

    "I am guessing you are referring to your artificial heart needing a recharge?"

    "The squiddies really didn't hold anything back, did they?" I started sliding forward to set my hoof on the ground.

    "You will be pleased to note that we recharged your batteries-"

    That was about as far as I heard, as I was distracted by a sudden ache all across my abdomen, forcing me to curl forward and nearly fall flat on my face; I probably would have, if Brenda hadn't grabbed hold to help steady me.

    After a few moments, I was able to pay attention to, "Ma'am? Are you alright? Ma'am, please look at me. What's wrong?"

    I finally grated, "I /hope/ that that was just my uterine muscles cramping from being stretched so far so quickly. The alternatives are much less pleasant - I don't even know if what's inside me is physically capable of passing through my hipbones, and I certainly don't want to die finding out that-" I cut myself off at a second cramp. Brenda started shouting, the captain started barking orders, and in a few moments I was stretched out on a tarp on the ground.

    One of the black-garbed figures managed to catch my attention. "Ma'am, you're going into labour. Your, uh, egg is wider around than an infant, so I need to either break your pelvis or destroy the egg. Are you able to make a medical decision?"

    "It's... not... my... egg..."

    "I'll take that to mean you don't wish us to take any effort to preserve it. I'm going to drill a hole in its shell so I can see what I'm dealing with. This shouldn't be any worse than a gynecological exam."

    I grunted, and sweated, and tried not to interfere with what he was doing. He suddenly cursed, and wiped at his goggles. "The albumen is pressurized - it's just coming straight out." A pile of clear jelly was building up on the tarp. "It shouldn't be doing that - not without water flushing it out. I think the shell is filling up with air. Don't worry, shells are designed to withstand outside pressures-"

    My gut clenched - and there was a horrible crunching, crackling sound. My belly deflated like a popped balloon. The man's goggles were sprayed with blood.

    And /then/ I couldn't stop screaming, until I passed out a mercifully short few moments later.
     
  • Threadmarks
    • 6.6
  • Threadmarks
    • *Chapter Six: Pro-hibition*

    I woke to discover a few useful facts. I was in a bed, in an unfamiliar, white-walled room; some kind soul had set a calendar and clock nearby, so that I saw it was only two days later; and I couldn't feel my legs, or anything at all from the waist down.

    A quick lift of the sheet revealed my legs were still in place, though my lower wardrobe had been replaced with a cloth diaper. A lift of my head showed Brenda curled up on the carpet next to my bed, on the opposite side from the IV drip stand.

    Things could have been worse.

    They could also have been a lot better - starting with the squiddies never having mentioned that I'd had any contact at all with the Berserker, let alone offered it in a bargain with a mob of mercenaries.

    I had about ten minutes to ponder that before a gas-masked head leaned through the doorway. I had another two minutes before a fully-suited figure strode into the room.

    "Do you have any idea how hard it is to get good chitosan these days?"

    "I'll go with 'no'." Brenda sat up, but simply rested her head on the bed near my hip. I absently started stroking her headfeathers.

    "Let's just say there isn't an abundance of shrimp near Youngstown. We had to use up most of our stockpile to keep you from bleeding out on us."

    "Is that supposed to make me more inclined to pay you? Need I remind you that it was your medic - if he was a medic - who got me started on that whole bleeding out thing?"

    "Don't worry, I'm not demanding extra pay - just what you already owe us."

    "Lake Erie hired you. You can take it up with them."

    "You're here. I'm taking it up with you."

    "I have to say, I don't think I've ever seen someone use your negotiation tactics so brazenly - coming over before anyone can even tell me if trying to sit up will rupture my spleen, let alone whether this paraplegia is short-term, long-term, or permanent."

    "We /are/ running behind sched- wait, paraplegia?"

    "You're telling me you didn't already know?"

    "How could we? You've been unconscious."

    He stared at me. I stared at him. Brenda pushed her head to get me to scratch behind her ear-holes. After a few moments of standoff, he sighed. "Fine, one medic, coming right up."

    "Not to be too picky or anything, but how hard would it be for /my/ medic to come in?"

    "What, you mean that vet?"

    "I mean that woman who knows my physiology well enough to have implanted my artificial heart, among other treatments."

    "She could be Mary, Mother of God in disguise and have raised you from the dead-"

    "... near enough..."

    "- and I don't care, as long as we finish our business. I'll have her brought in through the security cordon." He vanished back out the doorway.

    "So," I said to Brenda, "what have /you/ been up to the last couple of days?"

    "These people wouldn't let anyone else near you," she said, eyes still half-closed from my continued scritching, "so I've made sure you're taken care of properly. Avoiding bedsores, changing your diaper, keeping your fur groomed so you'd feel confident and ready to kick ass and take names when you woke up..."

    "That's..." I wanted to say 'creepy' or 'stalkerish', but reigned in my tongue. I had no idea whether I'd need somebody to do all that for me for the next thirty years, and with what had been done to her, I couldn't tell if she could have /not/ done something like that. So I continued with, "above and beyond the call of duty."

    "It was no duty at all. I know you don't feel about me the way I do about you - I can't /not/ take care of you, any more than a mother can't take care of her newborn. That guard who imprinted me on you didn't say /how/ I had to love you."

    Carefully, so as not to dislodge the IV in my elbow, I rubbed my face. "I hope you won't take this the wrong way - but I'm really, really sorry that I wasn't able to keep the bimbo zone sealed up before you got pulled through it. The simple fact that it /can/ do what it's done to you is all sorts of disturbing."

    "I'm imprinted, not an idiot."

    "Er..."

    "I think the idiot part of being a bimbo comes from new bimbos being /told/ to be dumb during the imprinting stage."

    "That's... possible, I guess, though it doesn't match the theory I heard about neural crest cells."

    "Do neural crest cells have anything to do with giant eggs appearing?"

    "Not that I know of."

    "Then your theory's crap."

    I managed a shrug, then had a thought. "Say, did you see what happened to that egg's contents?"

    "Kind of. Three, four gallons of goo pretty much just soaked into the ground and disappeared. I think they kept all the pieces of shell they pulled out of you."

    I rubbed my head again. "I suppose that now I can't find the answer, I can actually face the question of /why/ I had a giant egg stuck inside me... I mean, if the bimbo zone had just made me pregnant, I could at least kind of understand it as part of that whole female-fertility thing..."

    "Isn't it obvious?"

    "I want to make a comment about my brains feeling scrambled, but whatever drugs are in this IV are making it hard to concentrate."

    "There aren't any drugs in it right now, just blood substitute and volume expander. They couldn't transfuse blood, they didn't have any that matched your type."

    "Hunh. Could have sworn I was AB positive, the universal recipient."

    "Don't ask me, I'm just passing on what I've overheard."

    "Maybe I can blame being muzzy-headed on a shortage of red blood cells, then. So, uh - what's obvious about the egg?"

    "How do you think new zones get made?"

    "I hadn't really thought about it. I guess I assumed whatever made the first ones just kept making more."

    "I don't know how long it'll take, but I'd make a bet that a new zone's going to show up where your egg drained to."

    "... And here I thought I was just avoiding the creepiness of some sort of alien parasite incubating inside me."

    --

    "The good news," Denise said after some basic prodding, under Brenda's watchful, hawk-like eyes, "is that I'm pretty sure you're not permanently paralyzed. I think all we're dealing with is swelling that's pinching some important nerves. Once your over-engineered metabolism finishes healing up from the damage from the shards, you should be back on your hoof and paw in no time."

    I nodded, encouraged. I'd used a wheelchair as a disguise, and because it made things easier, so I figured I could get used to it as a necessity for a while.

    Denise continued, "There's an off chance the nerves themselves were damaged, but without more specialized instruments, I have no way of determining that. Which brings us to the bad news." She stared at the soldier who'd escorted her in. "We're in a seized farmhouse, in the middle of around two hundred heavily armed men."

    "You're sure they're not women?"

    "Yes," she stated bluntly. "While they were quite competent in extracting us from Erie's civil guard, they also seem quite competent in keeping us from leaving. I will admit that the food is better than in prison. That's about all I'll admit."

    --

    "Captain?"

    "Yes?"

    "Just checking that it was you. Is there any chance that I could see a copy of the contract you were hired under?"

    "Of course. I'll have somebody retrieve a copy for you."

    "About that. I hope you won't take this the wrong way, but for matters of this value, there has to be a certain temptation for somebody with access to those papers to modify them, perhaps even without your knowledge or consent. While I would be happy to examine whatever papers you care to show, I trust that you will understand if I do not rely on their contents as being definitively accurate, without further confirmation from an external source."

    "You're not making this easy, are you?"

    "Captain - you're asking me to hand over something which could kill thousands. Even without my acknowledging whether or not I have access to any such thing, would /you/ hand over such a thing to a group without making /absolutely/ sure that group was really who they claimed to be, let alone that that's what they were owed?"

    "Are you saying you /don't/ have the city-killer?"

    "The thing about a policy of deliberate ambiguity, Captain, is that once that ambiguity is resolved, it can't be recreated. You have yet to give me sufficient reason to resolve it."

    "If I lose men because we had to fight off an attack while you play games, their blood will be on your hands."

    "I'm not forcing you to stay."

    "You expect us to leave without getting paid?"

    "I don't expect you to do anything. I will point out that I intend to be around for a very long while, and it would do my reputation significant damage were I to stiff the first mercenaries hired in my name."

    "We're /not/ leaving without the city-killer."

    "Period? Not even if an examination of the contract reveals you aren't owed it?"

    "Of /course/ we're owed! My men put their lives on the line to rescue you, you ungrateful furry b- ... Is there a reason you're trying to rile me up, ma'am?"

    "There is. In general, when honest business proceedings are taking place, a certain amount of courtesy is involved. It has yet to occur to you to offer me my glasses, let alone clothes, let alone privacy - either by myself or to consult with my associates - let alone anything related to the contract itself."

    "What, you're not demanding I call you 'Your Majesty' too?"

    "I am not demanding it - as far as I know, you are not a citizen of any of the realms I am a monarch of, and this is not a formal or diplomatic meeting. I /am/ taking into account the fact that you are aware of the title, but have been choosing not to use it."

    With the distortion from the gas mask, I couldn't tell whether he was grating his teeth, but would have been willing to lay good odds on it. "I will get you your papers, /Your Majesty/, and signal Lake Erie to send their own copy."

    "I would appreciate that, thank you. If you could, please arrange so that, let's say, Sarah - the blue fox centaur - can come back and forth without hindrance, and she can take care of my glasses and such minor things."

    --

    "Brought Boomer," Sarah announced. "Thought you'd want her."

    I squeezed her hand as she set the AI on my belly, smiling up at her. "Thanks, you read my mind."

    I heard an odd rumbling noise from the side, and in a few moments, identified it as Brenda, whose avian throat was emitting a rather un-birdlike growl.

    "Uh - Sarah, this is Brenda, a Changed who got sent through the bimbo zone before me, and was imprinted to 'love me'. Brenda, this is Sarah, who I once rescued from death by poisoning, and has been a steadfast companion since. Both of you have helped me when I was in need - I hope the two of you can help each other, too."

    Brenda turned away from the two of us, snorting, staring at a wall. "Sorry," she said. "I /know/ it's irrational, but - she's going to take you /away/ from me, and I want to chase her off."

    "I'm not going anywhere any time soon," I started, but Brenda shook her head.

    "I know me being possessive like this won't make you happy, so I'm going to work on it. Just letting you know that I /do/ feel this way."

    Sarah said, "Maybe I could give you a massage? You have been here all the time for days. Maybe we take bath or shower? Do your feathers need special care?"

    "I don't want to leave her alone - who knows what those black-suited bastards would do while nobody's watching?"

    "I can go get Bunny Joe to watch over her."

    Brenda seemed kind of torn, so I contributed, "Brenda, if you want to watch out for me, being well-rested would help... and looking your best and fiercest is more likely to head off trouble than, say, 'ragged animal chic'."

    "Fine, fine," she grumbled. "But anything happens to you while I'm gone, I'm taking it out of blue-boy's hide."

    --

    I flipped the papers in front of Boomer's camera, then adjusted my glasses to start looking at the front page myself. Since the captain knew I was going to be getting confirmation of its contents, I didn't expect it to have any notable differences from any other copy, and getting a head start on studying it seemed the best use of my time.

    I asked the AI, "Any obvious loopholes?"

    Her badger avatar shrugged. "Nearly the entire contents appear to be mimeographed from a standardized boilerplate, which seems likely to have been carefully crafted by a team of lawyers to avoid such simple modes of failure."

    "Maybe - but it's unlikely that team of lawyers had a digital mind like yours to help them.

    "Perhaps. There are several sections. Conditions of payment, mission parameters, support offered to the unit, methods of dispute resolution and so on. They were paid a certain amount up front, with further payment dependant on successfully recovering you intact-"

    "There's a possible loophole right there. Was the bimbo zone specifically mentioned?"

    "Not directly, but you were specified as being in 'suitable condition to continue serving as monarch of the Dominion of Lake Erie'."

    "Hrm. I was hoping that them being too late to keep me from being pulled into the zone would be enough on its own."

    "It may be an arguable point. Your reaction to that zone was not predictable, and if you had experienced a typical reaction to that zone, the changes to your neural structure could count as becoming incapacitated. However, it is unlikely the Free Company's legal staff would accept that argument."

    "What happens if I claim that's the case, and they claim it's not?"

    "Neutral third-party arbitration, to take place in the Metropolis of Cleveland."

    "Let's put a pin in that."

    We went over other parts of the contract, from what else they were supposed to try to rescue, to which version of the laws of war the Company was supposed to abide by, to dealing with prisoners-of-war.

    Boomer finished by reciting, "Signed, a squiggly hieroglyphic, translated as Whitecap, Minister of Finance on behalf of the Cabinet Committee of Her Majesty's Privy Council for Lake Erie."

    "Hm... It's not much, but I think I can work with that. At least enough to get what I want, but make all sorts of people mad at me. I'd rather not tick off a company of mercenaries who are as... /effective/ at their jobs as these fellows - they might come in useful in the future, and if nothing else, I don't want them to accept contracts against me and mine just because they carry a grudge. Of course, I also don't want the squiddies' government to turf me out and go republic if I step on too many toes..."

    "I have insufficient information to advise you on how to accomplish that set of goals."

    "So do I. Let's see if I can convince the mercs' legal department to let me, meaning you, speed-read through the rest of their library; and exchange some messages with the Lake Erie government."

    --

    "Captain Bravo."

    "Your Majesty."

    I smiled and nodded up at him. "Thank you," I said. "Oh, as an aside, according to the usual standards of decorum, once you've used that title, you're free to use 'ma'am' afterwards. But to my main point - I would like to thank you and your men for the efforts you all went to in attempting to recover me, my property, and my fellow prisoners. If you wish, you can consult with the government in Lake Erie for the specific form of that thanks - medals for personal service to the Crown, if you'd like them."

    "That's very nice, ma'am, but medals don't pay the bills, or help us win fights."

    "I wouldn't be too sure of that - a reputation for getting the job done can be quite intimidating to your opponents. But please don't think that my thanks are going to be expressed purely symbolically; I intend to make sure that you and your men receive what you are owed, financially and contractually, as well."

    "That's good to hear," he seemed to relax a tad.

    "That said," I continued, "that payment will have to be in the form of cash - and a significant quantity of that - rather than the 'city-killer' you negotiated for."

    There was a long pause. "You're reneging on the contract?"

    "On the contrary - I'm fulfilling it to the best ability of the government of Lake Erie."

    "It doesn't sound like it."

    "There are some legal technicalities involved, but the short version is, I would like to make a cash offer in line with the non-payment penalties of the similar contracts you have in your library."

    "I think I want to hear about these 'technicalities'."

    "In that case - I'll start with an analogy. I don't know much about Youngstown; do your people still have sports and music and such culture?"

    He sighed. "We do."

    "Good. Let's say you play baseball, and a musical instrument - in fact, you're in charge of both the team and the orchestra. Now - if the orchestra falls into debt, can its treasurer sell off the baseball team's bats?"

    "You're saying the city-killer isn't Lake Erie's to sell."

    "I'm not just Queen of the Dominion of Lake Erie, I'm also Queen of Quebec, arguably the Queen of Canada, and of many other places which don't concern us. Buffalo was destroyed before the Dominion of Lake Erie was founded - if I did acquire that city-killer, I would have done so under one of my other Crowns. There is a long-standing constitutional tradition that the government of one member of the Commonwealth has no connection to any other government, even if the same person happens to be the monarch of both."

    "That's a lot of words that don't mean much of anything. None of those other countries still exist."

    "Quebec does, if no others do."

    "Quebec's in Indian Country."

    "Which is why that's not the only technicality I'm using to guide me. As a monarch in the Canadian traditions, I consider myself bound by certain guidelines, including the ones that led to certain treaties expressly prohibiting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. In fact, my very first formal act as Queen of Lake Erie was a proclamation expressing my hostility to anything involving mass deaths. When the Lake Erie Finance Minister signed that contract, he was doing so against my explicit wishes. If you ask your lawyer to buy a horse for you for ten dollars, and he makes an offer for fifteen, things get... complicated, and unpleasant for all involved."

    "You're still not saying whether or not you actually have a city-killer."

    "Now that the offer was made, rumours are going to spread that I do, whether or not that's the case. Given that, it would be... unwise for me to explicitly state that I don't. Some people wouldn't believe me, and think I had something to hide; some would take my lack of possession of such as an admission of weakness. If I do have one, then for similar reasons, it's better for me to avoid explicitly acknowledging it. The best course that I can think of is to keep as many people as possible guessing, for as long as possible."

    "You'd better be offering a /lot/ of money. Running a company isn't cheap."

    "I have suggested to my government in Lake Erie to be generous enough that taking the matter to arbitration would most likely end up with you receiving less." I frowned. "I wish I understood what possessed them to make the offer they did in the first place."

    "They made lots of offers. That was the first one the Company's agent didn't have instructions for."

    "If you'd been negotiating yourself, instead of through an agent, would you have taken one of the other offers?"

    "You get to keep your secrets, I get to keep mine."

    --

    I stared at the telegram Sarah handed to me, and thought about it. Whitecap was offering his resignation, and I wasn't sure whether to accept or reject it, or let the squiddies' government handle it instead of dealing with it personally. Canadian tradition was for me, as monarch, to act as the government advised - but the older, deeper British traditions went all the way back to when kings were more war-leaders than figureheads. I'd been drawing on whichever tradition seemed handiest at the moment, but that had led to the whole mess with the Free Company.

    I'd been doing well enough so far by asking for more information, so I did that once again, asking Sarah to send a return message to Whitecap, asking him to explain his reasoning leading up to the offer to the mercenaries. In short order, I had a reply: "We acquired copies of your 'motivation tree' shortly after your hibernation. It was obvious that while you had to place the 'avoid extinction of sapience' node as equal to the 'personal survival' node for public relations purposes, the latter was the true root node. The Youngstown Free Company were the available tool with the greatest chance of ensuring your survival, thus the lesser node was sacrificed for the greater."

    "Hoo-boy," I started, but Boomer interrupted me by flashing her whole screen.

    Text scrolled across, reading, "Message patterns match steganographic protocol. Do you wish to view hidden message now?"

    I curled the telegram around Boomer to hide her screen from Sarah and Brenda, and tapped agreement. The screen changed to read, "Decoding and decompressing acronyms, etc, message reads: Youngstown Free Company appears more interested in gathering intelligence than money. Their known expenses exceed their projected income. Due to similarity in outfit and location, there is a possible connection to Pittsburgh, but this is unconfirmed. City-killer's existence was used to entice them to accept contract."

    I re-read that, cleared the screen, and grunted another "Hoo-boy."

    I'd gotten lazy. I'd come up with a perfectly useful six-layered multiple background story - and then had dropped it to focus on one particular persona, that of Queen Bunny of Canada. Meanwhile, it looked like both the squiddies and the Youngstown/Pittsburgh group (or groups) hadn't been slacking off. I couldn't even tell whether the non-hidden message about their interpretation of my motivations was true, or was just a believable cover story to allow the hidden message to be sent... and I had absolutely no clue what Pittsburgh was up to. I only even had Denise's word that Captain Bravo was male.

    And if Captain Bravo had really wanted - there was nothing I could have done to keep him from forcing me to tell him about the Berserker. Or anything else. All the words we'd exchanged, the loopholes and technicalities I'd dug up; he wouldn't even have had to do anything but lock the door, and wait until I was delirious from dehydration. With only a modest bit of cleverness, a cover story would have absolved him of any negative consequences of my dying while under his control. The only reason I was going to pay him off in cash was because /he/ chose to allow that, not because I'd come up with any particularly persuasive ideas. I was still alive... because he believed I was more valuable to him alive.

    If I tried to rely on that belief, then I would stay alive exactly as long as that belief lasted. And since I didn't know what he based it on, I might as well treat it as a random switch, which could change at any time.

    If I wanted to stay alive for an appreciable length of time, I was going to have to really step up my game, and become a lot more independent and self-sufficient, instead of relying on the random whims of strange mercenaries.

    I sniffed the air, and decided my first step would be learning how to change my own diapers.
     
  • Threadmarks
    • 6.7
  • Threadmarks
    • *Chapter Seven: Pro-fessional*

    I cleared the copy of 'The Prince' from Boomer's screen.

    "Captain Bravo, how hard would it be for me to convince you to remain in place for another day or two?"

    --

    "Ladies and gentlemen." I looked around the conference room, where the various union heads had been gathered by the Free Company - fortunately, with little more resistance than loud arguments, and which had only occasionally needed to be solved with the application of rifle-butts. (A bit to my amusement, Toffee had been treated as one of my 'associates' earlier, and had already been acquired.) I was in my military duds, and discreetly tied to my chair, which was not-so-discreetly raised higher than that of anyone else in the room. Members of the Free Company were spread along the walls, partly to keep order, and partly as a pure, bluffing show of force.

    "When your city's 'Civil Guard' captured and imprisoned me, you committed an act of war. Whether you intended it or not, whether you had any influence or not, whether formal declarations were made or not - at that moment a state of war came to exist between the city-state of Erie, and the Dominion of Lake Erie.

    "For whatever reason, your city's defensive measures were so pitiful that a single company of infantry was more than capable of penetrating within, and doing as they wished. In short - I find myself to be in the position of an occupying power, until such time as I choose to withdraw. I would rather spend my resources elsewhere rather than on a military occupation. Thus I have decided to make a one-time offer, to find out just how much damage I have to do to your city's infrastructure to prevent you from committing any further acts of war.

    "Given your city's unwritten constitution and de facto practices, you are, collectively, the closest it has to a government competent to sign a peace treaty. If you will pass those papers on the table around, you will find the text of such a treaty, with notes explaining what everything means. Mainly, it covers transfer of authority from the now-existing military government imposed by force, to a new civil government that meets certain standards: a charter of rights, universal suffrage, prohibition of slavery, an impartial judiciary, and so forth. In short, a government with members who can be held accountable for their actions. There are also some items dealing with the specific act of war that caused all this: trials for everyone in the chain of command that committed the act, transfer of certain assets as reparations.

    "Which brings me to my offer. Sign the peace treaty, and I'll withdraw the infantry, and allow you an appropriate length of time to implement the treaty's provisions, with minimal interference during the transition period. You get to keep your jobs for your unions, your wealth, and your dignity. You will be able to seek positions in the new civilian government. No further damage will need to be done to the city, the port will remain open, business will continue. There are even provisions in the treaty for Lake Erie to help you build up your defenses against any other attack. In short, you will have demonstrated that your act of war was an aberration, and that you are working hard to prevent any such act from occurring again.

    "Oh, yes. As soon as each of you sign, then I will have no reason to suspect you of intending to attempt some form of insurgency, so you will be released from custody to return home, with none of your property seized to keep out of the hands of would-be guerrillas."

    --

    After they had all been dismissed and were out of sight, I let Sarah manhandle me back into my hospital bed. She asked, conversationally, "Do you think it'll work?"

    I sighed. "I honestly don't know. I tried to make signing as enticing an option as possible, given the examples Boomer had for me to draw on... but there's still something wonky about this whole place. Your civil guard doesn't seem organized enough to deal with a single monstrous Changed, let alone any more intelligent hostile entities - and I can't figure out what's been keeping reasonably smart political types from beefing up the guard enough to protect their own keisters."

    Toby Junior wriggled out of Sarah's maw and sprung onto my lap. I tugged at my covers to let Wagger out, and the octo-kitty and tailsnake proceeded to play. I actually found myself unhappy that I couldn't feel Wagger's movements.

    Sarah interrupted the byplay by fluffing my pillow, and asking, "What will you do if they don't agree."

    I sighed. "I know this city is your home, but about all I can see to do is have the Free Company destroy as much landside infrastructure as possible on their way out, and the squiddies do the same to the waterside."

    "Isn't that... excessive?"

    "Sarah - stop that for a sec. Look at me. If you wanted to, you could take that pillow and smother me to death right now, and there's not a thing I could do to stop you." There were, actually, a few things I could try, such as drawing the poison-tipped-needle-gun I had in a concealed holster in my back; but none of them were guaranteed to work, and dilly-dallying with such exceptions would have blurred my main point. I continued, "While you have no particular reason to do that, there appear to be a number of Erieans who do. I've come up with exactly four choices. First, I could just let them. I think we can both agree that that's not a very good solution."

    "I've heard better plans," she agreed as she puttered around, getting me tucked in, checking papers, and so on.

    I started petting Toby Junior and continued, "Second, I could convince them they don't really /want/ to do me harm. That's the peace treaty: rearranging Erie's organization so that the people involved have better things to do than put any effort into killing me. Third, I could remove their /ability/ to do me harm. Destroying infrastructure is, as best as I can tell, the least costly way to do that. There are several /more/ destructive ways. Anyway, fourth, convince someone else to do numbers two or three for me. This one is more theoretical, since my interpersonal skills suck. I wasn't even able to convince Captain Bravo to detach just five men for a bodyguard detail."

    "Those choices don't sound like you. Are you sure the bimbo zone didn't do something to your mind?"

    "Of course I'm not /sure/. But it didn't have to, to make me face up to /those/ choices."

    "Maybe I should get you a counsellor."

    "Do you really think you could find one I could trust?"

    "There is a very professional rape crisis centre and women's shelter in the city."

    I coughed once, suppressing some sort of laugh or sob or something. "Let me tell you a story. It's not true, but you'd have trouble finding one that comes closer to the truth. Once upon a time, there was a bunny woman. She had troubles, but whenever she faced them, the East side of her mind told her she had a choice - she could always just say 'Bugger all this for a lark', drop everything, and just wander into the forest, to spend a month, or a year, or a decade; and then come back at her own pleasure, and start up from scratch. So every time she had a problem, she always included that option among the possible solutions, and always found something better to do than go a-hermiting.

    "A couple of times, other people trapped her, so she /couldn't/ leave. This made her unhappy. But the South side of her mind showed her a different choice: whether to be dressed or be nude. Oddly enough, most of the plans she came up with were worse than deciding to walk around in the buff, so she walked around nude, and was less unhappy, because she could make that one choice for herself, until she figured out how to escape.

    "And then one day, she faced a situation where she might never run away again, and which her state of clothing didn't matter. Her internal organs got rearranged, and she became physically completely helpless. Thinking very hard, the North side of her mind reminded her of one of her secrets: that she knew how to destroy a city. She looked at her problems, and realized that one solution to them was to destroy the city they were in. So she had a new choice to consider, every time she faced a problem.

    "But a bunny woman who fantasizes about being alone and reading a lot is a different sort of bunny woman than one who spends her time thinking about matters of state, of war and strategy and logistics and morale and espionage and so on. Even if it's the same bunny woman, who still has the same goals and memories and skills, it's the difference between the refreshing east wind and the chill north wind."

    I petted the cat. After a while, Sarah said, "Your legs /are/ going to get better."

    "Probably," I agreed.

    After another while, Sarah asked, "What about the west?"

    "Hm?"

    "In your story. What about the West side of the bunny woman's mind?"

    "It hasn't made any suggestions yet. Maybe it will, maybe it won't - every mind keeps /some/ secrets from itself."

    "... I am /definitely/ getting a professional counsellor for you."

    She turned to leave, and I called out, "Could you send Brenda in?"

    Since it turned out Brenda had been guarding the doorway, that was easily accomplished. "I've had a thought," I said to her, "which I'd like your opinion on. How much do you think people would underestimate you if they thought you were an animal instead of a person?"

    --

    "Ah!" I woke with a cut-off scream, abruptly sitting up - well, as much as I could with my nerve signals getting cut off somewhere around the T8 vertebra. I panted and looked around quickly, trying to figure out whether I needed to draw my weapon /immediately/ or I should keep it secret...

    "Has she been having nightmares for long?" asked an unfamiliar voice.

    I collected my glasses as I heard Sarah answer, "For longer than I've known her. But she is usually good at avoiding them."

    "Alcohol?"

    "Never. Drugs from a doctor, or sleeping with a person or animal. Sleep, not sex."

    "Hm... well, I've seen worse."

    That was around when I finally managed to see clearly. Brenda was stretched out on the floor, snoring softly; Sarah was standing inside the doorway, along with an unfamiliar woman. The word 'tomboy' came to mind, or maybe 'punk' - ragged hair dyed in several shades of purple, a selection of tattoos from her neck to her wrists, jeans, and a jacket that straddled the edge between 'motorcycle leathers' and 'leather armour'.

    The only reason my heart rate wasn't slowing down from an emergency peak was, well, you know. "A rape counsellor, I presume?"

    At my voice, Brenda lifted her head, blinking, giving a half-hearted growl to the pair at the doorway.

    "Abigail," said the only human in the room. "I run the Erie Emergency Shelter, and smack some sense into anyone who needs it who I can reach. Our usual counsellor is Amy, but Sarah didn't think she'd be much help for you."

    I settled back onto my pillows, lacing my fingers over my belly along the line where the numbness started. "Why's that?"

    "Amy's more about all the wishy-washy, feely stuff. Hugs and group meetings and dream symbols and all that crap."

    "'Crap'?"

    She shrugged. "Ah, it works for some. I'm better at teaching self-defense, but that doesn't help until people /want/ to defend themselves."

    Sarah said, "I'll let you two talk. Brenda?" She gestured at the doorway.

    The griffoness rose to all fours, padded next to my bed, and plopped back down. Sarah sighed, and Abigail grinned. "Nice claws. Think I've heard of you - deliveries, right?"

    Brenda just rumbled, and I offered the most appropriate cover story we'd come up with. "She was, but got shoved into a zone that affected her mind. Seems to have made her protective of me."

    Abigail's eyes flicked between us for a few moments, then looked at me and said, "We've had a few bimbos who lost what they were imprinted on. We've learned a few tricks to help them find reasons the people they love would want them to go on. Just something to keep in mind in the future." At my raised eyebrow, she added, "Her fur's started coming in white instead of gray. She wants to be a fierce animal, I don't care. She wants anything else, she can always drop by."

    "Uh... /huh/." It was my turn to give her a more thorough look.

    "So," she hooked her thumbs into her pockets, and leaned against a counter, "Sarah says you're going cuckoo."

    I snorted once, but smiled just a bit. "And you're here to stop that?"

    "Up to you, really. I've seen some shit. Maybe I've seen something that you can use. Anything in particular that's bugging you?"

    "You haven't got the security clearance."

    "Security what now?"

    I waved a hand at myself. "Queen Bunny. Head-of-state. Currently trying to negotiate a peace treaty so I don't have to blow up significant amounts of your city."

    "Oh, that."

    "Yeah, 'that'."

    She shrugged. "You can't talk, you can't talk. Any troubles you /can/ talk about?"

    "You want them alphabetically or chronologically?"

    "Whatever works for you."

    "Hm. Okay, let's see..." I ran through my memory palace to find the list that was suitable for public consumption. "I was hit by a truck, died, revived decades later after something like eight billion people died including everyone I ever knew, stuck in this body, threatened by a mob with actual pitchforks, chased by a monster bigger than this house, drugged and kidnapped, shot by a bandit, had my foot melted off, looked through Buffalo just after everyone died looking for survivors, kidnapped at gunpoint, was shot through the heart, had one of my best friends stabbed, my vehicle blown up, my followers' meetingplace blown up, captured /again/, imprisoned, watched someone get mind-wiped just to try to get me to cooperate, got yanked into the bimbo zone myself, had it do /something/ to me other than a simple bimbofication, and while I was getting extracted, enjoyed a rather painful injury which seems to have done a number on my spine and left me stuck in this bed and wearing diapers."

    "Jesus." Abigail pulled out a cigarette and lit it, though she was at least polite enough not to blow smoke in my direction. "That all?"

    "I left a few things out to protect some peoples' privacy."

    "Okay, I give. You've had more troubles than most anyone I've met."

    "'Most'?"

    "Ever hear of carousel trees?"

    "Uh... no?"

    "If you ever find a branch growing out of your chest, and another growing out your back, do whatever you have to to keep the chest one from touching the ground. That is, unless you're in a spot you don't mind being rooted to for the rest of your life."

    "Oh... kaay..."

    She shrugged. "There's more to it than that, but that's enough info to keep you safe. I can introduce you to a few people who didn't learn that in time, if you've got a strong stomach."

    "Would they want to meet me?"

    She blew smoke towards the ceiling, looking like she'd tried for a smoke ring but failed. "Yeah, I think so. Nice to hear that's the question you asked."

    "Yeah, yeah, I've still got empathy for my fellow man - or Changed, or whatever - and all that jazz."

    "Don't knock it, til you've met people who haven't got it."

    "Did I not mention people trying to kill me, and who did kidnap me?"

    "Yeah, that does seem like it happens to you a lot. You doing anything about that?"

    "Had a self-defense course to practice, though I've either got to wait and see if I get my legs back or figure out a new one. Been surrounding myself with people who seem more interested in keeping me alive and in one piece. Made a few other preparations I'm not prepared to share with you. Oh, and last time something like that happened, I pointed out that a formal state of war existed between this city and Lake Erie and suggested a surrender agreement and peace treaty would be better than the alternatives."

    More smoke curled up. "Sounds like you've got that taken care of, then."

    I barked a disbelieving laugh. "Are you /crazy/? The only reason I'm letting you anywhere /near/ me is that I seem to have acquired a pet griffon who'd tear your throat out if you tried anything. There's a particular way almost everyone in this city is cracked in the head, that you can't even see, that seems to be part of why I've ended up in a state where I've seriously considered the pros and cons of just getting my legs taken off."

    Her gaze focused instantly, and intently, on me again. "Don't-" she started, but I waved her off.

    "Oh, don't worry, the cons outweigh the pros, even if I do have a mutant healing factor that'd let me regrow them."

    She stared at me for a long moment, then went back to watching the curls of smoke. "Okay," she agreed. "What I'm hearing you say is that you don't feel safe. Is there anything you can do that /will/ let you feel secure?"

    I snorted again. "Depends. Do you want to include considerations about a Second Singularity that might wipe out everyone who survived the first one?"

    "Do /you/ include that?"

    "At least half of that list I gave you, and most of the list I didn't, is /because/ I've been including that and trying to deal with it."

    "Saving the world is a little outside my job description. How about we focus on what would keep /you/ safe?"

    I shrugged. "I don't see how that can happen, in the short term. I still don't know /why/ you Erieans have been trying to kill me, so I don't know what it would take to get you to /stop/."

    "No clues at all?"

    "Hm. Well, I have got one other mystery about the place I don't understand, and which, most likely, you literally can't think about and would lose most of this conversation if I referred to it directly. Conservation of evidence suggests the two are connected, I just don't know how, or even what it would take to find out..."

    "You don't sound too sure of that."

    I grimaced. "Last time I came close to where I might find something out, I ended up a paraplegic. I'm not exactly eager to repeat the experience."

    "I can see that. But you /are/ alive, and it sounds like you might even recover, so I gotta ask - is what happened worse than not knowing?"

    I opened my mouth to give an immediate answer, but paused, to think about my reasoning. After a few moments, I closed my mouth, frowning. Eventually, I said, "I'll have to get back to you on that." I ran my memory back over the conversation so far. "Say, any chance you happen to know any self-defense tricks that work for someone whose legs don't?"

    --

    "'Course," Abigail added, "it's a lot harder to aim for a pressure point if you're too sleepy to see straight."

    "I'd be less worried about that then the fact without my glasses, I can't recognize faces six feet away from me."

    "Can't you see when someone you're talking to is trying to steer the conversation to something they think is important?"

    "I'd have to say 'probably not'. Just one among many reasons I sometimes mention my social skills suck. So - what about my sleeping arrangements needs talking?"

    "Thought about finding a more long-term solution than drugs?"

    "I'm not using drugs even as my short-term solution. I've just been under medical care a lot lately."

    "What, you got something against altered states of consciousness?"

    "Yes and no. I might have mentioned something about people trying to kill me a lot, and I really, /really/ don't want someone to try that while I'm so out of it I /can't wake up/."

    "Okay, okay, jeez. What's the 'no' for?"

    "Eh, some altered states can be useful tools, if used /as/ tools, instead of just for fun. You know the heliograph network?" She nodded at the rhetorical question, so I continued, "Wrote out the specs for that while I was zapping my brain."

    "Haven't heard that one before. What was it, Salvinorin?"

    "Externally induced electromagnetic fields."

    "You're shitting me."

    In a few minutes, I had my thinking cap delivered, and Sarah, Brenda, /and/ Bear Joe all standing guard. "I've been meaning to do this more often, what with all the problems I have to deal with, but, well, I've got all these problems I have to deal with... you're sure you want to see this? I'm pretty sure it's going to be really boring."

    Abigail nodded. "I'm kinda curious about the whole thing now, even outside the whole figuring out how to help you thing."

    "Fair enough. Lemme just set the timer..."

    --

    "Bunny. Bunny!" Someone shook my shoulder.

    "Huh? Wha?" I looked up from my notepad.

    Sarah said, "Time's up."

    "Already?"

    "/Been/ half an hour."

    "Oh. Uh - I'm pretty sure I was just getting started on something. Anything important going on in the next hour or two?"

    "Abigail dying of boredom?"

    "Oh. Right, sorry, forgot you were there. So - boring, right?"

    She crushed out a cigarette, and it looked like it wasn't her first. "Yeah, right up to when you grabbed your pet and started measuring her for bondage gear."

    "What?"

    "That's what you've been drawing, isn't it?"

    "What?" I focused on what I'd been drawing. "Oh. No. Very much no. Lemme just think a sec about how classified all this should be..." I flipped through some pages. "Right. First useful idea I had - if the peace treaty gets signed, use at least some of the reparations to help empower the powerless in Erie, including a donation for your emergency shelter."

    "Can't say I'm gonna say no to that, unless you've got too many strings tied to it."

    "Not even going to ask you to rename a bench after me. Part of a long-term selfish plan, to get as many people up to snuff to where they can help out."

    "Where's the bondage gear fit into all that?"

    "Bit of free associating, new idea. Um... controversial idea. Bimbos may or may not be able to give meaningful consent about some things. Makes it hard to protect them, or figure out if they need help at all. So I started working out a set of gizmos where they could push a red button to signal if they needed help, and a green button every day or so to indicate they're alright. You haven't got much of an electrical grid, so I was fiddling around with batteries and solar cells - and with discreet, or not-so-discreet places to wear them - and with the whole set of issues of radio networking and locating a distress call without benefit of GPS. I've still got a lot of blank spots in the design, starting with figuring out who'd be trustworthy enough to pay attention to the signals, and to send someone over for a red light, or if a green light isn't lit for too long. Not the Civil Guard, that's for sure."

    Abigail was staring at me with an intent expression. "You know where to buy these alarm jewelry things?"

    "I haven't finalized the design - but if I do, I don't have to buy them, I know how to /make/ them. Would need some raw materials, but with reparations in the pipeline, that should be easy enough."

    As I flipped through the design pages, I very carefully didn't mention another feature of the bracelets, collars, anklets, and so on; or the /real/ reason I'd come up with that approach in the first place: location tracking of the bimbos. I still only had hints that some of them disappeared, but not when, or where to, or which ones; but this was one way that I might be able to start collecting such information.

    It might not be the /best/ way, but that was the trade-off with the artificial flow state.

    Abigail looked thoughtful. "... If I wore that hat, could I come up with something like that?"

    I shook my head. "Doesn't work like that. Just lets you focus better on what you already know. Well, it /might/ be able to do other things to your head, but I haven't gotten them to work yet."

    "Can it let you sleep without nightmares?"

    "Um." I frowned. "It's not impossible that that might be possible; might not be possible, either."

    "Now there's a fancy bit of hedging."

    I shrugged. "Hey, it's always good to know what you don't know. It's a novel approach, at least, and might be handy if it does work."

    "If you do make it work - any chance you could send a few hats to the shelter?"

    "I thought most folk didn't like using electronics if they could avoid it - the whole 'city-swallowing dragon' thing."

    "Maybe people rich enough to talk to a queen can afford that. I've had people in pain so bad they kill themselves just to make it stop - others who do just as good as, with whatever they can get to fuck themselves up."

    "Ah. Uh ... I'll see what I can come up with."
     
  • Threadmarks
    • 6.8
  • Threadmarks
    • *Chapter Eight: Pro-tection*

    Negotiating the peace treaty turned out to be astonishingly simple. I met with each of the union heads individually, asked them what they wanted to change in it - and whatever they said, I then asked how much their union was willing to chip in to increase the reparations owed. When their own cash and job was on the line, the original treaty proposal was, surprise surprise, entirely acceptable.

    I threw together a signing ceremony as fast as I could after that... mostly so that when the Free Company left, it would appear that I was being generous and giving the Erieans time to set their house in order, instead of because I couldn't keep the soldiers around.

    Oddly enough, even though the Lake Erie squiddies had embassies, they hadn't established a flag or anthem. I tried whipping up some quick placeholders, but neither Boomer nor Clara could provide any particularly relevant symbols; so, somewhat reluctantly, I fell back to the British tradition of using royal symbols to represent the state of the Dominion of Lake Erie. I dug out - well, asked Sarah to dig out - the personal royal flag I'd flown on top of Munchkin during my visit to Brantford, to hang in counterpart to the flag of the city of Erie. (Which was another of those annoying "Let's just stick the whole coat of arms in the middle of the flag!" jobs. I made a note to Boomer to recommend the new government might want to pick something more pleasing, like, say, a flag based on the shield of the coat of arms, the way flags were originally designed by heralds.) 'God Save the Queen' was a simple enough tune, but since I was an atheist, and had no intention of using the 'Defender of the Faith' part of the royal titles if I could avoid it, I made a quick executive decision to strike out 'God Save' and swap in 'Hail to'.

    Most importantly, I made sure the press was there, well-supplied with photo film.

    And, if you will excuse the expression, I gave interview.

    "Who's this?" asked the man I'd given a newspaper reporter's press card to, reaching one hand out towards Brenda's head.

    She growled, he pulled his hand back, and I said, "What does it say on her vest?"

    "Er... 'Service griffon', 'please ask before petting'."

    "There you go, then."

    "What's a, uh, service griffon?"

    "She serves as a service animal. Fetching items, opening doors, pressing buttons - I can even hook her up to pull my wheelchair, if need be."

    "Is she dangerous?"

    "If she were a part of my security cordon, then I would trust you to understand that the value provided by a free press should be tempered by knowing when leaving certain details out of a story does more good than harm."

    "Er... does your, ah, adoption of this animal, mean that your injuries are permanent?"

    "My medical professionals are fairly confident that I will eventually make a full recovery, though there is still a reasonable chance that I will never walk again." I decided to try steering things back to the topics I wanted covered. "Rest assured, that the amount of reparations have already been fixed, and will not be altered based on my degree of recovery."

    "Isn't that money for dealing with your injuries?"

    "No, it was purely punitive, removing it from the control of a system that demonstrated it was not qualified to be entrusted with that responsibility. In fact, most of it is not in the form of money at all, but partial ownership of various local enterprises."

    "What's going to happen to it all?"

    "We're still working out final details on that. What has been confirmed is that it will mostly be re-invested locally, with the proceeds going to the benefit of local charities that help those in need. For example, I have made personal contact with a local women's shelter. Your city also has a few issues which other cities do not have to deal with, that I'm trying to learn more about before offering help that does more harm."

    "You mean bimbos."

    "I do, in fact, mean bimbos. I am very uncomfortable with using the bimbo zone as punishment - but for those people who have become bimbos, I need to find the fine line between ensuring they are well-treated and forcing them away from the people they have been imprinted on to love. Slavery is bad, because it keeps slaves from being able to do more for themselves... but I don't know enough about bimbos to say what they are, or aren't, capable of. I'm working on some interim measures, to offer them as much protection as possible until final decisions are made."

    "So... you're not going to force people to give up their bimbos?"

    "Hrm. I'm not really used to doing interviews - I'm probably not explaining myself well. The decision on that hasn't been made yet."

    "How about the mayor's harem?"

    "As I said - the decision hasn't been made yet."

    And so it went.

    As my claim to royalty depended on my original body's extremely distant relationship with the original British royal family, I provided an abbreviated version of my origins that was consistent with that fact. I described how my favourite colour was not, in fact, pink. I touched hands with people who wanted physical contact with a royal personage, and let myself be posed for photographs.

    In short: I schmoozed, to the limited extent that I knew how to do so.

    It may even have done some good.

    --

    "Note to self: When meeting with more than a couple of people at a time, gloves aren't a fashion accessory, they're a hygienic necessity."

    --

    While I was recovering from that social outing, I thought of another reason to try out the bimbo alarm jewelry, which was enough for me to go ahead with the project. Technoville had told me that any computer hooked up to a radio would quickly be taken over; I wanted to learn more about how that happened, and could tweak the parameters of the radio system to make a few preliminary tests. A few hours in electronically-induced flow state, and I had my design specs ready to feed into Munchkin's mini-fab.

    I brought the first samples with me as I visited the women's shelter. The place had enough security to satisfy even the North side of my mind - which only made sense, given that the occasional ex- hammering on the door might be a Changed as big as a Clydesdale.

    Amy, rather than Abigail, let in me, Brenda, and Sarah. The co-manager of the place made me think of Fluttershy, if that character had been an anthropomorphic otter instead of a cartoon pony: soft-spoken, long-haired, and overflowing with empathy for her charges. Brenda pulled my chair through a common room where some women were reading to their children, a couple were painting the same bowl of fruit, and others focused on their own pursuits. I offered polite words of greeting, trying not to intrude if they didn't want me distracting them.

    And then Amy brought me to a blonde woman, dressed in a big white bathrobe over pajamas, curled up in a bench under a window (with heavy metal screening protecting the bulletproof glass). "This is Colleen," Amy introduced her, her long whiskers twitching sadly as she spoke. "She seems to be in a permanent depression. When she was sent through the bimbo zone, she was imprinted not just to love a certain old man I don't want to name, but to protect and defend him. He died. In similar situations, we've sometimes had success in redirecting the bimbo's focus - onto a new individual, or onto the original's children, or even onto something more abstract, like what the original 'would have wanted'. But Colleen's imprint seems to have been very specific. She'll eat if she's fed, go where someone leads her, but that's about all."

    Several thoughts occurred to me quite quickly, and I gestured for Amy to lead us somewhere out of earshot. Sarah stayed behind, to sit next to the woman for a bit. "Simply as a logic puzzle, I've already had an idea about how to get Colleen interested in, well, living again." Amy perked up, eyes wide and webbed hands rubbing each other, so I quickly continued, "But there are ethical issues that it might be better not to rush into."

    Amy brushed her hair back so she could see me with both eyes. "Her prognosis is that she will not recover, and she will end up dying - forgetting to eat, or wandering outside during winter, or something of the sort."

    "Should you be telling me that? I'm not a doctor."

    "If you can do something for her, breach of confidentiality is a minor sin at best. Do you know a zone that reverses bimbo programming?"

    "No - I don't even know what happens if someone goes through the bimbo zone twice."

    "Brain damage, to the point that someone who started human becomes an uncontrollable animal."

    "Eyurgh. Okay, so noted. Anyway - I know a few bits of philosophy and science, and if I mention them to Colleen... they might give her something to focus on, some sort of hope."

    "What sort of hope?" I explained my thought to her, and she frowned. "Is that true?"

    "To the best of my knowledge."

    "It sounds very... un-Godly."

    "In a sense, it is. But if it might help her - then now you know, and you can give it a go once you've run it by your review board, or whatever your process is."

    "I'm not sure I can. And we don't have a board like that - it's just Abigail and me." She turned away, and I watched her thick tail swing back and forth, trying to guess at her thoughts. After a few moments, she turned back. "Tell her. I don't think it will do a thing - but I'm willing to try almost anything."

    I soon had my chair parked by the bench, looking out the window at a house across the street. I tried sorting my thoughts a bit, took a breath, and said, "I don't know if being imprinted is anything like it's described. But if all that matters to you is one man, who died... there /may/ be a way to get him back."

    Her eyes focused on me. I took that as encouragement, and continued.

    "This way depends on unproven science with questionable assumptions, would require resources that probably don't exist anywhere on Earth and that nobody currently knows how to build. It may, in fact, turn out to be impossible. To understand how it could work even in theory may take more learning than you can learn. What I can say is that no magic is involved. No wishful thinking, no religion, no /unprovable/ assumptions. It's something you can start working towards, and have an idea of how close to your goal you get."

    She continued staring at me, now with a slight crease between her eyebrows. After a moment, she opened her mouth, and after a few false tries, said what I would interpret as, "How?" Amy squeezed my shoulder hard enough that I had to focus to avoid wincing.

    "There are things you have to learn before you can understand that. But I can describe one of the first things." I waved at her. "You are not quite the same now as when you woke up. You are even more different than you were a year ago, or ten. But you're still the same /person/. It has nothing to do with any particular atoms you're made up of - it's the overall /patterns/ those atoms are arranged in. That's called the 'pattern theory of identity'. And with that theory, and with, well, mind-boggling levels of effort... it just may be possible to recreate the pattern of the man you're thinking about. Meaning that he was alive, and then was dead, and then would be alive again."

    I paused, glancing at Amy, then at Sarah, who'd started heading to a nearby table to grab a plate of small sandwiches. I turned back to the woman. "To do that, though, you'll need to learn a lot about math, and physics, and neurology; and grapple with ideas that seem impossibly crazy at first. And you'll need to take care of yourself, so you can start learning those things. And maybe you'll have to work on other things, like at a regular job, so you can afford to buy the books and pay the teachers you'll need." Sarah returned with the sandwiches, and placed it in front of the woman, so I added, "And get your strength up, so you can start doing all that."

    I fell silent. We watched her. She stared at me.

    After a long minute, she looked away, down at the sandwiches, and picked one up.

    --

    In Amy's paper-strewn office, I politely sipped a cup of not-coffee, while Brenda playfully gnawed on a bone at my feet, after having given me an eye-roll once Amy wasn't looking at her.

    Amy set her own cup down, to say, "I don't think we ever would have thought of telling her /that/. What do you think she'll do when she finds out it's not true?"

    I raised a brow. "What makes you think it's not true?"

    "You can't just bring people back from the dead. Their souls are gone, in heaven."

    "I have all sorts of things I could say to that, from cryonics to what I've seen happen in Indian Country, but the short of it is, I believe that what I said is true. I under-emphasized the difficulties, and over-emphasized how possible it could be... but if she's still alive a hundred or a thousand years from now, she could very well have created a person who matches the man she imprinted on in all measurable respects. Whether or not it's the /same/ man is an argument for philosophers... but argue against it too hard, and she might go catatonic again."

    "I suppose I let myself in for that, letting her believe something so... strange, when I let you talk to her. I just, well, expected you to feel so bad about failing that you'd want to give the shelter more money."

    I muffled an amused snort, then said, "I'll give you some notes before I go, so you can try the same explanation yourself on any other bimbos who lose their will to live. In the meantime, I wanted to talk to you about some bracelets I fabbed up..."

    I gave her the quick overview of the user interface - red button if bad, green button if good, try to leave in sunlight.

    "And you can tell where the bracelets are when the buttons are pressed?"

    "Yes and no," I hedged. "For technical reasons, what I can build are stations that point in the direction of the bracelet. Two or more, spread a few miles apart are needed to pinpoint a location in the city. The trick is getting the information from the two stations to whoever is going to go investigate - and deciding on the solution for that depends on who that's going to be."

    "Do you have anyone in mind?"

    "Definitely /not/ the current Civil Guard. Well, the current version, anyway. I've had a few vague thoughts on some sort of security company, which uses the profits from paying customers to subsidize bracelets for people who can't afford capitalist rates... but I'm not close enough to the people on the ground to /really/ know how badly that approach could mess up."

    "Are any... /computers/ involved?"

    "No, this design is purely analogue, no switches other than the buttons themselves."

    "It's electrical, though?"

    "Well, of course."

    "I know some women who won't touch it. But... I think I know some who would. Does it have to be a bracelet?"

    "Not... /necessarily/, but I'd say it's important that it's wearable."

    "It only works when touching someone?"

    "Not quite. Um. A quick hacker parable might explain. Many years ago, when trains were invented, the people running them had a problem: to keep more than one train from trying to be on the same part of the track at the same time. One solution they came up with, was to have a sort of key, that unlocked a particular bit of track for that train, and that key was then left for the next train. Perfect security - only one key, so only one train could ever use that track at a time. Then, one day, two trains collided. When the crash was investigated, the owners discovered that the train drivers had gotten annoyed at having to move the key back and forth all the time, so they came up with a clever solution so they didn't have to work so hard: they made a second key." I suppose I grimaced, and continued with the moral. "Any gizmo has to take into account not just how it's /supposed/ to be used, but how people /will/ use it." I gestured at the sample bracelet. "This thing is only of any use if its owner actually has it /with/ them. So part of my design criteria is to let people be able to keep it on their persons without thinking about it. That mostly narrowed it down to 'bracelet' or 'necklace', so I went with one."

    "Hm. Does it have to be... so black?"

    "Not entirely, but a lot of it does. Collects sunlight. There's still enough leeway in the design of the power system to throw some filigree work on top of the basic design, or make it the band for a wristwatch, or something like that."

    She set the bracelet down on one of the smaller stacks, and folded her hands together. Her nose twitched, and I wondered how different an otter-shaped sensorium was from what I was used to.

    "It sounds like you are not interested in making money from this... project. So I must ask - what are you doing it for? Good press?"

    "That certainly doesn't hurt, but it's not my main goal." I shrugged and looked away. "I've already almost forgotten the name of the woman in the window-"

    "Colleen."

    "Yes, well, names aren't my strong suit. Anyway - the way things were going, it seems like things were just going to get worse for her. But now... maybe she'll start studying math, and in ten years, will be better qualified than anyone else for a useful construction project, and save me some weeks of effort. More likely not... but there are a lot of people out there, who just need a little help to get through their troubles, and become the best they can be. As best as I can figure the odds, in the long term, every hour I spend helping the worst off returns about one point two hours saved, in the long run. The numbers can become even better with more directed efforts - but for that, I need to at least have a vague idea of what the heck I'm doing in the first place. So I guess you could call this a pilot project, so I can learn how to do charity stuff, where if I mess up I don't sink a whole city into a recession or something like that."

    "Is that all? Just... math? You're not doing this because you care?"

    I turned back to her. "Mu. ... which means I un-ask the question, because it is based on faulty assumptions. I've met Colleen. I'm sad she's sad, and I hope she does better. I hope the other people we saw do better. I hope the people who live here who I didn't see do better. I hope the people who don't live here now, but did in the past and will in the future, do better. I hope the people in Dogtown in similar situations do better. I hope the people in all the places I've never been, and who I have no idea even exist, do better. And, maybe, I can do something to help a good number of them do better... but I'm only human. Or close enough. If I let myself focus too hard on too many people, I'll get... burnt out, and then not be able to do anyone any good at all."

    "That sounds like you've rehearsed it a lot. Is it actually true?"

    I grimaced again, but it rang a bell in my mind, reminding me to be a good little aspiring rationalist and check my assumptions. "Maybe. Probably? I've been having emotional issues ever since I searched through Buffalo for survivors - probably even before that, since I got fuzzy, but Buffalo didn't help. So... I'm doing my best to manage my mental and emotional health, and trying to avoid anything that's likely to disconnect from reality any further."

    "'Further'?"

    I shrugged, feeling a bit guilty. "I have no permanent residence, no stable workplace, and the people near me are in danger just by being so - the man who helped me search Buffalo was killed with a knife, just a few days ago. I am at a point in my life where being paralyzed from the waist down, possibly permanently, is merely one more cup of water added to the flood."

    "It sounds like you should take a vacation."

    "Tried that already - medical leave. Ended with my friend getting stabbed, people trying to blow up me and my friends, and a literal state of war."

    "Are we in danger, by your being here? By helping with your project?"

    "I... don't /think/ so, but I honestly don't know. From what I've seen, you're in /less/ danger than most would be, because you're already prepared for the levels of violence involved."

    "I see." She slid the bracelet across the desk towards me. "I'm going to have to talk to Abigail before I can give you an answer."

    I took it back, sliding it into one of my wheelchair's pockets. "Of course."

    --

    To the back of the shelter's main house was a very large yard, with a tall, brick fence protecting it. Within was a small playground, slides and swings and monkeybars and a few other immortal ways to keep kids running around; and a rather large garden, with enough trees and bushes to let several groups at once have private benches to sit quietly.

    I didn't feel like going to the effort of hauling myself out of the wheelchair and back, but I did enjoy the late-summer, early-autumn greenery enough to let Brenda pull me to one such corner. I took off my glasses, closed my eyes, tilted my head back to face into the sun, and rested a hand on her head-feathers as she sat beside me.

    "Can I pet your griffon, miss?"

    I cracked open an eye just wide enough to make out a short humanoid, yellow on top and in a dress. "As long as you're nice about it, and stop as soon as she shows she wants you to." I patted Brenda on the head, pulled my hand back to my lap, and closed my eyes again.

    After a few moments, the girl's voice asked, "Did your boyfriend hurt your legs?"

    A new voice, older, jarring as its source jogged over. "I'm sorry, ma'am, she's not bothering you is she?"

    I didn't even bother opening my eyes. "We're just fine. Just relaxing in the sunbeams. She asked before petting, just like she was supposed to."

    "I like her feathers," piped up the girl.

    "Yes, well... that's good, then." I heard the woman settle onto the nearby bench.

    "Did he?" asked the girl.

    "Hm?" was my cogent reply.

    "Hurt your legs?"

    "Patty!" hissed the woman at, I guessed, the impropriety. The corners of my mouth twitched, almost smiling.

    "No boyfriends. Or girlfriends. Just hurt my back."

    "Are you a bunny?"

    "Mm-hm," I agreed.

    "Are you a bimbo like Mommy?"

    "Nuh-uh." I lifted one hand just far enough to wave in the vague direction of the bench. "Hi, Mommy." I got a giggle from Patty for my effort.

    She added, "Your griffon's a bimbo," not asking.

    I opened an eye to peer at her, finding her arms wrapped around Brenda's neck; I decided that I was probably happy I couldn't make out the latter's expression. "How can you tell?"

    "She's coming in white, see?" Patty grabbed a hunk of Brenda's fur, and I tensed, expecting her to yank; but she just pulled it to the side. With a slight mental sigh, I pulled out my glasses to see how far the new hair was growing in - then raised my eyes at the sight of both Patty and her Mommy, who both had feathers instead of hair. Patty's were as yellow as a songbird's, while her mother's were stark white. There was no sign of any other avian or animalistic features, just the plumage. I ignored my brief flare of impolite curiosity about how extensively their Change extended, looking away from the mother digging around in her purse to look back out over the wall; all I could see were the distant towers of the parts of Erie that had been rebuilt in the Singularity.

    "She didn't want to be turned into a bimbo," I commented to Patty, who was back to the hugging and petting, "but since she was, I'm trying to do right by her."

    "I wanna be a bimbo too, but Mommy says I hafta wait 'til I'm grown up."

    "You should listen to your Mommy. It's a really big decision, because once you make it, you can't take it back."

    'Mommy' paused in her rummaging, giving me a funny look. "The papers said you hate slavery, and want to get rid of it."

    "Newspapers simplify everything, sometimes too far. I'm opposed to /involuntary/ slavery, and the old city government was abusing the bimbo zone. But if somebody really, really wants to be a bimbo, I'm pretty sure it shouldn't be any more illegal than, I don't know, any other irreversible medical decision. Get the government out of forcing it to happen, and put up safeguards to keep it from happening accidentally - and if nothing else, I'll have lots of more important issues to pay attention to instead."

    "So you're /not/ trying to get rid of bimbos?"

    "Of course not. I'm trying to get rid of /abuse/ of bimbos."

    She took her hand out of her purse, looking at me thoughtfully. "I guess I shouldn't believe everything I read."

    "Hear that, Patty? Everyone has new things to learn, including me and your Mommy."

    "Come on, Patty; it's time to go back inside. Say goodbye to the nice lady and her griffon."

    "Bye, bunny-lady! Bye, griffon!"

    Once the pair were out of earshot, Brenda muttered, "I forgot how /sticky/ kids that young are. I'm going to need a shower."

    "You could always just preen."

    "I don't think I want these feathers in my mouth. I don't know where that kid's been. I'm just glad that woman didn't pull out her knife - if I started growling, that kid could have gotten scared enough to choke me by accident."

    "... Pardon? Knife?"

    "I could smell the metal when she pulled it out of its sheath in her purse, and hear it bump against the other stuff. Couldn't you?"

    "My ears aren't aimed at anything right now, and my nose isn't much better than a human's. ... Think she was getting ready to protect Patty from you?"

    "She was looking at you, not me."

    "... Huh. That's funny."
     
  • Threadmarks
    • 6.9
  • Threadmarks
    • *Chapter Nine: Pro-drome*

    Inspecting Munchkin from stem to stern for any surprises left behind while it had been in the custody of the Civil Guard was an annoying job all on its own; trying to accomplish that with my spine still giving five-oh-three (service unavailable) error codes was a pretty good distraction from trying to figure out all the implications of all the events that had happened since I arrived in Erie.

    While my legs were sticking out from underneath the fabric storage bin of the clothes fabber, I heard someone clear their throat for attention, so I signaled Brenda to pull me out.

    "Bunny," Sarah said, "we need to talk."

    "Fair enough. What's up?"

    "Not just you-me we, everyone we. I've gotten everyone together in the living carriage."

    "Oh-kaay..."

    When Sarah said 'everyone', she really meant it. Minerva Harriet Tubman Joshi, sitting on her puppet trunk next to the Professor, who was petting Toby Junior the octo-cat; Bunny Joe and Bear Joe; Denise Black, holding Alphie; Sarah herself, along with another foxtaur who had to be Jeff, along with Pat and Max... Toffee, ex-mayor and her ex-secretary, mayor-pro-tem, Winston Edwards; Captain Shatter and his interpreter, Neckline; a cluster of figures in robes and face-concealing cowls who I made an educated guess were (and soon confirmed as) all nine members of the Bayesian Conspiracy that'd been rescued; Abigail and Amy; and, of course, Brenda using her leash to pull my wheelchair to the room, and Boomer in my pocket.

    If Winnebago hadn't designed the place to pop up furniture on command, it would have been impossible for everyone to fit. As it was, Brenda and I parked ourselves just outside that carriage, in the doorway leading to the lab carriage, and I found myself checking the walls to see if there was an undocumented feature to slide them outwards.

    Sarah caught my attention again, sitting her rear end down in the middle of the room, facing me. She cleared her throat, then recited in a stilted voice, "Bunny. We are here today because we love and care about you. That's why we want you to seek treatment."

    I blinked a few times, as this was right out of left field, at least to me. "Treatment for what?"

    Sarah glanced around, then back at me. "It wasn't part of the rehearsal... but would you mind telling everyone what you were doing when I found you?"

    "Uh... checking my private carriage for damage, or anything else untoward."

    Sarah nodded, saying "Physical labour."

    "Yeeesss?"

    "While you can't move your legs."

    "... Yeeesss?"

    "Bunny, do you really think that that's the most /productive/ use of your time?"

    At that, I gave a firmer nod. "There were other things that were more important, but I did them, and the inspection made it to the top of my priority list."

    "I'm sure it did," Sarah said, "but what I mean is - is that the most productive use of /your/ time?"

    "... I'm not following."

    Toffee took a step forward, face clouded. "Oh, just get to the bleeping point already, you stupid fuzzball." She pointed at me. "You're getting distracted by every flashy thing that comes in front of you, it's getting worse, and we think you should go into counselling before you go nuts and kill us all while you're trying to dance with the bleeping fairies or some stupid bleep like that." She gestured at the group, who had, shall we say, mixed reactions to what appeared to be a speech well outside what they'd rehearsed. "They've all got letters to read about how they've seen you're getting worse, and how they love and care about you and bleep like that." She crossed her arms, glaring balefully at anyone who wanted to challenge her.

    Captain Shatter whispered to Neckline, "What a fascinating ritual."

    I looked from one face to another. "Ignoring the verbiage... is that roughly true?"

    I got various nods and mumbles of assent.

    "And," I considered, "You thought this... group thing was better than coming to me individually?"

    Bunny Joe answered, "Some of us started talking to each other about you. Then more of us talked. We talked to Clara. She said that with what we have to work with, this is the most effective way of getting your attention."

    "Well, you've got /that/, at least. Uh... what's next."

    Sarah took the lead again. "Well, since it looks like the rehearsal's out the window... we've made arrangements with Abigail and Amy to keep the shelter running while they focus on helping you. Pick one, or both, and take at least a week off. In the shelter, or on the ship, or wherever you like - just stop trying to work on /stuff/, and work on /you/, first."

    I snarked a bit, "I've been trying to make time for that, but there's been the people trying to blow us up, or capture me and try to stick me in a zone, and so on. Do you really think I /can/ spend a week without another attack?"

    "Maybe, maybe not," Sarah admitted. "But we think you need to try."

    "And you think that's more important than trying to prepare for the next attack?"

    "No," Sarah said. "But /we/ can do that." She glared at Toffee. "Most of us, anyway." Back to looking at me, and went back to stilted reciting. "We are your friends and we're here to help you. Let us take care of things for you, while you take care of yourself."

    "Um... Conspiracy guys? Is that you?" I got some nods from the crowd of hoods. "Got any numbers on this?"

    There was a brief muttering amongst them, then one stood up. "I'm 'purple skunk', until we get a better naming scheme going. In spite of Aumann's agreement theorem, our estimates haven't converged yet, but roughly, if you refuse treatment and continue working on defensive measures, we anticipate over a ninety percent chance of the death of at least one of the people in this room in the next month, including at least a ten percent chance that everyone in this room dies. If you accept treatment, we anticipate merely a sixty percent chance of the death of at least one person in this room in the next month, with under a one percent chance everyone dies. Most of the 'everyone dies' scenarios we're anticipating involve you releasing one or more city-killers. If you'd like, at a later time, we can go over the methodology and more details."

    "Hunh." I drummed my fingers on my armrests, trying to ignore all the eyes focused on me. "If I remember right about interventions, you're all also supposed to tell me how you won't support my self-destructive actions if I don't agree, but I don't think we have to do that." I shrugged. "The fact you all agree enough to get together is pretty good evidence you've seen /something/ wrong with me, and I've been meaning to see a mental doc since before that sniper took out my heart... so my current thought is that if you've done this much work, then as long as you've made security arrangements that are up to snuff, I'm in."

    --

    I wasn't entirely satisfied with the group's plans for keeping me, themselves, and my various unique pieces of equipment safe. Of course, it was possible that it might be impossible for them to properly satisfy me, given that some of them had loyalties to potentially hostile groups, some had thinking processes that were undermined to an unknown degree, and the rest simply didn't have any relevant expertise. Still, it wasn't a terrible plan, and with a few suggested tweaks from me to reduce the odds that any one part of the group could cause too much trouble if they decided to steal the whole kit and kaboodle, improving the security plans even further dropped from the top of my priority to-do list.

    The new top item was to get myself as sane as possible.

    In short order, I was back at the women's shelter, with my wheelchair, a week's worth of essentials in a bag (which weren't /quite/ what most people would consider essential; less of a variety of outfits, more jumbo-sized shampoo and conditioner, plus enough metalwork to get some practice in, if I could find a place for it), Boomer, and Brenda. Instead of any royal get-ups, I went back to simple shorts and t-shirts.

    In even shorter order, Amy and I were out back in the garden, with a portable sign fencing off the bit of path we parked ourselves at. She left behind Abigail; I left behind Brenda, and left Boomer turned off.

    "Generally," she said, webbed hands folded on the lap of her peasant's dress, "I'd take this opportunity to try and work out as full of a case history as possible. However, before I even try, I think we need to work on trust. If you don't trust me enough to tell me the truth, then I won't be able to help you properly. If you have some issue with me in particular, then I can help you find another psychiatrist to take your case."

    I rolled my chair a bit to face the playground, so my ears wouldn't have to turn so far when they twitched to catch the intermittent noises from there. "Trust's a tricky thing. Everyone is pretty well convinced that I have access to at least one city-killer - and assuming that's true, I've got a certain responsibility about that. Being, well, the equivalent of a nuclear power means that there are some things I /can't/ trust you with, or anyone with, without a background check of greater reliability than is feasible." My forehead wrinkled. "And maybe not even then. Someone shoves you through that bimbo zone and imprints you on them, well, apparently you'd be happy to blab whatever they wanted to know. Not that I understand this whole 'imprinting' business - rebuilding bodies, sure; applying templates for feminization and domestication syndrome, I can get that; but falling in love with whoever you're told to before you fall asleep? I can't figure out how that /could/ be done."

    "Then why did you bring Brenda, instead of Sarah or Bunny Joe?"

    "I may not understand it - but if it's really what happened, then I also don't know what would happen to her if she had to be apart from the person she was imprinted on. I might not have bimbofied her myself, but I've still got a responsibility for her, at the least to keep her from turning into another... Colleen, was it? That said - I did ask her not to join us for this first talk."

    "It's very commendable of you-" I winced, and she trailed off.

    "Amy - I don't know how long we have before the next whatever-it-is interrupts our lives. I'd prefer if we focused less on nice words and more on fixing," I vaguely waved my hand at myself, "this, as much as we can."

    "We can do that, if you wish. In that case, given what I have learned of you so far from those who know you, and what I have observed so far, puts together your nightmares, your avoidance of talking about your disturbing experiences, your flattened emotional affect, and the hypervigilance I can see in you right now, you are well on your way to a case of full-blown post-traumatic stress disorder. The only reason you don't already qualify is that, according to the texts I have consulted, not enough time has passed."

    "You're the doc, doc, so I'm not going to disagree. Uh - 'hypervigilance'?"

    "You are twitching at every noise, glancing at every bit of movement."

    "Well - rabbit ears are built to do that, aren't they?"

    "Perhaps. But my ears are also mobile - and I have been able to keep them focused on you, not the environment."

    "Oh. Maybe I've been having trouble keeping track of what's changing because of my body," I gave Wagger's head a pat, "and because of my mind. So... do I have to start taking pills or something?"

    "There are drugs which are known to alleviate the symptoms, though we do not really have access to them - and they do little to deal with the underlying problem. If you are intent on a quick fix... you have no religious objections to electricity, from what I heard?"

    "Er - no. Though I'm going to want to double-check any equipment you want to use to run current through my skull."

    "Nothing so crude," she twitched her whiskers, I guessed in annoyance. She reached into a pocket of her dress, pulling out a hand-sized object; plastic, with four great big colorful buttons in a circle, a few switches to the side, and a logo which was nearly faded, but that I was morally certain had once read 'Simon', or some variation thereof.

    She held the electronic game out to me, and, confused, I took it. She then started explaining, "Memories are not like writing something down. Every time you remember something, when you're done remembering, it gets written down just a bit differently, depending on what else you were thinking about. It is possible to reduce the emotional effect of traumatic memories by recalling them as vividly, as clearly, with as much detail in as many senses as possible, while your mind is also distracted with another cognitive task. If you truly believe we are going to be attacked tomorrow, or something of the sort, then I can provide this much treatment, at least. I do not expect it to work as fast as proper therapy, or as well, or to deal with any of your other issues... but it won't hurt, and will probably help at least a little."

    I don't think I could ever imitate my expression at that moment if I tried. "You're... serious?"

    "Entirely. There are other versions of this therapy, where you do other things while recalling the traumatic events, such as moving your eyes in certain patterns. But few of my patients like electricity, and from the pre-apocalypse papers on psychology and psychiatry I have been able to collect, the multi-sensory modality of this particular mental task works well. I can give you some papers on self-evaluation, timing and number of repetitions, and so on, before you leave."

    "... Gotta admit, I don't think I'd have ever thought to try anything of the sort on my own. Still not /entirely/ sure I believe it, but at this point, I'm not going to say it won't." I set it on my lap, watching as Wagger flickered her tongue over it. "So... if we /do/ have more time before the inevitable interruptions... what'd you like to do?"

    "Talk, mainly."

    --

    "Do you have any objective evidence that this... 'Bun-Bun' really exists?"

    "Um... I'm pretty sure I can't start and stop lactating via force of will, all on my own..."

    --

    "Tell me more about these 'North', 'South', and so on... what did you call them, sub-personalities?"

    "There's not much to tell. It's just a mental trick, to remind myself that I can look at a problem from different perspectives..."

    --

    "Not a drop?"

    "The only time I've ever ingested alcohol was involuntarily, as part of a medical procedure immediately before I got furry. Nothing before, nothing after, and no other mind-altering chemicals that I know of."

    "I'm not going to judge you, or turn you into any authorities. I just need to know so I can take it into account for your treatment."

    "I've been a teetotaler all my life. It's theoretically possible that the new gut flora I acquired from the Acadians might be leaking unusual chemicals, though they hadn't as of my last medical scan; or that something besides what I remember happening happened while I was in the bimbo zone... but, again, if so, it didn't show up on the scans. Since I didn't go through an ordinary sort of Change process, I've still got a male human brain in this female almost-human body, and I don't know enough about hormones to say how /that/ might be messing me up..."

    --

    "Did you particularly enjoy it?"

    "No, I'm not an exhibitionist. I suppose you could say I was following in the traditions of some of the protests of the nineteen-sixties."

    "I know this is a delicate subject, but before your spine injury, did you ever experience arousal at all?"

    "I'm not exactly comfortable on the topic, but - yes, all the parts were in working order."

    "How many sexual partners have you had since your change?"

    "None."

    "Is it a matter of being uncomfortable with your anatomy, or not being able to find a partner you find attractive, or-"

    "Pregnancy, STDs, and adapting to the fact that I'm never going to be able to go home again have been more than enough reasons for me not to go looking for a date."

    "They may be more than enough reasons - but are they /your/ reasons?"

    --

    "I'm not sure whether to call those hypomanic episodes, from your description; do you mind if I eventually ask the people you were with for their perspectives?"

    "Kind of hard for some - Human Joe's been stabbed and frozen and might or might not be revivable. But after that whole intervention thing, I'm not exactly going to be able to keep any secrets or help myself by telling you not to go..."

    --

    "Sarah mentioned that you described one of your coping mechanisms to her, that you consider problems in light of having another solution, such as being able to leave everything behind. You have also told me that you feel a responsibility for Brenda, and don't want to leave her alone. Could you describe to me how these work together?"

    "Uh..."

    --

    "What are your nightmares about?"

    --

    "When was your last panic attack?"

    --

    "Well... your symptomatology has a lot of layers. I'm going to need to consult some references before I can recommend any treatment options."

    "Don't forget, if there's any chemical that can help, I can almost certainly arrange for it to be made at the university. It'll be a bit tricky, but should be manageable."

    "I'll keep that in mind."

    --

    "Well," I said, with a slight smile at the yellow-feathered girl, "hello again... Patty, was it?"

    "Your chair smells funny."

    I sighed a little, and idly pushed a bit at the handle on the chair's big wheel, moving it forward an inch in the gravel before settling back. "That's not the chair, it's something called a 'scent synthesizer'. It's supposed to help smell nice, not funny."

    "Do you want to swing with me?"

    "Uh... even if I was good at getting in and out of the chair, with my legs not working, I don't think I could start swinging."

    "Slide?"

    "How would I climb up?"

    "See-saw?"

    "Now you're just being silly."

    "Monkey bars?"

    "... Sure, why not."

    --

    "Note to self - not being able to feel my legs means not being able to feel injuries to my legs, such as profusely bleeding cuts."

    --

    Amy said, "As best as I can tell, you have a strongly entrenched habit of staying within the detached protector schema mode, within which you use the maladaptive social withdrawal coping response and the social isolation and emotional inhibition schemata. Given your overall situation, I recommend an integrated approach using cognitive behaviour therapy, schema therapy, and the internal family systems model for your long-term issues; desensitization and reprocessing for your acute stress; and if needed, occupational therapy to help you adapt to long-term paraplegia."

    "I'm trusting that those are actually evidence-based... whatever-they-ares, and will do some good."

    "I can show you the papers we have on them, but Erie doesn't have enough people to ethically perform new clinical trials."

    "So what's on first?"

    "First, I would like you to tell me more about your childhood..."

    --

    After a surprisingly exhausting first day, I was relaxing in the common room with a number of the shelter's other residents, watching a rather short reptilian woman (who I was trying very hard not to think of as a 'kobold', with little success) wearing little more than bangles, baubles, and scarves twirling and dancing to some amateur music. The instrumental tune had little to recommend it but enthusiasm and a strong beat (and was vaguely reminiscent, at least to me, of the giants scene from the movie 'Ella Enchanted'), but the dancer was working with it in ways I don't have the vocabulary to describe, making it her own. I suspected the Professor would have approved of the way she drew in her audience.

    I was clapping along, sitting between Amy and a woman whose mammaries were, entirely literally, larger than her head (and were contained in a bra which appeared to be a masterwork of structural engineering), and even Wagger was bobbing to the beat.

    Amy leaned over, and I spared her an ear as she said, "It's a shame Bun-Bun hasn't fixed your legs yet - they've been practicing a couple's dance for later, but I don't think anyone here knows how to dance with a wheelchair." She poked my thigh with a blunt-clawed finger, hard enough to leave a mark, and Wagger stopped bopping to hiss at her.

    She tilted her head, then put her finger on my thigh again, and slowly started pushing in again. At a certain point, Wagger dropped her jaw open and started hissing again.

    Amy leaned in again. "How long has your tail-snake been able to feel what happens to the rest of you?"

    "Uh... never, as far as I know."

    "Well, she can now."

    "... Great. If that's the case, it looks like my mutant healing factor just hooked up the wrong central nervous system. Uh - would it be impolite for me to head out now to have some words with myself?"

    "I don't think it'll hurt to wait for the end of the song, will it?"

    --

    In the morning, my legs had started twitching - not under my control, and I still couldn't feel them.

    By lunchtime, Wagger seemed to have learned enough to control any given muscle, to the degree that she could move my leg away from a hand she saw reaching to pinch it.

    By evening, I decided it might be safest to tie my feet to the bed, just in case Wagger tried teaching herself to walk while I was asleep. (Brenda managed to only giggle once at that.)

    The /next/ morning... I could feel all the bruises and cuts and suchlike in both my legs, as well as everything else from the waist down. Still couldn't /control/ anything, but I was willing to call it progress and be cheered. As a bonus, Wagger appeared to have learned how not to be incontinent. (I still wore the discreet adult diapers, though, just in case.)

    And so it went. I wasn't even focusing very much on my physical improvements; Amy kept me busy with all sorts of exercises, from role-playing one sub-portion of my mind talking to another, to creating a deck of flashcards, to keeping a dream journal... and so on.

    By the fifth day, I was able to twitch my toes, both on my paw and my hoof, and was willing to call that cause for a celebration. However, that day, a new woman came to the shelter to get away from an abusive husband, so I kept said celebration down to sharing a toast of a glass of grape juice with Amy at dinner-time.

    Come day six, I was able to weakly start moving my legs... though Wagger seemed to have more control over them than I did.

    I'm not going to say that my head was screwed on straight from seven days of intensive psychotherapy; in fact, a lot of people would say I seemed even crazier, in that Amy had really focused on treating my various sub-selves as independent entities with wants, needs, and desires of their own. (A lot of our time was spent in simply identifying which parts of me had strong enough impetuses to be worth dealing with individually.) But when overall-me was able to recognize what parts of me wanted, and was able to satisfy those wants, then those parts willingly joined in the overall, well, alliance, instead of fighting for what they wanted. Self-management (and selves-management) was the key - and once Amy inculcated the basics of that skill into me, I could continue working on improving that on my own, without making it my full-time day-job.

    The seventh night, Brenda slept in a separate bed... and while my dreams were still, well, I'll just simplify and say 'disturbing', I didn't wake up screaming in the middle of the night. I still felt that the electronic game was a completely ridiculous way to even try dealing with that, even after the evidence that it seemed to be helping.

    And so, the morning after that, I was nearly unanimous in feeling confident that I was on a fairly steady upward trend. After recharging my cardiac batteries during breakfast, I was tinkering with the external transformer, looking for any leaks or short-circuits that might be the cause of some slightly off numbers I'd noticed - nothing serious, just not quite the same ones I'd been seeing so far. While part of me was focused on the hardware, another part was considering suggesting to Amy that we pull back on the therapy to half-days, so that I could start getting back into research, politics, and so forth again.

    Which was, of course, when Sarah trotted straight into the room, not hesitating to declare, "We have a problem."

    I started reassembling the charger. "Something serious enough to interrupt my recovery... I'm pretty sure Munchkin and its contents are locked up tight, so I'm going to guess: politics. Involving me in some way, so I'm going to guess... the city's constitutional convention going off the rails?"

    "No, the committee's still nervous you'll bring back the Free Company. It's the bimbos."

    I glanced over at Brenda, who paused in her preening of her wings to look back at us. "What about them?"

    "That's just it, we don't know. Most of them have disappeared."
     
  • Threadmarks
    • 6.10
  • Threadmarks
    • *Chapter Ten: Pro-liferation*

    "In fact," Sarah continued as I started packing my things, "the only bimbos I can still find are the ones here, and the mayor's harem."

    "How does that work, anyway, since Toffee was deposed? Did the harem stick with her, or with the mayor-pro-tem, or are they waiting for a permanent mayor, or what?"

    "What do you mean?" She looked genuinely confused.

    "What do you mean what do I mean? It's a simple question - who are the mayor's harem attached to?"

    "Edwards, of course. Why would they go with anyone else just because he became mayor?"

    "... Oh, okay. I thought we were talking about the bimbos from the last mayor, but I guess they were gone. Didn't realize Edwards had collected any before his promotion."

    "What do you mean, bimbos from the last mayor? Toffee's not into women."

    "Uh... what about the bimbos Toffee inherited from LeBlanc?"

    "You can't inherit a bimbo - they imprint on who they imprint. Or they don't get imprinted, and do their own thing."

    "Uh... you know what? Let's table that for now." I wasn't agreeing with what Sarah was describing, but part of me was pointing out that she seemed to have gotten stuck in some version of the local bimbo-related Jedi mind trick, and that our time would probably be better spent discussing other aspects of what was going on. To start with, I pointed out, "My legs are still wobbly at best, as you can see... which do you think is faster, you pushing my wheelchair or me riding on your back?"

    "Neither. I'm not taking you anywhere." I raised my eyebrow at her, and she shuffled her forefeet. "You're not a bimbo - but you were in the bimbo zone, and /something/ happened to you there. Whatever's happening to the bimbos, maybe it's happening to people who were bimbofied, maybe it's happening to everyone who was in the zone. I can't think of a way to find out which, without putting you at risk."

    "Lack of knowledge puts me at a bigger risk than wandering around. If we don't know what's going on, then we've got even less of an idea how to keep it from happening to me. Hm... do Amy and Abigail know about this yet?"

    Sarah crossed her arms, and I tried to pay attention to that bit of me that was focusing on her body language and what I could interpret of her emotional connection with me. It wasn't very much - a couple of decades of being the next best thing to a hikikomori and focusing on text rather than faces had really atrophied skills that most humans took for granted - but my gut feeling was that Sarah was less interested in the disappeared bimbos, and more interested in protecting me from joining them. "I don't see how they couldn't. They try to keep track of everyone they've helped."

    "Then the next step is a quick chat with them. While I roll over there - what are the crime scenes like? Broken dishes from fighting, weapons fire, sawed-off ankle chains to free the bimbos, anything?"

    "Why would anyone need to chain up a bimbo? They're /happy/ with what they do."

    "I'm sure bicycles are happy machines, but they get chained to keep from getting stolen. And there are things people do with chains and such for entertainment."

    "Uh... no, nothing like any of that."

    "They all just wandered off?"

    "Maybe. Maybe someone's been sneaking in, and threatening to kill the people they were all imprinted on, to get them to come willingly."

    "What's the timing? When did they leave?"

    "Most seem to have vanished this morning, some time between midnight and dawn. Some might have started disappearing earlier - a few, maybe days earlier - but they might have just been doing other things."

    "Hm." The shelter was compact enough that we'd arrived at the office, which I'd been hearing muffled voices from.

    Brenda shoved the door open with her beak, revealing Abigail waving her arms and shouting, "- protect ourselves!"

    Amy, calm, composed, sitting at her desk, coolly responded, "Acting in self defense is one thing. Handing out firearms to untrained women is another."

    "'Scuze me," I rapped on the door, catching their attention. "One quick question. How many alarm bracelets have you handed out, outside the shelter?"

    Abigail crossed her arms, mirroring Sarah's stormy expression, as Amy said, "Three. One to a human, one to a Changed, one to a bimbo. The first two are fine. The bimbo pushed the green button yesterday morning. She hasn't pushed any buttons since then."

    "Okay, thanks. Uh - okay, a second question. Anything you need help with here before I go start doing things?"

    Abigail waved us outward. "Go. Kick the asses of whoever's responsible."

    Amy added, "And stay safe."

    "I'll see what I can do, on both counts."

    --

    The shelter had a flat roof - I guessed it might once have been a small commercial or office building, before being fortified for its current use - and after some chair-wrangling, Sarah, Brenda, Boomer, and I made it up there. Not for the view, but so we could open the metal case where I could examine the radio direction finder's logs. Computer chips were still at a premium, but with Boomer's help, I'd been able to find analogue solutions; the whole thing looked like a teletype, or an old-style daisy-wheel printer.

    Sarah picked up the most recent paper, and read aloud, "'Time, date, ID, Direction.' Three entries a day for the last few days. We already know where they live - what good does this do us?"

    "Little," I admitted. "Which is why I'm not looking at that one, I'm looking at the debug logs. 'Scuze me." I opened up an interior door, and tugged out another piece of paper, this one covered in a solid mass of numbers. "Get all that, Boomer?"

    "Yes, Bunny," she agreed. "Bracelet number three made its automated check-in twenty minutes ago. Signal strength is too variable to be confident of position, but appears to still be within the city. The bracelet has been moving all night."

    I grabbed the walkie-talkie from its charge-point. "Safety One to any free Safeties. Anyone got their ears on?"

    "Uh... is this thing on? Safety Two here."

    Sarah's eyes and tail perked in surprise. "Is that Jeff?"

    "Probably. Hold on. Safety One to Safety Two. I need you to read out, let's say, the last couple lines in the debug log."

    "Okay, let me get that... uh... the whole lines?"

    "Please."

    "Okay. Er, that wasn't part of the log. Gee, six, aitch, en..." He kept on reading over a hundred alphanumerics. "That's it."

    "Alright, thanks. Safety One out." I returned the hand-radio. "Boomer?"

    "Map displaying." Her badger avatar vanished, replaced with the map of the city she'd assembled over the last few years from whatever sources she'd found, and highlighting points. "Bracelet three maintained position here from eight PM until two AM. Two and three AM, it was moving. Four AM, it was in the location designated 'Bimbo Zone'. It travelled roughly west, at speeds consistent with bicycling. The last two signals were in the same location, ten kilometers outside of the current city. Land records indicate the area is zoned for agriculture."

    Sarah gave me a Look. "Did you tell Amy or Abigail you can track the bracelets this accurately?"

    "Do you want to stand here and debate information security, or go see who needs rescuing?"

    --

    Sarah let me ride her during the gallop to Munchkin, and once I made sure none of the seals had been broken or tampered with, we were good to go.

    We soon caught up to the half-hour-old location, and kept going with eyes wide open for any sign of Judith. I muttered, "Note to self - in the mark two bracelet, add some sort of ping-response. Uh - Boomer, do you know what's growing there? It /looks/ like lots of flowers, but..."

    "There are no records, but it appears to be papaver somniferum. Given the number of new varietals and species, I cannot confirm that identification."

    Sarah asked, "Wait, is this the Ferrum place?"

    Boomer agreed, "That is the name on the land records."

    Sarah nodded to me. "Bunny, this is actually one of your farms. Part of what the Mayor's Office gave you as reparations. Those must be the poppies; we figured it was good P.R. for the local medicines to be grown and distributed in your name."

    "... Poppies? As in opium poppies?"

    Sarah shrugged, and Brenda just tilted her head. "Probably? I just know they do something to make morphine out of them."

    Boomer added, "Update to one of your standing requests: You may be able to acquire additional chemicals for Project Mouse here, such as etorphine, a large-animal tranquilizer."

    I grunted. "We're getting off-track. Boomer, can you show, say, a heat map of the most probable location of Judith's bracelet? Hm... we don't really know what's going on, so I'm a bit hesitant about walking around out there - there could be a transformative zone that's gone unmapped so far. Or snipers - I don't want to lose any more internal organs. Hm... ah, I know! We just need a better viewpoint. Lemme go see if a PPG is fueled and ready."

    "Are you sure you're saner than when you started getting treatment? You're worried about snipers - so you want to fly and make yourself a bigger target?"

    "I'm not /really/ worried about snipers. Nobody but me and you know I can trace the bracelets, let alone that we have. Well, unless they were watching Munchkin wander by."

    "So why do /you/ have to fly?"

    "Your taur-body is too heavy, Brenda hasn't learned how, Boomer doesn't have limbs, and the bun-bots don't have brains."

    "There are more people in the city."

    "You've got a walkie-talkie, if you want to call someone over, you can. Meanwhile, Judith might need immediate medical attention, or there might be some time-sensitive info disappearing as we speak."

    --

    I'd almost forgotten how much I enjoyed being in the air. I would have happily yelled out 'Wheee!', if it weren't for the whole lives-might-be-in-danger aspect. What I did call out was, "There she is!"

    --

    Sarah crossed her eyes and sighed. "Now what are you doing?"

    "Judith looked like she was puking. Whatever's going on, my hazmat suit seems a sensible precaution. And yadda yadda, we haven't got one that fits you or Brenda. Hm... let's get a bun-bot suited up, though, to push the wheelchair."

    --

    As we crested the slight rise that had hid Judith from the farm road, I called out, as best I could through the hood, "Hello? Are you alright over there?"

    Judith was looking rather haggard, nearly entirely undressed bent over with arms around her knees. "It won't... stop coming... /out/..." She proceeded to be sick again, spewing something as clear as water, which piled up in front of her for a moment in a very un-water-like fashion.

    "I'm here to help," I half-hedged, waving to the nurse-bun to roll me closer. "Is there anything you can tell me?"

    "Just... went for a walk. See the old neighbourhood. Then... seemed like a nice day... for exercise..."

    As we reached about ten feet from her, her mouth kept moving, but no more sounds came out; she clutched at her throat.

    And then her skin disappeared, leaving a human-shaped pile of transparent goo. It raised an arm, reaching toward us - then collapsed in a splash.

    I was telling the nurse-bun "Back. Back!" even before I saw whatever Judith had turned into soak into the ground, disappearing without even leaving a stain - just the bra and panties she'd been wearing.

    I had visions of being eaten from the inside out. "Did any get on me? Is it /eating through my suit/?" I hauled up my legs to look at the suit's feet, then back to try and get a view of the nurse-bot's suit, and the chair's wheels.

    I had further visions of some self-propelled liquid stuff coming up out of the ground to engulf us, and practically teleported into Munchkin's airlock. "Get us out of here!" I called through the intercom to Sarah and Brenda. "And don't open this door until we've been decontaminated!"

    "What happened?"

    As the vehicle rocked into motion, and the first of a series of antibiotic substances showered through the airlock, I commented, "Boomer can show you a video later. Other than that, I have no freaking idea."

    --

    "Look," Sarah pointed at Boomer's screen, "she had some sort of transparent skeleton, that was the last bit to melt."

    "In a minute." I focused back on the hand-held radio. "A quarantine is the /minimum/ necessary, Abigail - I don't want anything to get in that might affect your bimbos, and if they're already affected, I don't want them to get out. ... Yes, total lockdown. ... Yes, I really mean it. ... Abigail - Judith /melted/, and I mean that literally, right in front of me. ... I'm heading to collect the mayor's harem, to put them in isolation, and after that, find someone to coordinate a manhunt for all the other bimbos. What I don't know is if there's anything left to /find/. Bunny out."

    "And here, earlier," Sarah added, "zoom in there... her teeth are already clear. Her tongue's still pink, but see-through. And /then/ her skin went, all at once. She had to be half-goo before you got near her."

    "Great, so we can do a quick check for transparent teeth to see if someone's in the advanced stages of... whatever the frell this is."

    "We should go to the bimbo zone," said an unexpected voice - both Sarah and I looked in surprise at Brenda. "You said before, she went there before she went to the field, right? So whatever happened to her probably came from there."

    "Probably," I slowly said, "but even if it did, if we go there - what will we do there?"

    "See if there's any tracks from any other bimbos. See if we can follow them."

    I frowned, my ears already flat against my head. "If the bimbo zone has started melting people, I'm not sure either of us should go anywhere near it. We've both been changed by it - if turning into goo is the next stage, I don't want any part of it."

    "You want to let someone else risk their lives instead of us?"

    I didn't answer immediately, running through one of Amy's exercises to consult my various sub-selves. "Hunh. Part of me does, it seems. But what more of me wants to do is get that zone blocked off, or just plain destroyed, before anyone else gets pulled in. If the city had significant amounts of explosives, they'd have used them against the Free Company, and I'm pretty sure they didn't... I wish I'd gotten someone to start making naffa three years ago, before I got shot in the heart. What else is there that can be improvised... ANFO? Thermite? Thermobaric flour fuel-air explosive? Some version of napalm? What does it take /to/ take out a zone?"

    Sarah said, "After Jeff and I were Changed, we reported the zone to the civil guard, and they destroyed it. You could ask them how they did it."

    "After they locked me up, ran Brenda through the bimbo zone just to be an example, and then stuck me in it anyway? ... Yeah, okay, maybe, as long as they /do/ know how. ... I probably should avoid mentioning /which/ zone I'm planning on destroying."

    --

    "Why don't you just use one of your city-killers?" The red-coated member of the not-quite-disbanded Civil Guard sneered at me.

    "Because, among other reasons, I don't want to kill the whole freaking city! Now, what is it you use to deal with bad zones? Fire? Acid? Tap-dancing?"

    "Yyyyeah... you're not cleared for that."

    If I hadn't just spent a week in therapy, I might have done something that provided an extreme amount of short-term satisfaction. As it was, I let the parts of me that were focused on my long-term goals override my more impulsive parts' immediate suggestions, with the promise to my subselves that any suggestions they made which /helped/ those long-term goals would be immediately adopted. Almost instantly, such as suggestion came to mind.

    "In that case," I said, "you're in violation of the peace treaty, and I have the option to replace your city's current provisional government with direct personal rule - as was agreed to and signed off on by the previous mayor and other muckety-mucks. Which would make me your boss. Which would both make me /cleared/ for everything you know, and with the power to fire your stupid ass for turning an emergency, time-sensitive, quarantine-related request into an international incident."

    "Yyyyeah... like I'll believe /that/."

    I stared at him a moment, then pulled out my radio. "Is Mayor Pro Tem Edwards on the network? ... Well, I need someone in the Civil Guard chain-of-command, fast. I've got a... /member/ of that organization too stupid to apply basic principles of self-preservation trying to obstruct the whole operation, willing to void the whole peace treaty. ... Uh-huh. ... Yep. Okay, here he is." I held out the radio to the guard. "Your boss wants to talk to you."

    Certain parts of me quite enjoyed the color-changes that went along with the guard's variety of expressions.

    --

    "Really?"

    "Yep," said the replacement guard, after the other one had let me in, then, apparently, been sent off to the livery to be bossed around by stable boys for a while.

    "And you can pull that off without explosives?"

    "'S long's we've got these special capacitors, we can brew up a good zap. Explosives're us'aly better used for exploding things."

    "Got any EMP-makers ready to go?"

    "A couple, but our generator's in the shop. You got somethin' to charge 'em with?"

    "Mm, I think so."

    "Good. Just remember that anything electric nearby gets zapped, so if you like that digital watch or if you've got metal tooth fillings, get a good distance from where you set it off."

    --

    Brenda stated flatly, "I don't want you anywhere near that... thing."

    "I'm all too aware my heart's electrically powered."

    "Don't forget Bun-bun. Your skeleton's a computer, right?"

    "It's got triple safeties. Have to pull that bit out, and attach that wire, before the timer can do anything at all."

    "How close do you have to get it?"

    "I don't think they've done proper tests. The guy just told me 'the closer the better'."

    "I'll take it inside, then, and arm it. You can't, and the blue bi- lady doesn't know where the dangerous part of the zone is."

    "I've got bun-bots who can follow directions and are a lot more disposable."

    "That's sweet, but if the thingy goes off early, you lose a bun-bot and you can't make more. If I go in, even if I do something wrong and it goes off early, nothing happens to me."

    "If something else goes wrong and you go in too deep, you'll melt."

    "I remember where the zone grabbed me."

    "What makes you think that's the furthest it /can/ grab you?"

    "So I leave some leeway. Maybe get a stick to push the thingy farther."

    "I'm of several minds about letting you go."

    "Then I'll make things simple. I'm going. End of discussion."

    --

    I'd activated Munchkin's riot mode, in case its electrified surface happened to have an off-label use as a basic Faraday cage; and had the mini-fabber working overtime to produce real Faraday cages to shelter Boomer, Archie, Scorpia, and every other piece of electronics I could stuff inside one. (Including a brand-new metal-foil vest for yours truly.) After dropping off Brenda and the fully-charged EMP generator, I'd also set course for a couple of kilometers away. I had a sacrificial pair of walkie-talkies set up, one on a loose collar around Brenda's neck, the other on the ground outside the questionable protection of Munchkin's wiring.

    "We're clear," I announced over the external intercom, through the radio's mike, and to Brenda. "And grounded. You can bring it in and set the timer."

    "I'm already in," her voice came back. "Found a bunch of recent tracks and footprints. I'm going to set the timer and check where they go."

    "Brenda, just set the timer - we can do the footwork in a few minutes. ... Brenda? ... Brenda!"

    Sarah asked, "Did it go off?"

    "No, the little light on the radio is still on. ... Sarah, I can't go anywhere near there while that thing's active, but if Brenda's gone off the rails..."

    "Yeah, the stupid guards won't bother for a Changed, and I've got good legs for galloping. I'll see if she needs help."

    --

    I tried arguing with everyone I could get on the radio, who might get to the zone before Sarah made it. Their excuses were some variation of, "Sorry, gotta button up for the EMP."

    It was an excruciatingly long wait.

    --

    The little light on the radio went out; its tuned circuits had been overloaded by a powerful, invisible, and extremely brief wave of electromagnetic radiation. I yanked the grounding spike out of the lawn I'd parked on, and set Munchkin at maximum safe speed back to the zone.

    Sarah had her hindbody lying down, and was resting Brenda's head on her lap, stroking her feathers. As soon as Munchkin stopped, I stumbled out the door, making it the few steps to the pair before my legs twitched out of control, sending me down to the pavement.

    "We should go," Brenda said. "Far away. Far, far as we can go."

    Sarah said quietly, "Her beak's already half see-through, and it's getting more so. Whatever happened to her, the EMP didn't stop her."

    My various subselves clamoured for attention, half-a-dozen thoughts trying to squeeze through my mind at once. I focused on one - probably not the best one, but being able to deal with one was better than not being able to deal with any. "Boomer. How long was it for Judith? Between when she left the zone, and when she... splashed."

    "Given the data from the tracking bracelet, depending on when she left the zone: Between one and two hours."

    "Just take me away," Brenda said. "So when I go, I won't hurt anyone."

    "Fuck that," a certain small part of me reveled in my letting it swear when appropriate. "I kept Toffee from turning into a snake - er, physically - I can keep you from turning into a puddle. ... I can try, at least. Sarah, take her to the cargo carriage and make her comfortable."

    --

    "What the hell is that?"

    "Zentai suit built for a griffon. Judith looked like she was still controlling herself even after she turned clear, at least for a few minutes. Maybe this'll help Brenda keep herself together. Just let me get a few samples for the autodoc before we seal her up."

    "Uh - how will she breathe?"

    "The material's supposed to be porous to air, but not water."

    "Far, far, far, far far..."

    --

    The autodoc threw up its metaphorical hands. Whatever Brenda was turning into was still mostly made up of cells, but not any sort that its limited database could recognize.

    "Boomer, I want to talk to Clara - where's the nearest heliograph station where I can open a live conversation with her?"

    --

    I dismissed the local station crew, and set up bun-bots to run the mirrors and relay the messages back and forth. The first signal was the Mayday call, which I had specifically designed into the heliograph network for any such situation where lives were on the line, and had the effect of clearing the line of any lower-priority traffic. After a few moments spent proving to Clara that I was me, and working out which method we'd use to talk to keep the other stations relaying our messages back and forth from knowing what we were talking about, my questions pretty much boiled down to, "Would the retroviral therapy we used on Toffee work on Brenda?"

    Clara's answer was fairly simple. Paraphrasing a bit from the Morse-like code, she responded, "Maybe, but the previous stockpile was used against the snake-oids, and you do not possess the technology to create more. In addition, the fact that the process takes hours instead of years implies a different mechanism is at work, and a different counter-agent would need to be developed."

    "Maybe we can come to you?"

    "It is two hundred kilometers. Even at your vehicle's maximum speed, by the time you arrive, there will be insufficient time to develop a counter-agent."

    "Is there /anything/ we can do?"

    "Place her in another transformation zone, in hopes that the new change will interrupt the last. Inject the naffa-production retrovirus, with similar hope. Freeze her, in hopes that a better solution may be found later. Offer to assist with euthanasia, if that is a preferable demise. Collect her liquid remains, in case they still contain her neural patterns. Experiment with random biochemicals or forms of radiation in case one might interrupt the process without killing her. Provide a lab animal to determine if the condition is contagious. Be kind and comfort her during the time she has left."

    "None of those sound like they're very likely to help."

    "They aren't."

    --

    I sat down next to Sarah, and we gently transferred Brenda's head from her lap to mine. I couldn't see her eyes or expression through the suit's black material, but it was stretchy enough for her to open her beak. "That you, Bunny?"

    "Yep."

    "What's the word?"

    "A bunch of ideas, none very likely to help," I reluctantly admitted, and relayed Clara's suggestions.

    "I think I like that 'be kind' one."

    "I'm not sure I'll be very good at it. We haven't even started with getting me to face deaths in my therapy."

    "Bunny, I'm in love with you. I know it's artificial, I know you don't feel the same - I want you to end up happy. And, okay, I'm selfish enough that I want you to be a /little/ sad when I'm gone, but I want you to get over it. Maybe get together with the blue bitch-"

    "Hey!" Sarah instinctively interjected, though without much force.

    "- I can see she's got a thing for you, even though she's trying to stay in the friend zone. But for now - if you can't handle being here, I'm sure you can think of something important to do, somewhere far from here to go. But if you're up to it - I think I'd be happy if you just held me, and talked about anything."

    How the hell could anyone refuse a request like that and still call themselves human?

    So I held her. And I talked. And what I said is none of your damn business.

    --

    After some time... Brenda's form suddenly sagged, her mass puddling in the bottom of her suit in a way impossible for anything with a skeleton.

    I kept talking for a few minutes... and then, as gently as I could, set the head of the suit on the floor. The liquid shifted as it found its new level.

    And then it shifted again.

    I scooted back from it, nervously.

    The suit's wings slowly filled back out again; and then the head. The legs regained their shape.

    A black-coated talon reached forward, curled all the claws save one, and ever so slowly, drew shapes on the floor: letters. Words. "STILL HERE", were the first two. "SENSES FUCKED" were the next.

    Ever so hesitantly, I whispered, "Can you hear me?"

    "WHOA. DO THAT AGAIN."

    I complied.

    "OK. GETTING HANG. TOO MUCH. SEE EVERYWHERE." After a few more minutes, she added, "OK. THINK I REMEMBER WHERE EVERYTHING GOES. NEXT: LUNGS." She made some disturbing ripples in her torso. "OK. NEED TO PRACTICE LUNGS LATER. CAN YOU OPEN SUIT?"

    "If you can hear me, and understand me, what will you do if I do?"

    "THINK YOU ASKED WHAT I'LL DO. TRY NOT TO SINK INTO DIRT."

    Since Brenda's death sentence seemed to have at least been postponed, I ignored the parts of me that said it was a bad idea, reached to the suit's neck, and pulled back the magnetic, zipper-like seal.

    When I got halfway, a mass of jelly spilled out, barely maintaining anything like a coherent shape, and coating my hands and forearms. In moments, my fur was gone, simply dissolved, and I started listening to the more cautious parts of my mind, yanking myself away from her with only minor burns to my skin.

    "SORRY," Brenda finger-wrote, as she pulled herself out of the suit and back into her usual shape - though a tad more transparent than I was used to seeing her. "DIDN'T KNOW I DO THAT. I THINK I CAN CONTROL IT." She held up a talon, which morphed into a sphere, then a hand, then back into a talon. "THIS COULD BE FUN."

    "Mmmaybe you should stay in the suit for now... until we're more sure about what's going on with you..."
     
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    • Yay, we're nearing the point where the story continues. Can't wait for that to happen.
     
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    7.1
  • Threadmarks
    • *Book Seven: Mis-*


    *Chapter One: Mis-anthrope*

    "Well, Doc?" Brenda chalked onto a lap-sized slate with one limb, as she squeezed the rest of her near-liquid form back into her griffon-shaped suit. "What's the verdict?"

    "I may be a vet," Denise answered, "but even I know what patient privacy is."

    "It's OK," Brenda wrote, sealing herself up. "I want Bunny to know."

    Denise sighed, and flipped through her papers. "I can tell you more about what I can't find than what I can. Your cells seem to be undifferentiated - I can't find any that are even distinctly muscle or skin cells, let alone any actual organs. That includes a lack of nerve cells or a brain - I don't know how you're thinking, or what you're thinking with."

    Brenda scribbled out, "What, no jokes?"

    Denise glared. "This isn't a joking matter. You've been turned into a life-form even more alien than the squiddies. We don't know what might hurt you that the rest of us could just ignore. Maybe salt or vinegar is a deadly poison to you now."

    Brenda wiped the chalk clear to make room for, "So take samples & test".

    Denise shook her head. "I'm not comfortable with that. The samples I've already drawn held together for an hour, then the inter-cellular matrix dissolved, and the samples liquified into individual cells floating in water. Without knowing what you're using to think, any sample I take might be like scooping out a bit of your brain. And I'm not going to ask you to try splitting off larger pieces, given how much more likely part of your thinking is to end up in the wrong piece."

    Brenda tilted her head - or, at least, shifted the part of herself in the head part of her suit to make it look like she did that. Then she shrugged (or at least imitated the gesture well enough), and added, "What do you know?"

    Denise flipped a few more pages. "Well, for one, I figured out part of why everything looks weird to you. We can't see infrared; to you, it looks red. We can't see ultraviolet; to you, it looks blue. Almost all the colours of what we usually call 'visible' light look like green to you. I'm going to guess that's the best your brain can do to interpret the information your visual sense is giving you, and whatever you're thinking with is closely modeled on your original brain.

    "Now, your problem with speaking doesn't seem to be creating hollow spaces that act like lungs, but with creating vocal cords to vibrate the air."

    After a few more items, Brenda interrupted to ask about a particular detail. "Do you know what I eat? Do I need light like plants?"

    Denise shrugged. "I haven't been able to get good observations about that yet. You can dissolve everything organic you've touched so far, and you can keep from dissolving it if you want. Beyond that, I think we mostly have to see what happens, if your body sends hunger or thirst signals to your mind, that sort of thing."

    I finally spoke up. "Is she going to... be okay? Not suddenly melt?"

    Denise shook her head, but not in an answer to my question. "There's no way to know. She could collapse any moment. She might be effectively immortal and outlive us all. If you're asking if she can leave the cargo bay... well, I'd /like/ to keep her confined indefinitely and keep running tests, but I've got no medical /reason/ to. Her newest Change doesn't seem to create any specifically identifiable danger to herself or others... so for now, I'm going to provisionally clear her from quarantine, as long as she keeps the suit sealed."

    --

    I dreamed I was swimming, floating in the water near the campground at Long Point.

    I woke to a similar sensation... though with various exceptions that reminded me more of my time in the bimbo zone. I was surrounded in transparent /stuff/ that barely let me move - and which filled all my orifices. I couldn't inhale, but didn't seem to be suffering from a lack of oxygen. My breasts ached as if I hadn't been milked for many hours, and I had to pee.

    I managed to tilt my head to look down at myself... my belly was inflated again.

    I tried to scream.

    One of the handheld AIs floated through the stuff, until it was almost touching my ear.

    "Ooh, you're awake," a voice came from it - neither Alphie's nor Boomer's. "I figured out all /sorts/ of tricks I can do. Still can't make vocal cords worth a damn, but Alphie and I came up with a workaround."

    I might have flailed and thrashed a bit.

    "Oh, right. You still need air to talk. Hold on, this will be a bit tricky - I don't want to rupture your lungs as I pull out of them."

    In a few moments, my head broke the surface of, well, Brenda, and I spent a few more moments gasping for breath.

    While I was doing that, Alphie floated to the surface next to me, and said, "I figured out how to change my colour, too. Look!" The transparent goo turned to a see-through blue, and then became opaque.

    "Brenda," I started to say, but she kept talking right over me.

    "I moved almost all my thinky bits inside you. I can get rid of most of the rest, and just coat you, inside and out. I can be any outfit you want! I had to teach the cells in your gut not to try to digest me, of course, but that's sorted out. Uh, you may want to check if you're lactose intolerant now, but I'm pretty sure you can digest that on your own, right?"

    "Brenda," I tried again.

    "And if anyone tries to hurt you again I'll be right there to keep you in one piece, and even fix you up. Ooh, I bet I could even replace your organs with myself. Wouldn't that be nice? Bun-Bun could be your skeleton, and I could be your flesh, and you could be the brains, and Wagger could, uh, wag, and we'd all be happy together!"

    I hurriedly stated, "Brenda, I don't want you replacing any of my organs."

    "Even if you lose some?"

    Since she was finally responding to my voice, I carefully said, "We can cross that bridge if we come to it. The bimbo zone took my organs apart, and I was very unhappy about it. Maybe you could practice on some lab animals before you try anything like that on a person - if you can't get vocal cords to work, you might have unexpected troubles with more complicated structures."

    "I suppose that's safe. Say, maybe I can keep you safer if I just keep you inside me."

    My neck sank a few inches into the blue spheroid of stuff, and I once again spoke quickly. "Brenda, I want you to let me out of you. And, er, to remove yourself from inside me. All of you."

    She was silent for a long moment, but at least I didn't sink any deeper. "... Are you sure?"

    "Call it a trust exercise... I want to be sure that you're still you in there."

    There was a sigh. "Well, I suppose. Uh - it'll take a few minutes. I was exploring, and your milk ducts and urethra are kind of narrow."

    After a few minutes of sensation for which the word 'uncomfortable' was wholly inadequate, I was sitting on my private carriage's floor, and Brenda was pulling herself back into griffon shape - though she was now favouring a see-through blue colour scheme. She shifted Alphie so that he was embedded in the front of her chest. "There, you're back to just you, and I'm all here. Happy?"

    I pulled my arms around my once-again-deflated belly. "That's one word. Brenda, do you understand why I'm uncomfortable with what you just did?"

    "Flashback to the zone?"

    "... Brenda, what is it called when one person inserts something into another person's genitals, without having previously gotten permission to do so?"

    "Ohshit! Ohmygod! I didn't even /think/ about it like that! You must hate me now and never want to see me again and-"

    "Brenda!" I reached out one of my hands, which she'd accidentally de-furred earlier, to rest on her surface. "I don't hate you. I do think you should get some counselling, until you've settled into the new you. Fortunately, I happen to know someone who's dealt with problems /almost/ as unusual as this..."

    --

    Just to be on the safe side, I discreetly arranged for Brenda and Amy to meet up away from the shelter, and the bimbos remaining inside. Since we EMPed the zone, there was less of a likelihood that they'd vanish too - but with Brenda seeming to have absorbed at least some aspects of the bimbo zone, I felt that there wasn't anything to be gained by tempting fate.

    The Civil Guard was still trying to track down all the bimbos who'd disappeared, but after seeing what happened to Judith, I wasn't holding out much hope... and despite all my technical doo-dads, I didn't have much else I could add to the search. So, with my counsellor dealing with her new patient, I went over my to-do list to see which items were near the top, priority-wise. One item caught my eye; I hadn't checked in on the city's constitutional committee during my week-long spell of intensive therapy.

    --

    "Mister... Owen Lears?" I asked the man in pajamas and a bathrobe.

    "Yes?"

    "/There/ you are!" I glared at him. "Why are you here, instead of the hall put aside for the committee?"

    "Committee? Oh, yes, that - we finished that on the first day, and all voted to go home."

    "... Really. You wrote a constitution in one day."

    "We didn't have to do much writing. We just took the old American one, and replaced 'states' with 'unions'."

    "... That's /it/?"

    "Why would we need to do anything else?"

    "... There are /so/ many ways I could answer that. But I'll try to focus on the personal consequences: I don't see how I would be willing to accept such a slapdash job, and by the provisions of the treaty, my refusal would mean a reversion to rule by military occupation. Trust me, after you bungled a generous opportunity for civil government, you would /not/ like how that plays out. And I have projects I would much rather be doing than running this town."

    "Yeah? So?"

    "So any of your committee members who aren't back at the hall in one hour are going to get arrested."

    I turned my chair around - I already missed Brenda's help maneuvering it - and rolled back toward Munchkin without another word.

    --

    "Purple fox?"

    "Er... yes, ma'am?" The Bayesian cultist was still scrambling into his robe and hood as he answered the door.

    "Show me your constitution draft."

    "Yes, ma'am!"

    I spent some time going over both the main text, and the extensive notes.

    Eventually, I got to his version of a Bill of Rights, and started wincing. "A clarification, here, please. Your free association clause - where you have, 'any person may ... refuse to transact with any other person for any reason'... does that mean a business owner may refuse to sell to people of a race or religion he dislikes?"

    "Of course, ma'am."

    "And a doctor may similarly refuse to treat a patient for religious reasons?"

    "Yes, ma'am."

    "Hrm. Moving on... The freedom of thought and religion clause... 'nor shall the Government operate or support any school, college, or university'. No government-run education at all?"

    "None, ma'am."

    "And you have the government prohibited from issuing or regulating money."

    "Yes, ma'am."

    "And you prohibit occupational licenses."

    "Yes, ma'am."

    "Including preventing the government from having a monopoly on 'services of adjudication, protection, and enforcement' of rights."

    "Exactly so, ma'am."

    "And... any land-owner may secede with their property, becoming an independent state?"

    "Yes, ma'am."

    I set the papers down, frowning. "I have to say, this looks less like a constitution to protect its citizens' rights and improve their welfare than it does a recipe for paralyzing the government to such a degree that everyone secedes into 'sovereign' armed households."

    "That's exactly right, ma'am."

    I blinked, then frowned harder. "Even if doing so means everyone ends up poorer and worse off than if they cooperated more?"

    "Yes, ma'am."

    "If you know that's the likely outcome - then /why/ did you design this thing that way?"

    "The wealthier and more cooperative people are, the more likely they are to re-develop the technology that will cause a second Singularity. Arranging for as many people as possible to act as sovereign individuals is likely to hamper technological innovation, to the degree that a new Singularity becomes impossible. I have another set of notes on my economic calculations, if you wish to read them, ma'am."

    "... No, thank you. I think I've learned what I need to know for now."

    --

    Sarah rolled me into the conference hall right on the one-hour dot. To my relief, it looked like the number of people matched the committee membership list. (Threatening arrest was one thing; getting the Civil Guard to carry it out, with the Free Company withdrawn back to their home city, would have been tricky, and possibly might have crashed the whole program.)

    After some consideration, and consultation of Boomer's knowledge of history, I was trying to pull a MacArthur, and had donned my Commander-in-Chief outfit. Sarah had grumbled a bit about having to wear more than a vest, but I'd gotten her decked out in a full-body camouflage thing that looked military-ish without actually being so.

    Sarah moved me to the head of the table, unceremoniously shoved the chair there out of the way, and installed my wheelchair in its place. I folded my hands together, watching as the dozen-ish people started shuffling over.

    Before they'd even sat down, I started talking. "The /injuries/ I received after your /former/ government kidnapped me have prevented me from giving this group appropriate oversight and direction. You are /supposed/ to be arranging for the structure of your future politics - and you couldn't even put more than a day's effort into it. Now, I'd like a quick show of hands: How many of you can explain how a first-past-the-post election system tends to lead to polarization into two camps, while a ranked-preference election system doesn't?"

    No hands rose. I sighed.

    I pulled out my walkie-talkie. "It's as bad as I was afraid of. Send in Purple Skunk."

    After a few moments, a figure in an identity-concealing robe and cowl entered the hall and joined us at the table. I introduced her, "This individual appears to have more knowledge about government documents than all of you put together. I should have brought her in at the beginning, but was distracted by medical concerns. Consider her my representative at these talks, and listen to her advice."

    One of the committee members finally spoke. "Who is she?"

    I focused my ears on him. "What difference does it make?"

    "Well... which union is she with?"

    "I repeat - what difference does it make?"

    "I just want to know which group's interests she's trying to advance."

    I managed a tight smile. "/Mine/. And I'm not in any of your interests." I drummed my fingers on the table for a moment. "Perhaps I need to clarify something. According to the terms of the peace treaty, the one which all your union bosses signed, I can pick any constitution I want and that would be the law. The reason this committee exists at all is due entirely to my leniency. Externally-imposed constitutions don't have a great success record, since the local population generally has particular concerns that such constitutions don't address. If you're willing to use something as close to the old American constitution as possible, then it's obvious there are no such concerns, and thus I should have no compunction in picking whatever constitutional details please me. That said - Purple, why don't you offer a few highlight suggestions?"

    "Almost any form of preferential voting more accurately represents a community's desires and interests; instant runoff is simple enough for our purposes, but both single transferable vote and mixed-member proportional representation have their advantages. Line-item vetoes reduce pork. Constitutional requirements that laws have explicit goals, and amendments have to be related to those goals, gets rid of all sorts of potential boondoggles. Requiring metrics to measure those goals, and an expiration date for laws if they fail to meet those goals, is untested but worth considering. Prediction markets were part of the platform in the twenty-forty insurrections, and the documentation on them was distributed enough that even after those movements were put down, we have enough information to create our own system."

    I reached into my wheelchair's pannier, withdrawing some bundles of papers, which I tossed onto the table to spread out a bit. "Here's a constitution created by one of your local citizens - along with some notes I've added on the parts of it that serve his interests more than yours. There are some interesting possibilities in its bill of rights you'll want to discuss, such as determining whether an entity is competent to be a person with rights; whether the right to bodily integrity means having to serve as life-support for another entity against your will; whether a patent or copyright system should be within your government's power or constitutionally forbidden; clarifying the right to bear arms. You have a /lot/ to discuss."

    Another committeer leaned forward. "According to the reports I have gathered, you fancy yourself a Canadian. Does this mean you plan to reject any constitution based on the American one?"

    My smile was much more genuine this time, since this question was actually relevant and productive. "At this point, the only constitutions I plan on rejecting are those in which no thought was put into, no consideration of alternatives made, no discussion, uh, discussed. You want a tri-cameral legislature, or for your Senate to be able to reject any bill with a one-third-plus-one minority vote? Go nuts. Want every bill to have to be read aloud, or voting to be compulsory? Fine by me. Really want to stick close to the American constitution? I can live with that - /as long as/ I can see that you've thought it over and really think that's the best approach."

    I looked around, and went back to frowning. "Any other questions?" None of them spoke up, so I sighed a bit, and told them, "You've lost a week before your deadline. I suggest you make the most of the time you have left."

    Purple Skunk started, "First, I think we should note down that we need to consider whether any given governmental position should be filled by election, by appointment, or by lot..."

    --

    I watched my legs twitch under Wagger's control as Sarah wheeled me back to Munchkin. When we were out of earshot of the committee members, she asked me, "Do you think they'll come up with something good enough?"

    "I'm certain of it. I didn't specify what Purple Skunk's roles or responsibilities were, so she's got almost carte blanche to do whatever it takes to keep them talking. If nothing else, she can put together a draft constitution all on her own at the end of the week, but I'm pretty sure it won't come to that. These people were suggested by the unions - now that I've pointed out that what they're doing can affect their lives and pocketbooks, and they've got someone keeping an eye on them, I'm pretty sure they've got incentives to come up with /something/ they think I'll find more acceptable than forcing my own ideas down their throats."

    "What if they are wrong?"

    "Then I force my ideas down their throats. In the meantime, where are the kits? I think Brenda accidentally started my lactation reflex again..."

    --

    "Mister Mayor?" I asked.

    "As I am only Mayor Pro Tem, and even that by your grace, Mister Edwards seems more appropriate. Tea?"

    "No, thank you - I haven't gotten used to the local version yet." I also didn't want to blatantly insult him by scanning for poisons.

    "What brings you to City Hall today, Your Majesty?"

    "The bimbo disappearances this morning. Almost everyone who'd ever been in the bimbo zone has gone away - but the group I've heard called the 'Mayor's Harem' is one of the few exceptions. I would like to know why."

    He poured himself a cup of some herbal infusion or other as he said, "I'm afraid that I'm as much in the dark as you are."

    "Can you tell me where they spent the night?"

    "In my room, with me."

    "What sort of protections surround that room? Thick walls, locked doors, barred windows, underground bunker?"

    "Nothing so elaborate; until your, shall we say, intervention, I have been a simple civil servant, and have lived modestly. I keep my doors locked, of course, but from the inside, and it is simple to leave."

    "Does /anything/ come to mind?"

    "Not particularly, no."

    "Hrm. Perhaps I should talk to them."

    "I doubt it would be worth your time, but if you wish, they are in the next room. I asked them to pick some funeral dresses; their minds are simple enough that that will likely occupy them until whatever memorial services are held."

    --

    "Candy? Crystal? Kelly? Karma? This is Bunny."

    "Ooh," said one of the nearly indistinguishable blonde bombshells. "Is she a new bimbo?"

    "Don't be silly," said another. "Her tits are too small. Is she your new girlfriend?"

    "Is she hurt?" said a third. "Her legs are twitching. Can we give her a massage?"

    "Maybe if I don't wear a bra, this dress will look right," said the fourth, still examining herself in some mirrors.

    Edwards stage-whispered, "They are used to not understanding questions, but good at remembering what makes people happy."

    "Um, ladies," I said, feeling oddly nervous but not having enough time to do a proper selves-query, "Some people were hurt last night. I want to find out why. Can you tell me what happened last night?"

    "Well," the first one said, "after we ate, we all fu-"

    Edwards coughed, very fakely, and, face red, quickly said "/After/ that."

    "Oh, well," the first one said, "after that, we fell asleep."

    "Where?" I asked.

    "In bed, together."

    "Did any of you wake up in the night?"

    "I didn't."

    "Not me."

    "Nope."

    "I don't like the lines these panties make."

    I sighed. "Right. When did you wake up?" And so it continued, with nothing of value being learned. Eventually, I gave up. "Thank you all for your time," I said.

    "Did we help?" asked one, bouncing.

    "... Well, you helped me rule out a lot of theories, so - sure, you did."

    "Yay!" She bounced harder, grabbing the hands of a couple of the others and dancing in a quick circle with them.

    As I watched the antics, at first they seemed nice and simple and cute... but then I wondered what they'd been before they'd been turned into these caricatures of femininity, what their lives had been before they'd been bent into this new shape. I muttered to Edwards, "I'm still uncomfortable with this whole thing - but as long as you're responsible for them, you're /going/ to take care of them, or else answer to me. Capiche?"

    It seemed like I hadn't muttered quietly enough, because one of them - I'll admit that I still couldn't tell them apart, stomped over to us. "You can't talk to him like that! He's the mayor! That means he's in charge!"

    I managed to raise an eyebrow, Spock-like, then glanced sideways at Edwards. "Is there anything you want to tell them?"

    "You mean, like you can fire me?"

    "Huh?" blinked the one who'd made the objection. "She can fire you? How does that work?"

    I tried to keep things simple. "It's complicated," I offered, since that covered pretty much everything.

    "Huh?"

    Edwards shrugged. "She's a queen, and I'm a mayor. Right now, she outranks me."

    "Oooo-ooooh!" the three chorused, and then the fourth chimed in with a quick "Oh!" and dropped the hats she was examining. All four walked right up to me, surrounding my wheelchair.

    "So," the one in front of me licked her lips, "/you're/ the one in charge?"

    I looked at Edwards, eyes wide, and squeaked a quick, "Help?"

    He just folded his hands behind his back, and looked up towards the ceiling in a vaguely British-y, butler-y way. "It is, of course, my duty to give such callipygian and callistethous women lives that are as dignified as possible, given their artificially limited mental capacities, a significant part of which involves respecting any choices or preferences that they do manage to express. One of the more fundamental choices which a person who has been judged to be not entirely mentally competent can make involves expressing a desire for or against any particular caretaker, and given your own recent statement of your willingness to oversee my responsibilities for them, I can only assume that any transfer of guardianship which happens to be made at this date and in this place is voluntary on both parties' sides, meaning that as a good mayor, and, if I may be so bold, a good man, my only option is to step back and allow the obvious matters to take their own course in their own good time."

    The bimbo behind me had started rubbing my shoulders. "He gets like that when he doesn't want us to understand."

    Edwards' face turned into what might be described as a smile, of such infinitesimal proportions as to avoid affecting the standard 'stiff upper lip'. "Put simply, girls - if you want her, she's yours."

    "Ooh!" they chorused.

    "Eep!"
     
  • Threadmarks
    • 7.2
  • Threadmarks
    • *Chapter Two: Mis-cible*

    "Note to self: Look into non-lethal methods of self-defense, to deal with people who aren't trying to kill me, but are being... obstacles. I think Boomer mentioned something about tranquilizer darts..."

    --

    While I was at City Hall, I had Edwards show me their computer. I knew they had one, because he'd made some print-outs on a relevant topic the first time I'd seen him.

    It was in the basement, and brought a pang of familiarity. Behind locked doors, inside what appeared to be walls lined to act as a Faraday cage, there was a tower, pretty much of the same style that had been in use from the eighties to when I died; plus monitor, keyboard, trackball, printer, the works. Edwards mentioned, "It was thirty years out-of-date when the Singularity happened," which meant it still looked a few years more futuristic than what I recalled. (The stuff from just before the Singularity itself was different enough that my mind didn't really categorize it as 'computers'.) However, in addition to being stylish, it was also worn-out and falling apart. The plastics were yellowing; all the keys had their symbols hand-painted, and some had even been replaced with carved wood; and I didn't want to think about what it would have taken to keep the physical moving parts going.

    And even with all of that, I was still tempted to claim the whole thing as part of my reparations. I lent my main subself alliance lend its support to my utilitarian subself, overruling my "Ooh, shiny!" subself, and tried to mollify the latter by pointing out that I had a freaking Turing-grade AI in my pocket.

    The harem - I had no intention of calling it /my/ harem - had been left behind at the locked door, but were still waiting to pounce as soon as we returned. "I know you have some kind of encyclopedia on there," I said to Edwards, thoughtfully. "How extensive is it?"

    "I have yet to be disappointed in what it offers."

    "So if I asked you to find an instruction manual for, say, royal handmaidens and ladies-in-waiting..?"

    He did his almost-smile again. "An interesting choice," was all he said as he sat down, and started turning things on. (I had to suppress my reactions when I discovered it to be running Windows XP - I wanted to both laugh and cry and scream that /that/ OS was the one to survive the apocalypse.)

    "Er - /can/ any of them read?"

    "Kelly still retains that skill, yes."

    As he printed out some old booklets and decorum, etiquette, and ladylike behaviour, I wondered aloud, "Is this the best computer you have left?"

    "There is a certain amount of ill feeling towards such objects. We do not publicize this machine's existence; and even those who are aware of it think of it as a necessary evil, when they do think of it, much like a sewage processing plant."

    "That is all very interesting and has many connotations but, I notice, did not actually answer my question."

    "'Best' implies that we have more than one."

    "If you could have one, why couldn't you have more than one?"

    He sat back and folded his hands. "This machine was assembled by my predecessor - as Secretary, not as mayor - from parts that were confirmed to be in storage, unplugged and unpowered, from long before the Singularity. Simply finding a full set of piece that were compatible with each other took several years. All forms of input, save for this keyboard and trackball, were physically removed, had their wires snipped, and/or had their sockets blocked. Similarly, all forms of output save this screen and printer. The power line contains several forms of conditioning to smooth out any unusual spikes that might affect it. The door contains a physical mechanism which interrupts the power unless it is closed; no piece has ever been powered up save while in this protected room. For several years, there was a decorative water feature outside to muffle any sounds from within, and an armed guard. When I became Secretary, I spread the rumor amongst the knowledgeable few that I kept this machine because I had become addicted to video games. In short: there are three pieces for which I have no replacement parts, at least none that can be used without risking the compromise of the whole machine. If no replacements have been procured by when they fail, then I will be forced to rely on hand calculators."

    "If you like, I may be able to help with that." I thought of one of the Bayesians, Blue Rabbit, who'd claimed to have finagled a computer out of Clara.

    "That is kind of you, but unnecessary. I will not be mayor very long."

    "You're not going to seek election to, er, whatever post the constitutional committee comes up with?"

    "I was appointed to be secretary. I served. I was appointed Mayor Pro Tem. I am serving. When I am done serving, I will seek to be appointed as secretary again, or a similar posting. I am not well-suited to executive positions. I do not possess the... people skills."

    "I suspect we could spend quite some time commiserating with each other about that, but for the moment... what do you have on here?"

    "Business and accounting software, and a cache of significant portions of several projects: encyclopedias, a library of texts whose copyrights had expired, a different library of texts whose copyrights were waived, yet another library of texts that were still under copyright and illegal to possess at the time - that latter has been at least as much help as all the others combined. There are various other pieces of software, from maps and star-charts to a simple version of the 'trust verification architecture' that became ubiquitous after this data was stored; but we rarely use any of those, given that increased use increases the odds of an irreplaceable part failing."

    "Do you know how much data there is, in total?"

    "The figure that was passed to me was fifty terabytes."

    "That seems like both a lot, and not very much. More than I could manage to make a copy of just now, and a fraction of the storage sizes I've seen bandied about for twenty-fifty era computers."

    "Intact storage devices are one of the more common finds; the main difficulty is examining them for useful data without compromising the remainder of the library. It would not be difficult to transfer a portion of these archives onto one for you, if you can narrow down your choices to two terabytes or less."

    I hesitated, faced with that choice. "I have to admit," I managed to think aloud, "that your rumour of video game addiction is all too plausible. There are many things I /should/ be doing - but if I was faced with the choice of doing them, or in revelling in all the fiction and media and games you could give, well... I'd be using up a lot of willpower." That made me frown. "And I think that's an answer, there - if I have to actually /will/ myself to keep doing something, then sooner or later, I'll face the choice while my mental energy is low. Meaning that it's in my best interests to arrange matters to minimize such choices. So as much as I /want/ to grab this computer and not let go for the next three years... maybe just an encyclopedia, an index of the whole lot, and whatever other non-fiction the city's used and happens to fit?"

    --

    "Without violating any confidences, Amy, can you tell me how Brenda is doing?"

    "Who is doing the asking? Queen Bunny, Brenda's friend, or a fellow patient?"

    "I'll start with my Queen hat. Is she a danger to others?"

    "Her imprinting on you seems to have been magnified; at the moment, she is plausibly likely to use excessive force against anyone she perceives to be a threat to you, and possibly to use extreme measures in her attempts to protect you."

    "Do I want to know what those 'extreme measures' are?"

    "I'll put it this way; I contacted Doctor Black to find Brenda some experimental animals to practice her abilities on, so that even while under stress or performing other activities, she does not dissolve any tissues she would regret having dissolved. About all I can guarantee is that she is psychologically incapable of harming your central nervous system."

    "And as her friend - is she going to harm herself?"

    "Answering to you-the-friend, I have to be careful about discussing certain issues, but her fixation on you means that if you come to harm she believes she could have prevented, she will... not take it well. Her guilt may lead her to punish herself by attempting to subordinate herself to you in a very unhealthy manner."

    "As in, replacing my flesh with herself?"

    "Oh, she already told you that? Yes, merging with you in such a fashion is currently one of her central fantasies, though I am trying to nudge her in the direction of healthier outlets."

    "Then I suppose it's time for me to get back to being one of your patients for a while. ... Has anyone mentioned to you that I saw a woman die today? Or as good as, I think..."

    --

    Back in the shelter's garden to relax after my latest session, I'd parked my chair at the end of a small path, where I could keep an eye out for anyone coming in my direction. So I was able to follow a blue-tinted, quadrupedal form all the way from the door into the house right up to me. Brenda stretched out on the bench that was installed to face the flowerbeds along the edge of the wall, and the vines climbing up it, as if she had a perfectly ordinary skeleton and set of muscles that needed minding. Alphie was still in her chest, and it looked like something else was embedded deeper within her.

    "So," I said, "how're things?"

    "Amy has helped me to understand that you might have perfectly valid objections to some of the things I want to do with you. So I'm putting together evidence that at least some of those objections are unfounded." She lifted a wing and waved at herself with it. "I've got a squirrel in here right now. She's fine, swimming around, I just make sure my surface tension is high enough to keep her from getting out. I'm going to try to make sure she stays fine when I'm asleep, and then tomorrow, that I can keep her fine when I run through an obstacle course and stress tests. If I can keep her safe through all that, then I should be able to keep you safe if you let me be your living bodysuit."

    "... Uh-/huh/. ... Figured out what you /do/ eat yet?"

    "I got hungry earlier, and absorbed a salad and some potatoes. Denise thinks that I'm going to need more calories than I used to, since it'll take more effort to move nutrients around inside me without a proper circulatory system."

    I watched the squirrel paddle up through her neck and into her head, bounce against her skin a few times, and then keep paddling right back into her torso.

    After a few moments of silence, Brenda added, "I'm also trying to figure out how to be as useful to you as I can. I'm working on controlling extra limbs, and trying to make my claw-tips as hard as possible, and turning them into complicated shapes... it's not working too well, yet, but I have high hopes. Oh! And when I put some of my extra mass in the freezer, I was able to absorb it right back into me as soon as it was above freezing, so you won't have to worry about me being trapped on you because I can't be just me anymore."

    "Mm-hm," I made a noncommittal sound. My weird-o-meter had pegged itself at 'maximum' at the sight of the squirrel, so I wasn't really following. "Oh, by the way - the mayor's harem seems to have adopted me instead of Mayor-Pro-Tem Edwards. I've distracted them with some pamphlets on how royal servants act, but they'll probably catch up with me again soon. I don't know them well enough to trust them with any secrets, so you'll probably want to decide how intelligent you want them to think you are... and, I don't know, see if you're up to playing dress-up as, er, the dresses. I think I've got four outfits for different situations, and they're probably not going to accept that - and I shudder to think of the results if I let them anywhere near the clothes fabber. ... Or let them know that 'clothes fabber' is a thing that can exist."

    --

    The next morning, I made my way back to the Civil Guard outpost where I'd collected the EMP generator; my plan was to ask about safe retrieval methods. My plan was derailed as soon as I asked, "How has the search for the women who went missing yesterday gone?"

    "Oh, that was a big fuss over nothing. We found 'em all, easy enough."

    My ears went straight up. "Really? Where?"

    "First place we should'a looked - the shelter we always find 'em at."

    My ears flattened back again. I'd just come from that shelter, and there hadn't been any extra bimbos about the place. It looked like the mental glitch was striking again.

    When I got back to Munchkin, I was once again trying to figure out the implications of that glitch, and just nodded to Sarah absently. "How's the mayor's harem doing?"

    "The mayor has a harem now?"

    I paused, and decided this was as good a time as any to try prodding on the topic. "Sarah, how long have I had a harem?"

    "At least as long as I've known you, I guess."

    "And what do they all have in common?"

    "Why are you asking?"

    "I just got reminded of something, and want to see if my memory's straight."

    "Well, if you don't count the bun-bots, they're all bimbos."

    "And where do bimbos come from?"

    "Here in Erie."

    "And when was the first time I came to Erie?"

    "Three years ago, the day you were shot."

    "Did we meet before then?"

    "Yes."

    "Did I have my harem then?"

    "I guess."

    "How could I have had a harem of bimbos from Erie when we met, if I hadn't been to Erie by then?"

    Sarah didn't answer right away, just frowned, and blinked rapidly.

    I decided that I'd confused her enough, so offered her an easy out. "Don't worry about it - you've got some memory issues, is all. Lots of Changed people do, especially animal-form ones."

    "Animal-form Changed... right."

    "Have you seen Denise lately? there's a few things I want to ask her, too."

    "Not... lately." She blinked one more time, then shook her head. "Not since yesterday. By the way, I've been meaning to ask you - now that Brenda is too squishy to pull your chair, how about we get some tack and harness for me, too?"

    "I'm not really sure that's appropriate," I shrugged. "She was acting as a service animal, not a person. I'm not sure it would look appropriate if you took that job."

    "I'm used to it. To be honest, I've kind of missed pulling stuff for a while - Denise really treated me well while I was a pony, before she found the foxtaur zone to give me arms and a human brain again."

    This was the first time I'd heard anything of the sort; up until now, Sarah had told me she and Jeff had been Changed by accident. I looked up and down at her nervously, wondering just what was going on. "Um," I hedged, "besides, the clothes fabber can make things that look like leather, but we don't have any of the real stuff for feedstock."

    "Oh, is that all? I'll just draw from petty cash and get some from the marketplace."

    "Still think it's better, if you want to help me with my chair, to push it instead of pull it."

    "Don't you always say to be prepared? There's lots of things you might need help pulling with - I don't know why we haven't made the tools for that until now."

    "It's a mystery," I agreed, my gut clenching at the implications of what had just happened.

    --

    What do you do when you discover a zero-day exploit that affects /people/?

    I'll admit that I spent a few moments fantasizing about harem-izing the whole town into slaves eager to do my slightest bidding.

    ... Okay, a few minutes.

    And then, after that self-indulgent interlude, I turned back to reality. If the glitch let one person induce people to confabulate new memories, then there didn't seem any reason more than one person couldn't do the same thing. Or, put more simply - someone /else/ might do /more/ than spend a few moments fantasizing about the mass-slavery thing.

    In fact, as I thought about it, that seemed to be a remarkably convenient glitch to have arisen by mere evolution by natural selection. If nobody else had already taken advantage of the whole situation... then I guessed it was only because they hadn't gotten around to it yet.

    Even outside whatever soft and squishy feelings I had for any particular individuals affected by the glitch, simple long-term self-interest - and short-term self-defense - was enough reason to try to figure out a patch for everyone in town who had it. Not to mention figuring out enough about it to make sure it wasn't transmissible.

    Unfortunately, the only ways I could come up with to even start getting a basic feeling for the parameters of what the glitch could and couldn't do involved testing it. That is, in deliberately altering peoples' minds without their consent.

    The phrase 'the ends don't justify the means' was pretty much made for just such an ethical dilemma. But as I thought about it, several of my sub-selves brought up the question of whether that phrase was actually /true/ or not.

    I decided that getting some external advice might help me sort out the solutions. However, if the glitch was deliberately created as a slave-maker, then it seemed within reason that it contained some sort of self-defense aspect, which meant that asking anyone already affected by the glitch might not lead to useful answers. I only knew of five people who'd been in Erie and seemed unaffected: myself; Dotty and Human Joe, who were dead; Minerva, who, the last I'd seen of her, had been happily playing with dolls and puppets; and Bunny Joe.

    As I set Munchkin's course for the Lake Erie Embassy, where I'd heard many of the gang had shacked up during my convalescence, I put my mind to thinking of how to deal with the fact that I might accidentally trigger the glitch, and what I should do if I did.

    --

    Bunny Joe was not, in fact, at the Embassy; she was aboard the Travelling Matt. In particular, she was stretched out in a hammock, reading a book. As I rolled up, she just raised an eyebrow and asked, "Are you sane yet?"

    "Eh, it's back to being a matter of opinion. Listen, I need some advice."

    She rolled so she was sitting, facing me. "About?"

    "It's complicated, but it starts with what used to be the mayor's harem."

    "'Used to be'?"

    "Well, the four bimbos seem to have picked me over Edwards."

    Joe didn't answer, she just blinked rapidly, looking off at a wall.

    I froze, tense, since that was exactly what Sarah had done when the glitch triggered in her. My mind felt blank - all I could remember from my recent musings was to try to keep people the way they were, reinforcing whatever behaviours and memories they already had. I recalled that Bunny Joe had been created by the 'spirits' of the Great Peace to help me psychologically, which she had interpreted in her own way. Which is why I told her, "Also, I think I could use a hug."

    She blinked back into focus, looking down at me, eyebrows raised even higher, but with a smile. "Really? Well, I'm not going to say no to /that/." She slipped down to the floor, and after a bit of awkwardness around the wheelchair, she solved it by sitting on my lap, twisting sideways so we could wrap our arms around each other. "This is nice," she said.

    "Mm-hm," I said, not committing either way, feeling mainly confused. A couple of weeks ago, when I'd been revived, Bunny Joe hadn't been affected by the glitch, in all the three years I'd been frozen. Now she had. What had changed since then? Well, her brain had, obviously, for one thing.

    "Now, what did you want to ask me about?"

    I certainly wasn't going to ask her about what I'd been planning to - not if she was as glitched as everyone else in town. "Maybe we should talk in private," I hedged. "Munchkin's parked over on the dock."

    "If you like." She rolled off my lap, and she was soon pushing me down the gangplank.

    "Oh, by the way," I said, "while I've got you here, I'd like to have the autodoc scan you for a few things." I made up an excuse on the spot, "The Free Company had to be wearing those gas masks for a reason, and I don't want any of us to be taken by surprise by a species-specific pathogen."

    "If you like," she repeated, with a shrug.

    The autodoc didn't have radioisotopes, X-rays didn't show soft tissues well, and there were far too many metallic parts to the autodoc for them to have built in an MRI. But it did have ultrasonograph gear, and something called 'photoacoustic imaging', and something else called 'functional near-infrared spectroscopy', and - most importantly - scans of Bunny Joe's brain taken long before she'd ever set paw in the city of Erie.

    While she settled into the coffin-like device, I checked with Boomer about the areas of the brain associated with memory or confabulation - and, at Boomer's suggestion, anosognosia, the inability to recognize a disability - and tapped the autodoc's controls to focus on those regions.

    I was about as far from a brain surgeon as you could get - really, all I was at the moment was being a monkey's pair of hands, following Boomer's directions.

    To have Joe think about something not quite related to the bimbos, I asked, "I've been thinking about the bun-bots... is it overly creepy that I have almost a dozen robots that look exactly like me, and do anything I tell them to?"

    Joe tried to shake her head, but the scanners held it in place. "You made them as your tools, as I was made to be a tool of the spirits. I am more 'creeped out' by their mechanical innards, than anything else about them."

    I nudged the conversation towards the topic at hand. "So you would be happier if I had living slaves doing my bidding?"

    "If you want advice, you should ask someone from your culture, not mine. We do not have the same taboo against taking prisoners of war from raids, and bringing them into our families, that you do."

    "Should I pass the harem of bimbos on along to you, then?"

    She started blinking rapidly. "I... do not think they'd agree..."

    I didn't want a random association affecting her very much, so I tried to focus her back with the same distraction I'd used before. "I'm just not a very huggy person, like you."

    "Hugs - yes, physical affection is important..." She squinched her eyes shut for a moment, then tried to shake her head again as she opened them. "According to the local school, a harem exists so its members can help each other, when their owner is not available. If you have not been able to provide them with what they need, they provide for each other."

    "Mm... I suppose that's one way to look at it." My attention was more on the autodoc's displays than the conversation.

    "Is there a reason this exam is taking so long? It did not seem so long last time."

    "Just want to be thorough," I commented, and quickly brought it to a close.

    As soon as Joe was free, she casually walked up behind me, resting her cheek on the top of my head and her arms on my shoulders. "If you don't want to hug them, then I can hug you instead," she said. "Have you been hugging your mind healer?"

    I blanked out the display. "Er, no - that's not how that works." I wondered if I'd focused too hard on the hugging, and whether /that/ might have long-term effects... "Can you help me into the auto-doc? I should probably get a quick scan, myself." Not to mention give her a reason to stop hugging me for a few minutes.

    Joe squinted at the main display. "What does 'Anomalous electroplaques in upper thorax' mean?"

    "... I don't know, but I probably should find out."
     
  • Threadmarks
    • 7.3
  • Threadmarks
    • *Chapter Three: Mis-diagnose*

    "One of the white matter tracts between the fusiform face area and the hippocampus appear to have been interrupted."

    I rolled my eyes at Boomer. "I never did finish going through my human-brain colouring book."

    "The individual subsections of the brain appear to be intact; it is the connection between them that appears to have been severed. A very small number of cells were affected - Bunny Joe's brain scan still appears to be within normal parameters. It is only in comparison to her previous scans, and those of other affected individuals for a similar variation, that any difference is detectable."

    "So we have our fingerprint?"

    "If you wish to call it that, yes."

    "And does this interruption explain the... weirdness in their behaviour?"

    "Unknown. It is plausible that this neural tract leads to an inability to recognize or remember changes in groups of people, but the data is insufficient to confirm or disprove that hypothesis."

    "And the confabulation?"

    "It is possible that that is the normal result of this form of memory disruption. Again, the data is insufficient-"

    "-To confirm or disprove, I getcha. Okay, so if that's what's happening... are there other effects? I mean, would it affect their recognition of groups other than the bimbo harem?"

    "Unknown."

    "Hm... could there be some connection with why their politics focuses around their unions?"

    "Unknown."

    "Have you got any idea how that one particular connection happened to get severed in so many people?"

    "Studies exist demonstrating that certain neural pathways express unique combinations of proteins and antigens, which can be used to target treatments. I have no information on whether this neural pathway has such an antigen signature."

    "Something we can ask Clara to check the library on. Even assuming that's the case... what might have actually latched onto that signature?"

    "Extrapolating from a few words in my database, I would posit a virus or organism could attach to the antigens in question, optionally followed by a drug targeting the virus or organism and killing both it and the neurons it was attached to."

    "Okay - but Joe's been in Erie for three years, and just started exhibiting symptoms of the glitch, well, sometime between the last day and a week or so ago. Would your virus-or-whatever take that long to do its thing?"

    "Possible, though that progression is uncommon."

    "So... maybe she avoided getting infected at all, until just recently?"

    "Possible."

    "So what did she avoid doing for three years, that she just started doing, that includes a disease vector? Did she start drinking the wrong water? Walk too close to the bimbo zone?"

    "Unknown."

    "And - you're sure there's no sign of the interruption in my neural pathway?"

    "Correct."

    "Okay, then to add to my previous question - what did she start doing, since I was revived, that Minerva and I haven't done?"

    "Unknown."

    --

    I rolled up front again, leading around the kitchen counter to see Bunny Joe. "You've got some signs of a possible infection," I said, entirely truthfully; though also somewhat deceitfully; though also in Joe's own best interests. "I need to ask a couple of epidemiological questions."

    She looked up from her book. "Of course you do," she sighed. "Very well."

    "Since my revival, have you begun doing anything that you have not done in the previous years you were in the city, which might have unknowingly exposed you to a disease; possibly started eating a new food, or drinking a beverage from a new source, or meeting a new person, or going to a new place; that /isn't/ a new thing /I/'ve also done?"

    "Are you serious?"

    "As can be."

    "You really need to ask?"

    "It's important."

    "I mean - you don't already know?"

    "I've been busy."

    "'Furry orgy'."

    "What?"

    Joe sighed. "Sarah and I have entered into a sexual relationship. You were right there when she first propositioned me."

    "... Oh. Right." I looked away from her, trying not to blush. "... I think that could fit the timeline. Is there anything else?"

    "Other than being imprisoned, there is little I have done that I have not already done, or that you were not with me for."

    "Alright. ... I'm not an epidemiologist, so I'm probably going to need to bring Denise and Clara in on this, and we might need to do a few tests to figure out how to cure it."

    "Do you wish some of my blood now?"

    "... I suppose the autodoc can draw it, we've got the fridge to store it, and it seems likely some useful tests could be run on it."

    --

    "Okay, Boomer; we've got something that seems to be some sort of STD, which has effects on the brain. How many things do you know of that fit that category?"

    "I am not aware of any known pathogen which has the described neurological effect."

    "I'm not asking about the effect, just for things transmitted by sex that can pass through the blood-brain barrier."

    "Query: Does this include the barrier being damaged via meningitis or a brain abscess?"

    "Since so many people seem affected, and Sarah doesn't seem to have meningitis, let's say no."

    "There are several diseases that pass the barrier. Some are not ordinarily sexually transmitted, such as trypanosomiasis, rabies, Toxoplasmosis gondii, or progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy. Some can be, such as HIV, neurosyphilis, and certain prions."

    "And since none of those cause the brain effect we've seen, it could be something completely unrelated to any of them."

    "That seems possible."

    "Is it even possible to test for all the ones you listed?"

    "Yes."

    "... With the equipment we've got?"

    "Several of the tests require reagents that I have not seen any evidence of, within this city."

    "Mm. If the nearest place to get those reagents is Brock University, we might have to try to bring some people through the Great Peace to try testing them there... I suppose it would have been too much to ask Clara to test everyone for unknown diseases the last time we were there." I paused, then snapped my fingers. "Then again, maybe she still can."

    "That does not seem to make sense."

    "Boomer, you used to be Laura - in a sense - and so did Clara. If you were her, would you have thrown away any of the medical samples you took just after they'd been poisoned with the nerve gas residue?"

    "I do not believe so."

    --

    I tipped the delivery boy, and retreated back into Munchkin (parked by the shelter) to open Clara's telegram. I read it aloud to Boomer, "Confirmation of presence of spirochaetes closely related to Treponema pallidum in Sample Group A, and absence of same in Sample Group B. Appears to be treatable with penicillin G." I set the paper down, frowning. "Well, that could be our smoking gun. The question is - what should we do about it? If it's a deliberately engineered, uh, spirochaete, then whoever released it probably wouldn't be happy about an eradication campaign... and would curing the disease clear up the blocked neural pathway? And on a more personal note, I don't know if /I/ might have been exposed when the bimbo zone or goo-Brenda went inside me, plus back in the day, I used to wear a medic-alert bracelet warning of an allergy to penicillin and supha drugs, though I don't know if I was /actually/ allergic or not, plus I've only got my brain and eyes left from back then to worry about allergy-wise anyway..."

    "I possess insufficient data to offer advice on these matters."

    "Hm... I didn't get pulled into the zone very much after Sarah and Bunny Joe started, um. So if I were infected then, I should have already started glitching myself."

    "Your immune system is not quite human. It is possible that a disease may have a longer incubation period in your body than in Sarah's."

    "I suppose. And Brenda gooped me not that long ago... Hm... Well, I had the robo-fac make up some penicillin before it crashed, but it's hardly enough to treat the whole city, so, hm..."

    --

    "Say, Denise? How much penicillin do you have in stock?"

    "None."

    "Why not?"

    "It stopped working. Everything that used to be treated by it, became resistant to it."

    "What do you use instead?"

    "We've got five different antibiotics. To prevent any new immunity from evolving, me and the other vets coordinate to use the same one in a year, then switch to another the next year, and so on. We lose some livestock that we could save with more aggressive intervention, but we keep the whole system working. It's a sore spot with some farmers, who want their herd or whatever saved /now/ instead of thinking long-term, but we keep the drugs locked up tight enough that cheating is kept down to an acceptable level."

    "How about for people?"

    "I haven't heard of anything that can be treated with penicillin in a long time. Why do you ask?"

    "I have reason to believe I may have been exposed to something which /can/ be treated with it, and I have a supply I acquired before finding out from you just now that it might be useless, and part of me may or may not be allergic to the stuff. Think you might be up to helping me work out an appropriate dosage, and keeping an eye on me in case of anaphylaxis?"

    "Ah, so you /have/ gone completely crazy. Wait right here while I go find some nice young men in their clean white coats."

    "Crazy would be if I tried injecting myself with penicillin, and didn't find a medical professional to watch for bad reactions."

    "Maybe /I'm/ crazy for even listening to this. I haven't heard such craziness in... I don't know how long. I suppose I can take comfort in the fact that this /is/ as crazy as things get."

    "Ah. Well."

    She just sighed. "What is it?"

    "Well, according to the autodoc, apparently, I seem to be turning into an electric eel."

    "... Maybe I should join old Mrs. Friesen on the porch, with her rocking chair and laudanum. Then I could talk everyone's ear off instead of listening to idiotic people trying to talk about things they don't understand."

    "If you're trying to tell me I'm not just out of my depth, but I'm also stupid, I'm not going to disagree."

    "Bunny - allergies are based on your immune system. Your immune system is made of cells, mostly created in bone marrow. Your immune system is made entirely out of Bun-Bun's cells, not your original ones. Whatever you were allergic to when you were human, you aren't anymore."

    "Ah. ... I'd offer you a raise, but I don't know if you still want to be employed by me for very long."

    "Shut up and tell me what you think you're infected with."

    "Er..."

    "You know what I mean."

    "Er, not just that, but I'm not sure I can tell you."

    "Embarrassing or top secret?"

    "I'll go with column B. I've been having Clara run some tests on some samples she already has, and there's a, um, reasonably good chance I've been exposed - but the tests to be sure need chemicals she doesn't think you have. So - if allergies aren't a concern, better safe than sorry."

    "And you want penicillin instead of a real antibiotic?"

    "I've got reason to think that the antibiotics you use regularly won't have a significant effect."

    She heaved a sigh. "Let me check my books. I'm sure there's /something/ in there about outdated, obsolete, and useless antibiotic therapy for unnamed diseases which show no symptoms and might not even exist."

    "I knew I could count on you."

    --

    "Ow." I rubbed my shoulder.

    "You want to stop, you can stop any time. You want to keep going, then with what your Clara and my books say, you tell your autodoc to administer four MU of aqueous crystalline penicillin G intravenously, every four hours, for fourteen days."

    ".../Every/ four hours?"

    "If you want to get a sufficient concentration of the stuff past your blood-brain barrier to where it'll do any good."

    "/Now/ you think it will do good?"

    "Your brain's from way back when. Maybe the strain of syphilis you've got is primitive enough that penicillin will work."

    "It's /not/ syphilis."

    "Don't sass me, boy. Or girl, whatever you prefer these days. There aren't many diseases that this can /be/ a cure to."

    "... It may be related to syphilis. But it's not from 'way back when'."

    "Then take your shots, and give me some warning if you think it's going to start spreading."

    "... I think I can assure you that you don't have to worry about it starting to spread," I said, telling the truth in detail while deceiving by implication.

    "In that case - what's this about turning into a fish?"

    "Not fish, electric eel. The autodoc says it found 'electroplaques' in my body, cells that electric eels use to make, well, electricity."

    "You're going to start giving people shocks?"

    "They seem to be in my chest, not my hands."

    "Any heart problems?"

    "None. All the numbers I get from the recharger are inside the ranges they're supposed to be."

    "How smart is your skeleton?"

    "Smart enough to have learned her name, and follow commands - well, sometimes, at least."

    "Smart enough to think she knows how to power your blood pump better than batteries do?"

    "... Maybe. She kind of absorbed my hoof and Wagger into herself, so she could be trying the same with the artificial heart."

    "Well, tell her to stop it. That heart needs a dozen watts, without interruption. That's a million joules a day. Do you think an /organic/ system could provide that power, regulated to a precise enough level to keep your blood flowing continuously? I don't even want to /think/ about how many extra calories you'd have to consume to try to power it yourself."

    Boomer piped up, "Roughly two hundred forty dietary calories, not counting conversion losses."

    Denise glared at the AI. "Shush, you, I'm on a rant." She turned back to me, poking a finger onto my chest, where my surgery scar was ever-so-slowly fading. "The batteries /work/. She tries fiddling with them, and you won't live long enough to finish treating your not-syphilis."

    "Alright, already," I held my hands up in surrender. "I can't disagree with you - I don't know enough to even try. Just remember, I come in something like fifth place when it comes to deciding what my body does - you, Bun-Bun, Wagger, and whatever zone I get shoved in all seem to have priority. Maybe Brenda these days, too, depending on what she figures out she can do. You want to fight out which of you is ahead of the others, go ahead, just leave me out of it."

    "And you wonder why I want you to have a real doctor instead of a vet."

    "And you wonder why I want a multi-species physician instead of a mere human GP."

    --

    In my room at the shelter, I frowned at the half-finished letter, nibbling on the top of my pencil as I tried to figure out a better way to phrase the message.

    Abruptly, a weight landed on my head, my vision obscured.

    "Gah!" I gave a whole-body twitch, slipped one of the knives from my sleeves into my hand, and as I heaved around, I pushed it through whoever was trying to black-bag me.

    My eyes were unblocked, revealing... Brenda, now in her pre-bimbofication colours, staring at the blade in her chest, her forelimbs changing back from tentacles into talons again. "Okay," she commented, "now I'm /really/ glad I'm not made of flesh any more."

    "My door was /locked/." I looked over at it. "/Is/ locked."

    "I've been learning more tricks. I can put some of my mass in a freezer, and reabsorb it as soon as it thaws." She plucked the knife out of her, holding it to me. "Yours, right?"

    I grumbled, returning it to its hiding spot. "We really need to have a talk about boundaries-"

    "Ooh, what's this? A secret diary page?"

    "No, it's a private-"

    "'Dear Minerva.' A love-letter? 'In regards to our private discussion, I have identified a novel pathogen endemic to this region.' ... Doesn't sound like a love letter. 'While the topic is awkward, the main method of transmission appears to be via body-fluid transfer, such as during sex. While you are probably too young for such activities at the moment, in the years to come, please try to remember this, and to arrange for any prospective partners to undergo the appropriate antibiotic treatment, to avoid becoming infected yourself.'"

    I finally managed to pluck the paper from her grasp, and fold it up. "Are you quite done?"

    "Not quite. I came to warn you the harem is waiting outside for you. Can I give you another whole-body hug? You can stab me again if you want to."

    I rubbed my nose. "I'd really prefer if you didn't. I am currently undergoing an antibiotic treatment. I do not know whether or not you are susceptible to the pathogen, or can carry it, but we should avoid any... personal touching until we're both confirmed to be clear of it."

    "So you want me to start taking this treatment too?"

    "Not... exactly. One definition for antibiotic is 'a poison that kills some kinds of cells quicker than others'. I have no idea if the cells you're now made of are more or less susceptible to the poison than the pathogen... and even then, figuring out the dosage is an... interesting problem. You don't have a blood-brain barrier to get through - but you also don't seem to have a liver to metabolize the stuff to keep it from staying in your system at dangerous concentrations."

    "Maybe I do, and it's just spread all through me, like my thinky bits."

    "Maybe," I shrugged, "but even finding that much out is going to require tests."

    "So you don't want to start wearing me now?"

    "Brenda... if there is a literal life-and-death choice to be made, I'll wear you in an instant. But short of that - if we got that close again, I'd have to start my treatment from scratch. Which involves painful injections. Every four hours. For two whole weeks. So unless we're dealing with a situation where that amount of pain is worth paying, we should stay apart."

    "No hugs?"

    "We can hug, if you want - but like flesh people, with our arms, not whole-body engulfing."

    "Are you sure? I can hide you inside me and get you past the harem..."

    "Tempting, but no."

    "How about if I make some air bubbles so I don't touch any part of you that can pass this infection?"

    "... Do you know what the harem's waiting for me /for/?"

    "I think I saw them writing a big questionnaire about what you like."

    "... What the heck. We might as well figure out if this trick can work at all - you're not all /that/ much bigger than me."

    "I left a lot of me in the freezer. I'm actually mostly hollow right now."

    --

    The harem saw through the ruse at once. Not literally - Brenda's outer shell was fully opaque, and I didn't have anything glowing - but from what I was able to muffledly hear, some combination of Brenda's gooey nature combined with the fact that the harem /knew/ I'd been in my room was enough for them to figure out my hiding place. In fact, one of them just stuck an arm right into Brenda, fumbled along my neck for a bit, and grabbed my arms, pulling me up and out of Brenda's back.

    "/There/ you are, your majesty," she smiled brightly. (I still hadn't figured out how to tell which was which.) "We've been looking /everywhere/ for you."

    I sighed, and stepped out of Brenda, resting an arm on the wall in case Wagger twitched my legs. "I'm very busy," I commented. I watched my right foot's toes curl and relax, curl and relax, without my telling them to, and decided a wheelchair would be more dignified than falling on my rear. I turned to head back into my room to grab it.

    One of the bimbos slid in front of me. "You're not going to lock yourself away from us again, are you?"

    My right knee pulled my calf up, and I started tipping over... only to land in the grip of one or two of the ladies. Neither staying in place and leaning on them, nor pushing against them to straighten back up, were acceptably polite outcomes, so I tried reaching a hand back in the direction I'd just been and muttered, "Brenda, a pull, please?" She waved a wing over, engulfed my hand in it, and with that leverage I managed to straighten myself back out.

    The harem were glancing at each other, so I just frowned at them and stated, "Spine injuries are nasty things. Even though I heal better than some, I may have permanent damage. Adding physical rehabilitation to my counselling and all the other things I have to do means I barely have enough time to sleep, let alone stand around and play dress-up or have tea parties or orgies or whatever it is you did for the mayors."

    "Ooh, /that/'s why," said the one behind me.

    One of the ones I'd landed on said, "We're not here to make you do things-"

    "-or us-"

    "-you don't want to do."

    "We're here to make your life /easier/."

    "We won't make you play dress up-"

    "-unless you want to-"

    "-but we can take care of your clothes, so you can always be dressed up, without spending any time on it."

    "Or cook."

    "Or clean."

    "Or watch your kids."

    "I didn't think she had kids?"

    "Maybe she just thinks she's too busy to raise them."

    The patter of voices from all sides was confusing and annoying, so I cleared my throat and raised a hand to interrupt them. "That's all well and good. My wheelchair, if you please?"

    "Sorry." "Sorry." "Sorry." "Sorry."

    In short order I was installed on what I wondered if I should start calling my mobile throne.

    I looked up at them, still frowning. "I did not request your services. I have no desire for them. Even trying to accommodate your nearby presence would be difficult, and would interfere with various security and intelligence matters. I am not in charge of the city. Mayor Pro Tem Edwards is, and then whoever is elected in his place will be. I recommend you go find him and help him instead of me."

    They looked at each other again, then back at me. "Don't think of them as /services/."

    "We just want to /thank/ you, for being our /guardian/."

    "Our /protector/."

    "Our cute little babe-cake."

    "... who /watches over us/ and keeps us /safe/."

    "Hrm," I grunted. "There's watching over you, and then there's watching over you. ... Which reminds me; Brenda, in the Munchkin, in the lab, in drawer seven C, could you grab the four things inside and bring them back?"

    She nodded her head, said "Sure thing, boss," with Alphie, and bounded away, more like a rubbery cartoon or a deer pronking than any sane quadruped's gait.

    I sighed and looked at the quartet, then sighed again. "I'm pretty sure," I commented, "there's more to life than finding the most powerful person around, and doing whatever it takes to convince them to protect you."

    More shared glances, before one said, "If you don't go into heat, maybe."

    "Having one husband is a lot less work than being a street-walker."

    "Or a House girl."

    "Or a 'gram girl."

    I asked, "'Gram girl'?"

    "It's new."

    "Someone wants a girl, they can just send a telegram now, and one'll come over."

    "... Of course," I rolled my eyes to myself. "I forgot the rule about what happens when humans get hold of new media."

    "Huh?"

    "'The internet is for porn'. Oh, look, here's Brenda."

    The hollow, rubbery gryphoness bounced back to our little crowd, stuck a talon down her beak, and pulled out four black bracelets.

    I said to the harem, "One for each of you. I want you to wear them at all times. If you get in trouble - and I mean /real/ trouble, something where you'll need medical attention or emergency rescue - press the red button. I'd prefer if you could remember to push the green button once a day, which will let me know you're alright and haven't been kept from pushing the buttons."

    "Ooh, shiny!"

    "Black /does/ go well with almost anything..."

    "It's a lot less annoying than that collar."

    "I kinda liked the collars."

    What I didn't mention was that these bracelets were new and improved over the ones that had let me find Judith; they would respond to a coded signal to pinpoint their location, if I ever had to find them. Not to mention pinging their location every ten minutes instead of every hour. I wasn't sure if the solar cells could keep a full charge with that rate; it depended on how much light they'd get during regular use.

    "She /does/ like us!"

    "I knew she was only pretending to be a grumpy-pants."

    The four of them took a step closer; and I was abruptly in the middle of a four-fold hug that would have given any anime character a life-threatening nosebleed. One of them nibbled my ear, and whispered into it, "And if you want our /personal/ thanks..."

    Another simply licked my other ear. "... Our next cycle is in just over a week."

    "Right!" I exclaimed, and grabbed the chair's wheel-bars, pushing myself out of the crowd. "Lots to do, no time to waste, mind your teachers and do your homework, Brenda you're with me."

    As I left the giggling behind me, I muttered, "I can't /wait/ for this place to become a republic..."
     
  • Threadmarks
    • 7.4
  • Threadmarks
    • *Chapter Four: Mis-guided*

    With Brenda's help, I made it to Munchkin without getting taken further off-track, and we drove off to the nearest Royal Mail Canada office. I sent the letter off to Minerva, a very similar one to Captain Shatter, and a more clinical one to the Lake Erie embassy.

    That brought me to the end of the high-priority items on my to-do list, and as I looked over the lower-priority ones, I grimaced a little, none of them particularly appealing at the moment. Amy had pointed out, every so often, that, every so often, I needed to do things that weren't /on/ a to-do list, to keep myself sane. I thought about torturing Brenda with the harmonica, or breaking out the watercolours and making a mess, or trying to teach Wagger how to not interfere when I walked.

    In my private chamber, my gaze fell on a pile of papers - the ones filled out by the Bayesians who'd tried sheltering aboard. The top one was by 'Blue Wolf', mentioning his family heirloom, some sort of advice-giving, solar-powered ebony skull. That sounded weird enough that it caught my interest, so I chose to spend my off-time seeing if I could find out more.

    The 'math club''s meeting place had been bombed out, and the city didn't have any phonebooks. Fortunately, I was already parked right at the Royal Mail, and was able to hire a telegram boy to go to the Professor to ask for Minerva's current address, where he asked for Blue Wolf's address, where he finally delivered my request for an informal meeting to learn about the skull, at a time and place of his choosing. The delivery boy, pedaling hard on his bicycle and panting but smiling, placed the return message into my hand: Now was good, and he suggested the Professor's warehouse.

    Wolfy was in full robes and cowl, and with the Professor's good-natured permission, had made room for both of us in the office area, along with a wooden case of just the right size to contain a human head. "Your Majesty," he said, through his face-concealing cowl, "it is an honor and a pleasure to meet you."

    "And you. This is it?" I nodded at the case.

    "Yes, ma'am. Before I open it, I should warn you, that it behaves... strangely. My family have worked out a script to get it to be more cooperative, and how to keep it that way as long as possible. But it is touchy, so I ask that you and your, ah, griffon try to be quiet, or at least play along. You'll see what I mean."

    "You make it sound intriguing. I'll try to be a good audience for the show."

    Wolfy nodded, unlatched the box, and with both hands, pulled out, as expected, something black and skull-shaped. What his brief note hadn't mentioned were the crystalline teeth, or the patterns just on the edge of visibility etched into its surface.

    He also hadn't mentioned that the eye-sockets could glow with red lights, which is exactly what they started to do.

    "IN-sig-NIF-i-GANT WOOO-ooorms! What mortals dare disturb the astral meditations of Sargon the Sorcerer, Sargon the Great, Sargon the Mighty?"

    I will admit that without Wolfy's warning, I probably would have snarked my head off at that particular bit of posturing.

    Wolfy took a much more submissive tone. "Your eminence, this humble servant apologizes most profusely for disturbing your phylactery and returning your attention to the physical plane, but hopes your magnificent mind may find favour in being presented with new information and new challenges to solve."

    "What is it this time, boy? More tinkering with mere mechanical devices in this base and de-magicked realm?"

    "No, my lord. A teacher and potentate of these realms has heard of your knowledge, and come to seek an audience with you."

    "Are you referring to the broken furry golem, or the slime with delusions of personhood?"

    Wolfy made a quick gesture in my direction, which I took as a suggestion to start talking. "There are no... golems here," I told the skull. "I left my constructs in my... walking castle." That wasn't quite true, but I didn't see any need to mention Scorpia's potential for ambulation, or Boomer's conversational skills should I pull her out of my pocket and turn her on.

    "If you /are/ alive, have you come to be healed of your infirmity?"

    "I believe I can accomplish that myself, with time. I am simply a scholar, here to learn what I can, both from you and about you."

    "And why should I waste any of my time dealing with such a pitiful specimen?"

    Wolfy answered before I did. "She comes in all humility, leaving behind her wealth and retainers and position. Outside these walls, she is a head-of-state, a queen whose realm warred on this city, and conquered it, but in their generosity merely overthrew the corrupt madmen and are installing new nobility in their place."

    "If she is a queen, why does she not seek to gain my favour with gold and jewels?"

    Wolfy hesitated, so I jumped in, trying to twist my mind to match the framework this personality seemed to exist in. "True wealth and power lies not in mere physical possessions, but in being able to do as you wish, regardless of what you have. There seems to be little you wish for that gold and jewels could enable you to acquire."

    An echoing laugh came from wherever it was inside the skull that its voice emanated from. "You amuse me, little queen, so I offer you a boon: solve three riddles, and I will answer any one question you may ask."

    "That is... generous of you," I managed, "but while you would gain amusement from my mental struggles, I /am/ a queen, with queenly problems - not those involving the abstract and arcane aspects of the astral realms you meditate on."

    "You DOUBT my COMPETENCE?"

    "No - I doubt that I have the wit to ask you about anything I would understand about the astral, or anything about those parts of the physical world that still remain important enough to you for you to still remember."

    "I am no nursemaid, to coddle the ignorant and uplift the unworthy. What DO you understand?"

    "... That some ways of finding the truth work better than others, and how to find the difference."

    "Is that ALL?"

    "No, but it is what all the rest is based on."

    "Out of all things that can be known, what is the one thing you WISH to know more than all others?"

    "My first instinct is to say 'how not to die', but I've already died twice, and thanks to certain mere mechanical devices, I got better - without even having to place my vital essence in a separate container."

    "Are you MOCKING me?"

    "I am trying to understand you. To answer your last question... I suspect that what I most want to know is: What don't I know that I don't know?"

    "You have a certain way with words, little queen, and your riddle is amusing, if simple. If you truly wish an answer to it, then bring my phylactery to the reproduction made of my original castle, lost a hundred fifty thousand-thousand years ago during the age of true magic; from where the sixth road meets the six hundred sixty-sixth, travel south to the sixty-sixth-"

    Wolfy spoke up, "You need not spend your valuable time giving these directions, great one, as you have given them to this humble servant, who can give them to her."

    "You DARE interrupt ME, insolent whelp?"

    "No, my lord, I only sought to spare you-"

    My walkie-talkie buzzed, which wasn't supposed to happen for anything short of an emergency. "Yes?" I asked, ignoring Sargon's sputtering outrage.

    Sarah's voice came back, "The Free Company's back. They don't look happy. And they say they want to talk to you."

    "Sorry, Sargon - matters of state outweighing simple conversation beckon. Unless one of the things I don't know that I don't know that you're willing to share right now involve how to deal with unruly mercenaries, I have to go."

    "Such impertinent behaviour is an insult to-!"

    Wolfy just about dropped Sargon into his box and latched the lid. "You might as well go," he said. "Once he starts going on about his castle, there's no getting him off the topic."

    I started turning around to roll back towards Munchkin, Brenda and Wolfy following. "Does it really exist?"

    "Maybe?" Wolfy shrugged. "His directions are to a spot in an old state park, about ninety miles southeast of here. The maps I've found say there used to be a prison there."

    "You've never gone to look?"

    "Not all of us have an armored land-train, lasers, and bodyguard robots to go exploring with."

    --

    I made use of my armored land-train, laser, and bodyguard robots to make as many preparations as I could for the parley, almost all of which were ones I tried to keep out of even potential sight of the Free Company's people. Coming up with further fallback plans, and exchanging radio messages with Sarah to set up various details, took up the time until the Company men arrived at the Lake Erie embassy. It might not have been neutral ground, but there were a number of ways to get out of there if one of the Company fellows turned out to have a gun hidden in a marsupial pouch or his biohazard suit lined with an unknown form of explosives or something. (Pinky even said that there was at least one escape route she wanted to not tell me about; so I added that to the plan list. Q, I think that one was.)

    In yet another boring conference room, I waited at the head of yet another boring conference table, though I sat on a standard office chair with casters instead of a wheelchair. Brenda had reshaped and recolored herself in imitation of one of the potted plants, I had a couple of bun-bots to act as nurse and secretary, a squad of them in the room behind me, one of the alarm bracelets on my right ankle, filter plugs in my nostrils, anti-laser lenses in my glasses, Scorpia fully charged up, and a full load of hardware hidden inside my clothes (and my own equivalent of a marsupial pouch, Wagger's gullet). (After a few moments of thought, I asked Bun-Bun if she were able to grow a marsupial pouch that couldn't be seen. She didn't answer. I also asked if she could not turn off my adrenaline today, since I might need the boost.)

    In short: I was feeling a little nervous.

    Three figures wearing the gas masks and black body-suits I'd expected, and carrying some business-type briefcases I hadn't, were ushered in by the squiddies' translator, who stepped out of the room and closed the door. As they took their seats, I asked, "Would I have met any of you before?"

    The one in the middle shook his head. "Captain Bravo was unavailable. I am Captain Alpha."

    I nodded, to maintain politeness. "And what brings your people back to Erie, Captain?"

    "We wish to offer bids for any and all city-killers, or related technologies, that are in your possession."

    I blinked. "That is... unexpected. I have to say that I can't think of any offer you might make that I would accept, but I am quite happy to listen and discuss the matter. That is, unless the discussion degenerates into 'give us what we want or we'll invade' sorts of offers."

    "That is not our intention today," said the Captain, and I had to repress a sigh at the last word in that sentence. He continued, "But I believe matters will not come anywhere near such an impasse. What we have to offer you is quite generous."

    "You don't say," I said, mostly to fill the conversational gap.

    "To begin with. While we believe that your stated intentions to prevent a second Singularity by researching the first are ill-advised, at best, we are willing to assist you in what you want in exchange for what we want. Our preliminary analysis is that your primary bottleneck is a lack of skilled manpower. The squiddies are unable to travel inland, the local education system is appalling, and you have been cut off from the Nine Nations and are on questionable terms at best with Technoville. We have university-level scientists in all fields, from traditional archaeology to even the computer sciences, who could be assigned to form the nucleus of your research group."

    My eyebrows had risen fairly high during that, and when he finished, I looked away, at one of the walls, for a few moments. "Skilled people are rare," I acknowledged his point, "but skills can be taught. When dealing with such matters, what is even more important is trustworthiness - specifically, that the people can be trusted to handle such dangerous knowledge. I could only assume that such a group of people would remain loyal to your city over me, and that's without even starting to get into whether they would be up to treating a potential basilisk with the amount of respect it deserves, among other such issues."

    "I see." He set one of the cases on the table, flipped open the latches with his thumbs. I tried not to tense, or for my breathing to hitch, just to remain in a state of fluid readiness. I probably didn't succeed, but I tried.

    Captain Alpha pulled out a simple folder containing papers, which he flipped through. "We have a catalogue of a large number of zones, and a list of how their effects can be synergized. If there are any physical or biological transformations you seek, such as returning to your original form, we can very likely arrange for that to happen."

    I tilted my head. "If you can do all that - why do you still have something resembling a human form? Surely there are all sorts of shapes that could provide a tactical advantage, which, if you can do all you can say you do, you can reverse after a tour of duty."

    "We have a certain philosophical approach to such matters, which precludes voluntary personal transformations."

    I looked away from him again, at the wall, considering, for the first time in a very long time, what it might be like to stop being a humanoid rabbit (plus various accoutrements), and get back to being a simple human. I thought of what I could do as a human... and then of what I could do with Bun-Bun's help. What I had done with her so far - among other details, that with a merely human liver and kidneys and so forth, I'd probably still be frozen while Denise looked for a way to bring me back to life. I thought, and I confronted a simple fact - on balance, I could do more good the way I was, then the way I had been.

    I thought of Sarah and Jeff, who'd never asked to be foxtaurs; Brenda, who'd been Changed twice; and all the bimbofications. If all of /those/ could be reversed, that was a definite good. Then I thought of the Berserker being let loose, spreading its whispers, infecting any computers it came near, taking control of a war machine... there was a reason I didn't object to hearing it called a 'city-killer'. Similarly, my other possession that could be classified as that, the fusion reactor in Munchkin, which could be set to self-destruct...

    I looked back at the envoys. "While you have, at least, suggested something that I could consider a net positive, I'm afraid, again, that handing over control of a city-killer is too high a price."

    He shuffled papers, opening a new folder. "We have a factory-seed. We have been preparing to place it where the industry could be put to greatest use for us, but we could be convinced to site it at a location of your choosing, with further negotiations to decide what portions of its output would be put to internal expansion, to your products, and to our products."

    "What sort of 'products'?"

    "Shaped metal. Refined chemicals. Machinery. Vehicles. Farming equipment."

    "Electronics?"

    He hesitated, then said, "While within such a factory's capacity, and in fact, necessary for its own works, further negotiations would be required to be sure appropriate safety precautions surrounded such objects."

    "Biologicals?"

    "Not directly, but distillery equipment, lab equipment, certainly."

    "Weapons of mass destruction?"

    "We have no source of radioactive material, or diseases of the appropriate sort, or software of the appropriate sort."

    "I notice you didn't mention a lack of chemicals."

    "As I said, such a factory can produce arbitrary refining equipment, and most toxins do not require exotic elements."

    "Hm." I looked away to think. It sounded a lot like the robo-fac I'd built Munchkin in. Which suggested that if I could dig the right November files out of the computer I'd salvaged from the place, I might be able to get the new factory-thing to make more of the fusion reactors. On the other hand, if that was possible, then the Free Company might also be able to make the exact same things - and self-destruct them near any hostile armies or cities.

    I looked back at him. "Why haven't you already started making use of this factory-seed?"

    "We already have a solid industrial base in Youngstown. A factory-seed is useful for reducing transport costs, but our areas of operations are compact enough that all our lines-of-transit are still short."

    I tried to think of any obvious loopholes in what was being described. One was almost obvious: "How is it powered?"

    "Initially, solar. It can continue expanding indefinitely on just sunlight, though its rate of production will be limited. For intensive manufacturing, you'll need hydro-power, windmills, bio-diesel; maybe even petroleum, if you know where to get some."

    I drummed my fingers, frowning. "If that's all the case, that your industry is so good that you can trade away one of these seeds... why are you still using horse-drawn carts and don't already control this whole region with aircraft, rail lines, artillery, and so on?"

    The two assistants (assuming that was what they were) glanced at each other. (Or, at least, they turned their gas-masks far enough where it looked like they might be able to see each other through their smoked-glass lenses.) Captain Alpha simply said, "Local energy sources can be found easily enough. But overall, they are thin on the ground, and transporting energy from where it is concentrated to wherever else it might be needed is problematic. Or, put another way, we could clear all the growths and monsters for any rail-line right-of-way we wish; we can't clear /all/ the rail-lines we might wish."

    "Hm." I knew I wasn't an economist, and that if they started throwing numbers around, I could be bamboozled all too easily. But in general terms, it seemed... reasonable. "Depending on the specific details, I suspect that we could come to an entirely amicable arrangement of that nature... except for one complicating factor. I didn't expect you to make an offer good enough I'd even have to bring it up."

    "Which factor is that?"

    "I don't know you well enough to trust you with a technology capable of destroying a city. I don't even know what sort of government you have, let alone what social institutions you have to keep it in check; what your track record in interacting with your neighbours is; and, of course, I don't even know what any of you look like."

    "Are you saying that you will not trade with us unless we remove our protective gear?"

    "No. At least, not exactly. I'm talking about an accumulation of evidence of trustworthiness. Revealing your appearance could be part of that, but doesn't have to be. The more I learn about you, the more accurately I can predict - well, try to - what you'll do with any city-killers in your possession."

    "I feel that I should mention that our main interest in acquiring all your city-killers is because of what we /do/ know about you."

    "Is this about that state of war thing when you were hired to rescue me? Surely the fact that I /didn't/ use a city-killer is-"

    He'd started shaking his head, so I trailed off. "Well before that, you have engaged in behaviour that is reckless beyond belief, endangering all who are near you. You created a long-distance communications network. Granted, using optical frequencies, a low bandwidth, and non-automated routing were a good start for safeguards, they are laughably inadequate for real protection. You use actual radios for short-range communication. Your personal vehicle is heavily computerized. You have made contact with at least one AI. All told, I can only attribute the fact that you have only been killed once, and even that reversibly, either to an unbelievable amount of luck, or to hidden support from one or more AIs that are using you for their own purposes. Neither of which are acceptable scenarios for leaving you with supposed control of city-killer-level technology."

    "By any chance, if I suggested that 'not all AIs are bad', would you simply take that as further evidence of my being a pawn, as opposed to considering the statement on its merits?"

    "Our data suggests you are culturally most familiar with twentieth-century North America?"

    "... Near enough that I'm willing to agree to see where you're going with that."

    "A simple analogy. 'Not all German soldiers in nineteen-forty are bad'."

    "Ouch," I winced, then considered for a few moments. "Let's say that everything you say is completely true. That doesn't change the fact that humanity barely squeaked through the last Singularity, and we're facing an extinction risk should another happen. As best as I can figure, it's the largest extinction risk that we /do/ face. There are only so many possible ways to reduce that risk. Do you have better plans than I do for dealing with it?"

    "Yes."

    "Lovely! What are they?"

    "Security reasons prohibit me from discussing them at this time."

    I sighed. "That's all well and good for /you/, then. But it doesn't help /me/ rearrange my plans. I can work on improving my security measures, but I doubt that anything I can do in that regard would satisfy you."

    "If you intend on continuing to closely interact with AIs, that is unlikely."

    I snorted. "Sometimes it seems I can barely take a step without tripping over the things. I made first contact with one just this morning, housed in something shaped like a black skull."

    "... Did it identify itself as Sargon?"

    "You've met?"

    "We have... encountered several copies of him before. Almost all of their behaviour is fixed and unchangeable, and they do not appear truly sapient, or to communicate other than audibly. They are toys, dangerous only in that they are stepping-stones to real dangers."

    "Ah, so his - their - castle is a booby-trap?"

    He didn't answer for a long moment. Then he stuck his hands into his case, where I couldn't see them, and fiddled for several more moments. I tensed again, but all that resulted were a couple of nods from his two fellows.

    He folded his hands neatly before himself again, saying, "It occurs to me that your earlier phrase, 'accumulation of evidence', is a good one. We have accumulated next to no evidence that you have the capability of pursuing your stated research goals without self-destructing, messily, and in a way that may cause immense damage to those all around you. This is why we are willing to go to extensive measures to limit the damage you are capable of causing. It occurs to me that an exchange of evidence may be of benefit to both of us."

    "I'm listening," I agreed, noncommittally.

    "We are aware of the castle you mentioned, and are confident that it presents no special physical dangers. I propose that you provide us with evidence about your research skills by performing whatever examination of the site that you see fit, with one or more of us observing. Should you demonstrate ability beyond our current estimation, we will reciprocate by providing you with evidence we prefer to keep private about ourselves."

    "Thus increasing my trust of you, and my willingness to hand over city-killer tech. ... And, I might as well say it, reducing the odds that you will be motivated to use measures more unpleasant than voluntary trade to remove that tech from my control. There's a lot of details that would have to be hammered out, but I have to say, I like your positive-sum approach."

    "You accept the principle idea, then?"

    "It makes a lot more sense than challenging me to cook up a spaghetti dinner, at least."
     
  • Threadmarks
    • 7.5
  • Threadmarks
    • *Chapter Five: Mis-manage*

    The total population of the Royal Canadian Household in Munchkin was currently, if arguably, eight. I counted Bunny Joe as one person; while she'd brought along Bear Joe, I wasn't convinced that enough of Joe's mind had been stuffed inside his skull for him to be a full partner in the social contract's rights and responsibilities. Minerva, while a minor, was a fully human minor, with all the personhood and quirks that implied - such as bringing a pet, Toby Junior, to pet and play with to a formal meeting. Despite being twice the woman I was in many respects, Sarah only counted once. Denise probably didn't /want/ to be counted among our number, but was doomed to disappointment on many things. While Alphie was half-embedded in Brenda's chest, and served as her voicebox, I was counting them separately. And while Boomer had started with her software identical to Alphie's, or near enough, the facial expressions of their equine and mustelid avatars matched up so rarely that I couldn't help but treat them as separate individuals. And, finally, while I, myself, was one of the odder cases, until Wagger or Bun-Bun started expressing their own opinions on the issues of the day, I was willing to treat myself as being unanimous about my singular population count.

    "Welcome to the first semi-formal meeting of what I'm calling the Private Council. Would everyone take a seat and settle in, please?

    "Thank you. I don't want this to become some formalized ritual, where the order on the agenda is more important than dealing with actual problems; but I did want to get us all together for some announcements and discussion.

    "First of all, I'm instituting a preliminary information security system. None of us are experts in the field, so we know going in that it's just going to be a temporary setup until we can work out something better, but I know I've been letting myself slip pieces of data to people who shouldn't have them. I think the downsides are much smaller than the upsides.

    "I'm using Munchkin itself as the model, and color-coding it so it's easy to remember. White is outside Munchkin: information that's already public. Blue is the cargo car: stuff that we may not want publicized, but can be figured out by people watching us, such as any random people who we happen to rescue. Green is the living car, for people who we can trust at least enough not to stab us as we sleep. Yellow is the lab car, for materials that can be dangerous to those who don't know how to handle them. And red is my private car, for materials we don't want anyone else to get a hold of."

    What I didn't add aloud was that, at least in my own mind, I'd added an extra category, black, for materials I didn't want anyone else to even know existed.

    "These aren't hard-and-fast rules. They're meant to be guidelines. I expect I'm going to be spending some time sorting out which items and pieces of info go into which category. The general point is to avoid spreading information unnecessarily.

    "The remainder of this meeting is coded Yellow, with possible exceptions.

    "Any questions?"

    --

    "Next up. I have a proposal for a project, which I'm going to call 'Delver'. I've received information that ninety miles south-ish from here is a castle. I intend to go take a look at it, to see whether anything there can be made use of, up to and including claiming the site as a new headquarters; and to see if anything there is dangerous and needs to be disposed of, up to and including destroying the entire site.

    "There are a few reasons to look at such a site. If I'm to do any digging into the Singularity, then it's a good idea to start getting some practice into practical archaeology. Getting the practice on a site that doesn't have any intrinsic importance, before a fumbled shovel might destroy an invaluable piece of data, seems worth the effort.

    "There are also a few reasons to look at that site, as opposed to any others. The main one is to try to improve relations between us and the Free Company. They think we are, to put it bluntly, idiot children who can't be trusted with matches, let alone something really dangerous. I get the impression that if we don't give them what they want from us in a 'voluntary' trade, they'll take it by force. I'm also pretty sure that if they used force, none of my technical tricks would be enough to stop them. So I'm quite willing to try to play along with their ideas, as long as they continue to pose a looming threat.

    "Because of that last goal, I'd like Delver to be done with all due caution and care, to try to impress any observers the Free Company has watching us. This means taking the time before leaving Erie to gather whatever information about the site and its environs that we can, getting as many of the potentially useful tools as we can build or buy, looking for any subject-matter experts we can hire, and so on. To this end, I'd rather not set a date to leave until we can make a good guess about how long it'll take to do all of that.

    "At least one other thing to keep in mind is that, given how little we know about the Free Company, they have some sort of hidden agenda. Maybe they want someone else to clean out the castle so they can keep their hands clean. Maybe they're lying about the castle posing no physical danger, and whatever observers they send are expendable. Maybe they're playing with the definition of 'physical danger', and there's a mind-wipe zone inside or something. In short - nobody who's going is to let their guard down just because it's supposed to be a nice, easy training mission."

    --

    "Let's see... oh, yes. I've determined that there's a disease that's fairly widespread among Erieans, and whose main method of transmission is sexual contact. I'm still working out a way to determine if anyone is infected, but I have figured out a cure. Well, I suppose I should actually give credit to Clara for working out the cure. Anyway, it seems impolite to spread the disease more than it already has, so I'm going to request that you all consider taking the cure, and avoiding infectious contact with anyone who hasn't. It's two weeks of injections, which is annoying, so I'll understand if you don't want to. If it makes you feel any better, I've already started taking the treatment myself."

    --

    "Moving along; I'd like to make some longer-term arrangements to keep Human Joe frozen, other than inside Munchkin. For one, he's in the way in case anyone else needs to be preserved. For another, it would be better for him to be in a fixed location. I propose we find some industrial space to serve as storage space for his cryostat, while looking for a building that would be suitable for the longer term. I'd like to suggest we pass along this task to the local Bayesians, some of whom were already working on a similar project before their space got blown up. ... I suppose we should make a note to avoid publicizing the location of the cryo-storage space, in case anyone else takes it into their mind to apply explosives."

    --

    "I don't expect this item to be resolved today, but I do want to bring it up. The odds that I'm going to get killed by something in the near future are non-negligible. And that doesn't even take into account the various ways I could end up hors de combat, such as a zone mind-wipe that makes me want nothing more than to be a tree, or something. I'm positioning this whole monarchy job as being working on long-term problems that a regular political process is ill-equipped to handle... and I want those problems handled, even if I'm not around to handle them.

    "I don't expect to be able to reproduce in anything like a natural fashion - and even if I could, waiting fifteen to twenty years for someone new to even start working on the problems isn't a good solution. But I still want something resembling an heir, who can take the resources I've gathered so far and put them to good use. The people who seem most likely to be willing and able to get to work on existential-risk reduction are the ones in this room. I know not all of you have the interest or skills to even try - but I'd like each of you to start thinking about what it would mean to try taking on that sort of responsibility."

    I paused for effect, looking around at each face.

    "There's a certain mindset involved in thinking that your long-term goal is so important that it's worth doing almost anything, or even just plain anything, to accomplish. I'm hoping to cultivate that mindset in each of you. To start with, I remembered the names of a few pieces of text that might provide relevant advice, and Clara was able to find copies somewhere in her library, or maybe students' personal data storage devices - she just said she found 'em. I'm handing out copies of 'The List of Character Survival Techniques' as an introduction, and when you're done with that, I'd recommend the 'Evil Overlord List' and its sequels, and 'Murphy's Laws of Combat'. I'm paying the heliographers to transmit further items during their usual down-times, starting with selected articles from 'Dragon Magazine', as well as excerpts from the 'Grimtooth's Traps' line for practical puzzles to ponder how to pass."

    --

    "Bunny Joe, Sarah, could you stay behind for a minute?

    "I'm calling this piece of info red level of security. I've written up a simple set of documents to serve as a will, living will, and the like, in case of my death or incapacitation. Among other details, they name my current choice of heir. I've used a bit of encryption mathematical trickery on them, splitting them into three pieces, any two of which can be used to recreate the original documents. I'm storing one piece aboard Munchkin, entrusting one piece to the Lake Erie squiddies, and transmitting the third piece to Clara to hold in trust for the Quebecois, until we get back in touch with them again."

    --

    "Candy? Crystal? Kelly? Karma? I have a proposition for you. At the moment, you are security level blue. I am willing to consider that to security level green - if you can do something for me.

    "There is something called 'decision fatigue'. Making lots of little decisions makes it harder to make the big decisions. I know some politicians have tried to reduce that for themselves by simplifying their lives - reducing their wardrobe to just a blue suit or a grey one. If you can come up with ways to reduce /my/ decision fatigue... I'll probably let you."

    "Among other benefits, if you do so, I will grant you access to one of my buns, who has the same measurements and range of motion as me. You will be able to learn a great many things about me from it, so it will be a further extension of my trust to you."

    --

    "I would like to apologize for neglecting my diplomatic duties to you and your people, Captain Shatter."

    "Not at all. We are delighted to... observe the local forms of... inter-state relations, and in particular... your resolution to your conflict with... the locals. We have never witnessed... the writing of a constitution... before."

    "Ah, that's why you haven't set sail yet. Hm... in that case, do you think you might be willing to have a few of the people under your command join me in a little expedition inland?"

    --

    "Mister... Lee, is it?" I double-checked my itinerary.

    "Yes, Your Majesty. Former manager of Erie Pharamaceuticals. Current manager of Royal Canadian Pharamaceuticals, Erie Branch, until such time as you choose to replace me."

    "I have little to no interest in interfering in the day-to-day operations of your group, outside of ensuring there's an ombudsman who everyone can report any problems to. I have asked you here for two reasons, the first of which is that I wish to ensure that, as a Crown company, your company's actions do not negatively affect the reputation of the crown."

    "We use all available testing methods to ensure the purity and potency of our products. I have also brought samples of the new branding materials for your inspection and review."

    "Would it be safe to assume that the workers are fully unionized?"

    "Of course, ma'am."

    "Then from what I see so far, there are no major issues to deal with. Which allows me to proceed to my second reason for bringing you here: arranging to supply the Royal Mobile Household with medicines and other such interesting chemicals, which are infeasible to create in our private lab. Improving the equipment and resources in that lab would also be nice."

    --

    "No, vodka does /not/ contain enough alcohol by volume for my needs. I don't want to drink it, I want to burn it. Diesel would work about as well, but seems to be hard to come by, while I /know/ that if technology is advanced enough to make pipes, people are going to be using those pipes to distill alcohol. If you can't provide me what I need with a deliverable of two days, then please let me know now, so I can come up with an alternative solution."

    --

    "Mayor Edwards, it occurs to me that one area of information my current records are woefully lacking in are post-Singularity maps. I would greatly appreciate your advice in recommending libraries, whether public or private, from which I can remedy this deficiency."

    --

    I looked up from the article on exploring abandoned architecture, and spoke to myself, "Why haven't I set the mini-fabber to make a ladder yet? ... I suppose getting paws, then a hoof, then a spinal injury, then a tail with veto control over my legs, has kind of made climbing things low on my priority list... I suppose I should make sure I've got a good selection of ropes, too, a few grappling hooks, some sort of collapsible ten-foot pole... I wonder how Sarah would feel about an actual saddle? Hm... no need to limit myself to the classics; I've got compressed air, I wonder if Clara knows an easy way to make silly string? ... Wherever did I put that smart-metal lariat?"

    --

    "Yes, Brenda?"

    "I've been trading 'grams with Clara. Told her as much as we know about what I'm made of now. Got instructions back to test me for that disease, and treat me if I've got it. She says as long as I stick to the plan, you don't have to worry about catching anything from me!"

    "That's... nice."

    "And I've been practicing with your bun-bots! I can make any of them look like they're wearing any of your outfits now! Well, except I have to have enough of me there so I can think. They're very stretchy inside, even more than you!"

    "Er..."

    "... Or I can pretend to be a backpack, or something like that. Oh, and I've been working on my tentacles! Anybody tries to get into a fight with you, they won't know what hit them!"

    "Well..."

    "And I've just started trying to make myself look like you. If you need a body-double, that can talk better than the bun-bots, and react to new things, I can fill in for you! Fur's kind of hard for me, though."

    "Brenda, I'd prefer it if you didn't try to look like me - there's a lot of potential for dangerous confusion there. I'd also prefer if we finished this conversation when I finished showering."

    "Ooh, what's that? Do you have another giant egg in there?"

    "... No, it's not my uterus. Apparently growing a flap of skin doesn't take Bun-Bun very long, and I'm seeing how big my new marsupial pouch can get by filling it with water."

    "It looks as big as when I was in you!"

    "..."

    "Is that for /me/? You didn't know I was talking to Clara, so you changed yourself so I could be in you and not worry about that disease and eeee and can I try it now?"

    "... Have you checked to see if you dissolve in water? I don't think even you'd survive the recycler..."

    --

    "Hello, Miz... Unruh?"

    "That's right."

    "In charge of Royal Mail Canada's heliograph system and telegraph delivery service?"

    "That's right."

    "I am planning on making a trip to a site about a hundred fifty klicks from here. I'd like your opinion on the feasibility of creating a temporary heliograph line between here and there, and what impact that might have on your normal operations."

    --

    Present at the latest Munchkin meeting were myself; Joe, Sarah, Brenda, Denise; a couple of Free Company observers; a squad of red-shirted Acadian marines; a heliograph operator team; Blue Wolf and Sargon in his box; and some bun-bots.

    I'd at least learned enough about how these things went to have made arrangements for the right numbers and types of seats and refreshments.

    "Welcome, everyone, to the first meeting for Project Delver. Some of you will be joining me on the expedition; some of you will be remaining here, but contributing in other ways.

    "I will be issuing keycards to each of you shortly, which you will be able to use to access the parts of Munchkin that it is safe for you to do so. When I do, you will need to choose an additional security measure, such as a thumbprint or passcode, so that a stolen keycard will not be of use to a thief.

    "Project Delver's first goal is for everyone involved to return in one piece. The second goal is for anyone who ends up in less than one piece, to be given the best treatment possible as quickly as possible. The third goal is to end up with the maximum possible amount of valuable resources, including both information and materiel.

    "The basic plan is to travel to Site F aboard Munchkin, dropping off temporary heliograph relays on the way; to investigate the Site for useful and dangerous things, hopefully ending up with at least a preliminary examination of the entire Site; and to return to Erie, picking up the heliographs and their crews on the way. Given the second goal, Plan B is if someone is injured beyond what can be treated on-site, to bring them back to Erie's hospital as fast as possible, and then to return to collect everyone who was left behind. Plan C is if the Site turns out to have significant immobile resources and insignificant dangers, to establish a longer-term base to exploit those resources, and to minimize the odds of them from being exploited or destroyed by hostile groups.

    "Part of this meeting is to gather any suggestions any of you may have in improving those plans, or in preparing alternate ones.

    "This meeting is also, in part, so everyone involved can start familiarizing themselves with each other, and with the tools we'll be using. For example, this, here, is Pole-Bun, as in 'polish mine detector'. Despite her resemblance to me, she is not, in fact, a person; and thus she can be sent to walk ahead of a real person, to check for stable footing and a lack of things that will fall on heads. While I don't want to lose Pole-Bun, I'd rather lose her than a real person.

    "I have also prepared one of my flying machines for a demonstration today, to see which, if any, of you might be interested in learning how to be a backup pilot. I'm sure all of you can imagine the benefits of getting a higher perspective on things."

    --

    One of the lynx-shaped soldiers padded over and asked, "Will any of the citizens of the Dominion of Lake Erie be contributing to this project?"

    "No more than to any other, I'd imagine," I said. "Site F is inland, away from Lake Erie's shores. If it were in the same drainage basin, then I might have asked if they had anyone who might be willing to swim upstream; I don't know how they might be able to help, but I'd ask. But if I have to help them get over the hump to the next stream over, then by the time any of them could make it through all the twists and turns of the local river system to anywhere near Site F, we're probably already going to be done exploring the place."

    "Could you not bring even one in Munchkin?"

    "I've asked, but they don't seem interested. I suppose if we come across something at Site F in which an aquatic, tentacled sapient being would tremendously help, then I can use the heliograph line to send a message back negotiating for the help of one, and have Munchkin make a quick trip back and forth to bring one."

    --

    "And here we are at Site Mock-F."

    "It's a barn," said Observer Charlie.

    "Not a very big one," said Observer Delta.

    "On the outside, sure," I agreed. "But better to find out how we step on each other's toes at a barn, next to Erie and its medical establishment, than a few hours away. I've got the heliograph operators practicing their craft elsewhere, so at this point in the simulated expedition, we've gotten near Site F. I've gone up, taken some pictures, and come back down. Well, Joe, Sarah, Wolfy, it appears that our intelligence was faulty, and instead of a castle, we are faced with a simple barn. Whatever shall we do?"

    Bunny Joe tilted her head. "Blow it up?"

    "Explosives are kind of expensive these days."

    Sarah suggested, "Move in?"

    "We haven't seen the inside - it may be a monster-barn fake castle thing."

    Blue Wolf said, "Then I guess we'd better take a look. Should we send Pole-Bun in first?"

    "We should," I agreed. "And now that I think about it - I'd really like to be able to see what she sees, without risking /any/ of our people. Boomer, add to the session notes, I want to look into really, /really/ long video cables. Also, since I haven't actually flown - if I can put together a simple surveillance drone, so I don't have to risk my own neck in case the real thing has some sort of anti-air defenses. Now, while we're standing here gabbing, what should the marines be doing? That barn might be full of robo-centaur knights getting ready to sally out against us; how should we have already arranged ourselves in case of such a situation?"

    --

    "... 'Presbylutheran'?" I read from the pamphlet.

    "There weren't many people left after the Singularity. Almost all of the old churches with enough members left to even be called a church merged," said Edwards.

    "You do realize that I'm not a Christian of any shape or sort, right?"

    "Powerful people can be religious. And this is an area of influence outside the usual inter-union squabbling."

    "And why are /you/ suggesting /I/ engage in this area at all?"

    "Maybe because I want to keep my cushy job as secretary once the new constitution is in place, and the church's support would go a long way to keeping things stable. Or maybe I just want to watch you squirm uncomfortably."

    "... Or maybe you owe someone a favor. Fine, I'll talk to the priest. Or reverend, or bishop, or pastor, or whatever the title is. But if I burst into flames when I walk in the doors, I'm holding you responsible."

    --

    The harem were... trying. They'd found pictures of Queen Elizabeth on walkabout, and had imitated the fashion, with knee-length skirt and wide-brimmed hat, in royal blue. Since they hadn't been bothering me at all while they'd put that together, I didn't want to discourage their approach, so I took the ensemble they presented me with back to my private room, scanned it into the clothes fabber, and had it re-make the outfit - with the addition of my usual selection of hidden pockets. I tucked Boomer into my new marsupial pouch, padded her case's corners with a few hankies and a microfiber towel, and picked a cane to try to walk with that day. (Wagger finally seemed to be responding to the operant conditioning of 'twitch leg at bad time, Bunny falls onto tail', but it wasn't a deeply embedded lesson yet.)

    In relatively short order, I was welcomed into a small house behind a white-painted church. (Rectory? Parsonage? There was a whole vocabulary I was missing, and had little interest in spending my time to assimilate.)

    "May I offer you some tea? Wine?" asked the woman, with the sort of collar I'd seen on TV often enough to recognize as being some sort of indicator of ministership.

    "No, thank you," I settled into a seat. I added an explanation, "I've started to have some medical issues with locally-sourced food and water." It wasn't /entirely/ false, and I hoped helped move the conversation along.

    "It's a shame you couldn't make it to services, earlier."

    I sighed. "Ma'am - with all due respect, you're not going to convert me to any brand of theism, I'm not going to convert you to any variation of atheism, and I'm pretty sure we both have better things to do than waste our time trying. If that's all you asked me over for, I should probably just leave."

    "While it grieves me to see any soul as lost in the wilderness as yours, there is another reason you are here. What are your intentions towards the church in your new government?"

    "'My' new government? You mean Erie's new government?" At her nod, I said, "You should take that up with the new government, not me. I'm just making sure it meets certain minimal standards. After that, I have no intentions for it, or anything under its bailiwick."

    "Do those standards include freedom of religion?"

    "They include a bill of rights, which I won't consider complete without some sort of guarantee for freedom of thought and expression. There are certain limits to that guarantee, such as someone who believes that they can cure their child by starving it in the face of all medical evidence to the contrary, but the old American government was perfectly able to include 'reckless endangerment' laws within its constitution and still have lots of churches."

    "And what will you do if the new government fails to abide by that guarantee?"

    "Me? Almost certainly nothing. That's what elections, emigration, and revolutions are for. I'm not here to solve all the world's problems; I'm not here to solve /your/ problems. If I can solve the one problem I'm focused on with a guarantee of free religion, I'll work on that guarantee. If I can solve the one problem I'm focused on by establishing atheism as the one and only state church, I'll work on establishing that."

    "I'm not happy to hear that."

    "Then think of it this way. If there's anything you can do to help me on my problem, I'll be quite happy to offer whatever I can in return, commensurate to the size of your help."

    "And what 'problem' is that?"

    "From your perspective? Ensuring that enough people survive, in the long term, so that there is a reasonable chance of your church continuing to exist. I'm not going to say that if you're really interested in the long-term welfare of your flock that you should throw your total support behind me, because people generally just don't think that way."

    --

    "How's progress, Skunk?"

    "We resolved the populism versus unionism debate along with the separation of law bills and money bills by going back to bicameralism. One house, elected by single transferable vote, initiates law bills, requires a two-thirds majority to pass any, laws require a simple majority of the other house."

    "Is 'single transferable vote' a synonym for 'instant runoff'?"

    "Not quite. The person doing the voting still just ranks their candidates in order of preference, but since it's to elect a bunch of people into a group instead of an individual, if everybody's first vote is for X, then the excess votes go to their second choice."

    "I'll read up on it when I have a chance. Go ahead, then."

    "The other house has its members appointed by the union leaders, initiates money bills, the executive gets a line-item veto, bills can be defeated by a supermajority of the first house. Right now, we're working on tweaking the Bill of Rights to take into account the abuses and excesses of the Civil Guard, and the previous government in general. I'm pushing for a separate branch of government for ombudsmen, but I could live with them being part of the executive, if enough other measures are taken. When I get back, the plan is to discuss whether we want to constitutionally enshrine the pre-twenty-twenty-seven exclusionary rule and the principle of throwing out the 'fruit of the poisonous tree' for illegally-gathered evidence, or stay within the American legal tradition, incorporate Doe v. Alabama as precedent, and come up with other ways to punish government agents who exceed their lawful authority."

    "I'm not really familiar with that case, or what happened in twenty-twenty-seven."

    "I'm not an expert in the details, but the previous rule was ruled unconstitutional. After, if someone felt that a search was illegal, they were supposed to file a writ of habeas corpus to get an immediate hearing. However, in practice, it was nearly impossible to succeed. As police already had qualified immunity from lawsuits, only being liable for clear violations of peoples' rights, they had nearly free reign. Thus the creation of the Civil Guard instead of a police force, to avoid those abuses."

    "... I'm going to think that it didn't avoid them very well."

    "Perhaps not, but it was a step in the right direction, and the main problems lay elsewhere in the system. Given the terms of the surrender document, I'm implying to the committee that anything less than every civil rights protection we can come up with could be insufficient to satisfy you, but I'm also trying to get them to understand why the protections are valuable in and of themselves."

    "Pointing out how the Civil Guard, or whatever, is at least as likely to be pointed at them as at random civilians seems like one approach."

    "Perhaps, but given the backgrounds of the committee members, they simply don't have the context to understand what that's like. I'm getting tempted to spend a day forcing all of them to dress up like poor people and get hassled."

    "... I'm almost tempted to extend the deadline by a day if you do, but changing that, even for such a noble cause, would likely set a bad precedent..."

    --

    "I'd like everyone working on Project Delver to wear these. They're not directly related to the project, but are more for long-term data gathering."

    Sarah picked up the pen-shaped object, then the card-sized one. "What do they do? More radio gear?"

    "No, a couple of types of radiation detectors. Without decent sources of semiconductors or noble gasses, I'm limited in the sensors I can build. But the local newspaper has photos, so I was able to get some film to build a film-badge dosimeter. And the quartz fiber dosimeter doesn't require any special materials, it just needs to be read off and recharged every so often. Recharger's in the lab, along with a logbook and instruction sheet."

    "Are you /expecting/ radiation at the castle?"

    "I have no reason to. But I'm hoping the castle expedition is a prelude to bigger and better investigations, and I'd feel downright silly if I discovered the secrets of the universe, but died because I found them in the middle of a particle accelerator I didn't know was active."
     
  • Threadmarks
    • 7.6
  • Threadmarks
    • *Chapter Six: Mis-lead*

    We made it all of twenty miles out of Erie before we had to turn around and head all the way back.

    I'd let Miz Unruh make the arrangements she thought best for the heliograph camps, trusting that she knew her job and what was best for her people so I could focus better on the castle end of the trip. It was only as everyone pitched in to help set up the first relay that I discovered she'd made absolutely no provisions to get her people back if Munchkin broke down. So we drove back to Erie, grabbed just about every loose bicycle that was for sale or rent, and enough backpacks to hold provisions for stranded heliograph operators bicycling back home, and /then/ went on the road again.

    I chose to think of the whole thing as being quite fortunate, if it was the worst blunder we made. I spent most of the trip going back and forth in Munchkin looking for any worse blunders.

    --

    We took an old 'Penny Rail' line, east from Erie through the ruins of the cooling towers that were all that was left of Corry, Youngsville (not the Youngstown the Free Company was from), Warren, and to Cane, where we switched to a B&O Rail line heading southwest to Marienville - paralleling the non-rail Route Sixty-Six, and, according to the relevant maps, passing right through the frontage of the ex-prison we were aiming for.

    Naturally, we didn't get anywhere near that close before we got a look at the place. While I didn't want to risk Alphie or Boomer by sending them into the air, it wasn't too hard to send a hastily cobbled-together quadcopter straight up to check for a Toronto-like air defense system, and when it wasn't shot down, to make a quick flight in one of the powered paragliders. Each time we stopped to drop off a heliograph, I went up a few hundred feet, circled around so Boomer, strapped on my chest, could get a good view, and glided back down.

    After we passed Kane, we were going through an old national forest, so there wasn't much to see... until we were less than twenty klicks away. When I landed, Sarah, Bunny Joe, and I put our heads together to peer at Boomer's small display, with Brenda and Blue Wolf hanging back until we made room.

    I said, "If I said 'Enhance', would it do any good?"

    Boomer's voice came over the vague three-dimensional blob she was rotating. "I am already using all the enhancement algorithms I have in my memory, including ones which take advantage of my accelerometers to know my position when each frame of video was taken, the exact details of the camera's construction-"

    "Okay, okay," I cut her explanation off, "it's already enhanced. It's just... a lot more /rounded/ than most castles I'm used to seeing. Is that an artifact of the enhancement?"

    "No, the structure possesses that shape. The highest portion is roughly twenty meters above the ground level recorded in topographic maps for that site, while the portion I am highlighting is roughly seventeen meters."

    Sarah asked, "Maybe it used to be straighter and taller, and is just ruins now?"

    Bunny Joe said, "Maybe it was built in the shape of ruins."

    I tapped my lips with one finger, as I thought. "Maybe we can get a better look before we get any closer... Give me a couple of minutes, and I should be able to whip up a mount to aim Boomer's best camera through a telescope."

    --

    We gathered around Boomer again.

    "Okay," said Sarah, "so it's a giant stone lion. That's called a sphinx, right?" The figure was roughly forty meters long from nose to the base of its tail (if it had one), facing west, crouched on its belly as if getting ready to pounce onto the road.

    "Not quite," I commented, "sphinxes have human heads. Boomer, can you extrapolate more of the shape by assuming it's at least roughly symmetrical?"

    "I can," she said, and did. "I should also note that while the trees and limited number of frames are blocking almost all of my view of ground level, the figures appears to be resting on a mound roughly ten feet above local ground level. In addition, as I zoom out, I can confirm at least part of a wall surrounding the structure, roughly ten feet tall, five feet wide, with multiple twenty-foot towers."

    "I'm getting some serious deja vu," I frowned. "Maybe it was that giant cat that chased me around, over near Technoville? Can this thing get up and move?"

    "I have insufficient data to answer that question."

    "I could swear I've seen that before... did someone try recreating the Giza sphinx, with a lion's head?

    "The height is similar, but none of the other dimensions appear to be a close match."

    "Any records of any similar structures?"

    "Not in my database. Would you like to query Clara?"

    "... You know, we might as well. Make a good test of the heliograph line."

    Soon, beams of light were being reflected over nearly four hundred kilometers, from Munchkin through Kane via Erie to Buffalo and finally to Brock University. With only a light code, to keep the heliograph operators from knowing what I was talking about but without making their jobs too hard, I transmitted, "At site of castle, found a giant stone lion. I think I remember it, but don't remember where." I summarized what we'd found so far. "Any insights?"

    Her return message came quickly. "ISBN 978-0880381079. Authour: Merle M. Rasmussen. Title: Ghost of Lion Castle. Publication date: 1984. Source: Product listings in the role-playing magazines you have been requesting excerpts of. As there is no record of the authour's death, the text appears to still be under copyright. A digital copy is available to be checked out of the library."

    I sent, "I am currently unable to visit the library. How much information can you send on this communications medium? Is there such a thing as a digital interlibrary loan?"

    I got back, "Current university policies do not support digital loans. Information on texts is limited to that necessary for reviews, such as one article per periodical."

    "How much are you able to transmit about the building described in that book? Preferably focusing on dangers to people exploring it."

    "Many monsters wander the premises. When invaded by more than one individual at a time, intruders are transformed into beasts. Portcullises fall when walked under. Murder holes drop stones when walked under. Molten lead pours from nostrils when walked under. Glowing arrows fire out of arrow slits. Traps exist in the Treasury room, Butcher room and the Mason room."

    Instead of immediately responding, I showed the conversation's transcription to the rest of the team. "I had dozens, maybe hundreds, of 'adventure modules' like that in my personal library, before the first time I died," I said. "This book was probably one of them. From what I gathered before we left Erie, the AIs think the place was a prison right up to the Singularity, so... what do you think?"

    Sarah said, "If the real thing is like the book, it sounds like there's a transformation zone, maybe lots of them."

    Bunny Joe commented, "I do not think any one person, or even one family, could build something that large. And there is no sign of any larger settlements nearby to provide the labour. I do not think it was made by human hands, even if humans came up with the design."

    I nodded. "Maybe the Free Company was lying about no dangers, and they're hoping one or more of us get Changed. Or, maybe there are zones here that are more about mental changes than physical. Or, of course, we're still completely missing the gag. Whatever the answer is, I think nobody will object if I rule that nobody goes anywhere unless a bun-bot's been through there first?"

    --

    We came to a halt a little over a klick from the site at what the old maps showed as a road-salt depot, and which was now just a small clearing that trees didn't seem to want to grow in. I asked, "Any change in the weather forecast?"

    Blue Wolf was idly fiddling with the latch on the wooden skull's box, but answered, "Still looks the same - partly cloudy until at least sunset, but could be rain tomorrow."

    "That's going to play hob with the heliograph ranges," I mused. "We can always go back to Erie and redeploy on another day - the castle's not going anywhere. Still, no reason not to gather what info we can while the helio's still up."

    Sarah tilted her head. "We're not going right in, are we?"

    I shook my head in a negative. "I'm thinking of taking the 'glider and circling the site, get a view from all angles. First, though, there's Goal One to consider - what do we do if something goes wrong, or the place really does shoot glowing arrows, and I crash? There aren't many roads in the area."

    Bunny Joe suggested, "Have someone on the roof watch you fly. If you fall, they can see where you land, and we can come get you."

    After a bit more discussion, mostly ideas being shot down for not being as good as the first one, we started getting ready for that. "Acadians, you're in charge of physical security, in case of monsters or bandits. Free Company Observers, you, er, observe. Bunny Joe, you've got good eyes; you're on rooftop duty. Sarah, I'm designating you Munchkin's pilot for the duration. Brenda, you can nap in my quarters to keep from bothering everyone while they work. I'm going to grab a different outfit, and double-check my medkit and so on."

    Brenda, who was back to pretending to be a 'service griffon' in front of the Free Company, and I went back to my private car. She pushed Alphie out of the surface of her chest, and through him, said, "I should go with you, not nap."

    "I agree, but if you want to keep up your cover story, you need to be somewhere plausibly out of sight. Here's the freezer for your excess mass, and here's my flight suit for you to imitate, and here's a belly-pack that can explain why I'm carrying extra mass on my front."

    "Aren't you getting undressed? I'm going to be your clothes!"

    "And if we need to split up? Shorts and a t-shirt shouldn't interfere with you looking like my outer layers, should they?"

    She grumbled, but went transparent and started sliding around me, and into the marsupial-like pouch I was still getting used to having. I set Alphie aside for the moment - no need to risk both AIs - and once Brenda had covered me enough, held Boomer to my chest for her to grab onto. Once I had a layer of Brenda-stuff covering my whole body from the neck down, she went to work on the colours and textures, until, for all anyone else could tell, I was wearing a full-body jumpsuit.

    Boomer said, in Brenda's voice, "Do you want the tail covered or uncovered?"

    "Eh," I shrugged as I took a few steps to get used to the new distribution of weight, "doesn't matter much. Maybe leave her head free, and make a sleeve for the rest."

    So I had spoken, so it was done. "Sure you don't want a hood?"

    I swapped out my glasses for a pair of goggles, on the theory they were less likely to get lost. "Can you make yourself into a helmet?"

    "I'm made of goo. I can fiddle with my surface so it's dry and not sticky, but not that hard."

    "Then no hood. If I /do/ fall out of the sky, then feel free to do whatever you can to keep my skull from getting squashed, like turning into a bunch of pillows to slow down the stop when I hit the ground. Oh, and do as much for my torso as you can without increasing the risk to my head. Bun-Bun's pretty good with limbs, so don't worry about them much."

    --

    I circled clockwise around the castle; /well/ around the castle, to avoid anything short of a sniper or laser. East from Munchkin, curving around to the south, getting a view of the stone lion from all sides, including giving Boomer a view through the telescope every so often. I saw a few things I wanted to turn closer in to get a better look at, but just because I'd made lots of plans in case of a crash didn't mean I /wanted/ to crash.

    I landed without incident on the road, packed up my chute, and boarded Munchkin. Before I could head back to my room to let Brenda take up a separate embodiment again, Wagger gave my legs a twitch and I just about fell onto a couch. Sarah handed me a mug of hot something-or-other, and Bunny Joe was clambering down from the roof, and everybody was crowding closer to ask what I'd seen, so I gave a mental sigh, hoped Brenda wouldn't object to being literally objectified for a while longer, and set down Boomer so at least a few of us could get a look at her screen.

    I asked her, "Need any processing time to put together a new 3D model?"

    Boomer answered, "If I had been built with technology from twenty-fifteen, perhaps. I was not, so no." She started displaying the whole landscape on her screen, slowly rotating it around and around, and highlighting various points. "Access to the main structure from the ground appears difficult. The wall surrounds the whole building, and there is a two-meter-deep ditch just outside it. The ditch is broken in two places: the middle of the east wall, where the gate is sealed with a portcullis, and this tower in the north wall, where the tail of the lion leads to, which appears to be sealed with wooden doors. Comparing the site to previous maps, the entire footprint of the previous prison grounds has been flattened, and that area is surrounded by a vehicular road, surrounded by trees. That road is connected to a driveway reaching to Route Sixty-Six, passing by a parking lot and this building here."

    Sarah pointed a claw-tip at the latter. "What is this place? A guardhouse?"

    Boomer obligingly zoomed in, and above a set of glass doors, and below some panels of black glass on the rooftop I guessed were solar panels, were the words, 'Tourism Office'.

    I grunted, and asked the obvious question, "Are there any /other/ bits of writing in the area?"

    Boomer's virtual camera obligingly flew over to a gate where the driveway met the main road, over which was a sign reading, "Welcome to Lion Castle". A second sign was stuck into the ground to the right of the higher one, this one reading, "Pennsylvania's premiere LARP and paintball destination!"

    Sarah said, "Well, that just looks... cheap."

    I frowned, and asked, "You're sure there's no hint of this place existing before twenty-fifty?"

    Boomer responded, "None at all."

    I considered. "Well - the whole place looks secure enough against anything short of an army, and there aren't many of those around. If there aren't any zones to worry about, I might not mind setting up shop here... with a few renovations to make the entrance a little less tawdry. On the other paw, the only reason I can think of to build something that looks like a tourist trap is as, well, a trap, to get people who wander by to lower their guard and wander in."

    Joe asked, "If something could build all that, what would they need to trap people for?"

    I shrugged. "Maybe it's trying to recreate the original adventure, and needs live bodies to turn into monsters? Personally, I'd rather not spend the rest of my days as an orc guarding a chest in a ten-by-ten-foot room. So how about we start finding out if that's a possibility, drive closer, and send a few bun-bots to walk around that tourist office while the light's still good?"

    --

    We drove up to the driveway, and I sent a trio of the robots shaped like me (not counting my Brenda-bulge) out to walk through the gate. With a bit of help from the gang, I'd worked out a precise set of instructions for them to follow. (Natural language computer programming was a lot easier than having to translate everything into absolutely precise terms; and it was a lot more acceptable to the local technophobes if I avoided calling it 'programming' and just called it 'telling them what to do'.)

    I wanted to watch everything going on in real-time, but with all the trees, the office was out of sight of the road. I checked the 'glider's fuel, dithered a bit, and decided to conserve it by waiting.

    After five minutes, the first bun-bot came back, indicating nothing had eaten any of them, and drawing a map of where she'd walked so far; so I sent her back to continue the exploration. At ten and fifteen, the other two returned as they were supposed to. And at twenty, the first one came back again - but this time, she also reported that the doors she'd been told to try to open were unlocked.

    After a quick huddle of the gang, we sent her to explore inside the building, as well as the second bun-bot when she returned, while leaving the third to continue checking the exterior.

    After a while of this, the bun-bots reported they'd walked through the entire building, so I sent one back to retrieve the third, and looked at the people around me. "So far, so good," I said. "If there are any zones in the area, they don't seem to be in that building."

    Sarah said, "Or if there is one, it can tell the difference between people and bun-bots."

    Bunny Joe added, "Or maybe it ignores rabbit people."

    "All of which are very good maybes," I acknowledged. "So, does anyone want to volunteer to look at the place?" After a few seconds, I rolled my eyes. "Or maybe we should just stick to rabbit people to start with?" I looked at Joe, who looked back calmly. I gave a quick sigh, then said, "Lemme go grab something more appropriate than a flight suit."

    Back in my private car, I patted my belly. "You can come out, now, get back to griffon shape again. Or, now that I think of it, whatever other shape you want to be - we're in private, so you don't have to pretend to be an animal if you don't want to."

    I didn't feel any motion of her sliding out of my pouch, or from my limbs. Through Boomer, she said, "You're walking into a place that might be dangerous. You don't have to worry about falling, but I can help you more like this than waiting for you in Munchkin."

    "Maybe," I agreed, "but there's a whole lot we don't know about how you work yet. If there is a zone that wants to turn me into a bugbear... you might just be used as raw biomass, and, well, die."

    "And if you trip and fall into a refuse pit, or a support beam breaks, or all sorts of other things happen, you'll die unless I'm there to help."

    I drummed my Brenda-gloved fingers on my work-desk as I thought. "By the obvious extension of that logic, I shouldn't ever take you off."

    "I could live with that."

    "I'm not sure I want to be permanently pseudo-pregnant."

    Her mass finally started to shift out of my pouch, my belly flattening again. "I can be a backpack," she said, rearranging herself to match her words. She added, "And I'm good enough at imitating how cloth flows to hide a lot of my mass under a dress. And if you're using your wheelchair, I can hide my extra mass in a bunch of ways. It'll be even easier if you ever become comfortable enough with me to let me keep some of my mass in your gastrointestinal tract, but I should be able to manage without that."

    I continued my argument, "There are times when I have to keep both AIs turned off, to keep them safe. If you still haven't worked out how to do vocal cords, you're going to be stuck mute for... indefinite periods of time. Maybe days. Maybe longer."

    "When we were jailed, you said that you spent days and weeks without saying a word to anyone. If you can, I can."

    "I also said that I have schizoid personality disorder, and I don't think you've got that. If anything, you seem to be developing dependent personality disorder, and I'm not sure I want to encourage that."

    "I don't have D.P.D., I'm a bimbo. I don't know what the psychological term is, I just want to support you and what you're trying to do. Nobody else around here is working as hard as you are on X-risks, so if you die, they won't get worked on as well. Doing everything I can to keep you alive is in my own long-term self-interest, even if it does increase short-term risk."

    "... How much of that did you crib from things I've said and written?"

    "Even if the words are yours, the sentiment is still mine."

    I drummed my fingers again. "If we're really going to try doing this long-term... you're still going to have to show up as a service griffon, at least until there's a plausible reason to reduce your number of appearances."

    "We can do that when you're safe."

    "I'd want you to work on having a voice... and as many other methods of communication as possible. Morse-code squeezes, fine-tuning your colouring changes so you can write on your surface, and so on."

    "I'll be happy to."

    "And for a few reasons, including both the off chance that there's a super-computer nearby that can infect them across an air-gap, and so you can get a better idea of what would be involved in not being able to speak for a reasonably prolonged period, I'm going to turn off Boomer before we go out. Give my left arm three squeezes and I'll get out of Dodge, and turn Boomer back on as soon as there's no risk to her, so you can speak."

    "You've got to come back inside for your injection in three and a half hours anyway. It took me longer than that to figure out how to talk to Alphie. I'll be fine."

    I sighed. "In that case - let's lose the flight-suit look, and go for something more appropriate for walking about, shall we?"

    --

    Brenda was entirely capable of imitating the shape and appearance of a backpack. What her goo-body couldn't manage, though, was to imitate the strength of one. When I tried loading up Brenda-pack with some real tools, from wedges to force doors open or closed to a first aid kit, she struggled to hold it all in... and then just collapsed, the whole set of gear tumbling down my back. A solution was easy enough - I just threw one of the existing backpacks into the fabber for a slight alteration, creating a few openings where it pressed against my back for Brenda to reach through. She assured me that all her 'thinky bits' were safe inside, and if she did get yanked off, the part of her forming my clothes would be just fine for at least an hour, and there was more than enough extra mass in the freezer for her to rebuild herself with.

    After checking that nobody else - not even the Observers - felt the need to accompany me, I grabbed my Explorer Special cane (which could telescope out to ten feet, and had screw-tips at both ends for hooks, spikes, and a few other gizmos sharing backpack space with Brenda), and trudged down the drive.

    The office's exterior looked like one of those faux log cabins that lounged at the entrance to campgrounds, to give RV owners the feeling that they were being 'rustic'. Hand-stenciled signs lurked under a patio's eaves, offering 'paint', 'chrony', and 'spell scrolls' for reasonable prices. A darkened, red-and-white pop machine offered various concoctions for ten dollars - or one 'silver piece' - per bottle.

    When I stepped onto the patio, the pop machine lit up.

    I backstepped quickly, looking around for anyone who might have snuck up behind me while I was distracted; but after a few moments of nothing else happening, let myself relax a tad. After a moment of thought, I took a few more steps back to look up at the office's roof, confirming that, as I thought I'd remembered, the solar panels were dusty, but not completely obscured.

    I unfolded my cane to its ten-foot length, and poked at the pop machine with it. It didn't do anything, even when I pushed the 'root beer' button. Since I didn't have any dollars or 'silver pieces' that looked like they'd fit in the slot, I shortened my cane to a more supportive length and cautiously passed it.

    After that, I was only modestly surprised that, when I opened the front door, the interior lights came on.

    Just inside the door, to my left, a rack carried skulls lined up like bowling balls. A sign proclaimed "Win big! Bring back a phylactery for fifty gold pieces!". Beyond them, another rack, this one of goggles, whose sign exclaimed "For the full experience!". To the right was a small counter and stool, perhaps for check-outs; further inside was a rack full of pamphlets for campgrounds and other local attractions, a couple of empty coolers, a stand-up video-game arcade, a door to some restrooms, and another door labelled 'office'. The main room bent in an 'L' around those rooms, and I saw the edges of some further shelves in the back part, and some weirdly-shaped vaguely gun-like things racked on the wall.

    All in all, it was extremely... ordinary. A bit faded. Tacky, even.

    Before I stepped inside, I gave my mental North a nudge, asking for my paranoid subself's advice, and it occurred to me to wonder about what I /wasn't/ seeing. No broken glass from years of storms; very little dirt or debris tracked about; only a few dust-bunnies. I looked at the glass doors - they might have been washed a year ago, or a decade, if the weather had been good, but the outside was nearly invisible from the inside, and vice versa. I looked around at the parking lot, and considered the lack of tire-tracks in the leaf-litter from previous autumns. I looked over at the castle itself, the giant cat's jaws frozen open in a permanent silent roar.

    I decided to try the obvious, and asked thin air, "Is anybody home?"

    Silence reigned.

    I grabbed my walkie-talkie from my belt, and sent back to Munchkin, "So far, so good. There's power, but no sign anyone's been here in years. I'm heading inside."

    I hung it up on my belt, and reached over my shoulder and into my pack. I thought aloud, "Did I pack those wedges on top?" Before I could call up my most recent memory palace, I felt the pack's contents shifting - and a pair of wedges slid into my hand. I cracked a smile to myself, and said "Better than Heward's Handy Haversack."

    While I was making sure the front doors wouldn't be able to close on me, the arcade machine bleeped. I froze.

    After nothing much happening for a few more moments, I stepped inside to take a closer look at it. Along the top, the marquee didn't list a particular game, just "Video Games!". The screen glowed, showing just a few lines of text, in a highly-pixellated, early nineteen-eighties font. "A new challenger appears! Would you like to play a game? One coin = one play."

    I was feeling just a tad creeped out, but shrugged, and said to Brenda, "I never really was one for quarter-sucking arcades. For one, quarters were hard to come by when I was young enough to be entranced by them. For another, I liked the more in-depth games that took longer to finish - Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, Ultima Four... and I may be the only person alive who's ever heard of the 'Codex of Ultimate Wisdom'. Great, now I'm depressed again."

    I looked around for something to distract me, and my eyes fell on the checkout desk, which I was now at an angle from which I could see had drawers. In moments, I'd learned they were unlocked, and full of assorted commercial detritus - push-pins, a stapler, dried-out rubber bands, wrapping paper, and a bit of loose change. I held up the two quarters I'd found, trying to cheer myself up with the numismatic novelty of coins minted after I'd died, but that bit of ironic amusement only lasted a moment.

    I looked at the arcade machine, then at the quarters. With a shrug, I went over, set one on the rim of the marquee, and deposited the other into the slot.
     
  • Threadmarks
    • 7.7
  • Threadmarks
    • *Chapter Seven: Mis-sion*

    My eyes were drifting closed, no matter how hard I fought to keep them open.

    Once they completely shut, and I heard the digital bloops meaning I'd lost a virtual life, I realized that it wasn't because I was tired, it was because Brenda had extended a few fingers of her substance through my fur to push them closed. /Then/ I realized she was squeezing my left arm, three times and a pause, another three times and another pause.

    Aloud, I murmured, "I'll just take a sec and get to a save point, and reached for the joystick.

    Brenda didn't let go of my eyelids.

    I sighed, and dropped my hands. "Or maybe I'll just head out."

    I felt her start to withdraw.

    I checked Scorpia, noting, with mild surprise, that I'd been playing for over three hours. I grabbed my walkie-talkie - I remembered getting check-in calls and just responding with "I'm fine," and the like - and announced, "I'm coming back in."

    Ignoring the sounds of three hours of mission goals and accomplishments being tossed into the bit bucket, I left the office.

    In Munchkin, while Bunny Joe fiddled in the kitchenette and the two Observers watched through their gas-masks, Sarah raised a furry eyebrow at me. "What did you find?"

    I rubbed the back of my neck. "Funny story. I found an old video game, and was feeling nostalgic, and, well, lost track of time."

    Sarah crossed her arms, and her tail thrashed. "If your mind is still that distractible, you need to talk with Amy or Abigail."

    I nodded, contritely. "That makes sense. Lemme go change, hit the autodoc for my meds, and then I'll see if the heliograph can reach them."

    As soon as the door to my private car closed, I felt Brenda sliding out of the backpack; she even unbuckled the straps and set it down on the floor for me. Before I'd made it two steps further, she'd shifted her entire appearance, going from 'practical outdoors explorer outfit' to 'long, flowing, ice-blue dress'.

    "If the harem ever finds out you can do that," I said to her, only half-joking, "I don't think they'd ever let you do anything else." She squeezed my arms, and I added, "Right - voice. Lemme turn on Boomer..."

    "Well," said Brenda through the AI, "that was kind of boring, really."

    "I know, I know," I admitted. "I should have been spending my time on more important things, not a silly game." I brushed my fingers over the handheld Simon game on my workbench. "I haven't even got the excuse that it was a psychologically healthy release of tension, or the like."

    "So you're not perfect," my dress told me. (Yet another of those experiences I'd never expected to have...) "If it only cost you a few hours to figure that out, you're ahead of the curve, and you can spend tomorrow doing real work instead of playing that game, right?" I didn't answer right away. "Right?" she repeated.

    "I was just starting to figure out some of the patterns," I said. "If I can't find out if they're right or not - it'll be kind of frustrating."

    "So?"

    I shrugged. "They say pattern recognition is an important cognitive skill. And gamification can be a good way to increase motivation to learn skills - even something as simple and old-fashioned as crossword puzzles can help teach trivia."

    "You have a castle in the shape of a giant lion out there, waiting to be explored, and you're seriously telling me you'd rather play astro globs?"

    "That's 'astro blobs', and that was just one of the minigames."

    "Bunny."

    I sighed. "This is part of why I turned off Boomer for the trip. A lot of what I do, you're going to think is boring. If you're not happy hanging around with me playing games for a few hours, you're going to be less happy when I spend the whole day doing nothing but reading complicated technical papers."

    "That's an interesting point that's worth talking about, but you're avoiding the question."

    "Which question?"

    "You've got the Free Company people watching your every move, you've got this whole place which your AIs don't know about, you've said that a new Singularity could happen any day... and you want to play a stupid /game/?"

    I rubbed the back of my neck. "Well, when you put it like /that/..."

    "Good. That's settled. Now - do you want me to shrink down off the shoulders, or leave some straps? How about adding some mass to increase your, I'll be frank, non-existent cleavage? I can't go higher than knee length for the hemline, unless you let me hide some mass inside you, but how about slits on the sides to show off your thighs?"

    "... Yep, the harem would just love you. Default answer: 'as conservative as possible'."

    "Spoilsport."

    --

    After my current morning routine (which, now that Wagger was mostly leaving my legs to me, once again included basic 'how to fall' training from a trainer-bun), and after cautiously agreeing to let Brenda demonstrate that she could comb every strand of my pelt into place and clean every square millimeter of my skin in just a few seconds, it was time to work out the day's plan, so I gathered everyone outside Munchkin next to a campfire, to drink hot beverages and gab.

    "First up," I said, "I'm going to try looking through the tourism office's, er, office, for any useful paperwork, like maps or control instructions."

    One of the Observers - who I'd yet to see eat or drink - asked, "You are not planning on resuming playing the game?"

    I shrugged, feeling embarrassed again. "Not only am I not planning on it, I'm using some of the tricks from my therapy to actively avoid it. For example, a lot of my motivation to play the thing seems to be tied up with my nostalgia for pre-Singularity entertainment, so I'm making plans to fulfill that desire with things that don't require such full focus on one thing, like merging today's task with my pleasant memories of an old game about exploring ruins. It's not perfect, but I think it'll get the job done. And even if I do succumb to the desire to play with the arcade cabinet, I think I can still pull off a nudge to play with it by disassembling it to look for shiny pieces inside."

    The Observers turned their masks to each other, and then the other one said, "We look forward to seeing if your therapy is successful."

    "Er - thanks. That said, I want to spend a few minutes brainstorming about portcullises with you. I could just use an extension ladder to get over the outer wall, but I want to be able to lift the things if I can't get to what's supposed to raise them. Maybe a medieval windlass - that's pretty much just a giant spool for heavy chains, with a long handle to turn it - maybe an electric motor, but the whole point of a castle is to block access to such things by interloping outsiders like us. And also remember, if feasible, I'd like to keep the place in good shape to protect us once we're on the inside, so 'blow it up', while simple and effective, shouldn't be Plan A..."

    Bunny Joe started off with, "I want to remember that what can keep people out can keep people in. Part of this castle's mystery is that it used to be a prison. We do not want to break open all the entrances until we are sure there is nothing on the inside waiting to be let out."

    --

    "Say, Brenda, I've been meaning to ask; can you see out of any part of you?"

    "Not exactly, but close enough."

    "... Right. Well, if I print up a card with Morse code on it, and put it in one of your pockets, could you read it?"

    "Pockets are dark."

    "Hm... how sensitive is your sense of touch? How about I fab up a card with letters, dots, and dashes embossed on it, for you to refer to?"

    "That could work."

    --

    As I fumbled with the office desk's locks, I muttered aloud, "This is what I get for having read up on /how/ to pick locks without ever having /practiced/ picking locks..."

    From the shop's main room, I heard Joe ask, "Have you tried any of these glasses yet?"

    I called back, "I already have one pair, and I doubt any of them have my prescription."

    "These glasses don't show you what there is to see - they show what is not there to see at all."

    "Hunh," I tried tapping the third tumbler into place, "So someone cracked the problem of decent augmented reality? I can see how that could turn a tourist trap into a decent playing site. As long as you can throw up some floors and walls, you can move most of your decorating costs to software. Not sure I'll want to live in an undecorated castle, though."

    "If the decorations are in these glasses, why not put some on?"

    "I risked my brain on the video game - I'll let you be the one to risk yours on those things. So, what do you see?"

    "Angry spirits hovering over the skulls. Those cupboards are full. There is a sign hovering over your head that says 'Name: Unknown. Swipe for more details.'"

    "So swipe."

    "I do not know..." She waved her hands in front of her face. "Oh, there it goes. Now a really big sign is in the way of everything, with lots of words and numbers. Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom-"

    "Dexterity, Constitution, and Charisma?" I guessed.

    "Indeed."

    "Anything about Comeliness?"

    "Not that I can see. Class, Unknown, Alignment, Unknown-"

    "How about Race?"

    "Again, not that I can see."

    "Hm... that sounds like it's based on either Basic D and D, or maybe even the original version, rather than A D and D or the later editions."

    "Are you gaining amusement from spouting words that I do not understand?"

    "A little, yeah. What sort of numbers are there?"

    "Strength, eight, intelligence, eighteen, wisdom, twelve, dexterity, eight, constitution, six, charisma, three..."

    "I'm not sure if I should be flattered or insulted. I never seriously thought my Int was higher than fifteen, and even that was pushing it... and a three for charisma? Really? Where's it getting these numbers from, anyway?"

    "It does not say."

    "And here I thought at least half the fun of LARPing was in pretending to be someone /else/, not just being yourself. ... Crap, I just lost the tumblers again. Okay, time to break out the crowbar. Guess that means I don't qualify as a thief. ... Okay, fold-out maps, rolled-up posters, pamphlets, patches - it's all just advertising stuff."

    "Your sign just changed. It now reads 'Alignment: Chaotic'."

    "... Hunh. Hm... Well, if we do come across records of who actually owns the place, I'll be happy enough to offer reparations for the damage I'm doing."

    "It just changed to 'Alignment: Lawful'."

    "And now I'm creeped out that something's watching us - and judging. You might not believe how many hours of discussion have gone into what the whole law-versus-chaos thing really means, especially when the good-versus-evil axis hasn't been split out of it."

    "Oh, look, even the skull spirits are looking bored from your pointless monologue."

    "Need I point out that my pointless monologue is the result of the therapy that you were part of the intervention to get me to take? I /could/ fill my nostalgia sub-self's needs by going back to that video game and wasting a few-"

    I was interrupted by my walkie-talkie, which emitted Sarah's voice. "Bunny, a high-priority message is coming in on the heliograph. I think it's from the squiddies - it's in code, all I can read is 'urgent' and 'time-sensitive'."

    "I'll be right in," I sent back, and started heading out. I glanced at Joe. "We might need to cut this short. Coming?"

    She was still poking at nothing in particular in mid-air. "Leave the radio."

    I raised an eyebrow, but was in a hurry, so just shoved it into her hand as I passed by.

    In Munchkin, I grabbed the coded message that had been received so far from a bun-bot's hands, and kept walking back to my room. "Sorry, Brenda," I said, "you're going to have to head out front while I translate this."

    "I can keep myself from looking."

    "Part of gaining a security clearance is accepting that there are things you're not cleared for. Shoo, go be a griffon for a while - it'll do you some good to be more than a bodysuit."

    She started sliding down my body, pooling at my feet before taking her more usual form. "I suppose I can go catch some squirrels or something to eat and practice on."

    "Like I told Joe, we may have to leave, so don't go too far."

    Once she was out of the room, and I locked the door, I set down the paper and started working through the code. It was a fairly simple one, in case I didn't have either of the AIs handy to decrypt it, so it only took a few minutes for me to read, "Metropolis being attacked by two flying machines. Descriptions match Warthog drones from pre-Singularity American military. Significant damage and casualties. Origin unobserved, speculated to be Technoville. All above-water assets considered at risk. Recommend your withdrawal from urban areas to underwater habitat prepared in anticipation of-"

    That was as far as it got; the rest was still flashing over the landscape.

    "Okay," I thought to myself, "worst case scenario, roughly, is Technoville has me up next on its target list, and has a good enough intelligence network to know roughly where we are. As far as I know, the only urban areas within a few dozen klicks have been converted into cooling towers, so there's nowhere to hide Munchkin... unless it fits into the castle. From what I saw on the maps, it /might/ be able to squeeze into the stables..."

    I grabbed a walkie-talkie and gave Joe a quick order, "Joe? Time's a factor - grab the maps of the castle from the office and bring them here, quick."

    I jotted down some quick figures. Each of the five cars was a standard cargo container, eight feet wide, twenty long, and eight and a half high; on top of a sled which matched the length and width, but raised the base of the containers twenty-two inches from the ground. I remembered the top of the castle was sixty-six feet above the mound, and I'd seen five stories in the maps, so... /maybe/.

    I left my private room to meet up with Joe, who was still wearing her new glasses, and spread the maps. "Okay - side-view. Those arrow-slits are listed as being ten feet above each other, so that's probably how tall each story is... how thick are the floors? Doesn't say. Okay, floorplans. First floor. Between the forelegs, into the chest... at that scale, those inner doors are, I can't tell, just under ten feet apart? How accurate is this map, anyway? Okay, straight down the middle, from the outer doors to the hall out of the stables, that's... sixty feet. And if those aren't load-bearing pillars, and are just separators for the stables, then where the lion's lungs would be, each of those two stables are... about ten feet wide, and just over twenty feet long. So, maybe, if the ceiling's not too short, if that hall's not too narrow, we /might/ be able to fit two of Munchkin's cars in the stables, and the other three in the middle."

    Joe and Sarah glanced at each other, then at me. Sarah was the one who asked, "Why would we want to?"

    "Metropolis is being bombed. There's a chance we're next, and as fast as Munchkin is on the straightaway, we can't outrun real aircraft. There's nowhere anywhere near here to hide, except, maybe, inside the castle that the Free Company thought had enough special about it to be a worthy test of something-or-other about us. Since I wasted so much time yesterday, we're going to do as fast a survey as we can, and if Munchkin /can/ fit, get those portcullises up and put her inside and pretend nobody's around here. ... When we do, I should give the heliograph relayers instructions to hide out themselves for a while, so they're not obvious targets, either."

    Sarah offered, "What if Munchkin does not fit?"

    "Not sure yet. We could try parking it right against the inside of the outer wall, and hope we're not seen... maybe I could fab up some camouflage netting to throw on top. We could start travelling full-tilt, either away from Technoville and hope we can make it out of the planes' operational range; or back towards Erie, grab everyone we know, take shelter underwater with the squiddies."

    Joe frowned. "You do not intend to fight back?"

    "Against aircraft whose owners are confident enough in them to attack Cleveland? I've barely managed to create crossbows and airguns, and I've got one hand-held finicky laser that needs to be tuned for every shot. I can't even make decent fireworks, let alone something that could take out an airplane before it dropped all sorts of unpleasantness on our heads."

    Sarah glanced at the Observers, then the Acadians, then back at me. "So you're just going to run and hide?"

    I shook my head. "No, /first/ I'm going to see if we can hide Munchkin, and if we can, do that. /Then/, if that works out, we'll have enough breathing room to work out what to do next. Best case, it's only Cleveland that's being attacked, and this is all just a drill. In fact, that's the most likely case. But the /consequences/ of the case if we /are/ a target are big enough that I'd like to get a few thousand tons of rock between me and any airplanes in the area, as fast as possible. Sarah, grab a ladder and go to the main gate, find out what it takes to open it. Senior Acadian, please go outside and call in my service griffon. Joe, you're going to use another ladder to hop the outer wall, and get to that entrance in the lion's chest, and see if the AIs can get a good enough view to see if this whole exercise is futile. I'm going to see if I can finish up those jacks I started fabbing overnight, or if we need to find some keys or controls for the whole place..."

    --

    As soon as I turned Boomer on, I discovered that all of that initial plotting was moot; her three-dimensional renderings proved that Munchkin was too tall to make it through the outer gatehouse. I called everyone back in for a confab.

    "Plan A is a bust," I sighed. "So - for the moment, /starting/ with the assumption that Technoville planes are on their way /right now/, what are our best options for Plan B?"

    Sarah asked, "Can Munchkin go over the wall?"

    I grimaced. "Almost. The specs say she can manage obstacles of up to twelve feet, the wall's ten above ground level - but there's that ditch around the wall, five feet deep. And the two spots where there's no ditch, there's a tower in the way."

    "How wide is the ditch?"

    Boomer answered, "For the majority of its length, roughly eight feet, narrower where the towers bulge out of the wall."

    "And how long are Munchkin's leg-feet things?"

    Boomer supplied, "Just under ten feet."

    Sarah suggested, "So, can't we just have Munchkin go straight up, and have the back cars help support the front one as it does whatever it does to move its front end over the ditch and up the wall?"

    "Maybe," I said, arms crossed, "but the cars aren't designed to support each other's weight like that; each one is pretty well independent of the others, just hooked up to share power, water, and with those accordion airlocks. There's pretty much no room for anything to go wrong, like the edge of the ditch collapsing... and all of the car's weight would be on the edge of the ditch. I'm fairly sure that if we tried that, whatever car went first would roll into the ditch."

    Joe said, "Then maybe we should sacrifice one car on purpose, send it into the ditch to be a step for the others to climb over."

    "... Hunh," I said. "That... just might work. These cars are based on cargo containers that are supposed to stack on each other, so they should be able to support the weight."

    Sarah asked, "How would we get the car out of the ditch?"

    I answered, "It's only five feet deep - and like I said, the Munchkin cars are supposed to be able to climb a dozen feet. We could get it out of the ditch, just not into the castle's courtyard."

    Sarah suggested, "Leave it in place? Cover it with some tarps?"

    I grimaced. "If we could do that for one car, we could do it for them all. If we're dealing with pre-Singularity military hardware, I'm expecting it to have infrared, maybe radar, as well as visible light. A few feet of stone could be enough to hide Munchkin's cars, which is why I'm suggesting the castle. We'd have to find somewhere else for the one car... maybe push it up against the office, maybe send it down the road or railway as a distraction? Anyway, it sounds like we have a Plan A-one - Joe, you're back on chest-gate survey duty, while the rest of us work on Plan B."

    --

    "I hope you have a good plan B," Joe sent over the walkie-talkie, "because Munchkin isn't going to fit."

    "Crap. Walls too narrow?"

    "No, Alphie says there's just enough room. It's the ceilings - the horse pegs them at just about nine feet, not ten."

    "Hrm. Okay, come on back in."

    "Well, Sarah - Plan A one is bust. Plan A two is based on the fact that Munchkin's cars were built based on a modular design - the cargo containers are mostly separate from the 'sleds'. Shouldn't take much work to separate them... and the containers are a standard eight and a half feet tall. So with some finagling, it just may be possible to get the sleds to push and pull the cars into the castle, instead of just walking in. Mind you, given that, then we might be able to leave the cargo container parked as, well, just an ordinary cargo container, and get the last sled over the wall and in with the rest of Munchkin."

    "That seems a little excessive. Is it really worth the time and effort?"

    "Boomer, why don't you read aloud those weapon stats you showed me?"

    Boomer complied. "The standard armament of the unmanned warthog is a seven-barrel Gatling gun, firing four thousand rounds per minute of depleted uranium and high explosive in a five-to-one mix, each round weighing roughly fourteen ounces, at three thousand five hundred feet per second."

    Sarah's ears flattened. "And what does that mean?"

    I suppressed a snort. "A single round could punch through all of Munchkin's carriages in a row and barely slow down. That gun can fire sixty rounds per /second/. If any of those drones take a disliking to us, we're all dead. Period. There won't be enough left of our bodies to make a jar of chunky salsa, let alone be cryopreserved. Hey, Joe, that was fast."

    Joe considered, "How much would the castle walls protect against that?"

    Boomer answered, "Each round can penetrate roughly three to four feet of mortared stone. Given the rounded shape of the structure, some portions of the walls are that thick. Most are not."

    I expanded, "I'm not expecting it to protect us - well, maybe if we hid out in the basement. I'm trying to come up with a way for us to not get shot at in the first place. Plan B is just run, but there's no way to know how far we'd have to go, plus we'd lose the helio link. Plan C is find somewhere else to hide, but there's nothing on the maps anywhere near here. Plan D is head back to Erie, which is an even bigger target than this place."

    Sarah asked, "Have Jeff and the others been warned?"

    "... Good question. Best not to assume. I'll send some 'grams. Anyway - Plan E, go underwater, which means the squiddies. Plan F, the university, risking whatever's going on in Indian Country. Plan G, just plain Indian Country. The H plans are trying to talk to whoever's controlling the drones, via one means or another. Plan I is to ask Technoville for help - we don't /know/ they're running the drones. Plan J is to hire the Free Company. The plans after that get rather less plausible. Which one was building a catapult to launch Brenda at one, to infiltrate their airbase?"

    Sarah ran her finger down the list. "W."

    "Right. Given all of those, then until such time as we can get more intelligence on what's going on, I'm judging that our best option is to deny these things as much intelligence about us as possible - to wit, our obvious visual, radar, and infrared profiles. Even if that does mean half-disassembling our vehicle and taking refuge in a haunted castle. ... And Joe, take those glasses off - they look silly, and they're a security threat."
     
  • Threadmarks
    • 7.8
  • Threadmarks
    • *Chapter Eight: Mis-sile*

    "Bunny," Sarah shifted nervously on all fours, "please explain what I'm looking at."

    "Munchkin's fabber is programmed not to let me build firearms. I've been looking for ways around that, off and on, but I've just realized that I simply haven't been thinking /large/ enough."

    "That's not an explanation yet."

    "There's no programmed prohibition on model rocketry. There is, however, a practical limit, in the usual place: fuel. So I'm taking up my old fuel from thin air experimental gear, and seeing if I've picked up enough new materials to make a go of it."

    "How likely is it you're going to blow up this car?"

    "Relax, I've got Boomer double-checking everything. ... Okay, I'm double-checking her. ... Okay, I'm a monkey with hands doing what she tells me to. But she's a university-trained chemist, so the odds of a mishap are low enough that I'm letting myself be the lab monkey."

    "... I think I'm going to go explore the castle some more."

    "Probably for the best; shed fur mixes poorly with fume hood filters. Here, take the tricorder with you, and look around for poisonous gasses or contact hallucinogens or other chemical trickery."

    --

    Lion Castle contained more furniture than I was expecting; even without the augmented-reality goggles, the interior looked like a working medieval-to-renaissance household. In fact, from the inside, you'd hardly know the place was lion-shaped at all, with a few exceptions.

    The ground floor had some barracks with bunkbeds, the stables (now flattened), smithy, and a kitchen; the next floor up, a dining room; third floor, bedrooms; fourth floor, wizard's lab; fifth floor, library; and in the basement (which was actually ground level for the outside, but was inside the mound the castle stood on) were more storage rooms, a crypt, and a well. Plus there were a lot of miscellaneous rooms that didn't seem to have a set purpose, or were used for storage, or were set up as servant's quarters. About the only things that reduced the place's verisimilitude were the weapons: swords and hammers and arrows and so forth were all softly-padded 'boffers' instead of the real thing. (Fortunately, the traps we'd been warned about were also of the boffer type: a couple of rubbery blades swinging when doors were opened, a foam rock dropping down at another.) Whoever had built the place had even gone to the trouble of filling the library with appropriate books - there were whole shelves filled with tomes on theories behind how magic worked, atlases of false geography, even a number in a variety of unrecognizable scripts and languages.

    With Munchkin plugging up the chest entrance, options to get in and out were limited. The tail-tunnel led to one of the towers on the outer wall, and had doors leading outside the whole castle. The second floor had a room behind the lion's open mouth, which, with our ladders, was the easiest to work with. And there were some trap-doors above the lion's shoulders and thighs, leading to the lion's back, which were more safety hazards than anything.

    I sent one bun-bot to the northwest tower on the outer wall, to relay heliograph messages back and forth from a second bun I placed in the lion's mouth, both with strict instructions to hide at almost any sign of danger. I spread the other buns to watch for danger - two in the lab to look out the eye-windows, the others to peer through arrow-slits.

    And there was absolutely no sign of anything dangerous, or even anomalous. After the initial survey, I chased down the two Free Company observers to demand, "Alright, we're preparing for actual hostile entities and actual combat, which has nothing to do with relations between your people and mine. What's the big deal with this place?"

    The only answer I'd gotten was, "The experiment remains viable. We will continue to observe."

    I'll admit I spent a few moments considering converting one of the basement rooms into a dungeon, and tossing both of them in, with or without peeling them out of their suits and gas-masks first; but I had more useful projects to focus my attention on. Like rockets.

    --

    The wizard's lab, while containing contraptions from an armillary sphere (whose central globe's continents bore only a passing resemblance to reality) to a pedal-powered centrifuge, and lots and lots of glassware, was even more decorative than Munchkin's originally had been. Which meant if I wanted to be prepared to take down any jet aircraft that took an unhealthy interest in us, I was pretty well limited to Munchkin's stores. In theory, if I had unlimited time, I could get the minifab to make enough machinery to make just about anything - in its own way, it was a lot like the 'factory seed' that Captain Alpha had offered, only requiring a lot more human labour.

    I was working on the assumption that 'unlimited time' was as unrealistic as trying to follow the spellbooks' instructions to fire a magic missile. And as for the fuel problem, well...

    "I am sorry, Bunny, but I am unable to find any sequence of steps that would produce your specified minimum amount of solid rocket fuel within the specified timeframe."

    "Not your fault - I should have known to start working on something like this long ago. Okay, if we can't build that, what other options are there? Nothing nuclear, and we need a thrust/weight ratio above one, and it has to work in at atmosphere, but lemme run my memory over GURPS Vehicles and Atomic Rockets and High Frontier and... ah, how about moving the power source off the rocket itself? We've got a laser - can we use Kahled-Voolch to vaporize propellant?"

    "My information on that topic indicates that such lasers require both a greater output and a more accurate firing platform than Kahled-Voolch's specifications describe."

    "Hrm. I remember the phrase 'metal oxide rocket', and I know we can make thermite if we try... does that compute?"

    "As I do not believe you are referring to a 'candy rocket' with metal oxide additives, I believe you are referring to the aluminum-liquid-oxygen rockets that were proposed to be refueled from lunar regolith. However, if you are expanding your search-space to include such concepts, then I feel that I should point out a form of engine you have not been considering."

    "Mental blind spots are always annoying. What've you got?"

    "Liquid-fuel rockets. While we do have the equipment to separate and liquify oxygen and hydrogen, a simpler approach may be to use the existing liquid fuel you have stored for your powered paragliders."

    "I'd slap my forehead, but I've already got a headache. Okay, with what we've got, how fast an engine can we make?"

    "That is a multi-variable problem of sufficient breadth that I am ill-equipped to explore the solution space."

    "Alright, narrow it down - how many different ways can we use our current mainly-ethanol blend to generate thrust? Specifically, enough thrust to catch up to a jet-engine drone flying at least a couple hundred klicks an hour?"

    "The prime possibilities appear to include ducted fans, turbofan jet engines, or liquid-fuel rockets. However, I should point out that what little data I have on such engines assumes the existence of fuels with a higher energy density than simple alcohols."

    "We can check the micro-fab's database for anything that fits. If not, then I can think of two other possible sources for design plans: Clara, even if she has to calculate a design from scratch; and that computer tower I pulled out of the robo-factory just before it collapsed and haven't gotten around to trying to boot up yet."

    --

    "Bunny, duck!"

    I dropped flat to the floor and rolled, looking around for the danger...

    Joe was cheerfully waving one of the boffer swords through thin air. She explained, "You were about to be killed by a giant beetle."

    "... Right. Could you take off the glasses for a minute?"

    "Almost got it!" She dove under the dining table, fake sword held out, spear-like, in front of it. "Twenty-five experience points!"

    "All done?"

    "For now," she panted as she stood back up.

    "Glasses?"

    "Oh, right." She took them off, hanging them on her shirt's collar. "What's going on?"

    "Since we haven't been strafed yet, I figure we probably have a bit of time. Since you've done actual hunting, I figure you're the closest we've got to a tracking expert - so I'd like you to see if you can do anything to clean up the drag-marks in front of the castle, from Munchkin's carriages."

    "That makes sense. Oh, and maybe there'll be different monsters to fight out there!"

    "... In case I have to remind you, if one of those drones finds us, your monster-fighting days will be over /right/ quick. Maybe you should leave the glasses behind until you're done."

    "Do I have to?"

    "Seriously?"

    "Fine, I'll get to work." She turned away.

    "Joe."

    "What?"

    "Glasses."

    "Oh, right." I held out my hand, and she reluctantly handed them over.

    As she wandered off in the direction of the mouth entrance, grumbling, I stared at the things, speculatively. They certainly /looked/ like fun, and I had a few minutes to spare before I might get my first response from Clara...

    Brenda started squeezing my hands, in fast Morse. "You've got work, too," she told me.

    I rolled my eyes, pocketed the glasses, and returned to the stairwell - just in time to be bowled over by the Acadian predators galloping down them, each of them with goggles or glasses of their own, chasing invisible prey.

    I commented to Brenda, "I know they used to say the golden age of science-fiction and fantasy is 'ten'... but does that really mean people have to start acting that age as soon as they get a new digital toy?"

    She pulsed a response, "Are you asking the woman who would be deliriously happy to be your dress for the rest of our lives?"

    I shrugged, and commented, "They say they've got four brains. I'd have thought that meant they had four chances to come up with something better to do."

    Brenda pulsed, "Maybe the glasses have something to tempt all four brains."

    "Eh," I shrugged again, "I suppose it's one way they can keep exercised while we're cooped up, and to learn the ins and outs of the place. As long as they don't find a way to pull a redshirt."

    Brenda hesitated before squeezing out, "I don't understand."

    "Old joke. But even if they go full lotus-eater fantasist, as long as Sarah, you, and I don't go any crazier than we already are, we should all be able to come out of this alright."

    --

    Clara's response was brief, to-the-point, and disappointing. "Due to a variety of anti-proliferation laws and regulations, I am unable to provide you with information allowing the construction of anti-aircraft surface-to-air missiles outside of a purely scholarly and theoretical context."

    "On to Plan B," I said to Brenda. "Part one of which is to stick that computer case in a somewhat larger Faraday cage, so I can tinker without risking any transmissions."

    She squeezed, "Should you be telling me?"

    "I'm letting the Observers observe - but I'm not giving them access to high security stuff. Which this is. In fact, I'm going to assume they're competent enough at their craft to have planted listening devices and other bugs I don't know how to find, and leave behind anything that might get a glimpse of what I'm going to be doing."

    "I get the hint. I'll find some squirrels to practice my new kind of first-aid on."

    In short order, I was down to my fur, ensconced in a metal-mesh cage the size of a closet, within which was the computer tower I'd grabbed hold of three years ago, in hopes of salvaging something out of a disintegrating resource. It was finally time to find out if it was anything more than a rather large doorstopper.

    I unscrewed panels, peered at components, traced cables, and generally looked for anything that might explode if power were to be supplied. (Or even if it weren't; that robo-factory had been a little odd, as I thought about it.) But everything still looked in one piece; there wasn't even any significant dust. So I closed everything up, except for the rackmount server's integrated keyboard and screen, plugged it into Munchkin's electrical grid, and started hitting power buttons.

    LEDs lit; a few components started whirring; and there, on the computer screen, in little white letters, read the words 'host login', with a cursor blinking next to them.

    "Very funny," I said aloud. "I read a few articles about this 'trust verification architecture', enough to know that if I try out a set of usernames and passwords that I have no chance of knowing, then you'll have all the evidence you need to deny me any access at all."

    The cursor just kept blinking.

    "I don't want to steal any industrial secrets," I said to the machine, "or reverse-engineer you, or hack you, or anything like that. I just want to avoid this whole place getting blown up in, oh, twenty-four hours or so, by making the best use of the resources I have available - and the best way I can do that is if I can use some of your software I've already used, your design studio."

    The login prompt disappeared. In its place, in blue-white letters, appeared the phrase, "Please provide catalogue number".

    "I don't have a catalogue number, or a catalogue. I have a standard micro-factory, enough power to run it, and an extremely limited inventory of feedstock for it. What I need is to move certain pieces of mass from the ground to certain coordinates in the air, as fast as possible."

    The latest words disappeared, replaced with a picture of a classic, red firework.

    "Don't have any gunpowder," I started saying, but before I could get any further, the image was replaced with a quadcopter. "Don't have any petroleum-based fuels," I continued. "We do have ethanol fuel - and atmosphere compression and liquefaction gear. And the particular airborne coordinates are likely to be moving at several hundred kilometers per hour."

    The image disappeared, the words 'no catalogue matches found' faded in and out, and then 'custom design studio'.

    I was having to restrain myself from jumping up and down. I hadn't actually expected the computer to respond when I talked to it; I'd just started getting in the habit of thinking out loud, now that Brenda was becoming a near-constant audience. The fact that whoever had programmed this thing had included the same sort of design studio that had been in the public-facing parts of the robo-factory was something I'd hoped for, but had expected to spend a lot of hours just trying to get access to.

    Of course, this /also/ meant that I couldn't ever let this computer ever be plugged in outside its Faraday cage - ever - or let anyone know it worked. Odds were that it contained more of the November-dated files that had made Munchkin possible in the first place, and that hinted at what had gone on during the Singularity. But in the meantime, I had an opportunity to try to survive long enough to try to find those November files.

    --

    I popped out of the Faraday cage to go hunt up Boomer, to ask her to check her internal Wikipedia-like database on anti-aircraft defenses. Since all I was asking for were general stats, she was more willing than Clara to share such numbers with me, and I jotted them down as something to try to aim for. So back I went to the rackmount with a notecard containing the general parameters of one of the most prominent man-portable air-defense systems of the year I'd died, the American "Stinger", to see if I could cobble together something that came even close to its choice of tradeoffs: twenty-two pounds, seventeen hundred miles an hour, range of forty-five hundred yards, five feet long and seventy millimeters in diameter.

    To my astonishment, I was able to come pretty darned close. Using a liquid-fueled rocket instead of solid fuel limited the acceleration to a gee and a half, instead of accelerating to top speed in just a couple of seconds; and I didn't have anything explosive to use as a warhead (unless a bit of incendiary thermite counted as 'explosive'); and getting the liquid oxygen part of the fuel would be a bit of a pain; and it needed about fifteen feet of smooth ground to takeoff from instead of being fired from a launcher... but it even had enough of a brain to use a digital camera to recognize a target and keep itself aimed at it. If I wanted, I could set the mini-fac to start making the things, and get about one for every seventy minutes it was kept fed with proper feedstock. (Which mostly meant 'refined metals', of which we currently had plenty aboard.)

    But before I started getting ready to transfer the data to the mini-fac, I paused, and thought, and wondered whether the specs I was looking at were really the best ones to solve my problem. For one thing, the design had a tank for about three litres of alcohol, which would be used up in under a minute, most of which would be taken up just by accelerating to speed. Locking in the target speed, nudging up the desired endurance mostly increased the tank size, at least to a point.

    And while increasing the range seemed helpful... would such a rocket be of any actual offensive use against a ground-attack aircraft? I tried looking at the situation from the point of view of whoever might be running such drones, and frowned. My initial design basically flew straight towards its programmed target, trying to crash into it - a relatively simple bit of programming. But a rocket that didn't dodge or jink was one that seemed like it'd be easy to shoot down, even if it was moving at over mach two at the time. I wondered about sending it commands to change course during flight, so looked up what it would take to allow the missiles to do that.

    The design software took care of all the fiddly little details, but one particular number resulting from that change caught my eye - the additional electronics would nearly triple the manufacturing time, to a hundred sixty and change minutes each. It got even worse if I tried to give it enough brains to do anything more complicated. But if it meant they were that much less likely to get shot down... I frowned, drumming my fingers.

    Even if such a rocket collided, it was basically just a rock. If it just happened to get sucked into an engine, or punched through armor and hit something vital, then fine; but there was no guarantee of any such success. I modified the design, opening a small cargo space just behind the nose -cone, and asked, "Is there anything which we have the resources to put in there, that would, ah, help prevent the aircraft from being reverse-engineered if captured by a competing industrial interest?"

    Whether the computer was taking my paraphrasing at face value or was smart enough to see right through it, a couple of entries appeared: one with lampblack carbon, another with powdered aluminum, some with a few other substances, all of which also contained liquid oxygen.

    "What would that do?"

    A CGI video appeared: the hypothetical missile blew up quite spectacularly.

    I smiled. "Very nice," I said.

    The video disappeared, and was replaced with the materials safety sheet for 'oxyliquits'. I started reading, and my smile disappeared. I read further, and I outright frowned.

    I eventually sighed, and muttered, "The whole point is to /keep/ from getting blown up - doing it to ourselves isn't really part of the plan."

    My fingers drummed again. "Let's put that to the side for a moment. Maybe I'm using the wrong design constraints... if LOX is energetic enough to do /that/, then maybe it's powerful enough to go at this from a whole other angle. A laser rocket puts the power plant outside the vehicle, saving weight - can we use LOX similarly, such as putting it in a confined cylinder so that when it is triggered, the pressure from the expansion could launch something like the nose cone, without having to send the rocket engine with it?"

    The new design appeared. It was, basically, a cannon, if not by that name. After some fiddling around, I tried turning it into a gun. "Can we change this so that additional, er, nose cones and propellant can be placed for launch more quickly? Instead of having to carefully slide it down the cylinder, how about creating an opening at the other end they can be pushed through, which gets closed up before ignition?"

    For the first time, I didn't get an immediate answer. Instead, a variety of images started flashing by, too quick for me to get more than a glance at; finally, a new set of words appeared, this time in red: "Design not feasible. Peak pressure exceeds available material strength." The image returned to the previous, muzzle-loading version.

    "Hrm." More finger-drumming. "I'm not sure whether or not you can be described as having any sort of goals, or agency, so I don't know if there's anything I could offer to do that would increase the likelihood of any such goals being fulfilled. I'm going to make a hesitant guess that you would prefer not to get blown up by a third party. And based on that guess, I'm going to make a stretch of a guess. You seem to be able to hone in on maximum solutions to certain problems... I'm going to try posing a slightly larger-scale problem than I've been posing to you so far, and ask you to come up with a /minimal/ solution, instead."

    I was trying to be careful with my phrasing, in case this fragment of the factory had anything like Clara's prohibitions. "I expect there to be several aircraft in local airspace in the near future. Can you come up with one or more minimal solutions to the problems of ensuring the safety of those aircraft? That is, to describe things that I should completely avoid building, let alone activating?"

    The LOX-gun faded out, replaced with the gently-pulsing words, "Processing request."

    I sat back, watched, idly petted Wagger, and waited.

    After a whole minute, the words faded out. The new text read, "Local minima found. First minimum displaying." I couldn't make out /what/ I was looking at a picture of, other than it was electronic, and complicated. Fortunately, explanatory text faded in. "Generates wide-band radio interference interfering with communications within 1-2 kilometres. Build time: ten hours."

    That looked interesting - but with the bun-bots, Clara, and even Pepsi Convoy, there was ample evidence that programming had advanced to a point that drones didn't need to be remote-controlled. I skimmed through the figures to how far it could be detected from, and decided that the jammer was just one big beacon pointing to itself. There /might/ be a use for it in the future, so I'd probably snag its design specs with all the others, but not at the moment. I swiped to the next design.

    It was... a contraption, composed of many parts. And had an order of magnitude more warnings than the jammer. "Warning: generates magnetic fields of 17.2 Tesla. Do not bring metal within 10 metres outside of listed protected containers and through designated pathways. Unprotected metal will be heated and cause burns." "Warning: Failure of cooling system will result in structural components melting, and components under stress will explode." "Warning: Ear protection must be worn at all times while in operation." "Warning: Projectiles travel at hypersonic velocity and may have unexpected ballistic properties. Please consult manual for how to survey safe zones."

    While the computer called it a 'quench gun' for some reason, what it looked like to me was a coilgun - a gizmo that used magnetic fields to accelerate projectiles, instead of gunpowder. At least, that was the central piece of the assemblage. It was mounted on a tripod, and there were compressed-air hoses to aim and trigger it, which required an air compressor. There were more hoses full of water, a pump to shove at least a pop-can's worth every second, and a heat exchanger and radiator. There were the boxes containing the projectiles themselves, three thousand in a box, which got used up in just over three minutes - and those three minutes used up the entire charge of a standard twenty-pound battery.

    It was Kahled-Voolch turned up to twelve. (And, I mused, since it didn't use chemical propellants, it seemed to not fall under the robo-factory's prohibition on manufacturing unlicensed firearms.) I rubbed the near-vanished scar on my chest; if I came anywhere near even /shouting distance/ of the thing when it was turned on, I was a dead rabbit. But as I looked at the ballistic profiles of those needles, starting with "muzzle velocity: 2,237 m/s", and the associated range figures, it was pretty clear that anything made out of atoms that came within a few kilometers - such as, say, an aircraft on a ground-attack run - then that would be a dead anything, too.

    When I saw the manufacturing times, I decided that as severe as all those problems were, I was going to try to solve them. A mere ten hours for the whole assembly in 'rapid production mode' (which I hadn't even known was a thing), plus another half-hour per box-and-battery.

    I took a look at the other "minima" the computer had produced, and they weren't all that interesting - nets held up by balloons, various things to lob in gentle arcs to try to get sucked into engines, false landing lights - so I focused my attention on the quenchgun. And since 'quenchgun' was an annoying mouthful, I decided, at least in my mind, to give it a name in the tradition of my laser Kahled-voolch and my mouse-gun Karn-wena, and call this thing: Ron.

    My next step: see what I'd have to do to kick the mini-fac into gear without generating enough heat to light up the whole castle in infrared. And then maybe figure out whether there was a better place than the lion's mouth to set it up. And whether I should spend some build-time on those LOX rockets, or try for /two/ Rons. (I decided to make an immediate sanity check on that, and discovered that the superconducting magnets required particular feedstock, of which I'd only ever gotten a small amount from the factory before it had collapsed. If I wanted more than one Ron, I'd either have to see if any more feedstock was still in the factory's ruins, or use the Free Company's factory-seed to make more.) Oh, and I should probably check to see if the Acadians' bone-brains or metal-brains were sensitive to magnetic fields, even if they weren't close enough for their "metal-brains" to be heated by the eddy currents that would be induced by Ron...
     
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    • Yay! New update!

    Who is she going to get to operate this thing?
     
    Oh... nice. A coilgun anti-air gun design to blow up the enemy fighters. That'll ruin their day for sure. I just wonder what the reloading time /Rate of Fire for this weapon is.
     
    DieKatzchen said:
    Yay! New update!

    Who is she going to get to operate this thing?
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    I /could/ answer that; I'm currently writing up Book Eight, Chapter Ten. (Which is a bit more of a buffer than I'm used to, so I'll probably be posting new chapters twice a week for a little while.) But I think it's best to keep it as a surprise. ;)
     
    Beyogi said:
    Oh... nice. A coilgun anti-air gun design to blow up the enemy fighters. That'll ruin their day for sure. I just wonder what the reloading time /Rate of Fire for this weapon is.
    Click to expand...
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    I ran some sanity checks by statting the thing out in GURPS' "Vehicles" system, which is generally good enough to come within 20% of real-world numbers, if not closer. Skipping most of the game-specific stats (Accuracy, Malfunction rate, etc), and running some completely superfluous calculations beyond what Vehicles considers (heat dissipation, magnetic field strength, muzzle velocity), the more interesting numbers I ended up with were:

    "Ron"
    Calibre: 3mm.
    Barrel Length: 120 cm
    "Half-Damage" Range: 3,150 yards
    Maximum Range: 11,400 yards
    Indirect Fire Range: 28,500 yards
    Rate of Fire: 960 rounds per minute
    Weight: 19.2 lbs
    Cost: 19.2 hours in Internet (half that in fast-production mode)

    Tripod: 16 lbs. Cost: 0.3 hours.

    Box magazine, 3,000 shots (187.5 seconds of maximum fire). 3.9 lbs. 0.027 cubic feet (47 cubic inches). Cost: 0.3 hours. Requires 24,375 kiloJoules.
    20 pound battery: 27,000 kiloJoules, 0.2 cubic feet, Cost 0.12 hours.
    Round type: Armor-Piercing Sabots. Individual round weight: 0.4 grams.
    Muzzle velocity: 2,237 metres/second

    Phase-change cooling, per magazine: 51 kilograms water. (Boils 272 grams per second.)
    Radiative cooling at 100 Celsius: 115 metres square of radiator area.
    Radiative cooling at 225 Celsius: 35 metres square of radiator area.

    Average damage per shot: 64 points. (For comparison, a typical sword does 1d6 damage, an M16A1 does an average of 18 damage, 10 points of damage is typically enough to kill a typical human, and 50 enough to pulverize the body.)

    Magnetic field within barrel: 17.26 Teslas
     
    DataPacRat said:
    "Ron"
    Calibre: 3mm.
    Barrel Length: 120 cm
    "Half-Damage" Range: 3,150 yards
    Maximum Range: 11,400 yards
    Indirect Fire Range: 28,500 yards
    Rate of Fire: 960 rounds per minute
    Weight: 19.2 lbs
    Cost: 19.2 hours in Internet (half that in fast-production mode)
    Click to expand...
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    Sheesh... that's one impressive gun. Now we can only hope the targetting system is up to it. Can this fire guided ammunititions or do something to reduce issues with wind and different air densities?

    What's the range in meters?
     
    Beyogi said:
    Sheesh... that's one impressive gun. Now we can only hope the targetting system is up to it. Can this fire guided ammunititions
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    At this tech-level, the minimum size round that can accept a Cannon-Launched Guided Projectile system is 20mm.

    or do something to reduce issues with wind and different air densities?
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    I suspect that a significant amount of the design work involved coming up with clever ways for such a light projectile to be able to travel the listed distances without losing too much speed.

    What's the range in meters?
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    At this level of accuracy, it's safe enough to treat one yard as being the same as one metre.
     
    DataPacRat said:
    At this level of accuracy, it's safe enough to treat one yard as being the same as one metre.
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    Um... that's problematic. A proper bomber will fly too high to be hit. If the drones fly lower that won't be a problem, but they'll have to get very close for you to even have a chance to hit them. If they fire some sort of stealthed rocket or guided bomb of sorts the system may unable to do something against them.
     
    Beyogi said:
    Um... that's problematic. A proper bomber will fly too high to be hit. If the drones fly lower that won't be a problem, but they'll have to get very close for you to even have a chance to hit them. If they fire some sort of stealthed rocket or guided bomb of sorts the system may unable to do something against them.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    From in the story: "Metropolis being attacked by two flying machines. Descriptions match Warthog drones from pre-Singularity American military." From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Republic_A-10_Thunderbolt_II#Weapons : "The GAU-8 is optimized for a slant range of 4,000 feet (1,220 m) with the A-10 in a 30 degree dive." From the story: "Each round can penetrate roughly three to four feet of mortared stone."

    In short, even just the cannon opening fire means that Bunny's life, for the short time it would last, would become "problematic". But limited to what Internet can produce with the materials she's scrounged so far, she can only create weapons with so much effectiveness. The fact that she could create Ron at all is eyebrow-raising; that it's at least vaguely possible it might be able to do something about the threat in question - unmanned versions of one of the top close air support designs today - is a minor technological miracle.
     
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    • *Chapter Nine: Mis-chief*

    Can you still call a meeting a "meeting" if only one person shows up, and nobody actually meets with anyone else?

    I spread the word to everyone that I wanted to talk with them all in the morning, with the walkie-talkies and written notes and asking Blue Wolf to hunt down any stragglers. I /spent/ the night staying awake, watching over the mini-fac to make sure that it was making things that at least looked like the parts I wanted, and the factory computer hadn't slipped in some blueprints for, say, killer robots. I couldn't test every aspect of every part to make sure it met its specs, but I checked what I could.

    And so, as nine A.M. rolled around, I was a little short on sleep, a middling amount of glad that the Royal Canadian Pharmacy had found a source of caffeine, and a lot happy that Brenda had started learning how to perform a full-body massage.

    When, at nine on the dot, the only sounds of life in Munchkin were my own slurping of hot flavoured caffeine water, I double-checked that the notes listed the right time.

    At nine-oh-three, I made sure my walkie-talkie was turned on, and sent, "Radio Check." The bun-bots responded; nobody else did.

    At nine-oh-five, I started checking if there was anything unusual about the air just outside Munchkin, or if it was safe to go outside without the hazmat suit's contained air supply. Everything looked clean, even when I ran the tricorder on it.

    "If there was a zombie apocalypse overnight, I'm going to be very disappointed," I told Brenda.

    Through Boomer (tucked in my pouch), she answered, "What's a zombie?" I must have changed my body language or something else she could feel, as after a moment, she added, "What? I'm an accountant turned griffon turned bimbo turned bodysuit. That doesn't give me a lot of life experience with different sorts of apocalypses."

    "Then I probably shouldn't influence your thinking with suggestions that probably aren't true. Okay, I'm going to check the records from Munchkin's external cameras, see if anybody came through the one hall we can see from here. While I do that, think you can work the radio, and ask the bun-bots if they saw anyone overnight?"

    My blouse extruded a tentacle, which gripped the walkie-talkie and pulled it close to my stomach. "I can try."

    In short order, we pieced together the results of our respective inquiries: nada. Once the sun went down, and British-style lights-out was in effect, nobody but me was aboard Munchkin at all, and the whole gang were supposed to be stretched out in one or another bedroom. (Munchkin provided every sort of modern amenity save for personal space and sufficiently-powerful air fresheners.)

    "Well, they didn't go out the mouth, or the relay bun-bot would have seen. And they didn't go out the tail-tunnel - Munchkin's cameras can see the near side of that. I don't think they had any tools that could break open the outer walls. So either they went out the roof hatches, and are wandering around on the lion's back or came up with an exceedingly clever way to get down from there, or they're still in the castle. Or some combination - we shouldn't just /assume/ they've all gone to the same place."

    Brenda suggested, "Seems a good assumption to me."

    "It's possibly true. Maybe even probably true. Doesn't mean it's necessarily true. Speculating with certainty beyond what the available data supports is a good way to waste time and energy on incorrect guesses."

    "You seem remarkably calm about everyone just going away."

    "Artificial heart. And I'm guessing whatever's going on, those Observer guys knew about in advance, and know how to keep from getting caught up in; which means there /is/ a way to keep from getting caught up in it. Mind you, if their willful silence means Sarah and everyone else are simply dead, I am going to be extremely annoyed with them and may do something that is not in my long-term best interests. But I'd rather work on the assumption that the gang is just... tied up somewhere."

    "Are we going to go looking for them?"

    "Soon enough. Before we do, I want to think for a few seconds, so we can at least try to be prepared for the more likely possibilities. Maybe this place has a way of making those illusionary monsters real, and everyone outside Munchkin got kidnapped and tied up. In which case I'll want to dig up my armor, Karn-wena, maybe even Kahled-Voolch."

    Brenda offered, "Maybe they got sick or poisoned by something that didn't come near Munchkin, and just can't get up."

    "Which means we'll want a few first-aid basics."

    "More than me?"

    "Can you divide yourself and keep the other pieces intact for more than an hour?"

    "I'll have you know that I was able to fully disassemble a squirrel and replace each one of its organs' functions myself. Well, except for its skeleton - I'm still made of goo. And its brain. But the rest of it was made of me."

    "Oh-kay... good to know you can do that, at least. Uh - my previous question still applies to that squirrel."

    "I didn't try for duration. I only have so much of me to go around, so I absorbed my mass back into myself and ate the rest of the squirrel."

    "Let's, uh, try to avoid the necessity of forcing you to be anyone else's life-support system. Which reminds me, I should probably grab that Captain America shield, and set it and the armour to a good camouflage surface pattern. Which do you think would be better, 'gray urban' or 'night black'?"

    "Can't beat basic black. What are you packing now? I have to share that space in your pack if you don't want a big belly, or something even more awkward."

    "Relax, it's just a few essentials. Caltrops, fishing line, chalk, signal whistle..."

    "Fine, fine. Are we going to search the castle top to bottom or bottom to top?"

    "Neither - I'm going to start at the bedrooms on the third floor, where everyone was /supposed/ to be."

    --

    The castle had four staircases, roughly corresponding to the lion's legs. You'd think that would make for easy transit corridors, but there were a couple reasons not so. First, for some reason, the only floors where /every/ stairwell had an exit were the basement and first floor. (Maybe something to do with confusing an invading enemy.) And second, on the first floor, Munchkin was plugging up the forelegs' stairwells, so that on that floor, those two stairwells only opened into the bunkrooms in the forelegs. All of which meant that I had to take the paper maps of the place with me, just to be sure I was able to navigate from wherever I was to wherever I wanted to be.

    Or, of course, I could just ask Boomer, but since that involved talking, I brought the maps anyway.

    And I locked all of Munchkin up tight. Every person I knew of outside of my personal space, and within a dozen miles, had just vanished - I was more than willing to let my North-ish paranoid tendencies have free reign.

    "Okay, ground floor to third floor... left hind-leg. Let's keep as quiet as we can, in case something unpleasant is listening. Got your Morse Code card?"

    Brenda squeezed her assent, and I rolled my shoulders, held my left arm to my chest so I was looking over the shield, and kept my Ninja Special cane in my right hand.

    The arrow slits provided enough light in the stairwell to see, and the old Green Lantern ring served well enough as a flashlight.

    I kept my ears raised, twitching them around to try to catch any hint of any sound.

    Opening the door to the third floor hallway, I peered around the corner to see... stone walls, stone floor, wooden trusses supporting a stone ceiling, and wooden doors. Except in one doorway, once labelled 'Baker', which was filled less by a 'door' and more by 'smashed splinters'.

    Cautiously looking inside, there was... a simple wooden bed. And one of Munchkin's cots.

    I quickly opened the other doors - sidestepping the boffer traps - and saw various arrangements for sleep, from the luxurious canopied bed in "Sargon's bedchamber" to some piles of loose cloth that I guessed the Acadians had assembled for themselves.

    But Brenda and I were still alone.

    "Okay," I murmured, "/now/ we look top to bottom. We'll start with the roof hatches." I checked my map, shrugged, and went back to the stairway I'd just been in. But before going any higher, I warned Brenda, swung my pack over one shoulder, and pulled out one of the items I'd packed: a bag of flour. I liberally shook some out over the landing and the first few stairs.

    Brenda squeezed a simple, "Why?"

    I finger-spelled my response on our thigh. "In case someone else is moving around."

    Since describing every detail of checking my map, going from stairwell to stairwell, looking around for anything of at least the rough size or mass of a body, and sprinkling my ad-hoc footprint-detector would be boring to one and all, I'll just note that I did all of that, without seeing anything in the whole castle that shed any light on where anyone else was.

    By the time I'd finished the hatches, and had gone from the top-level library to the eye-level lab, I had to pause, drink some water, and nosh on some jerky. While I rested, I finger-spelled, "You know where all your spare mass is, right?"

    Brenda squeezed back, "Of course. Do you need all of me for something?"

    "No, just wondering if any had a mind of its own and escaped. You can squeeze out those arrow slits. You can also dissolve flesh and bone. You were with me all night, but something like you could have eaten everyone."

    "The rest of me is frozen solid. I've never heard of any other goo creatures like me. Be surprised if any are here."

    "Me, too. But I'm running low on ideas."

    After going through everything above, I was examining the wine cellar at the back of the basement level. Recalling my cliches, I poked around at any of the racks, in case one of them happened to conceal a secret door. I wasn't holding out much hope for that, since we were just inside the mound the lion-shaped part of the castle rested on.

    I slid a hand under my armour, into my pouch, and fished out Boomer. Turning her on, I asked, "Could you show me a three-D model of the place? Thanks - focus in on the mound, so I can see the interior walls compared to the exterior? Hm... is there any room for a secret passage in there?"

    Boomer responded, "According to my calculations, only if materials stronger than mortared stone are being used to support the weight of the edifice."

    "Hm... okay, let's assume that, for a moment - that what we see is just the surface, and beneath the surface could be super-materials or open spaces. What might be behind the surface? That is - /where/ is there enough room behind the surface to hide that many people?"

    Boomer's map went through several convolutions and rotations, and I frowned at it. The walls around the lab were thick enough to be interesting, due to the mane. The angle of the lower back meant there was some spare room there. I traced my finger to the tail-tunnel, which intersected with the outer wall; other than the towers, the rest of the wall appeared to be solid rock, but if it weren't, that was a good deal of volume to hide almost anything...

    Brenda squeezed for attention, then asked, "What's that?"

    "Hm?"

    She squeezed my fingers, and I quickly figured out she was directing me to move them on Boomer's display. I let her direct me directing Boomer, rotating the display to a profile of the whole castle. She nudged me to point my finger at a few lines sticking out of the bottom, and squeezed, "What's that?"

    "The well," I told her. Then I tilted my head, and asked Boomer, "How deep is it?"

    "Insufficient data. The water table is ten feet below this story's floor level. I do not have many frames of video available to extract further data."

    "Hm." I was about to say that it was big enough for a person, or a body, to go down, but my paranoid sub-self started wondering what sort of cameras and microphones might be hidden in the walls. So instead, I said, "Maybe I can come up with some sort of ground-penetrating radar, or seismograph to look for vibrations, or something else that can see through the walls," checked my map, and went up to Munchkin (careful to fill my footprints with fresh flour).

    Once the airlock doors were sealed behind me, I stretched, said, "I need to get this pack and armour off, how about we split up for a minute?"

    As Brenda formed up into her see-through-blue, hollow griffon shape, I just collapsed onto a couch. She left the room, and soon came back with Alphie on her chest. "So what about that radar thing?"

    "One, I've been going up and down - and /up/ and /down/ - stairs for a while. Two, I'm not planning on making any such thing... I don't even know if we can. Three, I need to brainstorm a bit: how can we get a good look down that well without effectively committing suicide? And four, just whose idea was it to let people sleep outside Munchkin in a castle of unknown weird dangers, anyway?"

    "I think Joe said she would, first."

    "Well, why didn't I stop them?"

    "Because you're an awful person who doesn't trust her friends to be able to take care of themselves while you work on your part of things. Oh, and you hate them and are going to do nothing to try to help them."

    I quirked an eyebrow. "I think your sarcasm needs some work."

    "I'm a blob of goo. You're lucky I have enough brains to offer /any/ emotional support, and you're expecting /quality/ assistance? Picky, picky, picky..."

    "/Much/ better. Okay, maybe I can take the camera design from the missile guidance package, and run its output through a cable instead of a radio, and we can just go fishing..."

    --

    "Say, while I'm getting this built, think should I set some bun-bots to setting up Ron? Hm, mind you, I'm not sure the lion's mouth is the right place for it - the portcullis behind the mouth and the one on the chest entrance are within the ten-metre metal exclusion zone, and the molten lead dispenser in the nose, so I'd need to see if that zone is more of a "heat metal to an uncomfortable number of degrees" sort of thing, which we could handle, or a "suck in random pieces of metal at dozens of miles an hour" thing that would break Ron before it could fire at all..."

    "Focus, Bunny."

    --

    Re-armoured, re-armed, and re-Brendaed, I took the shortest available route from Munchkin to the well room. (Right hindleg staircase up to the second level, walk through the dining room, then down the left foreleg stairs to the basement. I muttered something about knocking some holes in walls using words that were rather uncomplimentary to the castle's original designer and shouldn't be used in polite company.)

    The well was a cliche. Raised stone rim, a pair of posts supporting a third, around which was wrapped a rope with a bucket. I winced as I considered just how much effort would need to be applied to use that level of technology to supply water to the whole castle, and muttered something about modern plumbing. I spent a few moments looking at the maps, wondering if the supports for the fourth level would be strong enough to turn one of the small rooms there into a water tank large enough to pressurize some plumbing, and about drilling some holes for graywater outflow pipes, perhaps down the tail-tunnel to empty into the dry moat. As I was wondering where the castle's designers had expected people without a self-contained life-support system of their own to empty their chamberpots, and what sort of blackwater system might be worth trying out, I was distracted by Brenda squeezing for attention.

    I sighed. "Yeah, yeah, no reason to delay," and focused on the present.

    The contraption was simple: the camera, in a waterproof container with a couple of lights and batteries; a few rolls of the mini-fac's default ultra-tech twine, about a hundred metres each; a couple of similar rolls of data-cable; an X-shaped piece of plastic to lay over the well; and Alphie.

    I set everything up, so that I had a marionette-like apparatus to turn the camera, and so that even if I dropped everything Alphie wouldn't get pulled down.

    And then I stared at the maps some more.

    After a minute or so, Brenda pulsed, "What's wrong?"

    I finger-spelled, "I don't want to see what I think I'm going to see." Right up to then, I'd been able to treat the whole thing like an abstract project: a bit of exploration, a bit of gadgetry, all in a good cause. But now I was pushing up against the fact that, as far as we had the information for, over half-a-dozen people were at the bottom of a well filled with water, which implied nothing good. After Buffalo, after Judith... after the Singularity that had wiped out anyone I'd known... a very large portion of me just didn't want to see people I'd known personally turned into sunken corpses. And the parts of me that had pushed me to look for /anyone/ in Buffalo, to keep working the second Singularity problem, to just keep on keeping on, were getting... tired. I had to take a few minutes to try to gather my willpower.

    After another minute, Brenda squeezed out, "Close your eyes. I'll watch Alph-"

    I interrupted, shaking my head. Aloud, I said, "They deserve better," and began lowering. "I'll start with the camera pointing down. Alphie, let me know if it gets close to any side, and if you see... anything other than wall."

    I fed line, and more line, the well turning out to be surprisingly deep. After around thirty metres, Alphie finally reported, "There is something below the camera. There is too much floating silt to see clearly. Interpolating as descent continues. I see the bottom of the well. It appears to be gravel, with a number of coins resting on top."

    I took in a deep breath, and let it out. I was still confused, but at least I didn't have to-

    Alphie said, "I have lost the signal."

    I took roughly six-tenths of a second to think about that.

    Then I unplugged Alphie, stood, and ran out of the well-room as fast as my legs would take me - through the stairwell, slamming the door behind me, through the doorway to the rest of the crypt area, into the /other/ stairwell, and pounding up /those/ stairs. Up, and up, not hesitating to try to listen or look behind me, all the way to the top of that stairwell where a bun-bot was patiently peering through an arrow-slit to the north, and up even further, through the hatch and out onto the mane.

    And /then/ I let myself pause to gasp for breath, as I tried to keep all four stairways' hatches in sight, though mostly concentrating on the one I'd just come up and the one above the well. I debated moving down the lion's spine, down the angle of its back to ground-level, trusting in Bun-Bun to keep me from breaking any bones if I slipped... but that would just let me get out of the castle, and maybe to the road. And then what? Munchkin was half-disassembled in the castle, and I hadn't even thought to stick a bug-out bag in the empty car snugged up against the tourist office, let alone something to signal the heliograph line with.

    As I caught my breath, wondering if it was too late to bother grabbing my heart-rate controller from my pack to speed up my bloodflow, I asked aloud, "See anything?"

    Brenda squeezed a quick negative, and Alphie answered, "Nothing beyond what I have already described. I can show you a three-dimensional model of the well, if you wish."

    "Maybe later." I breathed for a few more minutes, fingering Karn-wena, debating swapping out the magazine of tranquilizer-filled needles for lethal ones, then looked around at the outer wall. "It may not be possible to climb the lion's back, but maybe I can slide down it... and if I could, maybe someone else made it out... no, the bun-bots on watch would have seen that. But there's ten towers on the outer wall with doors, plus the gatehouse and the tail-tip tower - somewhere to meet up if something goes wrong? Let's say, the tower to the right of the lion's head."

    After saying that, I finger-spelled on my thigh for Brenda, "Left of head." She squeezed once in acknowledgement.

    "Okay," I said, a verbal stall. "I'm assuming something started coming up the well. Probably something that smashed the one door. Maybe alive, maybe robot, maybe weird. Maybe it cleans the place - keeps birds from flying through the arrow slits and nesting. Maybe more than one something. I think the safest place to be right now is inside Munchkin. The something-or-somethings could be anywhere in the castle by now. If I remember right, all the portcullises are down, and we brought the jacks inside, so it's hard-to-impossible to get in from ground level."

    Brenda started squeezing, so I finger-spelled, "You could, yes."

    Out loud, I continued, "I want to get from up here down to ground level without crossing paths with the somethings first. I can't really see the flour I spread from very far... and maybe the somethings walk on walls, anyway, or are quadcopters, or something. I left the remote camera at the bottom of the well. ... I've still got my radio, and the sentry-buns have theirs. I can give them orders to move to the same staircase, and report if they see anything, or if the flour's been disturbed... should I bring them all into Munchkin with me?"

    I looked around, from the distant horizon to the trees filling the landscape all the way to the clearing around the castle's site. I wrapped my arms around myself as the breeze picked up for a few moments.

    "Nnnno," I finally hedged, "there's still those drones to watch for. Assuming there's no problems making it to Munchkin, I'll just have to order them to send a signal the instant they see something, inside or out."

    I sighed, looking around again. "I do like the view here. Shame. Would be such a nice place, if it weren't for the flying killer robots in the distance and the mysterious kidnapping who-knows-whats inside."

    Hesitantly, getting ready to jump back and run pell-mell if something popped out, I crouched down and pulled up the trap-door... and sighed again, as all I saw was my body-double robot, in her urban-camo fatigues.

    "Which bun-bot are you?"

    "Bun-bot seven, currently assigned as Sentry-Bun North, ma'am," she answered without turning, in what I knew to be my own voice even if it didn't sound to me like it.

    "New assignment. Pass-code 'incorrect horse'. Activate your body-guard program. Two suspected threats. One is armed drones flying from the outside, likely from the west. The other is unknown and suspected to be within this structure. The designated safe zone is inside Munchkin. I think I want you and several other bun-bots to secure a path from here to Munchkin, escort me there, and then resume sentry duty. Does your program offer better advice?"

    "If a threat exists, then I advise at least two bodyguards remain on close personal protection detail at all times. I also advise bun-bots remain in pairs, to the extent that is possible. I also advise activating Munchkin's riot mode. I also advise that you dress and act as a bun-bot and a bun-bot dresses as you. I also advise that extraction from this site be performed as soon as possible. I also advise-"

    I cleared my throat. "Let's get me to Munchkin and then work on the rest. Do you have maps of this place?"

    "Yes, ma'am."

    "Should I radio the other bun-bots to give them commands, or should you?"

    She held up her walkie-talkie, clicked it, and said, "Radio check."

    "Bun-bot one, standing by."

    "Bun-bot two, standing by."

    There was a pause, then "Bun-bot four, standing by."

    I might have squeaked - there was supposed to have been a 'bun-bot three' in there.

    At the end of the sequence, I'd learned that the relay-bun off on the outer wall was fine, as was the one in the lion's mouth. (The portcullis protecting that entrance was at the back of the 'mouth', while the bun-bot was at the front; perhaps being essentially locked away from the rest of the castle had kept it safe.) The four bun-bots at the tops of the stairwells reported in.

    And none of the others did, such as the ones that had been watching out the eye-windows.

    As soon as the last bun-bot failed to report during its designated second, Bun-Bot Seven radioed, "All sentry-bots move to the roof."

    I turned around, watching the other three hatches open, and three more bunnies climb up. Seven herself climbed up behind me, and called out... well, I'm not sure exactly what the words were - I don't think they were in any natural human language, which was part of the 'bodyguard' software. In seconds, the other three had ran over, surrounding me with four copies of myself. The buns to either side of me grasped my upper arms and lifted - and the whole set started running from the mane down the back, to the right hindleg trapdoor. They hurried down the stairs faster than I expect I could have fallen down them, burst out the ground-level door, and as soon as I thought Munchkin could hear me I started calling out the current verbal passcode to open the airlock.

    In scant seconds, all of us were piled into Munchkin, which was sealed up, electrified, and generally given instructions to act as paranoid as I felt.

    "Oh-/kay/," I said, as the bodyguard-bots broke out the crossbows and distributed them among themselves, "I think what we have here is a failure of intelligence. I'm going to see how fast I can manufacture some motion detectors, tripwires, and whatever else I can think of. Bun Seven, I don't want to lose the Relay-Bun in the mouth room, or the one in the outside tower. They're our only link to Clara - we can't call for rescue that'll arrive any time soon, but we can ask for ideas. They'll have to serve as our Sentry-Buns for the moment. You're the one with the bodyguard software - should one or more of you go join them, or stay as a group?"

    "Tactical flexibility is maximized by close cooperation."

    "... I think that means stick together. Everybody, take a full recharge, just in case. ... I probably should, too. Don't want to drop dead because a mysterious kidnapper doesn't know my diet includes electricity, these days..."
     
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    • Oh wow. Shit got real. I hope everyone is okay and just in the "time out" box for getting killed by the boss mob.
     
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