Ledman Pickup

Twenty One

  When Leonora woke up in the morning, everything seemed strange. It took her a few moments to even remember where she was, and how she got there. It had been so late at night, and she had been so tired, that she hadn't had a good look at the place and now that she did, she felt a little sad. She could hear that Sarah and Saya were in the kitchen, talking quietly, probably so as not to disturb her. She could hear the sound of their voices but could not make out the words. It didn't matter. The two were a family in their own little home. Everything about the living room also said 'home', from the child-made drawings displayed proudly on the walls, to the collection of pony paraphernalia strewn about the place. The photos on top of the small, old TV were all of Saya at various ages with no trace of any parents.

  Saya's talk of her missing father had stirred up a bunch of emotions that Leonora did not want to deal with, from thoughts of her long-lost mother to memories of her father, whom she hadn't visited in months and felt guilty about. It occurred to her that with her new brain, as she referred to it, she might be able to track her mother down somehow. Facts like those seemed to be coming unbidden to her mind but in this case there was nothing. She squeezed her eyes shut together and wished, but no data at all arrived. This too was odd. Over the past two days she had felt a constant stream of something flowing through her and now there was radio silence on that frequency.

  She knew the polite thing to do would be to go into the kitchen and thank Sarah and Saya for their hospitality, but she was afraid they would offer her something they clearly could not afford to. Taking a deep breath, she got up from the couch as silently as she could, tip-toed to the front door, slowly opened it with a sense of relief when it didn't squeak, and then hurried outside and up the street. She recalled that the house was not far from the river, the river she had apparently come to see for no apparent reason. She walked towards it, seeing the map clearly in her mind. For a large river, it was a disappointment, just a bunch of water as far as she could tell. Why she had expected it to be more, she couldn't say.

  There was a bench beside a jogging path so she sat down and stared across at the other bank. She usually enjoyed this kind of thing. She would sit back, smoke a jay, enjoy the sunshine and the wide open space, but now there was a subtle difference. She wasn't quite the same person anymore. Where before she had no qualms, no doubts, no goals, no obstacles, where she had been free and easy and almost always happy, almost always laughing, now she felt incomplete, that she couldn't rest without a plan. A plan. She almost laughed now at the thought. When had she ever wanted or needed a plan? What was the point of that? You go on, you do your thing, que sera sera and all of that.

  'First things first', she thought. 'A plan, beginning with the end in mind. What are we trying to accomplish here? If you don't know where you're going, you'll probably wind up somewhere else. Expected results, and then define the steps, and then you take it one thing at a time, with first things first.'

  It seemed pretty obvious. This is how one should proceed with any endeavor. But she had no end in mind. She wasn't trying to accomplish anything. What was it that Saya had asked her? What do you want to do with your life? And she had no answer to that one. What was it that had brought her here? She thought she had had a plan. Something about Green Bay, and then Grand Island in between. One step at a time, wasn't that it? So how do we get to Green Bay from here? And why are we going to Green Bay? And who is "we" and why am I thinking this way?

  Green Bay was gone. It wasn't even a notion anymore. It meant nothing. That goal, whatever it meant, no longer was. Then what was 'the end' now? Well, she thought, if I don't know what the big picture is, maybe I can do a smaller one, like breakfast. That could be the goal for now, and the next step is to decide where to go and what to have. The step after that? Go there and have that! She could see, a few blocks down along the river, the unmistakable towering logo of a Burger Joint. As good a place as any, she decided, and she got up and headed that way.

 

  Twenty Two

  Ginger MacAvoy had a nice view from her corner window office on the fourth floor of the historical San Francisco edifice that housed the headquarters of World Weary Avengers, Incorporated. She shared that level with most of the company’s executives and software developers. The CTO had a room in the building's basement and most of the testers were housed down there as well. It wasn't the best arrangement, morale-wise, but as Chief Security Officer, that was none of her concern. Her business was secrecy, privacy, and intellectual property. Ginger's be-freckled golden skin, which matched the golden hair that she kept tied up tight in a bun, along with her aviator sunglasses and bright pink lip gloss, masked the harsh interior life of the tireless watchdog. World Weary Avengers could not afford any lapses; they were the owners of some extremely advanced and therefore dangerous technology. Spies were always sniffing around, spying and prying and trying to break in. It was useful to be paranoid in her position, and to trust no one.

  One person she especially didn't trust was Kandhi Clarke. She didn't trust her and she didn't like her and she didn't approve of her existence, for that matter, and Kandhi knew it. Ginger was always trying to push her aside and keep her in the dark. Their loathing of each other was not merely mutual, it was severe and genuine. If Ginger had her way, there would be no quality assurance at all. She wasn't interested in whether their technology worked or not, only that it was never discovered by anyone from the outside world. The developers, all five of them, were under contracts so stringent they could probably not afford to ever leave. Ginger watched their every move. There was nothing she didn't know about them, and nothing she admired much either.

  The problem with mind control, she had immediately realized, is the problem of 'who controls the controller?' It was one of those dilemmas of recursions, like 'who created God'? If a device was capable of mind control, it had to be programmed, so the programmer could control it. It had to be operated, so the operator could control it. Any one with a second device could control a person with the first, and so on, and on to infinity. She was not concerned with the ethics. It was rather an impressive achievement, to be able to place specific thoughts into someone else's mind in their own voice, such that it was indistinguishable from their own self-generated ideas. To be able to enter those words into a device and transmit those thoughts into a specific target. That was version one. Version two had introduced the partial binding, whereby the device and the host's mind could inter-operate without the bother of typing or talking or displaying images on a screen. Version three had introduced trans-volitional search, whereby the device would immediately seek and discover throughout the connected universe whatever topics had entered the host's little mind.

  The partial bind had led to a state of dependence which Ginger thought was simply deplorable. She had experienced the bind and had rejected it after a time. Now she relied only on her own direct contact with the central hub, the main server within the company that could perform the same activities but with a layer of personal filtering in between - unobtrusive, in other words. She sat now at her desk and conveyed her desires to the mainframe. She was tracking Kandhi's UPD. She had opened a special secret channel into it and could now monitor and control its activity directly. She was disgusted to see that Kandhi, now driving through western Nebraska, was merely searching the public photo and video streams for facial recognition matches of Leonora Wells. Why not use the NatSurv? Ever since the war began, the national surveillance program had become quite extensive. Although it was supposed to be highly confidential and felonious to breach, the people at W.W.A. were light years ahead with un-detectable methods and didn't even concern themselves with being discovered. Even if they were, they had certain contracts that could not be ignored and would have given them a free ride anyway.

  The NatSurv quickly provided Ginger with information that Kandhi could have used the night before - Leonora entering Sarah Watson's car and driving it out of the Trinidad rest area. That same car was tracked at sev
eral locations along the highways, all the way into Grand Island, Nebraska. It was last spotted at the exit they took, and it was a no-brainer to conclude the car had traveled to the Watson's home not two miles away from there. Scanning that neighborhood's watch cameras for the remainder of the night was fruitless. Certainly they had slept after that long drive. Ginger panned out to within a few miles of the residence, and scanned the rest of the morning's activity. Sure enough, she easily located Leonora Wells sitting with a breakfast sandwich at the Riverside Burger Joint at ten-fifteen in the morning, not a half an hour before.

  Ginger instructed Kandhi's You to provide that data to Kandhi, who was surprised and excited to receive it. She was less than twenty miles away and stepped on it. Unfortunately, by the time she arrived, Leonora was gone again. Kandhi was hungry, though, so she ordered a burger and a soda, and sat down at a table outside to enjoy her lunch.

  'Worthless', muttered Ginger at the controls in San Francisco. 'Eating that crap. No wonder', she said to herself. The NatSurv had no further information on Leonora just yet. One of its weaknesses was its delay factor. The government, as always, used outdated equipment and the least sophisticated software it could find. While she was certain she would soon acquire imagery of Leonora's next movements, she called Mike Griggs into her office. The scruffy engineer - no older than thirty but as dirty and smelly as any old street bum - worked seventeen hours a day and dreamed about work during the rest.

  'Project Personality?' he asked, entering her office. She held up her hand to back him away from the door. She didn't want him stinking up the place, and he knew better, so he stood just outside in the hallway, as she said,

  "Fuck that. It's past all that. Now it's just a matter of getting the thing back."

  "Did you find the girl?" he asked.

  "I only care about the box,” she snapped. "The girl's just a carrier. If we can get to it, talk to it. Can we do that?"

  "You mean like open a channel?"

  "Whatever you want to call it,” she told him. "Can we reach it?"

  "Not from a distance,” Griggsy said. "It's totally masked out. We do tracking, you know. We don't do tracked.'

  'I know my own words', Ginger cracked. 'Answer the question. You said 'not from a distance'. Does that mean from closer we can?'

  'If we're in range', he said, 'we might get to it on the radio.'

  'Radio? Over the air and in the clear?'

  'Possibly', Mike considered. Like a walkie-talkie, you know? Scan the frequency but it's such a narrow band and such a low range, you would have to be pretty close.'

  'How close? A yard? A mile?'

  'A mile might be close enough', he said. 'Go A.M. scanner and look for its signature. It's embedded in the serial number. I'll send you the decode.'

  'Fine', she said, and waved him away. A minute or so later she received the data and forwarded it to Kandhi's You, with commands to begin the sweep and report on contact. Privately, she was muttering to herself,

  'Move, you lazy slob! Get off your ass and drive around', and then she remembered she had root control of the You. She could invoke its Mind Control Plugin and tell Kandhi to do just that. So she did. Kandhi thought it was her own idea to start driving around the neighborhood. Her You didn't tell her otherwise. It was under filtered forwarding, only giving Kandhi what Ginger permitted it to. To Kandhi, the surveillance seemed utterly useless. She drove around in meandering random patterns throughout the city for more than an hour, and got nothing. She received no sign of Leonora either in person or through her UPD. She was not even informed when her You found the Nupie on the local air band, and transmitted Ginger's message to it. The message was fairly simple. Ginger merely told the renegade device to return to the Riverside Burger Joint, wait there for Kandhi Clarke, and surrender itself to her.