She told me not to go on mission. I went on Mission and made fool on myself on TV.
She told me to make my own hero name. I was given new stupid hero name by TV reporter.
She told me Improbileon's real name. I asked her about her being a superhero.
She said that was a secret. (I think). I said I'll ask Conrad.
She said Conrad would keep her secret. I said he had spilled the beans on Max.
She said don't worry about her feelings and left the room to cry.
Hmm. This is a tricky one. I reviewed my handwritten scrawl and concluded I needed to practise my handwriting.
Then it came to me. Perhaps... perhaps... it was because I mentioned Max!
I paced the room a few more times, not hearing anything more from Terri's room.
I knocked gently on the door and said through the door quietly, “Terri, do you want a cup of tea?”
“Yes,” I heard. “Yes, please.”
***
Thursday, January 24, 2123 (5 minutes later)
I brought her tea in bed. She had climbed under the covers and had propped herself up with pillows. She did not make eye contact as I sat down on the edge of the bed.
“Did they give you any training?” she asked quietly.
“No. Conrad said it would be on-the-job training, the best kind.”
“Sink or swim,” she muttered as she sipped her tea,
“What?”
“They talked about it being the best way of inducting new heroes either train-train-train or sink-or-swim. Ask Conrad about it. He'll tell you.”
“Ok,” I said.
Terri went quiet.
“Are you ok?” I asked.
“Always the direct question...” she said quietly.
I smiled grimly and raised my eyebrows to query that remark.
“If you recall, we're supposed to be splitting up,” she continued in the same soft tones.
“I don’t want to split up.”
“We’re not good for each other. Come on, Aaron. It’s not the end of the world. We live, we learn, we upgrade.”
I looked away. That hurt. Her comment, that is, not me turning away, despite the brace around my sore neck.
“But this afternoon I felt an old emotion. I couldn't figure out what it was at first.”
“Oh?” I muttered, still looking away.
“It was like I was there with you,” she said. And she touched my hand.
“Concern?” I said, daring to look into her tear-ravaged eyes.
“You know. Like when you were in hospital after your base jump debacle?”
“I remember that it happened,” I said because I was delirious for the days my leg was being rebuilt.
“It was like that,” she said.
“So, you're saying my mission, the fight, has rekindled some affection towards me?” I said hopefully.
“No. I was just worried that you might die.”
“But that's a positive sign. I mean, for us?”
“No. Not really. Never mind.”
“But I do.”
“Yes, that's sweet, Aaron. Maybe in a different life or a different timeline?”
“Timeline?”
“I wished I'd never taken you to Mad-Sci-Soc. It is raking over bad memories. I just want peace. Peace, some genuine friends and a dog. A real dog.” She turned over and sighed, “I'm going to sleep now.”
That meant I was to sleep on the couch.
At least Terri did not complain about the tea.
As I crept out of the bedroom, Terri called out, “Don't stay up late. Remember we’re going out tomorrow night.”
I finally felt like a superhero. Apparently this is what it takes: being bashed around by robbers and humiliated on channel news. It felt good. It felt good because despite her rejecting words, I had a feeling that my relationship with Terri was on the mend.
***
Thursday, January 24, 2123 (Later that evening).
With this new inner glow and ignoring my aching limbs and sore neck, I had to do some work. I had to pay the rent. With Antonio as the landlord, the deal I had with him was to deliver results from my freelance Legacy Net Research and while most of the same information was, of course, available on the Holoweb, Ms Bell has to take its cut and so the price for that information was high. In comparison, I was cheap with no pop-up adverts, even if I was slower. So I bartered information for rent. However I needed to deliver the information to particular deadlines otherwise there was the fallback to the another payment method, the common one used by regular folk: money! Real money that I did not have. Since Antonio's demands for research was pretty low, it did leave me with lots of spare time but not a lot of cash.
One of the downsides of the arrangement was that occasionally we were asked to move apartments as Antonio sorted out a specific deal. Antonio liked to keep his property occupied. It kept vandals and decay away from otherwise empty or unsaleable properties. The property market still had not recovered from the Long Shakedown 30 years previously, when the Yellowstone volcano exploded just after the Third Robot War.
So after our, er... Fridge Incident, I had gone cap in hand, in person and very worried, to one of Antonio's lieutenants to report the explosion and seek a new apartment. I received a surprising response. The lieutenant clapped me on my back and congratulated me. “Excellent,” he said. “We had a comprehensive, silverstien-ian insurance policy on that property. Can you do something similar for this one too?” And he gave me an address of our new apartment. It made me feel as though I was part of a badly orchestrated insurance scam.
So I needed to do the work that night. I needed to show Terri that I could my side of the complex unwritten contract of household bill payment. The way we split the costs was a good deal for both of us, Terri would have been squeezed out of the city without me taking care of the accommodation costs. And commuting was up there with her other major dislikes, like house management and having a good time.
My research on Caribbean Beaches via the cob web only took one night. The main problem was collating it with modern data from the Holo-Web. Since the ancient technology I used to access the Legacy Net had no modern Holo-Web connections, no media, no protocols, no wires to pass the data through except for the “archaeologists' tunnel”. So, besides transcription, this left me just two ways of transferring data.
I could photograph the computer screen but that held the strong possibility that I might accidentally reveal my secret method of accessing the Legacy Net.
The second method of transferring data was even slower; printing on paper! Along with the ancient computer I inherited from my uncle, had come a contemporary ancient printer. I had a shock when I researched printer ink on the cob webs. In the twentieth century, printer ink was the most expensive consumer commodity on the planet, the first consumer product to be protectively monitored by chip: effectively padlocking the product to a container and to a particular manufacturer; the archetype of 22nd century corporate lock-in strategies. However the local art supplier had suitable wood-substitute paper and refill ink. I was set to go. I merely had to photograph the printed page and use text recognition facilities to extract the data to the Holo-web. That night I was able to print out the results on three pages, photograph and upload. Cross-referencing the top three beaches using geo-references and presto, the work was ready to go. I think Antonio would LOL-fest the results; three excellent beaches within the Caribbean Protection Zones and therefore largely untouched by the concomitant world. Excellent for that get-away-from-it-all experience:
The Baths, Virgin Gorda, British Virgin Islands, with its strange skull-like rock; just like scenery from the Monkey Island movie.
Trunk Bay, Virgin Islands National Park, St. John; protected from development for over a hundred years, no electricity or wireless connectivity.
Magens Bay, St. Thomas; a sheltered bay with a sprinkling of desert islands and palm trees, perfect for that ship-wreck/castaway effect.
This information was
gold-dust; Antonio would never be able to obtain this kind of unbiased information from the holo-web without paying exorbitant executive fees.
At 3am, I triple-encrypted the message and sent it off to Antonio. I hoped I wouldn't be too tired tomorrow. I promised to meet up with Conrad for lunch and then in the evening, Terri and I had a rare dinner date with my sell-out pal, Jason and his strange animal loving, new wife, Naoki.
***
Thursday, January 24, 2123 (the same night)
While I was printing and photographing, encrypting and emailing, elsewhere in the city something else was happening in the dead of the night. At an unlicensed barter shop in Queens, a string of humans and replicants were queueing up in response to a too-good-to-be-missed offer on a popular Holo-web recycling site. The terms of the deal were very specific: turn up in person, no virtual world trading. However, many agoraphobics had sent a replicant or surrogate instead.
At the shop counter was a single robot that was taking packets and exchanging them for other packets. The humans left elated while the replicants slunk out into the night, not wanting Police drones catching them in the city without a license.
The incoming packets went down a conveyor belt, out of the shop, into an underground tunnel, then up into a neighbouring warehouse. The warehouse had been converted into a giant factory full of moving metal and overhead gantries. At the far end, Robo-trucks were making deliveries. They were delivering fridges to teams of robots lifting the fridges and putting them onto production lines. Meanwhile the deliveries of small packets were also being worked upon by a team of a dozen robots of disparate styles and sizes but all dressed in surgical gowns. They opened each packet carefully and took a swab of the material inside. While activating a swab analysis machine, the robots would label the packet and put it in... you've guessed it... a fridge.
***
Friday, January 25, 2123. Lunchtime.
The SHUMSS secret hideout had free food and I was not going to pass that up. So, close to lunchtime, I made my way inside the building using the pass-codes that Conrad had given me. I did not use the riverboat tunnel route but a Quick-Route via the skyscraper opposite. This was the equivalent of the member's entrance, rather than the guest lobby. The entrance was conveniently located in a McSquirrels' toilet cubicle, one with a secret door to a lift and biometrically-controlled access to a stairway, then up one floor to the platform with the zip-line.
One zipline ride gave me free reign in a kitchen fit for heroes. I had already helped myself to a freshly fabricated sandwich by the time Conrad appeared.
“They were stealing Gruyère, Conrad. That surely was not a coincidence,” I said as a greeting trying to sound professional and nonchalant; I was referring to the previous day's attempted robbery of expensive food stuffs.
I confidently took a large bite of my sandwich in a triumphant flourish.
“Indeed not, PK. It seems a sudden spike of demand for that particular type of cheese has inflated its value and so it’s a good target for robbers. We'll have to arrange to procure some Gruyère ourselves and have it analysed. But we have another problem on our hands...”
“We do?” I said with my mouth full.
“The Kittoffery Kart has been stolen!”
“Your water powered car?” I said but it sounded more like “Yorb-Waber-Powbeh-Barh?”
“The very same!”
I swallowed hard. The sandwich sticking to my throat, I said, “Who could have done that?
“Improbileon is investigating the probabilities!”
I swallowed some water, to allow me to say, “Are you sure you didn't just forget where you parked?”
“What an RFID location tracking failure? Hmm, improbable. We need to work out the odds!”
“Well, let's talk to her then?”
“Let's! I have some experimental jet packs on the balcony. She's at the Mad-Sci-Soc club house uptown.”
***
Friday, January 25, 2123. (20 minutes after lunch).
Whoa, Jetpacks! I tried not to show my excitement at using a jet pack for the first time. Since it was completely computer controlled (select waypoint, select landing point, automatic collision avoidance), there was little difference between a jet pack and stepping into an auto-taxi except for noise and draughtiness. The jetpacks landed Conrad and myself on the screened landing platform located on the roof of Mad-Sci-Soc. Improbileon was already there in her mighty norse god-like superhero costume. Besides the debrief after the mission yesterday, she was still a strange stranger to me.
“In civvies?” she asked.
“Yes. You should do the same, Karmen. In case there is a passing drone that scans us.”
Karmen disabled her holo costume generator and revealed herself.
I thought it was interesting that she had both a holographic and fabricated version of her super hero costume. Clever. As a super hero, and yes, I was already thinking rather arrogantly as myself as being one, you could never tell when you might need to don a super suit or blend in with your secret identity.
This was my first look at Karmen while she was not in cosplay. She was more librarianal than liberational; ideal fodder for a make-over TV show. Her civilian wear was as conservative as nun's weekend outfit at a school reunion; shirt and baggy trousers of different shades of battleship gray. She really was the epitome of a female Clark Kent.
She nodded towards me in greeting.
“Let's go downstairs,” suggested Conrad.
We gathered in the lounge on the ground floor.
“The WPC being stolen the night after our first mission in five years... Statistically, you know what that means?” said Karmen tepidly.
“Absolutely,” nodded Conrad.
“What does it mean?” I asked.
Karmen appeared to ignore my question and said, “Aaron, is it ok if I call you Aaron? You can call me Karmen, when we're not on a mission.”
“Right, yeah. Thanks. Aaron is fine. I respond to a whole bunch of names, especially polite ones. Aaron is one of those.”
“Of course, it is,” said Karmen with some tiredness. “Conrad informs me that you are er... friends with Terri.”
“Well, we’ve had a few problems recently but the prospects have been looking better recently. I made her tea last night. And she didn't complain about it.” I needlessly tried to explain.
“Is she well?” Karmen asked.
“Physically never better. She spends a lot of time in the Gym and... “
She held up her hand. “Ok. Right. Good. Moving on, I just want to update you on the data. I have thrown everything into the supercomputer probability model and the stats are clear...” She waved at the nearby holoscreen.
“That's your super power, right? Balancing probabilities?” I interjected.
“That's right. Balancing improbabilities is a more accurate description,” she said with a hint of a smile. A complex three dimensional geometrical pattern started building up above the holoscreen computer surface. “I haven't had time to refine all the data. This is just a simple time, location and relationship interaction display but the results are undeniable.”
Conrad and I looked deeply into the structure of interlocking surfaces and swirls.
“Well, well, well. I suspected it, but this is the clincher,” mused Conrad rubbing his chin. “This string of improbabilities have an underlying correlating agent which while shocking, is now kind of obvious. The truth is never pretty.”
“What?” I was admiring the diagram's beauty but I did not derive any meaning from it.
Karmen pointed out a layer in the model. “Let me explain. This layer is you, plotted backwards from 21st January.”
“Uh-huh?”
“This is your relationship with Terri going back to 2120 according to your BragBook page, which we hacked, by the way, I presume you don't mind us and the NSA accessing your data.”
“Not at all. I've nothing to hide except my tax avoidance, associations with gangsters and my cardb
oard box fetish.”
“Nor your relationship with Terri.”
“Well, I definitely want to brag about that,” I smiled.
“Even if she might have something to hide?”
“Well, last Christmas...” I started to say then decided to shut up and irradiated a red face. I could not tell that story. Perhaps Terri does have something to hide.
Karmen smoothly moved on with her explanation. “So this data has been transposed and associated with this layer here.”
“And that is?”
“The price of organic Swiss cheese.”
“Like Gruyere?” I asked, playing along like it was a joke.
“Exactly like Gruyere.”
“And this is helping us find Conrad's car?” I said, struggling to suppress my disbelief.
“Yes, because of this intersection here, on the car's development, and coincidence of it being lost after the mission yesterday,” said Karmen earnestly.
“Coincidences do happen,” I said, trying to defend normality. But what is normal to Mad Scientists?
Karmen explained gently, “You can calculate the level of coincidences that would occur every day, the people you meet every day with the same birthday, same name, same favourite Star-Hit de-caf coffee flavour. These types of coincidences all seem magical to us, but in reality they are within quite a limited statistical probability. No, what we are mapping here is a series of improbabilities... I guess you haven't understood the impact of this intersection here,” she said, pointing to the middle of the holographic structure.
“That would be a good guess,” I smiled.
“I can summarise quite easily... I can say with a level of 85% certainty that Conrad's car is now residing in the basement of the Ms Bell Research Centre in Brooklyn.”
“You get that from that?” I exclaimed. “But how? There must be something I missed. How did you get from me and Terri to the price of cheese over to the location of Conrad's car at Ms Bell?”
“Right. From this vector,” said Karmen pointing to an undulating surface in the model.
“And that is?” I asked.
“Max...” said Conrad without satisfaction.
***
March, 1100.
Gruyère Cheese? Why Gruyère Cheese?
Gruyère is a hard cheese with a beautiful flavour, that improves with age; nutty, rich, sweet, and full-bodied. The Swiss say that Gruyère is the only cheese with a soul. It is Terri's favourite, always had been since a childhood trip to Switzerland. While Terri regularly bought a variety of artisan organic cheese from the local Deli-U-Like, she had also stored in the fridge an especially old slice of original Swiss Gruyere cheese that she had been saving for “a special occasion”.