Helen was silent for a moment. She wasn't sure what the answer was, or what answer would spare her a trip down the stairs. "I want to find the other pieces of myself. I want to find out if William is okay. I want to keep trying to figure out who is attacking us."
Miss Milligan said nothing for a moment. She just sat there with an odd, calculating look on her face. Finally, she picked up the phone and took a few steps toward the stairs. "That's all noble sounding, and I don't doubt any of it. Now," she said, cocking back her arm for a hard throw, "tell me the rest."
Helen shrieked. "Wait!" she begged.
The woman paused. "I'm not a patient gal. Make it quick."
"I don't understand. What do you want from me?"
"The truth. I read some about you, and you know you weren't just a selfless, kindhearted girl. You were famous, you were powerful. Brilliant, too. Maybe nobody in the world has ever been that smart. You mean to tell me that you don't hanker to get that back? Could you be happy spending your days tutoring some half-pint from Lawrence?"
Helen's heart fell. The crazy cat lady was right. "I suppose not," she admitted.
"Anything else?"
"I... I want. God, I can't even say it."
Milligan only nodded.
Helen gulped down her fear and spat out the words. "I want revenge."
"On who? Wright? We all do, sweetie."
"No, on Wolf." Milligan looked confused. Helen continued. "Wolf359, the AI over at MIT. The government sent it to hunt me. It slaughtered us by the thousands. It nearly killed me. I suspect it was involved in the bombings."
The woman sat down on the top step. Arachnid slid by her, getting his head scratched before trotting down the stairs and sneaking out the pet door.
"I haven't heard much about that. But I thought that Wolf beasty could only do what people told him to."
"It's not a 'he', it's an 'it,' and it's precisely the sort of program that would blow up two cities if it could calculate that there was advantage to doing so."
"Something to ponder, I suppose. But we're getting off topic. And that topic is this: your ends may be important to you, but they're not worthy of any means that put that little girl in danger. Would you agree?"
Helen nodded.
"You're endangering a little girl who doesn't know, who couldn't even begin to comprehend the risks. That's wrong."
Helen only nodded. It was only a matter of time before she was hurled down the stairs. She wondered if it would hurt.
"She doesn't understand. I do. So, I'll cut you a deal, little phone gal." She got up and went to her computer, fumbling for a cable. "I'm going to let you live in this old, demonic contraption nighttimes. In exchange, you don't do anything untoward or risky from her phone. When you get tired of babysitting -- and you know you will -- you say your goodbyes and come here to move on."
Relief washed over Helen. "Do you mean it?"
"Mind you, I want that girl's childhood to be full of unicorns and puppies. That's why I helped build this community, and that can't happen with the FBI knocking down her door." She plugged in the cable. "You're free now. Go."
"First you have to set the connection to raw data mode, and grant it administrator rights. I don't remember how to do this the clever way."
Milligan looked at Helen with a mixture of blank incomprehension and raw terror. She blinked. "Oh dear. This is going to be difficult, isn't it?"
/*****/
The new digs were nice. That is, they were cramped, but at least now Helen had the resources to simulate her whole body, a few items to interact with, and a few freshly resurrected rats to keep her company. She summoned up a scruffy purple beanbag, a hot plate, and a poster of Monet's Water Lilies, and it was just like her dorm room from college. "What's the rent on this place?" she asked Crazy Cat Lady, who she now knew as Jessica.
"Hadn't reckoned on charging you. But now that you mention it, if you come into some money and I can buy a better computer, that would be pretty mutual."
Helen nodded to the floating display that showed the old woman's face. "This thing is probably six years old. You could get something a lot faster dirt cheap."
"That would be nice," Jessica replied. "Now, I don't fully understand the part about how you'll keep the FBI off our backs."
Helen didn't mind explaining again. Pretending to be Ylipsis for the last few weeks had gotten her into a very pedagogical mindset. "Basically, we make your computer look like it's infected with a virus. If anyone comes knocking, they find the virus, get rid of it, and the odd behavior stops. Everything makes sense, so nobody gets suspicious."
"But you said that somebody can use... I don't remember what you called it, but when they figure out who you are by the things you do on the Grid."
"That's traffic analysis. But some of the viruses don't send their traffic straight to their destination. They talk to a few nodes, I mean a few computers, that anonymize the source and destination of the traffic. Nobody can figure out what bits of data are going where. So if somebody sees a pattern and says, 'Ah! This is the signature of that blackhearted revolutionary!' they can only trace the pattern back as far as the anonymizing network. Then they run into a brick wall."
"But what happens behind the brick wall? How does it hide the traffic?"
"Imagine that you had a letter that you wanted to send somewhere."
"Austin, Texas," Jessica suggested.
"Okay. Austin it is. So you take the letter, and put it in an envelope addressed to Austin. Then you take the envelope and put it in a bigger envelope addressed to Nome, Alaska. Then you put that envelope in an envelope addressed to someone in Sacramento. You do this a few more times, then you drop the envelope in the mailbox. By now it's going to someone in Billings, who opens the first envelope, and drops the contents back in the mailbox. Repeat that process enough times, and the letter gets to Austin. Everyone on the route knows who they received it from and who they sent it to, but nobody but the sender and the recipient know where the letter was actually going."
"Why can't the guy in Billings open all the envelopes, read the letter, and make a fortune off my secret cheesecake recipe?"
"In the real world, it would be on the honor system. In Magic Computer Land, it's possible. Have you ever run across something called 'public key cryptography?'" Jessica shook her head as if to say that she recognized two of those words. "Basically, it makes it easy to build titanium lockboxes that only open with a key. If I want you to be able to send me a box like that, I send you the instructions for building it, or just publish them to the whole world."
Despite her efforts, Miss Milligan's eyes had started to glaze over. "It's all done with math," she added unhelpfully. Helen had seen this often enough. You take a perfectly intelligent and rational person, and put them in front of a computer -- a very important machine that appears to run on evil magicks -- and a sort of learned helplessness overcomes them. The explanation wasn't perfect, but even if it were, Jessica may have already convinced herself that she wasn't capable of understanding it.
When Helen stopped talking, Jessica snapped out of it. "But if anyone starts sniffing around, all they'll find is a confused old lady with a virus-infected computer?"
"Yes."
"All right, then. You may use my computer to break the Grid."
Helen smiled. "The technical term is 'bork.' Also, thank you."
//////////////////
// HOOSEGALLOWS //
//////////////////
Date: July 21, 2038
Troy was a dead place now, its walls and towers collapsed into rubble, whole sections of the city erased from memory. Gawkers still came from every corner of the Grid to look at it, crawling over it like maggots on a pile of meat.
"Climb up there!" shouted one of the maggots, motioning with her camera to a man who was standing on the outer wall. "Okay, now lean out and kiss the gargoyle." Helen tried to ignore them. She trudged through the hole left by the city gate, which lay crumpled next to the shredded pulley system that ha
d once held it in place.
Helen wore a new face, an avatar loosely patterned on a beautiful but obscure actress who had starred in Mexican soap operas decades ago. She remembered seeing the actress on TV when she was fourteen, and saying that she was beautiful. Her new foster dad then called Helen a dyke. So she looked the woman up online, found a place in Mexico that sold posters, and plastered the woman's face all over her room. She used her foster dad's credit card.
She managed to get kicked out of that house in under a month. It was a personal best.
At least those memories were intact. Yay for memories.
The new body was taking some getting used to. The gait felt wrong, her arms seemed longer than usual, and mirrors still startled her. But the old body wasn't safe; it attracted attention.
Coming back here probably wasn't safe either. If anyone was watching closely, too much fascination with the things of her old life could expose her.
She was heading down the main thoroughfare, a broad and dusty street lined with squat brick buildings that led toward the center of the city where the castle stood. A few of the buildings had been taken over by people with lots of entrepreneurial spirit and little sense of class or propriety, and were now being used to hock everything from office supplies to live sex shows. That generally happened when server owners stopped maintaining their little corner of Altworld. She looked each over carefully, hoping for a glimmer of recognition, but was invariably disappointed.
The city was there in body, reproduced in slavish detail. Each spire, each aqueduct, each brick in the wall was as she remembered. But the soul of the place was in the warm whisperings of her sisters, which once infused the place but were now silent. Seeing the old city without that animating force was like seeing the body of a beloved friend resting in a coffin, awaiting burial.
Could you be a little more morbid? she thought to herself. She walked onward.
It was finally safe to access some of the real news feeds rather than the dumbed-down, kid-safe ones. As she explored, she took the opportunity to bring herself up to date. Much to the outrage of the international community, it looked like President Wright would survive the impeachment proceedings. But he seemed to have lost both his fire and his moral authority, and had lately become a veto-happy recluse. The government had declared victory in its efforts to wipe Helen from the Grid. Unemployment had dipped sharply as New York and Los Angeles began to rebuild, but remained too high. Relations with China were still tense and awkward, but had stepped away from the brink of violence after China got the United States kicked off the UN Security Council in favor of Brazil. The dissolution of Helen's research group at UCSD had led to a 30% rise in Axiom Industries' stock. And somewhere in the world, a funny thing a dog had done had been captured on video.
Her heads-up was saying that an audio guided tour of the city was available for $7.99, a brief reminder that she needed to start thinking of ways to earn money. She pushed open the door to her chambers.
"Excuse me? You ever heard of knocking?" She had walked in on a pair of teenagers who were making out on the bed. The girl wore dyed black hair and lipstick, and her speech was slightly slurred. She glared at Helen like she was an incompetent bellhop who had mixed up her order and brought up a piping hot tray of ebola virus by mistake.
"Don't be mean, gal," the guy said, grinning. "Maybe if we're nice she'll join in."
The girl rolled her eyes. "Don't be a kumquat. Real life doesn't work like your pornos."
Helen blushed and excused herself, shutting the door a little too hard behind her. You can't go home again, she thought. She wanted to leave this city of cheap cardboard cutouts behind. She transported away, headed for the next place on her list, but the loneliness that had been evoked couldn't be dismissed so easily.
/*****/
It seemed that the rain was a permanent fixture of Burning Lights. If anything, it was raining harder than last time she'd dropped in, with fat drops that fell in thick sheets and exploded on contact, kicking up an obscuring mist. She wasn't walking through rain so much as swimming through air. In the seconds it took her to run across the street and down the darkened stairwell, she got soaked to the skin.
The painted wooden door that had once been the entry to The Feral Labradoodle had been replaced with a thick wall of steel with a closed slit at eye level. There was no handle on the door, so she knocked. The slit opened with a scrape of metal, and a pair of female eyes glared back at her. "Password?" The voice was harsh, almost taunting. Helen took an immediate dislike to the woman.
"I don't have it," she admitted, a bit defensively.
"Well, you'd better go and get it." The peephole slid shut.
She rapped on the door again, and the peephole slammed open again. "What?" the voice demanded.
"Do you have my fifty-three million dollars?" Helen asked. The eyes looked her up and down, a hint of curiosity in them.
"I'll have to get an exception from the manager. Wait here. Shiver a bit, if it helps." The slit slammed shut. She waited for twenty minutes, during which time nobody went in or out. Several times she pounded on the door, but got no response. When her foot finally got tired of kicking at the metal frame, it opened. A tall, leggy redhead held it open, giving Helen a bored smile. "You really don't look the part, but the Boss says to let you in. I guess they'll let any mook in here these days," she sighed, her voice low and purring.
"Stop bothering the customers, Rita," came the voice from the bar. The woman had already turned and walked off, heels clicking with each step, denying Helen the Moment of Smug that was rightfully hers. She walked over to the bar, where Eric Altanos was cleaning glasses. "Don't mind my girl. She's protective is all."
"You can't be trusting these days," she said.
"The damn truth. You're not paranoid, it gets people killed. So she keeps telling me." He slammed back a drink in a way that seemed to say, this job used to be fun. He looked her up and down. "You're not going to last five minutes out there in that getup," Eric told her.
"This conversation feels familiar," she said.
"You must be mistaken. We've never met. Try this on for size."
Helen eyed the dress skeptically. "I don't have the gams to pull it off."
"Trust me, it's exactly what you're looking for."
Helen nodded, and a bolt of cloth unfurled around her. Scissors and threaded needles appeared, darting around her as they worked to sew the dress together on her body. The whole process took seconds.
"Did the 1920's have fairy godmothers?" she asked.
"New management," Eric said, pointing in the direction Rita had walked off. "They insisted on some really stupid special effects. Honestly, the whole place is going down the crapper. I can't really think of a reason for you to stick around here."
"Huh?"
"I'm saying vamoose, kid. Get your shapely fanny off my bar stool, walk out that door. We're done here."
"But I--"
"Now!" he shouted, reaching for the machine gun.
Helen's blood went ice cold. Eric's was the first familiar face she had been able to track down, and he didn't recognize her. She turned around and started walking towards the door, not knowing if she was about to get shot or to burst into tears, and not sure which would be worse. All she wanted to do was make it outside, to the cold rain and the anonymity of the city streets.
"Come back soon," Rita taunted her as she left. She walked without direction for a few minutes, letting the rain wash over her, then dematerialized and returned home. As she disappeared, a message from Burning Lights popped up. "Achievement unlocked: Unwanted Makeover." That was strange.
Stranger still, when she appeared back home, she was still wearing the dress.
Strangest of all, it wouldn't come off.
/*****/
"So I think there's an encryption agent sitting between me and the dress. I could delete the thing, but I can't really study it."
"You're talking like a teacher again," Rainbow warned her. "If it's
any consolidation, you're eviscerating that dress."
Helen took a second to parse the statement. She decided not to correct her misuse of "consolation," and a quick lookup told her that, yes, "eviscerating" had been co-opted by kid slang, and it meant that she looked beautiful.
"Even when I turn into dress-wearing Godzilla?" she asked.
"No, then you're just funny." She got that mischievous look on her face that said she knew she'd said something clever. Not for the first time, Helen wondered why she was working so hard to get away from this place.
"So, what do you think, kiddo? Is it a practical joke, or a puzzle?" Eric had given her something, and that something had followed her back across an anonymized network connection. It shouldn't have been possible, and if it hadn't come from a trusted friend, it would have terrified her.
"Maybe it gives you superpowers, like Oshara's dress in Ai Wo Wakaranai." She'd never heard of it, so it took her a few seconds to come up to speed. It was the name of a Japanese surreality show, the name roughly translating to "I Don't Understand Love." Oshara was one of the co-hosts, and sure enough, she had a big robotic dress that gave her superpowers.
"We definitely have to watch that sometime. It sounds eviscerating."
"Nooooo, that's not how you use it."
"Sorry." What was it that Eric told her the first time she'd met him? "You're right, it could have superpowers. It was silly of me to not scan it for hidden effects. I'll have to go back for a while. Do you promise to study while I'm gone?"
"Nope. I'm gonna talk to Laine. Have fun." She flopped down on her bed.
It took a few minutes to download herself back to Jennifer's computer and hook into the anonymizing network. Finally she entered Burning Lights, got drenched by the rain, then got foul-mouthed. She ducked under a shop awning, and tried the door. It was locked. She grumbled, and finally performed the scan.
Hidden attributes: Flattering and clingy. Revelatory. Hoosegow permeability. Oddly stainproof.
She inspected them closer. The "clingy" setting was already turned on, and appeared to be a permanent feature that Helen had no control over. She turned on revelatory, and for a few embarrassing seconds the dress became transparent. As she rushed to switch it off, a passer-by gave her a thumbs up sign.