3rd World Products, Book 17 (3 page)

“Convenient, huh?”

“You know what I mean.”

I sipped and asked, “How much company do you think I need, Lori? Ask Angie or Linda sometime.”

“Angie? Linda?”

Nodding, I replied, “Yup. They know me
really
well, ma’am. They know how I live and why. They had to before they could truly trust me, on the job or off. Do you know what I am to Agent Vicky now?”

“Uh… no, I guess not.”

“Same thing I am to Myra, Toni, and Kate. A friend instead of an awkward acquaintance or someone to avoid. I can go there, they can come here. If I can help with something, I will, and vice-versa. Remember when I visited you and Kate last month?”

“Yes.”

“What did Kate and I do while you were studying?”

Lori said almost warily, “You went to a pub, then you came back and talked until about three in the morning.”

“Yup. Does she do that with any of her other exes?”

Rolling her eyes, Lori said, “Oh, God,
no
, and
that’s
what was so
weird
about the whole thing!”

Shrugging, I said, “Didn’t seem weird to me.”

I sipped and said nothing more for a time. Lori sipped and seemed to be thinking about something. She’d just opened her mouth to speak when the house phone rang. I linked into the call and found Detective Greer at the other end.

Motioning Lori to link in with me, I said, “Hi, LT. What’s up?”

“Hi, Ed. This is a conference call, okay? You’ll be talking to Brian Dell, an air traffic controller in Winter Springs. Go ahead, Mr. Dell.”

A man with a voice full of tension asked, “Can you hear me?”

“Sure can. What’s up?”

“We have a small twin-engine circling the field on autopilot. The pilot is unresponsive and the passenger is a ten-year-old boy. He figured out enough to use the radio, but there’s no way he can land that plane. Detective Greer said you might be able to help?”

“Yup. Sure can. Give me the tail number and I’ll get right on it.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Land it, of course. Give me the tail number.”

“Land it?! How?! First I need to know your qualifications, sir. I…”

Raising my voice slightly, I interrupted him with, “LT, get that guy off the line and get me a tail number, please
.
”

Something at their end flapped and rustled, then Greer said, “I have it,” and read it off with a description of the plane.

I said, “Thanks, LT. Later,” and dropped the link, then linked to Athena with the info as I sent a probe to locate the plane.

Athena found the plane first and put up a screen. I zeroed my probe on it. She appeared in the plane’s back seat and sent theta waves at the kid in the right-hand front seat. He quietly twisted himself around to stare wide-eyed at her as she used our link to silently tell us the pilot had died of a heart attack.

I said, “Thanks, ma’am. Do you want to land it?”

Fielding the pilot to the back seats, she replied, “There would be fewer questions if you do it.”             

Yeah, that seemed likely. I said, “On my way,” and manifested Ed2 in the pilot’s seat. Taking the controls, I didn’t bother contacting the tower; they’d already cleared the field and the immediate sky for the emergency. Dropping a thousand feet, I lined up with the runway and began a final approach. No crosswinds. Excellent.

Frantic gabbling and commo commands came from the radio, but none of it stated reasons not to land, so I turned down the noise. Rather than head for the hangars after touchdown, I stopped the plane on the tarmac, turned off the engine, and let my sim dissipate.

Through our link, I said, “Thanks, Athena.”

“You’re welcome. Bye.”

Lori said, “Wait, Athena. Would you like to come hang out with us?”

“Thank you, but I’m otherwise occupied, Lori. Bye.”

She dropped the link. Lori looked at me and asked, “Otherwise occupied? Doing
what?
She’s an orbital computer core.”

I shrugged and sipped beer. “Whatever supercomputers do on Friday afternoons, I guess.”

“You don’t know what they do?”

With a head shake, I replied, “Nope. Never felt a need to pry. Seems likely they think about stuff, though.”

Giving me a fisheye, Lori said, “I can’t
believe
you’ve never… Oh, hell. I forgot who I’m talking to. Yes, I
can
believe it.”

I grinned. “Good for you, ma’am. If you’re really all that curious, you could ask your own core, y’know.”

The phone rang again; it was Greer with a few questions. I manifested a blank screen and answered the call. There was a lot of hectic office background noise as Greer said, “Ed, there was no way in
hell
you could have gotten to Winter Springs that fast. Who landed that plane?”

“Remember the lady you met at the Lee Road accident?”

“Um… Athena, I think you said her name was?”

“Yup. She popped in, found the pilot dead, and the rest is history.”

“Why didn’t she let them know what she was doing?”

“The field was clear, LT. It was time to land, not talk.”

“But… They can fly planes?!”

“They can operate flitters, LT. One’s running the factory station. A better question might be, ‘
what can’t they do?
‘.”

After a brief pause, he said, “Yeah, maybe so. Well, look, pass along our thanks, will you? Tell her she did an
excellent
job today.”

“Will do, LT.”

“Okay. Thanks, Ed. Gotta go. Bye.” He disconnected.

I bundled a copy of our chat and sent it to Athena, then sat back with my beer and contemplated Lori. In our previous conversation, it had appeared to me that she’d been slowly wandering toward something.

Lori, in turn, seemed to be contemplating me. After a long, silent, studious look, she let herself lean back and flinched hard when her back met the chair.

Hissing, “Too soon,” she leaned forward. Resting her elbows on her knees, she sipped beer and said, “Just when I think I’m really catching up, you do something like that.”

I gave her a fisheye. “Like what? You knew I could fly a plane.”

“Yeah, but…” She shook her head. “Oh, never mind, dammit. All this stuff just seems to come naturally to you. I had to work twice as hard and three times as long just to get my sim to recite the friggin’ alphabet in a reasonably realistic manner. You’ve got yours flying planes.”

That surprised me. Though we hadn’t really discussed methods, I thought she’d understood… no, I’d
assumed
. Again. Damn.

“Lori, my sim didn’t land it. I did.”

With a sort of ‘
no shit, Sherlock!
‘ expression, she replied, “Well,
duh!
You
know
what I mean, Ed. You can make yours do things way beyond what I can make mine do. I…”

I held up a hand and said, “No. I’m trying to tell you something, Lori. I didn’t just run it like a remote-control toy. I was
in
the sim like I’m in my own skin now. I was in that pilot’s seat the same way I’m in this lawn chair. I thought you knew that.”

Lori’s face developed a ‘
what the hell?!
‘ expression and she got to her feet as she yelped, “
How the hell could I know that?!
When did you
ever
tell me you could do something like
that?!
”

Hm. Maybe she was right. Had I ever actually explained to her how I used sims? Come to think of it, probably not, since I couldn’t even explain it to myself. I nodded.

“Yeah, you’re prob’ly right, ma’am. I’ve been trying to figure out how it works for almost two years, but I can’t, so I just do it. Since I can’t explain it to
me
, I probably wouldn’t have tried to explain it to you, either.”

Glowering at me, Lori took a big swig of her beer and a deep breath, then stated in a flat, angry tone, “
You-just-do-it.
Do you know how
absolutely-fucking-useless
that is as an explanation?”

Meeting her gaze, I sighed, “Well, yes, actually, I do. I’ve been enduring it for a few years. Longer, if you count all the other stuff I’ve been able to do without knowing how the hell I…”

She snapped, “Oh, shut up!” and sat down as she grumped, “
That’s
what I
mean
, dammit!” In a mocking tone, she quipped, “Can’t figure it out? Hey,
doesn’t matter!
I’ll just
do it anyway!
” Sipping beer and taking another breath, she added, “And you probably can’t tell me how you do
that
, either,
right?!
”

For lack of a better response, I admitted, “Guess not.”

Looking at me as if I was stupid, she snapped, “I
mean
…”, but then she fell silent and looked both angry and confused for a moment before she yelped, “Agh! Goddammit! Now
I
don’t know how to explain what I’m trying to say! You’re so goddamned
frustrating
sometimes!”

Ah. Okay. It was one of those ‘
yes, ma’am
‘ moments. Agree politely, sip beer, and wait for better times.

I sipped beer and said, “Yes, ma’am. As you say, milady. Just holler when you get a handle on it.”

Lori gave me an incredulous, angry look and started to say something, then didn’t. She took a long slug of her beer, then stared at the bottle and growled, “I probably shouldn’t drink when I’m around you. I can’t tell if it makes things better or worse.”

“A suggestion, ma’am.”

Turning her downward facing head to look at me, she gave me a fisheye and, “Well?”

“Link with me while I work with a sim. See what I see, feel what I feel. All that. I know you’ve been averse to mind-melding ever since our dream-walking incident, but I think it could be a fairly useful thing sometimes.”

She eyed me for a time, then shook her head tightly. “No. It would be too much like being in your body.”

I shrugged. “So? See if you can get the hang of shifting yourself into a sim.” Then something occurred to me and I asked, “Have you asked Xenia to help you with it? You could link up with her sim if you can’t stand the idea of linking with me like that.”

Sipping beer as I restored the yard’s refractive field, I called up my Ed2 sim and said, “And you’re wrong, Lori. With Ed2, what you see is all there is. There’s no body form under the clothes; they’re the actual surface of the sim. Ed2 is just an energy golem with a fancy shell. Three blended probes.”

“No body? But it has arms and legs. Fingers. Everything.”

“Well, sort of. Pants and shirt sleeves. Shoes. Sometimes a hat. But his only emulation of body parts are forearms and hands and what’s visible above the shirt.”

She gave me an odd glance, then got up to go to Ed2 and tried to put a finger inside his shirt above the top button. Her finger stubbed against his chest. She tried lifting the shirt away from his chest and failed at that, as well. Taking his left hand, she tried to slide his rolled-up sleeve further up his arm. It wouldn’t move.

Turning to me, she asked, “Why no body?”

“Why bother? He can do stuff well enough as-is and I can zap him into being without having to use my core.”

That made her give me a peering look. Her tone was almost cautious as she asked, “You mean you can operate him
without
Amaran protocols?”

Hm. Awkward? Sort of. “You wanna tell me why that was the first thing that popped into your head just now?”

With a glance at Ed2, Lori returned to her seat, sat down, and said somewhat defensively, “It just did, that’s all.”

“Uh, huh. PFMs are subject to the protocols. That makes a PFM-generated sim just another tool in the box.” Shrugging, I added, “He’s also a convenient way to operate the controls of a vehicle, for instance. With Ed2, I just popped into the left seat and flew the plane. Otherwise I’d have needed separate probes for each of the controls.” Holding up an index finger, I stated, “Simple solutions, ma’am.”

Chapter Three

Lori pulled a foot up on her seat and rested her chin on her knee as she studied Ed2. I studied Lori’s lovely upraised leg, of course. She started to say something, saw me eyeing her thigh, and sighed, “Would you
please
stick with the program?”

“There’s a program?”

In a flat tone, she replied, “We were discussing how to use sims.”

I chuckled, “Do you
really
not understand how biology works yet? When you blatantly display some wonderfully constructed part of yourself, I
have
to look. That’s what men have evolved to do at such times.”

“You’d like me to believe you can’t help leering at my legs?”

“You got it. Hey, we’re all products of evolution, ma’am. Mama Nature made the rules.”

“Uh, huh. Well, then, if you’re such a total slave to evolution, how did your vasectomy happen? Wouldn’t it violate Mother Nature’s rules?”

Grinning, I held up my finger again as I sipped beer, then said, “I knew you’d try to snag me on that. Think about it. All I had to do to beat the house rules was spend seventy bucks and an hour out of my life in a doc’s office. From then on I was playing for free. No chance of urchins bugging me for cars, clothes, college tuition, or bail money. I could satisfy Mama Nature’s built-in urges without reproductive consequences.”

Giving me a fisheye, Lori asked, “You really consider children to be nothing more than ‘consequences’? That’s pretty harsh, Ed.”

“Those who feel otherwise should do all the breeding.”

Sipping her beer, Lori said, “I still say it’s pretty harsh.”

“Well, so’s being trapped in parenthood when there are still places to see and things to do. And I was married to a gorgeous drunk at the time, Lori. As much as I loved her, I’m glad beyond words that we never had kids.”

“What about the other women you’ve known?”

“What about them? I let them know I’d been fixed. Eventually most of them believed me.”

As expected, that made Lori grin. She asked, “And the ones who didn’t believe you? What happened with them?”

Sipping some beer, I said, “One told me she thought she was preggers after a few months and asked what we were going to do about it. I took her to see my hospital records the next day and closed the door on that problem.”