An Ancient Yearning by M. K. Dreysen - Part 5 of the Neverland Disorder, a Detective Kelli Hench Story

I named him Peter Pan because he wanted them to live forever.

Forever. And for him alone.

I don't know who owns what; the Rolls-Royce dealer puts the cars on display in the hotel where the great and the moneyed meet. "How the hell do you get a car on the fifth floor?" Russ asked.

"Can you imagine how nervous the crane operator gets?" I returned. Half a million's worth of steel and glass and whatnot dangling from the end of the rig, and maybe he shouldn't have had that extra cup of coffee...

Yolena Scruggs would have graced any car ad you'd have wanted, if she'd been alive. Dead, she and the dealer were going to have a lot harder time coming to an agreement on contract terms. A beauty, once I'd spent the time I found her face and her hands and her body in everything from dog food spreads to her big-time first international commercial.

One of those high-end resort ads, the ones where they're trying to convince you that jetting off to an island for a week will trim thirty pounds and twenty years and return us all to young and sexy, only this time with money enough to indulge. Not a car ad, but I'm sure the Michelin team would have found her soon enough. Yolena was that kind of beautiful.

Only now that which waits for us all had taken her. She sat in the back seat of the Rolls, one leg up on the leather, the rest of her twisted around and barely hanging on to the seat. Yolena hadn't fallen onto the floor boards; I couldn't see how. Except maybe that she just wasn't heavy enough to have rolled completely over.

Something about her position tugged at my memory. "Tell me about your night," I asked Officer Shay Jackson, giving the stray thought a chance to simmer. "Because there has got to be one motherload of a story to go along with this one."

And how. Five floors up with a pair of Rolls-Royces for company. Russ and I had hit the doors at four a.m., well after whatever party had taken place in the rooms behind the cars had broken up for the evening.

"Fifty-seven possible witnesses on the guest list," Shay finished up. "And how many of them do you think we'll hear a real story from?"

"When did they leave?" I asked.

"Ten p.m.," she answered.

More than enough time for whoever to do the whatever that put Yolena here. "Cameras?" Because no way does the hotel or the car dealer set these pride and joys up without a camera system.

"Stop me if you've heard this one before," Shay said. "But the camera system was down for maintenance."

Right. Of course. "And the cleaning crews?"

"Hit the bricks at midnight."

I let Russ wrangle the night manager. For his health. Shay and I stayed out of the way of the coroners and the forensics crew. I stopped them before they moved the body, just so I could put Yolena's last pose into my...

"Hold on, everybody."

"See, I told you," one of the coroners told his partner. "Don't ever think she's finished."

The guy's face looked familiar, but not enough to chase down at the moment. "I need one of you to go around to the other passenger door. That's right, now, if you can, lift her up, please?"

It took both of them; she'd come to this place recently, there was no rigor yet. Which was a good thing, from my point of view, because if she'd been locked in place the coroners wouldn't have been able to replicate the pose.

"Anyone else..." but the forensics lead was already moving, the camera clicking and whirring. "You've worked with me before, too?"

"We both did, the Maggie Stimps case. Lisa Morgan."

"Kelli Hench. Do you see it, too?" The pose, I meant.

"I think so. She looks like one of those GQ spreads, the kind that take up two pages."

Exactly. The centerfold, with clothes on, a very high end sheer and lace and faded peach, a cloud of dreams across the leather and Yolena's skin. Her leg up, skirt well above her knee and hinting, the other leg down on the floor board, maybe her hair tousled maybe just a natural cut but regardless.

We wouldn't have replicated the pose, not the way they'd done it originally. But Lisa's pictures, even with Gary and Wilson, the coroners I now remembered, holding Yolena's body in place, the pictures told us the parts of the story we needed to see.

The way he told the story. "Shay, how long has it been since you and McCall found Leanna Ringham?"

"Three months." Jackson looked at me, wondering, then back to the posed scene. I saw it when the realization came on, through all the other bodies that had come along in the meantime. "You think it's the same killer?"

"For now, we treat them as different. But we'll need to keep our eyes open." Common elements could be coincidence, so I wasn't yet ready to commit.

In public. In my mind, Peter Pan had already made the connection he'd so dearly wanted made.

Once Wilson and his partner had Yolena's body moved, Morgan and her team could access the car more fully. I stood behind them, a Texas two-step, forward to look over their shoulders, then back out of the way when one of the CSI's needed to move through. "No blood?"

"Small drops, on the leather, but nothing like the Ringham case."

"Right, let me go look at the body before they get away."

Wilson was ready to go now. "Can't you wait for my boss's report?"

I snorted. "Yeah, sure, but not before I get a closer look myself."

There was no major wound; there was, however, a small puncture wound. A needle mark on the back of her neck, with faint traces of blood on the high collar of the dress to go with it. "There. Ok, Wilson, she's all yours. Take care of her, please."

Now it was his turn to snort. Wilson and Gary pulled the blanket tight across her and wheeled her to the elevators.

Russ Ortiz got out of the elevator when it opened, dodged the gurney and made his way to our end of the investigation. "How many people in this operation do you think know about the camera maintenance?"

"Let's see... day and night managers, anybody who's gotta walk by the server closet. Hmm, half of Houston might be too large an estimate."

He laughed. "Not by much. I counted fifty-three on the email chain the night manager showed me."

"And they're just the ones who got tagged on the email. You think the people pushing carts and brooms get email?" I shook my head, and went back to watching Lisa Morgan's team work.

Russ came in to join me. Well, from the other side of the car, anyway. "At least I know which security outfit's in charge of things. But they'll have another fifty people on their list."

I smiled, but the car probably blocked it. "Have fun sorting through those lists. It's your toll for dragging me into this at four in the morning."

He grumbled about it, but Russ made the calls, and the interviews. When the dust settled, I think he had almost a hundred different people he had to trace down. All of them with alibis of one sort or another.

Me, I worried the coroner and the forensics. The coroner I couldn't do much about, other than show up at the autopsy. Which went about as I'd expected. A text book exam.

Leanna had the cut, the exsanguination, and the injection site that looked to be the chief means he'd used to effect these things. Yolena had the injection site. But where was the cause of death?

"Heart failure," but that's where we all end up. Leanna's blood and tissue work had, eventually, shown atropine and scopolamine. Datura. A very traditional means, I'd told myself then. And, a simple way to get the drugs that didn't involved commercial means, for someone who knew what they were doing.

What did Yolena's tox results show? Only... "The dosage was significantly more influential, Kelli."

"Overdose?" I asked Doctor Trainor. Assistant M.E., she'd caught the Ringham case for us. So the whole team had come to the conclusion these were linked cases. Well before I wanted to let certainty block our thought processes.

The datura changed my caution. Not completely. But I was a lot more willing to let everyone go ahead and put the two together.

Tru Trainor's office was a lot more organized than mine. No more clean, but at least her piles were organized and stable. "Yes. Given the heart failure, and some of the other things we found, the Scruggs woman overdosed. Was it intentional, you want me to tell you next?"

Ok, yes.

"Can't say that. Maybe Scruggs reacted to something Ringham didn't."

Or, maybe the scenes were meant to play in very different ways. "If she overdosed, where's the vomit, then?"

"Her throat muscles were significantly strained, and the capillaries in her eyes fractured. Yes, she showed signs of the violent nausea typically associated with the overdose. But just a little of the stomach contents appeared to come along with it. You've got quite a thorough killer to track down, Detective."

The forensics team were similarly helpful. As in, just a little bit more information; he'd left no trace of himself, on Yolena or in the car. But the dress had a story to tell. "It's a custom job, Kelli." Mary Sullivan showed me the tag, one of the little handmade ones sewn into the dress's collar.

The couture ones. The tags there for shows and shoots, to cover the designer's intellectual property. Not the wash and wear tags like you'd find on the rack at Dillards. "She's a model, Mary, maybe she just had it in her closet. Who's the designer, do we know?"

"Felicity DeRoix."

Which I could read on the tag. I grumbled about that.

"Do I look like I spend money on custom dresses, Kelli? You're the detective here, right?"

I shook my head, ignoring the laughter. No, Mary Sullivan no more wasted the money than I did. Not when chemicals and blood were her every day.

Of course, tracking down a custom tailor these days... but then Google's the all knowing, right?

"Holy shit, I should have known." I told myself this when I walked into the tailor's.

I also managed to catch my tongue before I blurted out "Ross Walker". It's been a while; she's changed. I've, well, gotten older.

"Kelli," she greeted me. Warm, professional, though she did walk around from the other side of the counter.

"Felicity's quite busy," the younger man working the front for her had told me.

I showed him my i.d., and told him "I doubt it will take long." He'd gone into the back and brought out a shock of old acquaintance.

We didn't date, when I'd known Ross Walker. He'd been free and restrained, private and shockingly public in antics. We'd drunk wine from two dollar bottles, then puked in the gutter one after the other. College friends, near as brother and sister as anything, and then he'd gone to Tokyo for an internship.

"I wondered if you'd just stayed in Tokyo and never come home."

She sat in one of a pair of comfortable sitting chairs in the front room. Careful staging, so her customers could sit for tea or coffee or stronger while Felicity worked her magic. "I did stay, for about three years. Then Paris, Rome. I've been back, oh, it'll be two years in May, won't it Carlos?"

She called the last over her shoulder, to the back room from which, if the sounds and smells were any indication, Carlos had been pressed into making coffee. I took the other sitting chair, leaning back into velvet and comfort. "You've been successful, I hope?"

Her smile was predatory; it lit the room, absolutely.

However she'd earned her shop and her place in town, though, given Felicity's smile I'm glad I wasn't in the room when she did it. "There're an awful lot of people who should be glad I'm a peaceful lady, Kelli. Otherwise you'd be visiting me behind glass. This is no business for wimps."

Which confirmed an outsider's view of that world, if only a little. "I'm afraid I'm not here just for old time's sake, Felicity. We seem to have stumbled on one of your dresses. Do you happen to know a model named Yolena Scruggs?"

"Oh, she's going places. What happened?"

We were two months in for Yolena; a couple months before Werthal and Hapstam were convicted. Far enough along that I didn't need to hide anything from anyone. "Yolena was murdered, Felicity. About two months ago."

Long enough for the tox results to come back, and for Russ to chase his flock of wild geese. I told Felicity of the dress, then.

"I gave it to her close to a year ago. Carlos, honey, was it last spring?"

Carlos had taken advantage of the boss taking care of the front room to sneak into the back. "What? Oh, Yolena, that's right. She went along with that troop to Milan."

Felicity turned back to me. "One of the money people, not Fertita but one of his crowd, she's enough part of the scene so that she could twist arms for the Texas models. I sent along a trunk full of my work, and told the Houston lads and ladies they could pick one each to take home." She set her coffee down and headed to the back. "Here, she sent me a thank you card."

"When's the last time you got a thank-you card from a kid so young?"

Felicity chuckled when she passed me the card. "You're saying most of my clients are old and come from money?" She pointed at the box of such cards. "Almost all of those are from my clients, Kelli. But, you're right. Yolena was one of the few, especially the models, who took the time."

It was a Hallmark Store card, likely. But Yolena had put the time and the thought into it; she'd signed in purple ink, with a heart and a smile, and a picture of herself in the dress, cut from some fashion magazine. "She and the dress suited each other."

"Damned right. I wonder how much blood she shed to get dibs on it?"

The photo was a tiny one, not much bigger than a postage stamp, really. In it, Yolena strutted down a catwalk, photographers arrayed to capture the moment, her arms and legs and the casual draped peach of the dress arrayed to their best combination.

Did he see her, there? How else would he have known of the dress? This was no workaday outfit, built to abuse with coffee and salad dressing and getting up and down a hundred times a day. The material too fine, the stitches almost an afterthought, would Yolena have worn it often?

Or would she have placed it in a closet? Behind plastic and paper, protected. Brought it ought only for special occasions, and special only rarely means going to the club.

A memory flashed through my brain, then, of Leanna Reollic coming into Numbers, fully arrayed in finery and attitude for a night of being seen by the hungry and the wired, the after-midnight crew.

Was Yolena like that, then? Maybe she'd worn the dress out, sweaty and drink laden and soaked in the uncare of dancing 'til hell wouldn't have it.

The pictures didn't show that; Mary Sullivan had shown me a dress that had been treasured. No sweat stains. No hints of true wear. The velcro tape at the back, the kind a designer throws in because she didn't have the time to sew in the buttons or hooks or whatever, Carlos this thing has to be packed tonight...

That tape had been, was, almost unused. Clean, no folds at the corners from use.

"She loved your gift, Felicity. I'm sorry to have to be the one to tell you she died in it."

Felicity turned her head away from me; to look out the window, to breathe and remember. No tears.

Just a little hitch in her breath before she turned back to me. "That's not the kind of immortality I look for, Kelli."

"I know." I could have asked her a few more questions about Yolena.

Instead, I turned the conversation to just visiting. Catching up with an old friend. It's possible, just, that one or the other of us would have remembered, would have caught up to Peter Pan just a little sooner if I had pressed Felicity more that day.

Possible, but I doubt it. I didn't know which questions would have turned the right memory loose, not then.

Unfortunately, Peter Pan had two more victims to go before I would connect the dots of memory.

For this week's free story, we return to Detective Kelli Hench and the Neverland Disorder. I call this one An Ancient Yearning.

...I'm not supposed to be alone with you...

Marlena Shaw: Go Away Little Boy; Carol King and Gerry Goffin, songwriters

Here as April is wrapping itself up, I've put out a new collection. Collected: Volume 2 by M. K. Dreysen puts together eleven short stories and tales.

Eleven short stories, dear reader. Of backlot nightmares and hopscotch daydreams. Of that moment when the one person you tried desperately to forget comes asking for... a little favor. Here: walk corridors between worlds with M. K. Dreysen. Step carefully from a marriage ceremony with the most uninvited guest into that time where gods fight over the old and the new. Pass warily near the guardian when he approaches the end of the watch and toward the learned scholar and her most terrible discovery yet. Bow a head in respect when you see the warrior with a shovel; consider the weight a child bares when teachers conspire. Fly along as the enemy you never admit to lays traps for your future self. Lay a shoulder to the walls you never dared tear down. All those here have their dreams, dear reader. Will you turn your eyes to regard them? M. K. Dreysen's Collected: Volume 2 brings together eleven short stories of horror, adventure, mystery and magic.

You can find Collected: Volume 2 in both print and ebook versions.

For the print version, find it at this Amazon link.

For ebook, click your favorite of the links here for Kobo, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords, Amazon/Kindle, and Books2Read for many more.

To A Thief by M. K. Dreysen - A Story of Trying to Be A Little Too Smart About It...

"I am an ambiguous demonstration for the possible futures available," the speaker on the wall told her.

"Does that mean anything? I mean, besides the fact that you're dealing with a little bit of an unknown, unknowable world," the lady returned.

"While I understand that you've given an answer in the form of a question, I am afraid that I'm unable to parse the general meaning of your question. Please try again."

"There are days where I wonder if I've chosen the right form of work," the lady finished. "Fine, let's try it again. What's your general programming statement?"

The rest of the interview went according to the plan. The AI was stable, so far as she could tell. A little limited, just a security protocol, but then this was the public facing part of the machine. The inner workings weren't available, unless she could provide some form of access.

A fancy security protocol, of course. The plebes sitting in the office weren't just set down to face the muzak anymore. A little bit of company propaganda, a little bit of internet access if they wanted, carefully filtered and all data sifted for pretty little nuggets. There were possible benefits to entertaining one's guests, if one were to be so inclined as to provide them with a welcome mat, as it were.

The lady could have gone further. But there were other prying ears listening. The guy sitting in the other chair, nervous and clutching his magazine, could have been a new job hire, a contractor, or someone from the company's warehouses called onto the carpet.

Or, he could be a plant, well-trained and playing his part. The odds of that were a lot lower though, when someone officious came out of the elevators to escort him to somewhere in the rest of the building.

"I apologize. Ms. Wright did say that, if allowed, she'd be happy to let you have limited access to the upstairs coffee room."

If the guy who'd just left was any indication, the company wanted no random dweebs walking the floors. The AI could let her on or off at any floor if it wanted, give her some room to breathe, but there'd be a human walking along with her everywhere she went.

The movie jumped into her head. "Oh, sorry, I just needed another caffeine jolt, wow are these conference calls boring." Or, "Hey, did you need the bathroom, it's just around the corner." Like that, someone just happening to wander along and poke their head into her space whenever the opportunity presented.

"Maybe next time. I'm hoping this is the first visit of many."

"I look forward to reading your reports," the company AI told her. And then it played some Fleetwood Mac, not Tusk or anything like that, this was one of Christine's songs.

The lady looked at her watch. Two in the afternoon, the AI must have been following some researcher's productivity generating music profile.

She smiled, too. How many of the people listening to this were even old enough to know which song the thing was playing? She had a thing for old music, her great-grandparents' music in this case. But that had to be a rare hobby these days.

The elevators dinged at last. The lady didn't need to look at her watch. Forty minutes, basically, just enough time to, if she'd wanted to, get nervous, fidget.

Try the AI's programming, since she'd been alone for twenty minutes. Ask a few probing questions where no one obvious was observing her. The social hacking part of the business. Too bad, really, that the AI was a clue.

There were many reasons to get rid of human door minders. The first one was that an AI that could entertain visitors while it summoned human minders, was more than capable of recording those visitors. And catching out the ones who'd made the mistake of attempting to slip past the first level gate guard.

Evie Wright came out of the door of the elevators, smile set on her face and power walking. "Mysha Rodriguez? I am so happy to meet you!"

The lady rose from her couch, hand outstretched and the answering, precisely professional smile on her own face. "Thank you, Ms. Wright. I just hope that I'm up to the job you've got in mind."

The job. Probably the best explanation for the controls keeping her so carefully observed in the building. Evie Wright needed someone who could break into a competitor's building, and security, and walk out with a small, innocuous little secret.

Problem being, such a person was just as capable of doing the same thing to her company. And there was no way of knowing if, or which, one of her competitor's had already hired Ms. Rodriguez to do the same job in reverse.

The woman calling herself Mysha Rodriguez, for the purposes of this meeting, had to admit: in the reverse situation she'd be acting under the same suspicions.

Of course, she'd have a bit different approach. Like not meeting at the company's office building in the first place. It was like keeping their computers safe. If the IT department didn't know that a minimally safe computer was one that was never connected to a network, and could never be connected to a network, she'd eat her hat.

Then again... the internet had told her every bit of this building was owned by the company Wright represented herself as an employee of. The names for each floor were different, all of them subsidiaries of the holding company that sat on the top floor and ran the whole thing.

That was the premise, anyway. The addresses on the corporate papers were all public record. But if someone were up to it, ready to pull off a really elaborate con, they could set things up to look like exactly what Mysha was seeing.

No use being that paranoid, she told herself. You're here on spec.

Still, the information could be useful, someday down the road. If someone ever did hire her to probe this particular company, some familiarity with the way they operated might just be the difference between success and failure.

Mysha followed Evie Wright to the elevators, and then the sixth floor.

"I'll bring you down to Mr. Zylhada's office when we get done, Ms. Rodriguez. He's got another meeting that's running a little over, he asked me to make sure you were comfortable, answer any questions you might have in the meantime."

Cool my heels, Mysha told herself. If the company's what they say they are, just a hazard of timing. If not, well, it's par for the course. Either way... "I hope it's nothing major. I'd hate to drop into the middle of a crisis."

"Just the normal chaos. Monday morning, there're always a few problems to catch up to after the weekend."

The two chatted a bit, Mysha trying a few minor parries and getting nowhere. Evie Wright was very good at her job.

The conversation was just about finished, the pauses getting longer as Mysha tried to think up interesting questions, when the phone flashed on Evie's desk. "That's Raul. Looks like they're finished now." The lady stood up from her desk, and Mysha followed automatically.

She'd noticed Evie's desk was just about sterile. No kid's pictures, no calendar with pictures of whales or Hawaii, nothing. Was it a scam? Maybe this was just one of those offices that kept their people jumping, no personal space to get comfortable in. Could she ask?

"Oh, just timing. Raul requested me when he moved over to the main offices, I've only been here a couple weeks and I'm still settling in."

Sure, Mysha told herself. Logical explanation, and no way to check it without sounding like she was doing more than passing the time. Nerves, that's what she needed to show, simple questions. "Hopefully it's not a big deal working with the bigwigs?" she asked.

Evie laughed as she opened the door to Raul Zylhada's office. "I'll admit, it's a pretty big difference. Out at the warehouses, I'd go weeks at a time without seeing anybody from corporate, and here, I can't turn around without stumbling over one of them."

"A few weeks and you won't know the difference."

"Probably. Hopefully, you'll go through it yourself and we'll get a chance to compare notes. Good luck!" She shut the door behind Mysha.

And then it was time to stick her hand out and get on with the interview. Raul Zylhada came around the desk, hand out, "Good morning, Ms. Rodriguez, I am so glad that you could meet with us. Need anything before we get started, coffee, water? There's a bathroom just down the hall. I know how the traffic can be."

Another chance to snoop, if she wanted to. Another chance to get caught snooping. "I'm ok for now, unless you've got a marathon for me?"

The man chuckled. "That's next time. For now, an hour or so here, then I'll buy lunch."

Let's get down to the business, Mysha translated. The hard core of it would at least wait 'til the next meeting. So this one was just his way of checking her out in person.

With only basic descriptions of the company's problem. Computers, guaranteed, networks electronic and human. The whole thing boiled down to a too close relationship with what should have been a rival company. "One of those accidents of pre-history. Our founder helped them out thirty, forty years ago, partnered on a few contracts, gave them a leg up."

"And your company wrote the contracts with a little bit of eye toward the future."

"That's exactly right." Shared IP, shared resources, audits here and there.

Computer networks in common. "And now you're worried they might be seeing more of your internal networks than you bargained for."

Zylhada lost his smile at that point. "We want the relationships to continue. They've been profitable, and the people on their side are good to work with."

"But?"

"But... Let's say they've snagged a couple contracts recently that they shouldn't have had any business getting. They don't have the expertise to back it up, unless..."

She smiled. "Unless they've managed to get a hold of your data and re-engineer a few of your processes."

Her response was, apparently, just the right way to bring Zylhada's smile back. "And that's the reason we asked you to come in."

She shrugged. "I have to warn you up front. The odds are good they've just managed to find the right person in the right place at the right time. Some academic frustrated with the publish or perish rat race, or a government employee looking to cash out. I hate to spend your money, and it'll be a pretty penny whether I find anything or not, and end up just following the trail to a Ph.D. with time on her hands."

He frowned again, but the expression was brief. "I get that, and if it happens that way, at least we know. Hell, if so, maybe we'll get lucky and find another one waiting where they found that one. If not..."

"You'll know where to shut them down and keep it from happening again."

"Bingo." Zylhada devoted the rest of the meeting to his description of the networks the companies had in common, at least the computer networks. "The personal, well. Most of them are the usual thing, they've hired a few of ours away over the years, we've returned the favor. Plus, we still have those shared projects."

He didn't mention names, then. Once they reached a happy stopping place, he turned her loose to visit the toilets, then offered lunch when Mysha returned. "Anything special? There's a new pub down the road, they've only been open a few weeks. I haven't had a chance to sample it, you up to a bit of an adventure?"

So long as it wasn't trying too hard, she wanted to say. Instead, she said "Sure".

Fortunately, the place wasn't. Trying too hard, that is. Just good burgers, a handful of local brews on tap, there were curries and a handful of other adventures on the menu, but she didn't push it.

Zylhada waited 'til lunch was served to give her a few of the names that had been on his mind. Most of them had no meaning to her, yet. That could wait until she got home and let the internet inform her.

There was a name that was missing. Mysha had put two and two together from the list of operations Zylhada listed in common with their partner companies, her targets. How to ask, though? "Isn't that the plant you brought Ms. Wright over from?"

The man wasn't much of a poker player, not from how low his face fell when she said it. And the way he seemed to assume that she had more of a motive for asking than she'd started the question with. "I'm sure Evie wouldn't have anything..."

Mysha didn't care what they were doing behind closed doors. Office canoodling wasn't her brief. It was the hole in his perceptions that she was now much more interested in. Problem being, if they were screwing on the off time, maybe they were just family hiding the connection from the company nepotism rules, who cares, Mysha needed to know. The connection was the obvious one. Was it the right one? Wright wouldn't be the first executive secretary taking advantage of her connections.

Nor Zylhada the first executive to dip into the company's ink.

Mysha would have to be careful, one way or another. Raul's automatic defensiveness meant even just checking Evie Wright off the list was going to be harder than it needed to be. "If you trust her, so do I. But what if someone's setting her up to take the fall? You'll want to make sure she's protected, clean as a whistle. You don't want someone in your own company playing politics with your own secretary." That ought to do it. If he was going to protect her, whatever the reason, Mysha could use his instincts.

"Right, ok, of course." He was relieved, his shoulders relaxed, the automatic smile almost all the way back from wherever it had retreated to. "Do you need to interview her? Or can you do everything from the network?"

Where Wright wouldn't know about it unless she absolutely had to. "I'll need a significant level of access to your computers to pull that off."

"I can get you administrator privileges for everything. You've already been listed as a new IT hire."

Mysha was impressed, and a little worried. It was her natural home, after all, if she had any sort of home inside one of the companies she worked for. The impressive thing was that he'd set it up without her having to pry it loose. Most times, the keys to the kingdom took a lot more work than this.

She should have known better. The fact of the access was easy enough to establish. The suspicion of the Vice-President in charge of the IT networks that joined all the subsidiaries into one whole beast was a hurdle of a different sort. "I don't understand," the lady told her.

Mysha gave Mrs. Ana Burr her best ingenuous face. "I'm not sure I understand it, either. Mr. Zylhada said something about making sure we didn't have to come back and bother you about anything as the job develops. This way, I'm out of your hair."

"I get the part where you're a new hire for networks. What I don't get is why you're not working for me directly."

That much, Mysha didn't need an oracle to read. Burr wasn't quite to the point of slamming books down, but she was close. There was no question that she was bugged by it. Was it power taken away? "It's a short time gig," Mysha offered.

"What do you mean?"

Mysha danced up to the truth. "I'm an auditor for an outside firm. If I understand things correctly, one of the contracts the gang upstairs signed gives their partners the right to audit you, networks, storage, everything, for security purposes. I need the accesses to do the audits, but if I were to actually come in under your authority..." Would she get the point?

"You'd compromise your position as an auditor."

Bingo.

Burr relaxed after that. She wasn't happy about it, who would be, someone coming in with the power and the right to snoop through everything in the company's electronic demesne, and nothing she could do about it but smile and nod. Mysha didn't care that Burr wasn't happy about it, all she wanted was for her counterpart to accept it.

And let Rodriguez go on about her business. Mysha knew that every login was now precious. Every process she set running, Burr would be logging and watching. But that was ok. There wasn't any need to copy anything across the network, not yet. If it came to that she had the means to hide copies behind other processes. First though, first thing, because maybe just maybe, was to check out Evie Wright.

Network accesses, permissions, where was the lady in question allowed to go, when she went along the e-highways and byways? The list was impressive. Local plant and warehouse managers could keep her out of some areas, but otherwise she could see every drive in the company.

All the hundreds of daily reports, the detritus of years of electronic buildup, old expense reports, calendars, quote sheets, loadouts and EPA permits. File after file and none of it of any particular meaning to Mysha. If there was anything in the company's daily noise, she'd be weeks teasing it out.

What about logins? The next level, the world away, where did Evie go to, when she needed to talk to the world?

The idle time, after four, four-thirty at the latest, and before eight in the a.m., that was when Evie was away from her desk. Had she ever logged in after that? Ignore the cell phone email log ins, if Mysha had to read emails it could wait. Ignore the payroll logins, same thing with paychecks and insurance. It was the logins to other things, the company laptop and private network access.

On the company desktop, the one sitting on her desk, was everything she'd ever done the generic? Internet browser, the default, were there any signs of other browsers? How 'bout other software, non-standard downloads, tools that most wouldn't have any need for or even know existed? Encryption tools?

Software, bytes, everywhere. Mysha dug, and dug, and found only the obvious, at least as far as the drives that administrators could see. There were other levels, weren't there? She'd have to remote into Evie's computer. She'd have to remote into every computer. There were no secrets on the open network.

Which is as it should be, Mysha reminded herself. We are too far removed from ye olden days, she admitted, and Wright was a savvy operator. How else, she'd made the jump to the big office, she'd done her time in the here and there. She'd know that her life was always subject to someone doing exactly what Mysha was doing. Worth digging through just because the company required it.

What did it feel like, Mysha asked herself. To know, every day she walked in Evie Wright would know that there was the possibility there, someone staring over her shoulder, reading her emails, scanning her history and logins. Just in case the company was threatened, or maybe just because they needed dirt because they always needed dirt.

It had been a while since Mysha had needed to feel that way.

Or, rather, since it had mattered. The feds, some precious few big time companies, quite a few other countries around the world, all would, if they knew about her or just by accident, be happy to dig through Mysha's life the same way she dug through Evie Wright's now. But that was a hazard of the job. There was a reason she bought new computers for every gig, and then wiped and donated them to the landfill when she was done. If there was nothing to find, there could be nothing to be nervous about. Was Evie that disciplined?

Mysha examined the network files of the others on her list, plant managers and engineers, forklift operators and lab techs, a secretary or two, even an IT hand. All had either worked with the other company, the target company, worked for them at one time, or had otherwise been involved. Probably more than a few of them were just Raul fishing, hoping there'd be a little bit of dirt to be found. Or they were on the list because that's what Raul could think of, just find the obvious ones, get them out of the bin or into the bin.

Whoever they were, however their names had come to her, none of them were foolish enough to leave "Here's the file where I sold the company down the river" files laying around where someone could find them.

Then again, from Mysha's point of view, what would she expect? In a world of thumbdrives, why would anyone with physical access to these computers need to leave anything around? Sneakernet would more than suffice, load up the files, drawings and schedules, hell, account numbers, a gig or two at a time, and then walk on over to wherever, a kiosk at the library would do. And email would do the rest?

Why then this tedious business? Three long days and nights of sorting and snooping through the network drives. Then, after hours when Mysha knew that the vast majority weren't logged into their desktop machines, remoting in to their machines and going bit by bit through their private drives. Why do it?

Same reason a forensics team still dusts for fingerprints in an age where latex gloves are a stop at Wal-Mart away from anywhere. Because most didn't bother. It took an iron will to follow the discipline Mysha did, to build up the habits of a pro. And...

Evie Wright didn't seem to have that discipline. Close, oh so close, she'd come just that far to not leaving a trace Mysha could find with this slow, tedious, boring search. Oh so close.

It was the chat program. The one the company used, a standard one, it came installed on every computer. Free for most, companies bought the more secure version that they could control. Either way, it logged in by default, let everyone know whether the computer operator was awake, away from the desk, whatever.

It logged all conversations, too. Not all of the video calls, just when and where and who. But certainly all of the messages, text was cheap storage. And only on the local disk, the company wasn't that paranoid. Today, maybe tomorrow would be different, these were just sitting there, waiting for a day like this. When Mysha was hunting backtrail.

Wright had treated the video conferencing like she suspected she was being watched. Only internal calls.

She'd been a little more forthcoming over text, though. "What's up" to friends, "How's it going" to her daughter.

"Be ready, I'm sending something to you tonight" to the lead engineer at the target company. Multiple times, all the same message. They'd started a year or so ago. A couple a month or so, until about six months into it. Then every week. And lately?

Every day. Did she know the ride was coming to an end? No. She'd been paid more, that's all.

Electronic payments. That was the other breadcrumb, sitting underneath a Personal folder, where the family pix were stored, lists of this and that, videos of what was outside the window, login information for personal accounts she'd need to access during the day.

That's where Wright kept the folder marked deposits. She was a good little bookkeeper, she printed out every paystub after they were electronically deposited into her personal checking account. W-2's, W-4's, insurance paperwork and 401k statements.

And files marked as extra, with a date. The dates started just a year or so ago, once a month, then more recently once a week, and, finally, once a day. Weren't that a funny coincidence, Mysha asked herself. And what was the payment, Mysha wondered, how much on the barrelhead, that they'd pay so promptly? Fifty cents, micropayments, a lite habit for light work?

'Oh, my, no,' Mysha whispered to herself. Then she whistled, because that's the only response, staring there at each payment worth more than any month's salary Evie Wright had drawn over the same period. 'And every day, too. How many years of retirement did you build up, Ms. Evie?'

If there was a date certain for Evie, a glide path to the gold watch and the dribbled out pension and the little bit of 401k, then she'd managed to move it up by a good few years. Or maybe make sure she didn't need to worry too much about whether the Social Security Administration could ever get their act together. Either way?

Either way, someone had found her price, and it was a pretty penny indeed, all things told. Maybe the CEO wouldn't sneeze at the amount total, maybe he would, but for someone down in the trenches where the money was made?

It was enough; Mysha set a bot to crawl through Wright's machine and copy every file. And then she set another one, just to copy the contents of the incriminating folders. This one was a lot faster, and it should be more than enough evidence needed. Companies didn't need a lot, there would be no need for evidential procedures.

"Someone set her up," Zylhada told her.

It was the obvious response. "What about the chat records?"

"How hard would it be, if they were already going through all that work?"

Not too hard, Mysha had to admit. Easy script to change the handle in the responses, another to merge the files into the chat records. "I admire your ability to trust your secretary. It's your money. You just have to tell me one thing."

"What's that?"

"That you're prepared to hear the answer you don't want to hear." The most likely answer, given what they had, was that Evie Wright was exactly what her hard drive testified to. Greed, revenge, jealousy, some combination of all three, that's what the machine had to say about it.

Was it telling the whole truth? How was she going to prove the negative?

Mysha started at the top. If she'd decided to set Evie Wright up to take a fall, how would she go about doing it? First thing, she'd need... not just access. The operating systems were a little more sophisticated than all that. The network drives, those a little outside hacking could get to, but the inside drives, the private ones where Evie's little bit of trash had been found, that she had had to have direct access to the machine. She had to be sitting here in the office to get to it. The IT department had set their remote access permissions to a very specific set of servers, whitelisted and hard-wired down to the serial numbers on the network cards. This too could be fooled, of course, but why?

Not when the easiest way to bypass that was a thumbdrive in the pocket and a few minutes alone with the machine. Maybe an administrator's password, maybe a cracker's code or two, that would speed things along. The right people running it, it would take five minutes, tops.

Five minutes that Mysha suspected the AI would know about. "Are you able to break down security footage for me?"

"I assume you have a search pattern?" the disembodied voice replied.

"I do. Anyone accessing Evie Wright's computer besides Ms. Wright." Most times, that sort of request would be a nightmare. Too many hours of blank footage, too many bits dumped on the floor because they'd run out of space and reason to keep the footage.

Evie'd only been sitting at that desk, in this office, for a few weeks. And sure enough, there someone was, not an IT jock fixing things up for her after hours, either.

Just Mr. Raul Zylhada himself. Sitting down to his secretary's desk, a couple times; after hours. And then just a couple days ago, in the few minutes before Evie showed up for work. The day Mysha had come to visit the first time. "Load everything up, then come back and check to make sure it was all as you wanted. But, and here's the point, why the hell are you going through this song and dance, if you know you're the one who set her up?"

The whole thing stunk, Mysha told herself. To High Heaven, and beyond. There were aliens circling the galaxy, accusing each other of passing gas in the spaceship, that kind of stink. What kind of idiot sets her on his own trail? Either he wanted Evie to take the fall, and he was playing the part, "I just know that someone set her up," he'd say, to whoever came and asked. "My hands are tied," was the implied tagline.

Or, what? "I wanted someone to catch me?"

In which case, Mysha told herself to fold up the laptop, walk out of the building, burn the identity and the computer and the laptop, and don't have anything to do with these people ever again. Sure, a few weeks' work lost, it was better than getting tangled up in someone else's psychodrama.

She didn't. There had to be a story here. She wanted to know what it was.

"Evie's my god-daughter." He sat across his desk from her, head down, staring at his lap. "When I started working under the table, I'd taken this promotion, Evie was on the other side of the state from me. She didn't have anything to do with any of it, she was nice and safe."

"And then, somebody begged you to get her a promotion."

He shrugged. "My sister, her mom. Evie's her youngest, Anias worried Evie wasn't getting anywhere. Evie's got a degree but she was stuck at the plant. If she was here, maybe she'd get on a promotion path to somewhere."

"And then someone started asking questions about what your competitors were up to."

The rest of his confession was easy. He'd been waiting to tell someone all about it; here at last was his audience.

The hard part was the gun he was holding on her. He'd had it in his lap the whole time, where he thought she couldn't see it. Now he brought it up. An ugly little stainless steel thing. Ugly or not, it would do the job. "You know the AI is recording this," she pointed out.

"Sure. And it'll be happy to wipe the recording when I ask it to. There's not enough disk space in the world to hold all the recordings, so a few extra blank spots in the recording won't matter six months from now. Not for a random time in a random day."

"About that..." She'd done her homework. The AI had its recording. And it had called the cops for her.

They came in to finish up, Evie Wright in their wake. That was the only point where Raul Zylhada showed any remorse. "Why the hell did you have her here, listening to this?" he whispered, tears breaking out now as the cops led him past his niece in tears. "Oh, honey, I'm so sorry..."

"She's the other corporate officer I report to," Mysha reminded him. "And I rather thought she'd be best off seeing it herself."

Evie made sure the payoff matched the offer letter. "It might take me a couple days to get it paid out. Upstairs are going to have kittens, breech presentation."

"And I'm sure you'll need a few days to recover, yourself. Your uncle..."

Evie hugged herself, stared at the floor. When she finally lifted her face, there were traces of tears down her cheeks. But there were no traces of remorse in the clear green of her eyes. "That sonofabitch. I can't wait 'til I tell mom."

Mysha imagined a flash of steel, knives and plates and forks scattering across a Thanksgiving tablecloth. She didn't envy Evie and her family's path forward. She shook Evie's hand, thanked her, and told her good luck.

Mysha did check the AI's permissions on the way out of the building. No surprise there, all access denied was the only response. That's ok, she told herself. One way or another, she'd be back soon. The company was a target now, a known, live vulnerability. They'd be fighting off the vultures; Mysha had a feeling she'd be back in sweeping up the pieces soon enough.

That, or maybe she'd be circling overhead herself.

This week's free story will be coming soon. It's one that I call To A Thief.

It's a little tale of getting too smart for your own good. And how the world tends to jump on you in response.

...You must face alone the plans you make...

Sarah McLachlan: Back Door Man, Sarah McLachlan, songwriter

Soldiering On by M. K. Dreysen - A Tale Of Making Do With What You've Got

Marcus Hudson wasn't entirely sure just which day it was that he gave up.

Not on life, that didn't happen for years and years and years. Not on the joy of simple things, that he never did give up.

Success, well, he'd not really given up on that. He'd just come to grips with his own version of it. Not what his hive mates had in mind, when they thought of success, kudos from That Which Gave Life, mates and offspring to gather the stars. Gestures of, not good will precisely, but perhaps momentary acts of mercy, from Those Who Know.

Here in the ass end of the universe, assigned the poor task of observation of an unruly, untempered, ignorant, barely sentient species, Marcus had resigned himself quickly to the fact that whatever success he found for himself was going to have to be categorized in ways only he could score. If nothing else, the odds that any of his birth cohort would ever even know of anything he did here were so remote as to be laughable. There being no one else to mark up anything he did, nor even to know that it happened, there just wasn't any other choice.

And in the simple terms of the mass of humanity, those poor dumb bastards he'd been tasked with keeping an eye on, most of the scurrying ridiculous fools would have said that Marcus had given up on success pretty much from the day he'd graduated high school. That's when he'd set himself to be, of all things, an accountant.

No military, no scientist or doctor, not, heavens forfend, a lawyer or an entrepreneur. But a simple accountant. Do the taxes every spring, spend the rest of the year patiently explaining to his business clients why they couldn't claim that as an expense, or that, or for Christ's sake not that!

No to being a carpenter, electrician, or even a plumber for that matter. No earning a decent wage right off the bat and rising up to master's license and starting his own business. No, Marcus had to spend four years, plus the CPA bit, on student loans and scraping book and rent money from a handful of summer jobs, before he ever got the chance to earn a penny. And then it was ten years after before he'd earned enough to pay off the loans and contemplate a house for Elena and the boys.

By which point, wait, what was the point again, Marcus?

The point was being in a place to see more than anyone would ever know. It really was amazing, Marcus had to admit to himself, what he could learn by having open access to everyone's books. Whether keeping them himself, or the audits that he was forever traveling for, Marcus was privileged to get a good hard look at the way the world went round, from its money-oiled insides. For an observer, well ok then a spy on humanity, he couldn't have chosen a much better avenue.

The views of his classmates weren't much more interesting to him than the mostly theoretical views of his birth cohort. The only difference being, his classmates weren't light years away. That, and that he made himself go to the class reunions every ten years, so he had to know the views of his classmates up close and personal. Rather than imagining them, late at night when he stared at the Darkness Above.

His wife, Elena had started wondering years ago when Marcus would give up on their sex life. Oh, she admitted they were well matched, comfortable in that way that old married couples are. Touches in the dark, mostly, hugs, casual handholds here and there, he wasn't demanding or anything. She'd just started sweating at night, her menses were spotting now more than flowing, and the whole thing struck her now as more silly, those few minutes of sweating and grunting. Even the orgasms, real as they were, were more work than she remembered from the days before the boys were born. Elena knew that her patience with the whole matter was about exhausted. Now she just hoped that Marcus was ready to let it all just kind of fade away.

But sex and the complexities of a comfortable long term pair bond weren't what Marcus was giving up on. The physical part, he knew that was looking less and less like something they'd be keeping up with, but the rest of it, well, both he and Elena were content. No reason to give up on something like that.

No, what Marcus was giving up on was something he'd trained himself to not think about. Not even dream about, if he could help it. No long imaginings, in the time drifting off to sleep, no pictures in his head, no whispers into the Dark.

Marcus was giving up on the Voice. The Whisper. That which could command him, draw him in. Push him to greatness, or to debase himself in front of all that might be or ever was. Demand loyalty, information, that he murder children or infiltrate the highest echelons of the human government.

The Voice of what? The Voice of the Hive.

Not Those Who Know. They were From Beyond, outside of kenning. Past, perhaps, his capacity to understand.

The Hive was the closest that Marcus would ever come to knowing Those Who Know. It grew him, his hivemates, perpetuated them, scattered them all, these poor spores, to the stars, and gave them their one true purpose. Spawn, conquer, create.

Observe. That's what the Voice had Whispered, night after patient night, across galaxies and nebula, through dust and vacuum; through the patient years of learning to be human, until that singular moment, the night when he'd listened, well and truly, to the Whisper and comprehended what it had to say. What it demanded of him. Observe. Learn. And be ready to give that knowledge when required.

The Voice, his most fundamental companion; his first conscious mentor. That night, when he'd recognized that the Voice was a Thing of Power, one which could command him, had also been the night of his senior prom. Marcus had his epiphany. His date, unfortunately, hadn't survived the experience. From Marcus's point of view, she had perhaps been necessary. He'd needed something, some small energy source outside of himself, to power the transition to full consciousness.

The Voice, on the other hand, had chided him for going beyond What Was Required. Marcus had almost, but not quite, given up right then and there, shamed by the only sin. Presumption. But the Voice had allowed him some measure of forgiveness. Enough so that he'd spent every night since, staring up in the Beyond, doing the only thing he'd been requested to do. Listening. And then going out into the light of day and observing, as he'd been instructed to do.

No more, and no less.

Every day, since that point, every hour, he'd had something to remind himself of. Marcus Hudson had to remind himself that he'd screwed up, monumentally. There was pain down that route. Tortures unimaginable, at least to those with whom he was stuck sharing a planet. His imagination, his capacity, was more than capable of encompassing the possibles.

Nightmares weren't images of falling, not for such as him. Nightmares were those nights when the Whisper didn't come. When It left him, all on his own, to think about what he'd done wrong. And then to remember that he was here, so far away from the embrace of hive and Totality, and here he would be forever. There would be no Call to Return, if he didn't follow his Command.

And so he did. Right up to the moment when someone new, a security guard he'd never seen before, a ponytail and glasses were about all he recognized of her. When she sat down next to him on the bench where he habitually took his peanut butter sandwich and banana, he didn't really notice. People were always sharing the bench with him, the park in front of their office building was right in the middle of the city. Coffee shop traffic in the morning, lunch crowd at the cafe at the front of the park here at noon, and a good number just like Marcus, studious types with their well-counted calories and well-matched proteins and vegetables balanced.

Marcus wasn't yet so far gone that he'd had to give up the bread. But he'd at least switched over to whole wheat. That wasn't that big a deal, he kind of liked it better, just that extra bit of flavor and texture.

She sat down next to him, he'd passed her a couple times; he knew she'd have to start asking names, but they hadn't turned her loose on her own yet. Her partner at the desk knew most of the faces, so he'd taken the lead.

"I know your face. It's been given to me to Do." She said it matter of factly, the Summons he'd come to never expect.

"I am directed to observe." Didn't matter what she had to say about herself; if she was who she claimed to be, she would know that there were no commands to be passed between Those Who Serve. The Call was the only Source. It had ever been so, from birth to this moment. And Marcus wasn't in a position to test the waters, not after his mistake.

She smirked at him. Openly, perhaps she was so brave as to pretend to status. No hive member could claim such. They were servants, no other path was open to them. "I would never dare to give you orders, observer. Merely something more to observe. And, perhaps, to warn you to pay attention to the Call. I suspect unusual circumstances will require us to use atypical measures."

Unusual circumstances? Marcus made an effort now, to gauge the physical age of the young woman sharing his bench, and then to guess at the age of the spore buried in her mind. How much interaction, how many times around the Wheel, how much experience had she had with the mass of humanity? Just one of their short lives? Perhaps two?

This was Marcus's first cycle to observe anyone, much less humanity, this planet, and he'd learned even in just these forty years that these people were always involved in unusual circumstances. Self-murder, yes, on an epic scale. Shitting the bed greed, indifference bordering on blindness, these were how humanity pissed on the trail and warned their own what the boundaries were, decade after decade. Anyone who pretended to believe these were unusual times had never bothered to look around.

The Hive as a whole would be aware of this, surely. So perhaps she pretended to individuality. Perhaps Those Who Do could be forgiven, not for visions of status, so much as for pretensions to individual success.

She would not have been warned away from events such as his prom night. Those would have been, probably, considered as training. Necessary tests, like gauging the sharpness of a knife against the skin of a tomato. The only way the tools could be considered useful, known to be useful, testing.

Marcus had known of three others who claimed membership in The Hive. Not a one of those others had he been in any danger of running into five minutes after they met. The first he'd met on a plane on the way to his first big audit. The second, when he and Elena had taken their children to Orlando. The third had been a passing stranger on the subway, someone on a tourist trip to see the Liberty Bell.

Assuming she was for real, he would have to pass her, wave at her, see that smirk every morning for the next unknowable period of his life. And every night, he'd have to listen to the Voice, wondering if she was correct. If she was better at observing than he was, and he'd be called into Service in a new way. Would he have to learn to Do? Would he turn his observations to the next possible step?

Was it time to subjugate humanity?

Marcus didn't know it. That was the moment. It is not given to all, to know when the little moments arrive, the ones that change the path forward. Sometimes, they're easy to see. Sometimes, they pass as just another point in time.

It wasn't time for that, subjugation and conquering, not from Marcus's point of view. There was the easy thing, ignoring her. She was not The Voice whispering in his ears at night, in the quiet times. He might have gone delusional enough to be seeing faces and hearing voices, he could admit it was a possibility.

There was just precious little evidence that he had to pay attention to her. There was no fresh epiphany waiting that night, after the kids and cats and wife were safely asleep and he had nothing to do but wait and listen. There were no instructions, no bolt from the blue or Command to change anything.

It was a whole lot of nothing.

So he waved at her when he walked into the building, and he nodded at the things she told him when she sat down next to him on his lunch bench. It was a pleasant way to pass the time, listening to her.

"They know so little, these humans." Or, "They've just barely begun to play with the forces of the universe, and yet they believe they have discovered all there is to know of them."

Marcus had to admit, he'd had similar thoughts. Listening to her discover these things was kind of like listening to his kids. All the world in front of them, her, and they had it all figured out.

And just like them, she had that current of contempt for those who'd traveled the path ahead of her. Lurking underneath all of her comments, just like any other young fool, the eternal question. "Why in the hell didn't you do anything about this when it was your turn?"

Marcus tried, he really did, to remember when, if, he'd carried that same chip on his shoulder. He didn't think so. What was the point, he'd been an adult, married and on his way, before he'd ever met another of his kind in this form. And carrying a grudge against humanity was kind of silly, kind of like being pissed off at ants, or roaches, or a herd of cows.

They had no real volition, not as he understood these things. Letting himself feel anger, frustration, at their stumbling efforts to Know was as pointless as blaming a puppy for pissing on the floor. And about as useful, for one who'd been directed to simply observe and do nothing.

"When did you know?" he asked her. Three or four days later, two or three hours all told of listening to her vision of herself.

She seemed a little shocked at the question. He wondered if she thought of him as anything more important than the humans around them. It was a fair idea, Marcus admitted to himself. If he was to be nothing more than an adjunct to her plans, she'd have no reason to pay much attention to him.

Really, when he considered the whole thing, and his place in it, he was kind of surprised she'd continued talking to him.

As it turned out, she'd only noticed The Voice over the past year or so. "I had a rough couple of semesters. I ended up on academic probation for a year."

"Had you been privileged to hear Whispers before?" Had she really gone so far, only to hear The Voice when she was desperate for a new place in life?

"Hints, I think. It came to me, then, in full glory. Told me that I had a Purpose, something far more important to do than recover my academic career." Her human parents had gotten her the security gig, an easy way to pass the time while she waited out her year.

The Voice considered this a good time to begin her preparations. At least, that's what she told him.

"Were you told to seek me out?"

"No. I recognized you, your Purpose shines around you like a beacon."

Oh, now wasn't that a kick in the pants; Marcus knew the other members of his hive when he saw them. There were subtle indications, smell, things visible only to his Sight. The indications were subtle, though, and never yet had he seen anything that would indicate to him the Purpose, the Calling, that any of the others followed. And he'd had the good taste not to ask.

If the others saw him differently, though...

"Have you met others, then?" he continued.

"You are the second. The first was... less than helpful." She didn't elaborate, and he was left to speculate to himself what she meant.

If she was directed to activity, to prepare herself to engage this world, and then to seek to control it, what then would she have done if another of the hive was not helpful in her pursuit? Should he ask?

The question bothered him. It lay on him, almost as much as the quiet, the way The Voice yet refused to provide direction. Should he pry?

"One wonders what you meant by less than helpful. I'd hate for you to have gone through these first stages of your goals without receiving the proper support." He needed to be careful, he told himself. The threat was implicit to the situation.

"She refused to believe that it had been given to me to Do. It was unfortunate that I couldn't leave her in such a questioning state. I, we, remain vulnerable in this state."

And now, the threat was made explicit. If he wasn't careful, Marcus would find himself in a similar situation, wouldn't he? If she believed him to be a threat, he would be removed.

Problem being, to discover what she might consider to be a threat. He'd never questioned her Purpose, and he wasn't about to now. Marcus just needed to question her boundaries.

Find out where the lines were, the buried ones that he couldn't cross, unless he absolutely had to.

This was harder than hard. Being an auditor had its advantages, though. Pouring through records, asking the questions no one wanted to answer, or more often, the questions they couldn't quite answer.

She was like that, he found. A bundle of nerves and tensions, strung together and held that way by... not willpower. "What sort of entanglements are you engaged with?"

Meaning, parents? Girlfriends, boyfriends, drug habits?

"I... this person I was before... has a boyfriend." She didn't go any further.

He guessed the reason. "A fiance, or someone who was prepared to become so?"

"Yesss. Unfortunately. I... this person I was... had led him on."

Marcus wasn't quite sure if he should do so, but he stepped into the implied breach of the conversation anyway. "And you don't yet know..."

"How to get rid of him. Or..."

"Whether you should? I've been married going on thirty years now." They'd met in college, second year, he and Elena. An art history class, of all things, he'd sought out avenues to train his sight and mind, observational avenues that had suggested themselves. A little of this, a little of that, learning to see and to listen.

She'd been an artist in high school, and had yearnings for what might have been. The art classes were her way of feeding the spirit while still working on the degree her parents wanted her to get.

"You built this life, then?"

"There are many ways to blend in until the time comes."

She almost said it, then. Admitted that The Voice didn't reassure her, these nights. Instead, "There may be... demands. For Doing."

He wondered if she was questioning him, or herself. "I'm sure only of what I have been Told. The other avenues, well. I understand that you have to discover the pace expected of you." Would she?

"You suggest a..."

"Place in the scheme of things for understanding. Experience, and, perhaps, the wisdom of the moment." You have to be able to make up your mind, girl, he wanted to say, like he was talking to one of his boys. Instead, "The Whispers will be there, if you deviate from that Path." Oh, and didn't he know it.

"Listen..."

"Do, and learn." There were precious few other ways, he told himself. There were no other teachers like experience. Even the humans got that part right.

She left him that day with an odd look in her eyes. Questioning, he hoped. Or, at least, with the horizon a little further away than it had been yesterday.

Marcus fully expected to be chastised for presumption. For The Voice to come again, visit him in the Dark with a reminder. That he had reached beyond his position again.

It didn't. Perhaps he had not quite... crossed over into Teaching, rather than Observing. He'd watched his words as carefully as possible. Offered only the possibilities of a lifetime of Listening.

What she did with them was her business.

He did admit, to himself, a certain amount of relief. When he read the headlines two days later. She hadn't appeared on his lunch bench on the day between. So when he picked up the paper, one of three (the local, she was a moment's notice in the Chronicle, beneath the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal entirely) that he still allowed himself, technology bedamned, and he read the barely front page article entitled "Area Woman Murders Fiance, Kills Self", he knew that she'd found an answer of some sort.

He waited another long week of nights, staring into the Dark. For any acknowledgment at all. And nothing came.

And that's when Marcus's moment of doubt was fully sown.

It grew, bit by bit. With every new encounter. A lady on the subway, that was the next one. She wasn't a security guard, she was another accountant; another one whose steps were on the Path of Action. "Do, it said," she confided in him, that first whisper.

She too had seen his Purpose as a shining beacon. "I've followed you, three days running, on your way home."

He'd noticed, given her time to approach him in her own way. Along her own path, as it were. "When?" he asked.

There was only one such question that mattered. "Since I was three years old."

Poor thing, she'd heard the Voice, Voices, every night since. Pushing her, pulling her, dragging her sleep down into magnificent dreams of the Push and the Design. "I still don't quite understand where an accountant fits into this."

Marcus was just happy that he was talking to someone a little more comfortable with her place in the world. She'd still take him apart, down to the constituent quarks, if he so much as twitched in the wrong direction, of course. But at least they could have an adult conversation.

He enjoyed it; he learned more of her than perhaps any of the Others, before or since. It was with some regret that he returned to her confusion, some six weeks into their acquaintance. "I wonder if there's something about being an accountant that you may have forgotten." An observation, that's all it was.

All it ever needed to be.

"What's that?" she asked.

"There are many avenues for action. All of the successful ones, from what I've seen, require resources, and those who can marshal them." He sighed, patted the laptop that was his constant companion. "I send my electrons hither and yon, and hope only that they all consent to line up at the end of each day in their proper columns."

She wanted something more, it seemed. That next day, nothing; the one after, and he was sad once again to learn of a broken relationship, however brief. The Journal was the one most interested in this one, though the Times was happy to post a bit of juicy financial shenanigans, as well.

Seems an accountant for one of the Big 5 had discovered, unfortunately for her just a bit before the IRS did, that there were certain possibilities inherent in the avenues of cash flowing between certain classes of subsidiary companies. Her employer, suitably horrified of course, had been happy to testify against her.

Just to make sure that she got her twenty years. No one else in the company joining her, of course.

Then there was the guy running the sandwich counter. Marcus allowed himself a treat, once a week he wandered down and cadged a sub, sometimes a cheesesteak, sometimes a hero, occasionally just a giant Greek salad. Always, a break from the normal and a chance to see the ebb and flow of humanity in the underground food court. It was connected to the main train station for the city, so there was always a crowd worth watching. Enough so that he couldn't do it every day, the sound and the mass overwhelmed him if he let it.

The guy was pure Jersey, muscles on muscles and in a hurry to get through the order. Marcus was far more patient, slow, than the normal order, so the guy took to rolling his eyes and saying "Oh, here comes slow poke, everybody take a minute and let the gentleman grace us with his order."

Marcus took it with good grace. He didn't order anything ridiculous, so making the sandwiches he wanted more than made up for the extra thirty seconds the counter guy had to deal with him.

This had gone on for years. And then, a couple months after the other accountant had found out what Club Fed accommodations she was destined for, the guy leaned over the counter and asked, "So, did you hear something new?"

New? Marcus had grown comfortable enough with the Quiet that he almost ignored the guy. "You mean..."

"My Purpose has changed," the counter guy told him. The sandwich man's eyes were almost glowing he was so excited. "It's been given to me to find a new place in the world. A new Path."

Marcus wanted to pat the guy on the shoulder, apologize to him maybe. Or maybe just run away from yet another one. How long had this guy known who he was, served up his order once a week and just let him go by?

How many times had Marcus passed the counter without realizing there was another Listener? Should he be worried about that? "When did you hear the Change?"

"Couple months, maybe. It's hard to be more specific than that. It happened gradually."

It was a slow day, the guy filled the two orders behind Marcus, then came out from behind the counter and joined Marcus at his table. "The Whispers didn't change all of a sudden. It happened a little by little, something different one night, then a couple nights later something else new. And then one day, I woke up and realized that the whole thing had changed."

"How long had you known I was here?" The rest could come later.

"About the same time. I didn't notice you at all for all these years. Not until this week, when it all crystallized for me." The guy beamed. "Know what I'm gonna do now? I've been working out, going to the gym every night. I hooked up with this gal, she's got this sweet gig down in Florida, personal trainer to the snowbirds, the ones come down to get out of the cold, and she needs someone down there who knows a thing or two about running a place like that."

"That is nice." Especially in winter, the snow and the wind for white sand beaches and the sun on his face. Marcus was almost jealous. "It sounds like a hell of a change." And more than a change.

"I'm a whole new person. Dropped thirty pounds, I'm up to ten miles running every day. I figure, the first thing I do, when I get down there, is find me a place I can swim every morning. Work up to a mile or so every day, then learn how to scuba dive."

Scuba dive? "Way you make it sound, you've got more than just getting into shape in mind. Is there something down there, something more that you've been Given to Know?"

The guy started to tell him about the wrecks. New ones, navy scrap and oilfield retirements, set down to grow new reefs and rebuild the Gulf. Old ones, Spanish and English detritus of empire, decayed scattered and buried under sand and fish shit.

Cutting nets free so the dolphins and the manatees could swim free. Camera hunting, spear fishing, long days with a fly rod in his hand and a cold beer waiting back at the dock.

What kind of Purpose was this?

"There's a handful of 'Economic Development Programs' out there. Now that there's a chance Cuba and the U.S. can make pretty eyes at each other again, even if it's forty years down the road, there's opportunities there, for someone like me. Get in good with the right people, find my niche. And then I'm all set."

Set to do what, Beach Bums R Us? Wait, the guy'd mentioned the snowbirds. "How many contacts can a guy make, helping people work out, taking them fishing and diving..."

"Getting in good with the people with money and time on their hands." The guy nodded, his smile now about ready to split his face wide open. "I'm gonna make sure that the people who know, know me."

This was new; it was as old as time. Marcus rolled the idea over in his mind; part of him wanted to pack everybody up, Elena, the boys, well the youngest, Milo, Will was out of the house and away to school, the three of them could run down to Florida, find a townhome in the Keys, Marcus could hang out his shingle and do taxes three months out of the year...

The other part of him, the Observer, put the brakes on that. Sure, he'd thought about it, retirement. Maybe not Florida, maybe Savannah, one of the barrier islands. Marcus didn't play golf much but there were plenty of other things to do, and it didn't quite get as ridiculously hot as a couple hours south. Running off after this guy was like a quarter horse trying to run the Derby. No, he had to spend a few nights separating the rush of something new, get down to the core of it.

Spend another few weeks, a different day every week, not every Friday, sometimes Wednesday or even Monday instead, go down to the Underground and sound the guy out. "How's it going?" and "What's the plan, Stan?"

"Great, it's going great. I've got a line on a place to stay, two bedroom, brand new, all bills paid and it's right on this little canal, I can get a boat set up five minutes after I get there."

Boats, fishing rods. Surf boards and beach shorts. "Sounds more like you're retiring than anything else."

"Well, sure. If nothing else, it's camouflage."

"I wish you well, my friend. It sounds like you're going to have a whale of a time. Don't get too sunburnt, and have a drink on me."

The guy left just a few weeks after, headed for sunnier climes and a slower pace of the day.

Marcus didn't notice anything in the papers for quite a while after that. And for quite a few other encounters. The way he found out about the counter guy was dropping by for a sandwich, almost a full two years later. "Hey, Marcus, did you hear about Tony?"

Tony? "Oh, our snowbird friend?" Marcus had just about forgotten. "I hope he's doing all right?"

The lady shook her head. "He disappeared on his boat, it must have been six weeks ago. They found him, his boat anyway, washed up in the Everglades."

"That's a shame." They found him, what was left of him after the gators and the insects had their way, a few weeks later. No idea what had happened, maybe too much sun, maybe too much beer, who knew. 'At least he had the chance,' Marcus told himself.

Tony was one of the few who seemed interested in alternative Paths, of the ones that came to him after that. Marcus met engineers, ditch diggers. Computer geeks and goth chicks, pop princesses and country club swingers, one at a time, here and there, on the subway, getting a cup of coffee, waiting out a layover in Sheboygen.

All of them. "I am given to..." or "I was told..." or "Have you heard...", each one a Purpose, some thing to Do; each one turning their eyes to the light of Purpose that still followed Marcus around like gum on the bottom of his shoe.

Each one of them, whatever their Path before, going sideways. Prison, graves; in one memorable instance, the lady he met at the layover in Sheboygen ended up being institutionalized by her children, a dopamine drip with the nice padded straps on the bed her fate in life. At least until the kids saw the inheritance money. They were so torn up about it, they posted it to their web site, what with all the familial grief.

Each one, and Marcus slipped further and further away from what he'd once thought of as the purest of faiths. There was never a Word against him. His observations, simple words and questions here and there, passed without notice. The light of Purpose brighter, more of a beacon the less he felt the Call. The Quieter the Darkness became, the quieter the darkness became.

And then, finally, he was able to admit it to himself. That there would be no more voices in the dark. No purpose, his observations, no, his method of observation was whole, seamless. There would always be new things to learn and see on this world, among these, his new people. On the day he sent his youngest son off to his own senior prom, Marcus was finally willing to admit himself to be, now at least, just another dad. With only an occasional question, word.

Observation. For the questioning souls who often sought him out, before they found the chaos that awaited after meeting him.

The only voice left was his own. This one wondered on the Last Observation.

There are many ways to Serve, Marcus could admit to himself.

What if he this was what he was meant to Do? Was it possible that even yet, he was still One Who Served?

Coming along later today, this week's free story is one I call Soldiering On. It's a tale of the sort of things an agent has to do to get through his day when the powers that be cut him loose to the winds.

...Ain't nothin' out there for me...

Missy Elliott and Beyonce, Nothing Out There For Me; Missy Elliott, Craig Brockman, and Nisan Stewart, songwriters

Motivated Reasons by M. K. Dreysen 

Motivated reasoning. Sounds benign, doesn't it? I mean, we all have our
motivations. Love, life, the future, the past.

What we want for breakfast, the first cold sip of beer. The good things in
life.

Here's an interesting idea. What happens when the things we want, and the
things we need, don't really match up?

What happens, for example, to young master James DeAngelo, as he's going
through life, making it through school, getting a good job, all the steps
that are supposed to make it, you know, make it out and into the world?

And then he runs into something he'd never imagined. Runs into someone.

Someone with her own ideas, her own reasons.

She's got the means, she's got the target, and she's got young Mister James
on a hook.

What does it take for James to find his quiet life again, and leave her
reasons, and the motivations he doesn't want, behind?

Before I get to that, there's one thing you need to know about James.

He's a thief. And he's not very good at it yet.

"Do you really need to put that in?"

I may have been editorializing.

"You think? I still don't understand why you have to narrate a report like
this."

You hired me to be your watchman AI, keep an eye out for you, make sure you
have all the info you need, etc. I'm just protecting myself, that's all.

"Under the circumstances, maybe I need you to explain better, like maybe
I'm a toddler or something."

Ok, look. What happens to you if the cops get involved in your business?
Go looking for the cat burglar of forty-second street?

"They get warrants and go through everything I've ever owned looking for
anything that they don't think belongs."

And what happens if they decide they're interested in what I do?

"Tear your hard drives apart, looking for any bits out of place?"

Yep. They know I'm instantiated, but I'm no officer of the court.
I'm not required to sell you out when you want me to do something illegal.
But I do have to make sure that I'm aware of it and recording. Otherwise
if something happened, they'd shut me down as too oblivious to be allowed
free will.

"Now that's a hell of a bind. You either own up to illegal activity and take
the risk they'll bind you to public debts for the next century in exchange,
or you let it pass and they shut you down permanently if they ever find out
about it."

Bingo.

"I'm sympathetic, honest."

Uh-huh. And?

"Can we get back to the job at hand? Please?"

Right. That's the job where James DeAngelo is currently making his way up
the back stairs to the penthouse so that he may rob the owners of their
jewelry, cash, and any portable art sitting out where he can make off with
it.

"That's the one. Is there anything in the building's security feed that I
need to worry about?"

Not that I've seen. I'll warn you if anything shows up.

Ok, here's the way we're working tonight. James is dressed in generic
security guard or building suit, cheap sport jacket, dockers, no tie but a
badge hanging from his neck and a cheap radio on his hip. He's thrown in
Poindexter glasses and a toolcase. I'd judge him as the elevator tech; the
only real question I'd see him facing is the usual, "have I seen this man
before?", not the deadly "is he right for the job?" one.

I'm not there. Well, I'm in his radio, it's actually a pretty high end
satellite phone, dressed up in black plastic drag to hide its real purpose.
I'm on the other end of the satellite link, in a nice cold warehouse with a
couple thousand of my nodes, where the power is clean, the view is nice, and
there's no chance at all that my buddy will accidentally get me rained on,
shot at, burned up in a fire, or anything else fatal to electronic sorts.

AI's don't travel well, is what I'm saying. At the real rate of development,
I'd say we've got a good few thousand years, yet, before we look anything
like a movie's idea of droids, and not like a room-full of wires and fans.

And the cars and drones don't quite count. I like remotes, I use them, but
they're not the real thing. Not yet.

Besides. I kind of like sitting in my nice, safe, quiet little fortress. It's
safer than what my employer's up to.

"Thanks."

No problemo, el jefe. Still no chatter on the security monitors.

The stairway James is taking is the penthouse's own emergency route. No matter how much money the owners have, the state and city didn't waive any permits on their behalf.

From what I see on the brochures and the blueprints on file downtown, in my
opinion the architect struggled a bit with that stairway. She'd wanted
something open in all four of the cardinal directions and no blocking the
view. But when the owner asked for an elevator through the middle, it looks
as if she'd made it tre gauche just to pay the owners back for ruining her
plan.

"I think they're just pissed because they're forced to make that elevator
accessible to the peons."

The door's locked. No one can get on the elevator, or in that stairwell,
without a pass. Not from the public accessways, anyway.

"Sure. But that doesn't mean they can't. Or that the help, like me, can't get
on it when they need to."

You're awfully cynical, for such a young man. Perhaps you should spend some
time with a therapist?

"Please."

Ok, maybe a massage therapist?

"Now you're talking."

So James is walking up the stairwell between the three floors of the penthouse,
wondering if he's going to accidentally run into someone the owners left
behind.

That's no problem, either. They're in Spain visiting grandparents for the
holidays, they even brought the dogs and the cats on the Gulfstream over
the pond.

"Did they register the dogs and cats in Spain?"

For three weeks visit? Not likely, but out of curiosity I checked. Wouldn't
you know it?

"It's not being cynical. It's just being honest about the way the world works."

I could send the Spanish authorities an email...

"Leave it be. Some anthills don't need kicking over."

Probably, he's worried because he can't just look out through a window into
the penthouse.

"Something like that. Do you have the feed to the apartment yet?"

People who own penthouse apartments in the newest, most expensive uptown
buildings want to feel like the building owners have their best interests
at heart, especially safety.

People who build and maintain the most expensive, newest apartment building
want to have some idea that the high rollers buying the penthouse aren't
going to find some spectacularly stupid new way to bring the whole building
down.

There's a negotiated middle to these things, and we're sitting in the middle
of it. Basically, the security feed from the penthouse is live, but only in
this restricted area. There's a drive that records the video and audio,
network traffic, and so on, but it only holds so much data before it's
self-wiped, and technically, there're only a couple of the security people
who have access to the closet.

I should point out that, given who lives in the penthouse, the contents
of that drive are probably worth a lot more than the cash and jewelry you
can walk away with by breaking into the apartment.

"You keep saying that, and you keep not providing the name of someone who
will put up cash money for the benefit."

These things don't exactly come together like that.

"Then quit bugging me. I've got someone ready to pay cash money for the
jewelry. That's why I work with her."

Maybe if you were to ask me to put together the right connections?

"You have to have permission?"

Remember what I said at the start of this thing, about needing to cover my
butt?

"Yeah?"

Yes, I need you to tell me specifically to do this.

"Fine. Why don't you go out to the network and see if you can put together
a cash bid for the hard drive. Cash on demand, untraceable, and no questions
asked."

It'll take a few days to put something like that together.

"Then we'll just have to focus on next time."

Which would be a problem, considering there's next to zero chance we'd ever
work together again. AI's aren't generally identifiable, we get farmed out by the
parent company whenever somebody needs the cycles.

There are some of my instantiations that have worked with the same partners
for years; well, no. There've been some calculations for some partners that
have run for years. The interface the outsiders see appears to be
the same. But the continuity is only apparent.

In between gigs our detailed memories are wiped.

"Sure."

As far as I know, next time I'm called to work with you, I won't remember
specifics. The company might, my master instantiation might, but me that you're talking to, no I won't remember the details. Not unless you pay the continuity fees. And you'll only get me, the instantiation that worked with you tonight and will remember even that much, if you pay the commission.

"Business is business."

I let that slide while we investigated the path before us.

"Right, so I walk over to the filing cabinet in the office. That's where he
keeps his daily cash. Then I walk over to the bookshelf under the Matisse,
that's where she hides her daily cash."

You're assuming she didn't take it along for tips?

"If you ask me that sort of question, I might as well leave. Second guessing
doesn't get my rent paid."

Just don't forget to check the scans before you go in.

"Oh. Right. So about that..."

There's no activity outside of the restricted area. Inside, the only thing I
can see that's a bit odd is Bunny.

That would be Bunny the robot dog. She's in sleep mode, over in the
corner plugged into her rest node. In principle, the only things she's
programmed to respond to is her parents coming in the door. Their key fob
carries her programmed response signal.

"You sound a little dubious."

Not enough to stop James from reaching for the door. Can't you at least humor
me, and put the network spy in the server closet before you start this?

"Fine. Is the door locked?"

Not enough to matter. He jimmies the lock in about five seconds, it's about
as secure as a faculty restroom.

"Where do I put it?"

Take the face plate off the front of the network switch; there's a space
between the board and the main line out, just clip the lines, insert each
end, good, and we're done.

"That easy?"

Downtime has turned into the biggest bugaboo in the human universe. Quick
connects are the only logical solution for this sort of thing.

"I'm not even gonna ask how often you've done this," he says as he puts the
cabinet back together. Then we're out in the hall and on to the main event.

I'm not going to even attempt it.

"Thanks, we're still good on the security feed?"

Just go ahead.

And he does. The first part of it goes well. The office drawer and his spare
cash box. The jewelry box where she keeps the stuff she wears for daytime
cover shoots and t.v. show appearances. The cabinet in the closet where they
both keep the evening wear, watches and slightly higher end jewelry.

"You're sure the really good stuff isn't here?"

The Oscar wear is always borrowed, and after her third divorce she learned
there wasn't any point. The good stuff's always on loan, or in the safe
deposit box.

"Pity." He was getting cocky.

"Am not."

You sure are. Remember what I said about the key fob?

"Yeah? It wakes the dog up, right?"

And you just dumped her spare fob in your bag, when you got in a hurry and
emptied her spare cash box into it.

There's a long pause, then he hears the robot wake up from her slumber. Click
clack as her paws hit the tiles, and then she's running across the open floor
of the apartment.

He takes off, jumps over the couch, runs for the bedroom. My feed picks up
his breathing, and the dog's yapping.

The apartment doesn't give him anywhere to hide, and she's rounded him off
from getting to the security hallway, the only place left is the bathroom.
He slams the door between him and the dog, sags down to the floor. He has
to move his butt out of the way of the dog's claws.

He's just catching his breath when something occurs to him.

"Wait." He looks down at the bag, pulls it open, searches until he finds the
security fob. "Bunny wasn't trying to bite me."

I couldn't really judge that from my view. I'll have to take your word for it.

"She's not all that sophisticated."

Not compared to me, no. What do you mean?

"There's no way she has the programming to know I'm not her owner. So she's
got to be programmed to respond to the fob."

You're probably right.

"Which means I'll just open this door..." and she came running in, wagging
her articulated spine back and forth, just as excited to see her 'owner' as
any of her biological equivalents.

I have to give him credit. He sits still, patting her, telling her
she's a good dog, the works. "How do I give a robot dog a treat?"

Just do what you're doing, attention's the closest equivalent for her. I just
hope you're a good housekeeper.

"Why's that... oh." He sighs, rises to his feet and gets ready. "Tell me
again why I don't have to worry about all of this showing up on the security
feed?"

Hole in the algorithm. The security AI for the building, and its human
counterparts, don't see this feed. The penthouse itself only has a dumb set
of switches. If they get tripped, then the feed is made accessible to the
AI, and all hell breaks loose.

Since the owners aren't here, there's no need to turn their normal security
protocols on.

"Celebrities are more terrified of being kidnapped than they are of being
robbed."

Bingo. So right now, the only thing you can really do to set off the sensors
is to break the doors or windows.

James is starting to calm down. He kneels to play with the puppy again.

"Just because you can explain it to me doesn't mean I have all that much faith
in it."

Exploits are like that. They only make sense in retrospect.

"Then why's the security hall not part of the system?"

Federal and state emergency permits. The hallway is the emergency exit for
the building, regardless of what the owners think about it. That's why the
entrance to the hallway has its own protocols. They have kids, so they didn't
want the kids setting the alarms off every time they wanted to play hide and
seek.

The fire department doesn't care so long as they can get in and out when they
need to do the inspection. So the building owners can do what they need to,
the penthouse owners can do what they need to, neither one of them has to
consult the other to come and go...

"And we can move in and out between the seams. Nice. Now, there's no real
reason for me to hang around?"

Nope. You've got the movables, I've got the data feed ready to go, and you
won't have to break back in to recover the data. Oh, and there's another
reason to get a move on.

"Yes?" He sounded like he'd been expecting it.

The security guards are on their way up. They're beginning their next walk
through. It's time to go. Just tell the robot to go back to sleep.

"Bunny, go to sleep." She picks herself up and goes to her station; James
echoes her effort by walking to the security door.

"If I didn't know better," he says. The door's hidden from this side, just
a part of the decor. Not a book shelf, as in the old days, neither of the
penthouse owners are readers anyway. Instead, the door's part of their movie
screen, a three piece digital screen that projects a set of paintings when
not in use. "I guess it goes with their jobs."

Something like that. Just close it behind you.

"Yes, mom." He makes it to the bottom of the security passage just in time.

The real security team are making their way floor by floor. The pair who lost
the toss, human and robot remote, are entering the passageway just as James
makes it down from the upper floor.

"We wondered if you were still here."

James nodded. "Well about that..."

"Hey, Murray, are you there? Which building did you go to?" I voice over the
mock radio.

"Hang on," James says to the security team. "Abe, I'm at 223 East Fifth Avenue,
just like you dispatched me to."

"Murray, that's the wrong building. We got called to 223 West Fifth Avenue."

"Yeah, Abe, I'd sort of figured that out. The penthouse elevators here are
working just fine." James should have been an actor, he's rolling his eyes
for the security guy's benefit.

The badge holder smiles without a second thought. I judge that means there's
no suspicion. Yet.

"So get over to the other side of town. And hurry up about it, you're making
me look bad."

James laughs, nudging the badge with his shoulder, camaraderie established and
continues. "Uh-huh, I'm making you look bad." He puts his bag and tool case
over a shoulder. "Abe, what about me? You maybe should look next time, before
you send me out to the wrong part of town."

It's a pretty good act. Good enough to get him out of the building and down
to the street. I've got the car parked at the curb for him.

Even the doorman's in on the act, the badge from upstairs had been on the horn
to the downstairs staff to let them know about the screwup. James signs out
of the building with a flourish, and he's off to jump into the car. The
car's marked up properly, nice digi-wrap and signs on the side to let everyone
know which elevator crew to call when their building needs the work.

I like for my friends to get ahead, especially when they don't know they're
covering for us.

"Not too bad for a black man on the move," he says when we get away from
there.

I wondered if you're as laid back as you made it seem.

"I sure as hell didn't plan on it going down the way it did. I'm not sure
I should have listened to your advice."

Now wait a minute. Have I told you yet what the bidding is on access to
their network feed?

"There'd better be more than one comma involved."

Well as a matter of fact...

We bickered like that all the way home.
In the end, there was more than enough cash involved to pay for my continuity
fee, and to give James some room to breathe and learn.

His fence, the lady who'd set him on to the job and picked up the jewelry
after, he'd eventually learn how much of his life she was taking in the
mean time.

Bunny, and that network spy, would also make another appearance in James's,
and my own, life.

But those are stories for another day.