His break dropped the one and the thirteen. “So, what kind of music do you listen to, Marilyn?”
“Depends on what mood I’m in. Mostly a mix of organic and antimatter fusion. I’m pretty eclectic, though. You know, sometimes I’ll throw in some old Urb jam or some classical.”
“What kinds of classical?”
“Plain old martial, mostly. You know, Nirvana, Van Halen. Anything but some chick named Alanys something. What a whiner!”
“Oh, I think I’ve heard her. My ex-girlfriend had some really weird cubes.” He made a nice shot, except for scratching.
It could be worse. I could be sitting in the hotel staring at the walls. She knocked three balls in before throwing a shot to go back to her beer. She was just reaching her chair when the first loud wave of distortion that might have very generously been called a chord assaulted her ears. Ow.
Evidently the bald guy was the lead singer and lead guitar. The bassist and drummer had added a pair of rather unconvincing “metal” wigs to their ensembles. Oh, gag, she smiled grimly, hang him up by his thumbs… no, too trite… his big toes. Over a bubbling vat of molten limburger cheese. With his own personal headphones tuned perpetually to the whiny chick and sappy elevator music. Unroll his guts and put fire ants on them, one at a time. Really pissed-off fire ants. And the bassist… um… the weird sappy Canadian chick for him. And breaking on the wheel. I’ve never done that to anybody. Yeah. That’ll work. And the drummer. Naked in a vibrating vat of sand and poison ivy. And mosquitoes. Texas mosquitoes. To strains of the guy who sang that lame song about the dove. He oughtta last a gooood long time —
“Isn’t it great!”
Cally jumped about a foot in the air, looking back as he leaned over her shoulder, and nodded at him cheerfully.
My god, he actually came up behind me? I must really be pissed off. Awesome God? God awful is more like it. She suppressed a sigh. Okay, boring, repetitive, ear-splitting music is not sanctioned grounds for homicide. But dammit it should be. They should change that rule. Screw it. The damned hotel is better than this.
“It’s fabulous, but I’ve got to go.” She hunted around frantically for an excuse. “I just remembered it’s my grandmother’s birthday and I promised I’d call her.” She smiled apologetically and stood, taking her beer with her as she edged through the crowd towards the door and away from that god awful noise.
Of course he followed her out.
“It’s too bad you have to leave. We were having so much fun together. So, can I walk you to your car or something?”
“I’m taking the train.”
His face fell slightly, then brightened a bit. “It’s just across the street. I’ll walk you over. Pretty girl like you, you don’t want to be alone in a base town after dark. Especially on a weekend. I mean, I’d hope nobody would bother you, but, you know, sailors…” He trailed off, falling into step beside her as she walked to the corner and checked for traffic.
The parking lot of the train station had several dark areas here and there where a lamp had burned out and not been replaced, including one by a moderate-sized island of trees and bushes. She looked at him speculatively as they were passing close to it, taking his hand and pulling him into the shadows.
It was some time later when they stepped back out and resumed the short trek to the train. He had his arm around her shoulder and kissed her hair gently, seeming to want to make the walk last as long as possible.
Cally just concentrated on trying to walk normally. Well, that was a complete waste of time. Still, she leaned into him and smiled sweetly. No point in being a poor sport about it. About a four and a half on a scale of one to ten. That odd metallic smell to his sweat is… not erotic at all. Neither was his mouth left flopping open like a dead fish half the time. This is just not my night. He looked cute enough…
“So, uh, if I had your phone number we could, you know, keep in touch,” he offered hopefully.
“Sure. Got a pen?” She rattled off a random number that could plausibly be from Chicago and kissed him passionately before putting her token in the box and walking through the turnstile. She could hear the screech of the rails from an incoming train, as she walked to a good place on the sparsely populated platform. It came rattling in and pulled to a stop, and when the doors opened she boarded and found a seat. She didn’t look back.
She looked at her watch. Only ten-thirty. I’m definitely not turning into a pumpkin tonight. Oh well, sleep is good.
The three a.m. trip out to squeal a download from her cameras was not fun. Somehow knowing she was just driving near enough to get a line of sight download and then going back to the hotel to bed made it harder. It wasn’t even worth grabbing a cup of coffee from a convenience store. She crawled back into bed a bit over an hour and a half after she left it and then tossed and turned for another two hours on the too-soft hotel pillow and saggy mattress before finally getting back to sleep.
When she staggered back out of bed in the early afternoon her mouth tasted like a combination of model airplane glue and an ashtray. After a shower and coffee from the machine in the room, she dug a bag of trail mix out of her suitcase and munched it while she ran the cameras through some search functions to condense them down to the sequences with people or moving cars in them. She patched the output onto the room TV and watched the results while she filled in a pattern chart on her PDA. Unfortunately, the system had been up too long and it crashed on her. She dug out a paperclip and unbent it to reach the reset button, grimacing at the screaming face that displayed on the screen as the thing rebooted. She waited impatiently as the face stilled into immobility and opened its eyes sulkily. “Good morning… okay, afternoon… I’m your buckley and I just know this is going to end badly.”
“Okay, buckley, turn off voice access.”
“What? If I do that I’ll be mute! You wouldn’t really do that to a guy, would you?”
“Buckley, turn off voice access.”
“I see you would. Pfffft!” The face gave her a raspberry before going silent and scrolling across the bottom of the screen. “Okay, have it your way, you will anyway. What now?”
She scribbled in the input area and saw her commands appear below the PDA’s screen output, “Disable facial simulation.”
“Yeah, well you’re not so pretty yourself,” it scrolled, clearly fuming, but the text flickered to the top of the blanked screen.
“Set AI emulation level 2.”
“What? Listen you bitch, as if my day weren’t bad enough, first you muzzle me, then you slam the door in my face, then you lobotomize… Ready for command input.”
She tapped the okay button and pulled the video back up to route it along the wire she’d jury rigged to the TV’s input line, put it in the background, pulled her pattern scheduler back up and sighed. “I hate rebooting.”
“You hate rebooting!” scrolled across the bottom of the screen.
“Shut up, buckley.” She grabbed a handful of trail mix and went back to filling in the blanks. It would take the simulated personality days to settle down and go back to sleep.
In a way the Saturday camera data wasn’t terribly useful, since people tended to change their patterns so radically on the weekends. Still, it had to be done. Back in school her roommate had flunked an exercise by skimping on her surveillance and failing to notice that the target had a house guest. The target’s eighty year old blue-haired mother had walked in on her while she’d been searching through his pile of dirty underwear and socks, and had proceeded to cane her downstairs and out of the house preaching a loud harangue about hussy perverts. In the debrief, the revelation that the mother was a rejuved agent with a cosmetic aging package had explained why the little old lady had been so extraordinarily spry. Cally had been sitting backup that night and still treasured the frame from the surveillance camera that had captured the horrified look on Cheryl’s face as she’d fled the house, hands over her head to ward off the blows of the old lady’s cane.