“Good evening, Catie,” said her workspace in a cultured male voice.
“Any mail for me?”
“Nothing since you last checked in.”
“Nothing? In three whole hours?” That was mildly unusual.
“Would I lie to you?”
“Not if you wanted to keep your job,” Catie said, while knowing perfectly well that her workspace management program was about as likely to lie to her as her brother was to unload the dishwasher without being reminded.
“I live in fear of firing,” the management program said, dry-voiced.
Catie raised an eyebrow. She had asked one of her Net Force buddies to tinker with the program’s responsiveness modes some weeks back, and very slowly since then she had started to notice that it was developing what appeared to be a distinct strain of sarcasm. “Good,” she said as she came to the top of the stairs, “you do that.”
At the head of the stairs she stood in the big doorway there and looked through it and down. At this spot, in the real library, there was a gallery along the back wall of the main reading room, with a glass baffle to keep the readers from being disturbed by the sound of the never-ending stream of tourists. But in Catie’s version of the library there was no glass, only a doorway leading down into whatever other virtual space she should elect to visit. For the moment the door was filled with a swirling, glowing opalescent smoke effect, something Catie had designed for her mother as a “visual soother,” a distraction pattern for when she had to put someone on hold at the office.
“What’s your pleasure?” the management program said to her.
“Net Force Explorers meeting,” Catie said. “The usual address.”
“Net Force,” said her management program, and the smoke began to clear away. “I don’t think they suspect anything yet, so don’t blow it.”
I definitely need to talk to the guilty party about this, Catie thought. She stepped through the doorway, pausing on the landing of another stairway which formed to let her down into the big, echoing, empty space on the other side.
It wasn’t precisely empty. There were probably about fifty other kids there already, milling around and chatting, while above them hung suspended in space, glowing, a giant Net Force logo. It was ostensibly just as a courtesy that Net Force had set aside virtual “meeting space” on its own servers for these meetings. But Catie sometimes wondered whether there was some more clandestine agenda involved, some obscure security issue…or just a desire to “keep an eye on the kids.” For her own part, she didn’t much mind. There’s always the possibility that there are some of the “grown-ups” in here strolling around in disguise, listening to the conversations of the junior auxiliary and noting down which of us seem promising…. A moment later Catie put the thought aside as slightly paranoid. Yet, thinking about it, she decided it wouldn’t particularly bother her if that were happening. Catie firmly intended to wind up working for Net Force one day, doing image processing and analysis, or visuals-management work of one kind or another. If the cutting edge, in terms of excellence, opportunity, and potential excitement, was to be found anywhere, it was there. If someone from the adult side of Net Force wanted to look her over with that sort of work in mind, it was fine by her. The sooner the better, in fact….
Meanwhile, she had other fish to fry. Or one fish, a small one. As she came down the stairs to floor level, she paused, glancing over the group beneath her. A few faces she knew, a lot she didn’t, not that that had ever bothered her. She always left one of these meetings with at the very least a bunch of new acquaintances—
And there was the one she wanted to see. She finished coming down the stairs and walked around the edges of the small crowd, greeting a couple of people she knew as she passed — Megan O’Malley, Charlie Davis — and then walked over to her target from behind quietly, with the air of someone approaching a small and possibly dangerous animal without wanting to unduly frighten it.
“Hey, there, Squirt!” Catie said with an edge to her voice.
The figure actually jumped a little, and turned. A slight young boy, young especially when you considered that a lot of the other kids here were older by at least several years, tending toward their late teens. But Mark Gridley was no more than thirteen: dark-haired, dark-eyed, with Thai in his background and the devil in his eyes. “Ah,” Mark said. “Ah, Catie, hi, how are you…”
“You’re here early,” Catie said.
“Slumming,” Mark said idly.
“Oh, yeah,” Catie said. Since she’d first met him at one of these meetings, she’d been aware that Mark was obsessed with the idea that somehow, somewhere, he might possibly be missing out on something interesting. Even being the son of Net Force’s director was just barely enough “interesting” to keep him going, so that Mark routinely went looking for more. He was always early to these meetings, though he went out of his way to make it look accidental.
“How’s the artwork doing?” Mark said, with the air of someone who wanted to distract her from something. “Still fingerpainting?”
Catie grinned a little, and flexed those fingers. “Hey, everybody in the plastic arts has to start somewhere,” she said. “It’s what you do with the medium, anyway, not what everybody else does with it. Besides, it never keeps me away from the image work long.” She knew perfectly well that Mark knew this was her forte. There were few Net-based effects, in the strictly visual and graphical sense, that Catie couldn’t pull off with time and care. No harm in him knowing, either. Who knew, he might mention it to his father, and his father might mention it to James Winters, the Net Force Explorers liaison, and after that anything might happen. Networking is everything, Catie thought. “And how about you?” she said then. “The French police give up on you finally?”
Mark scowled, and blushed. He had gotten in some slight trouble recently when traveling with his dad, and those of the Net Force Explorers who knew the details were still teasing Mark about the episode, half out of envy that Mark had time to get in trouble while staying somewhere as interesting as Paris, and half out of the sheer amusement of watching him squirm — for Mark was hypercompetent on the Net and hated to come out on the wrong side of anything. “It wasn’t a big deal,” he said. “But enough about my scrapes. You’re the one who’s always getting yourself scraped up.” He tilted his head back and pretended to be peering at Catie’s elbows and knees.
She laughed at him. Catie had long been used to this kind of comment from her friends, both those at school and even those who were also Net Force Explorers. She had been in soccer leagues of one kind or another almost since she was old enough to walk, partly because of her dad’s interest in the sport, but partly because she liked it herself. Then, later on, as virtual life became more important to her, Catie began to discover its “flip side”—that reality had its own special and inimitable tang which even the utter freedom of virtuality couldn’t match. There was no switching off the implant and having everything be unchanged or “all better” afterward. Life was life, irrevocable, and the cuts and bruises you carried home from a soccer game were honestly earned and genuine, yours to keep. Some of her friends thought she was weird to take the “real” sports so seriously, but Catie didn’t mind.
“To each his, her, or its own,” her father would say, chucking aside some rude review of one of his exhibitions, and picking up the brush again. Catie found this a useful approach with the virtuality snobs, who usually had what passed for their minds made up and tended not to be very open to new data.