"I've had all the sorting out I need," Burt said. "There are things going on out in the big world. I want to get on with them."
Megan swallowed. She could just imagine what Wilma's reaction to this news was going to be. "Burt, doing just what? It would make me feel a lot better if I had some idea what you were getting into."
He and Bodo glanced at each other again. "I can't get into it, Megan," Burt said. "I promised I wouldn't."
"Promised who?
Burt sat down by the stream on one of a number of boulders that might have been dropped there by some ancient glacier, if this landscape had been real. "Look… I can't get into it, that's all. It's like I told Wilma-and even then, maybe I was saying too much. I've found out about some really interesting work I can be doing, and I'm going to go start doing it in the next few days, if everything works out all right."
"Just where did you find out about this?"
"Oh, there are a lot of little nooks and crannies in this virtual environment," Bodo said, smiling slightly. "Including some that the Breathing Space people don't know about."
Megan looked at him dubiously. "Come on, Megan, don't act so shocked," Burt said. "Is there a single virtual space on this planet that hasn't been compromised at some point or another? Or bent into some new shape by the people who used it, some shape that the builders never imagined? Heck, you can make a case for the idea that the whole old Internet system grew out of the machinations of ten or twenty people who wanted to use their college computers to play starship shoot-'em-up games with other students a thousand miles away. Definitely not what those first network designers had in mind for their machines! This is just more of that kind of thing."
"Goes on all the time," Bodo said, glancing around him. "This place is full of holes. Some of them were left there accidentally by the programmersThey were good, but they weren't omnipotent. Others…" He smiled a secretive smile.
"Others were made, you're saying," Megan said. "By someone from outside."
"Not always," Bodo said. "Some of them were drilled out from the inside. For one thing, there's more than one way in and out of here."
Megan raised her eyebrows, trying to conceal how worried she was feeling. "That's not what they say."
"Shows what 'they' know," Bodo said. "But there's always a back door… that's what the programmers say. With a little practice, a little ingenuity, you can always find one."
"But why?" Megan said. "If the whole point of this place is protecting the kids using it-"
"Oh, yeah, it's good for that," Burt said. "No one's going to deny it. But at the same time, sometimes things can get a little.. stifling. You know? All the counselors, monitoring your every word to see if you're coming along.. Oh, of course they do, Megan, it's in the contract, we all know it. It's the one tradeoff they do require, a little. Privacy for safety."
"And sometimes," Bodo said, "some of us find a way around it. Not obviously, mind you. But there are little pockets in this system that its sysops and programmers don't know about, and some of us have found ways to exploit them. 'Quiet' spots, like the reverse of the whispering spots under a dome-places where you can't be heard. This is one of them… Or else people devise ways to get 'out' into the Net without the monitors catching us and monitoring what we do or where we go."
He smiled. It was an unusually angelic smile from someone whose looks proclaimed him as being on the outer edge of things, or at least headed that way.
"It's like in the old days," Burt said, "and like it is now. If you can't meet other kids your age at home without being eavesdropped on, you go out and meet them on the corner. There are little 'street corners' here and there, scattered around Breathing Space…" He swallowed, for once looking just faintly nervous. "Megan, look, I can't go into a lot of details," Burt said. "But the door swings both ways. There are people who know about the street corners… and they meet you there and talk business. It's good business, and it pays enough to be interesting. It's nothing dangerous, nothing illegal. And that's all I'm going to say about it. I may have said too much as it is… "
"I think you're okay," Bodo said, "but better drop it. The walls have ears around here." He looked resigned. "Come to think of it, even the air has ears."
Megan sat there looking around them and the deceptively tranquil surroundings, her mind racing. She very much doubted that the Breathing Space administrators themselves, having gone to considerable trouble to set up a place where vulnerable kids would be safe from attack, would be in any way responsible for these covert recruitments to… what? There was no telling, and she thought it was unlikely she was going to get any more out of Burt on the matter. "So you're going to vanish all of a sudden," she said, "is that it? And I'm supposed to tell Wilma that this is all right, and there's nothing to worry about?"
Burt had the grace to look slightly guilty. "I won't just 'vanish,' " he said. "I may drop out of sight for a few days at a time. I might do that anyway, you know. We're not prisoners here, they don't try to keep us against our will. Lots of kids come and go from the physical Breathing Space facilities every day without anyone getting all upset about it."
This isn 't just anyone! This is one of my best friends, and your girlfriend, if you could just bring yourself to admit it! But plainly he couldn't. Megan looked down at Burt, sitting on his rock, and said, "Burt, I think this is a really bad idea. I wish you'd reconsider."
He looked up at her with an expression that hardened as she watched it. "All my life," Burt said, "people have been telling me that my ideas were bad ones. Okay, sometimes they were. But even the good ones, they would claim were bad ones because they didn't agree with them. This is just more of the same."
He got up. "I'm telling you, so you can tell her. Don't worry about me. I'll be fine, and I'll come back in better shape than I left… a lot better."
Burt turned his back and headed off, up the slope of the next hill. Bodo glanced after him, then over at Megan. It was a surprisingly commiserating look. "I'll stay with him," he said. "As long as he lets me, anyway. He's a nice guy, even if he does kinda have a temper."
"Uh, thanks," Megan said. Bodo sketched her a little salute, and went off after Burt. She watched them vanish over the next hill-literally, 'vanish'-first Burt, invoking the optional "invisibility" that the Breathing Space provided, and then Bodo, in his wake.
Megan stood there silent for a moment or so. He's just angry, he 's taking it out on the people around him, he 7/ think better of it eventually and stop this kind of thing, Megan thought.
But she doubted he'd do so very soon. Maybe that was her bad opinion of him talking. At the same time he obviously hadn't thought about the effect his actions were going to have on Wilma… or if he had, Burt didn't care.
I can't let this just happen. I can't. It would be like letting someone drive drunk. Anything that happens to Burt, or to anyone who gets caught up in whatever he's going to do, would be on my head… and I couldn 't stand it afterward.
Megan turned and made her way back to the doorway to her own space. Once there, she vanished the doorway and sat down at her desk under the hard back sky of near- Saturn space, leaned on her elbows, laced her fingers together, put her chin down on her hands, and thought hard.
"Workspace manager…"
"Listening, Megan."
"I want all the information you can find about the history, management, and structure of the Breathing Space youth refuge facilities."
"Finding that information for you now. Limiting parameters?"
"None." It was going to land a terrible amount of information on her desk to be sifted through. But Megan had a feeling that buried somewhere in it all could be a hint of exactly what Burt was getting into, something that could help her help him.. and she wouldn't know what it was until she saw it.