Her first and simplest impulse-to go straight to the Breathing Space people and 'blow the whistle' about what was happening-Megan had already rejected out of hand. All she had at the moment was hearsay evidence, and even though she felt certain Burt was telling her the truth, that wasn't going to count for much with the administrators of Breathing Space. She would at least need evidence of one of these "street corners," and an indication of how it worked, and she had neither. She might have to think about adapting a "mask," a false virtual identity, to see if she could find anything out that way. But that was very much a last-resort idea.
"Ready," said Megan's workspace. "Warning: material comprises the equivalent of some four thousand typed pages."
Megan smiled grimly. "Let's go."
Rhea went around Saturn at least once while Megan sat there, reading window after window of text that scrolled through the air in front of her in hanging windows, watching flat movies and stereo screenshots and fiill-virt interviews and pieces of documentaries play themselves out on the floor of her amphitheater. She plowed through all kinds of data; description, commentary, interviews, editorials, testimonials, even precis of court cases-for there had been quite a few of these over the years, people trying to get at their estranged kids by (for instance) claiming that the Breathing Space people had brainwashed them, or even kidnapped them. Other people had tried bribery, or even blackmail, to subvert Breathing Space staff and get them to reveal the physical locations of runaways, so that they could be snatched. The environment itself had been hacked into spectacularly once in the very early part of the century, when virtuality as people knew it now was just getting started, then it had been briefly and disastrously exploited by a ring of criminals specializing in child slavery, and worse. Since then, the Breathing Space organization had made the reorganization and security of its virtual spaces its highest priority, next to the care of the kids those spaces sheltered. The Breathing Space "sheltered environment" was now as watertight and secure as anything could be these days… or so it was publicly claimed.
But Bodo was right. Where there was a will to make an alternate way in, or out, someone would manage it. If hacking talent had ever been hard to acquire since computers began, it certainly wasn't now. Most kids knew a whole lot about the guts of the Net at a very early age, since so much emphasis was put on it in school, both as a learning tool and a way to help you with your homework… not to mention all the rest of your life. A lot of kids, like those who got seriously into simming, learned a great deal about systems analysis and how to best exploit the hardware/software interface for their own hobbies and pursuits. It wouldn't take that much time, Megan supposed, to find out a fair amount about how to subvert the kind of safeguards that Breathing Space must have around its virtual territory. And like any guarded space, Megan thought, it would be most vulnerable to attack from within. From the very people it's supposed to be protecting.
The problem is that nobody really likes to admit they need protection. She put her head down on her hands again for a moment. It implies that you're weak. Pretty soon you're looking for ways to prove you don't need any protection after all, you can take it, you're just using this place to get a little rest… and meanwhile, you 're bending the rules, and the system structure, so that you can do things your way.
Control… it was all about control. "The great adolescent dilemma" was the phrase used by one of the editorial writers who'd experienced Breathing Space from the inside, briefly, and talked to some of the kids there. Well, maybe he was overdramatizing. But there might be something to it. No teenager Megan knew had been able to avoid moments when they thought they would just burst, or go crazy, because of pressure from parents or teachers not to assert themselves, not to do something unique or even slightly dangerous that they really wanted to do. The urge to get away on your own, ideally with enough money to make it pleasant, the urge to run your life… it seemed, sometimes, that as it got stronger and stronger with the approach of adulthood, your parents stepped on it harder and harder. Even the relatively light rein on which Megan knew her parents "rode" her sometimes irked her out of all proportion to the actual control. She had never left home, but there had been times when the thought had crossed her mind, all right. How much more was someone like Burt going to feel the urge…?
Meanwhile, none of this solved the basic problem. What was this "work" that Burt was so interested in?
And why would anyone be offering kids in Breathing Space work? Though Breathing Space itself as a charitable organization was a wonderful idea, Megan very much doubted that any altruism was behind these offers. The world was just too full of people busy taking advantage of other people, and the fact that the approaches were being made in secret made Megan even more suspicious. Surely anyone legitimate would simply go to the environment's administrators and offer to help employ their clients when they got out. It would be wonderful publicity… for anyone who wanted publicity.
Well let's try to approach this logically. Just what has Breathing Space got?
Runaways.
No, she had to be less judgmental about it. Good strategic analysis meant taking a concept apart into its smallest possible pieces, not trying to work with a large emotive whole. Troubled kids, Megan thought, usually under legal age. Sometimes, people who've been declared missing persons, or are otherwise in some kind of trouble with the law.
… Not exactly your optimum employees. These kids might not have a fixed address, and might not want one. They probably wouldn't have much of a work record… sometimes might not have documentation, or might not even be eligible to work, depending on where they are.
Now what kind of employer-
"Megan?"
She looked up at the sound of her father's voice, one of the exterior outputs for which she allowed her workspace to interrupt her. "Yeah, Dad?"
"I've already eaten lunch twice," said her father's voice, with a slight echo around it that made him sound a little like the Great and Powerful Oz. "I would do it one more time just for the heck of it, but then your mother would start calling me 'The Gut That Walks' again. So can I please have my office back?"
"Oh, jeez, sorry Dad, I forgot where I was!" Megan got up from the desk, glanced around at the litter of frames, frozen videos and virteos, and still and solid images littering the floor of her amphitheater. "Workspace manager, save everything… "
"Saved." The voice then added, "This is a prescheduled reminder." And in her own voice it said, "Answer the mail, Megan, it's lying around all over the place!"
She sighed. "Later," she said. "Shut down-"
She blinked her implant off and found her father sitting in front of her and off to one side, in one of the few chairs in his office that wasn't covered with books laid out open and facedown. The sun had moved around the house, so that it was starting to come in these windows now; her father had drawn the blinds against the hot afternoon light. "Heavy session?" he said. "Or just catching up on the mail?"
"I wish," Megan said. She stretched, feeling a sudden ache in her back that hadn't been there before. "Dad, does this chair need to have its massage machinery checked?"
'They just tuned it last month, honey, when the support people came around to do the usual maintenance." He looked thoughtfully at her. "Any possibility that it's just stress?"
" 'Possibility'!" Megan said, and laughed, but there wasn't much humor in the sound.
"Anything you care to talk about?" her dad said as he sat himself down in the chair.