In the end she called her dad’s phone. As she was afraid, it was turned off. She left a message tagged MOST URGENT on it, telling him to come straight home. Then she called James Winters’s code again, got the same message, and this time left a detailed message a minute and a half long, tagged UTMOST URGENCY.
She stopped, then, took a breath. “Group of Seven call,” Maj said. “Del.”
“Working,” the machine said. A moment later there he was, sitting out in his backyard.
“You’re early,” Del said.
“Better than being late,” Maj said, somewhat grimly. “This is a Net Force Explorer problem, Del. Can you suit up and meet me in my space? Right now.”
He clambered out of the lawn lounge he was lying in.
“And do me a favor,” Maj said. “Get Robin, too. I’m a little pressed for time here.”
“This isn’t about the game?”
“Oh, it is,” she said, “but the stakes have been raised a little. We’re talking life and death here. The real thing, not the virtual type.”
Del stared at her. “Three minutes,” he said.
She broke out of virtuality, met Laurent in the hall. “Okay,” she said, “the ball’s rolling. I’m going to shut the house up. And if I have to, I’ll call the cops as well. I have no idea what they’ll make of it, but it’ll sure annoy anyone from your government who shows up thinking they’re going to take you for a ride in the next little while.”
“But how can this matter? If the microps—”
“We can’t stop them,” she said. “But maybe we can fight them. Look, Laurent, why are you arguing with me? If you get into the machine, it’ll at least cut your sensoria out of the loop, and you won’t feel sick.” Until you go unconscious. And how long will that be? Oh, God—!
“Fight them? With what?” he said, staggering a little.
“The power of geekery,” she said, “and the power of good. Better hope that’s enough. Get in there and get online!”
She put him in the implant chair in her dad’s den, pulling down the blinds and drawing the drapes. “I don’t want you to panic,” Maj said, “but I’m going to lock you in, okay? If they try anything—”
“All right,” he said.
“Meet me in my work space as soon as you get in. Get suited up. We’re going flying.”
She went around the house as calmly as she could, making sure all the windows were locked, all the doors shut, and pulling blinds and curtains closed everywhere. In her room the Muffin was sitting reading, for once. As Maj put her head in, the Muffin lifted a finger to her lips and said, “SSSSH. Laurent’s sick.”
“I know he is, honey,” Maj said. “I want you to come and be in mommy’s office with me.”
“Okay. Are you going online?”
“Yes, sweetie.”
“Okay.”
Maj escorted the little one into her mom’s office and made her comfortable on an old beanbag chair in the corner, which immediately began, in its traditional manner, leaking its little polystyrene “beans.”
“Dumb thing,” Maj muttered, shut the blinds, and drew the curtains in the office, and then went out to make the rest of the house secure, finishing by setting the alarm system. It would not stop anyone who was really intent on getting in…but it would slow them down, and time might start mattering a whole lot shortly. And it would automatically alert the local police if something disturbed the signal in any way.
She stood still there in the kitchen for a moment and thought. Nothing more she could do about the physical security, now. That was going to have to be the waiting part of this game. If she called the police now, she would only get in trouble for wasting their time. Who would believe her if she told them what was going on here? The local branch police station was only about five minutes away — that was close enough…she hoped. She had a panic button call set up in her work space with their name on it, too, as well as the auto-alert wired into the alarm system. She could shout for help any time she needed it.
Nothing to do now but get the battle organized. The main trouble was the medical expertise. If it had been the insides of a horse Maj had been dealing with, it would have been another story entirely. But you could not use veterinary science on people. The biology didn’t universally apply to humans. Not when it was something this delicate. Who do I know, who do I—
Charlie! Charlie Davis.
If he was around. Oh, please, let him be around….
She dived into her mom’s office again, locked the door. The Muffin was oblivious, still deep in the copy of Rewards and Fairies. Thank you, Rudyard, Maj thought, I owe you one…. She lined up the implant, plunged into her work space again. There stood Laurent, in his space suit, with his helmet under his arm. Physically he looked better, but she could see from his expression that he knew there was a lot wrong with him. “My thinking…feels kind of slow,” he said.
“It might,” she said. “But at least you aren’t in pain. Are you?”
He shook his head.
“Well, that’s something. Sit down. Hi, Del!”
“Robin’ll be here in a minute,” Del said, having just appeared from “nowhere,” suited up and ready to go. “Hi, Niko, how’s it shaking?”
“Shaking is the word,” Laurent said slowly.
“Computer! Virtcall to Charlie Davis. Tell him it’s urgent.”
“Working,” said the machine. It said nothing more for some moments.
“Oh, please be home,” Maj muttered. “You’re always home. Almost always.” It was a fair bet, for Charlie studied more than anyone she knew. Maj knew, from talking to a couple of the other Net Force Explorers, that it most probably had a lot to do with his ancient history as a ghetto kid. These days, after having been adopted by a doctor father and a nurse mother, he was relentless in his study of medicine, and—
Light flooded into her work space. And — oh, happy sight — there was Charlie down at his table in his own customary work space, an old eighteenth-century operating theater with circles of high desks all around it for people to watch while surgeons chopped other people’s legs off without anesthesia. The place would have given Maj the shudders if she had not understood it as an expression of Charlie’s essentially sardonic sense of humor. “Charlie!” she cried.
He looked up, slightly surprised. “I’m glad to see you, too,” he said.
She bounded down the stairs to where he sat, nearly tripping as she came down the last couple. “Charlie,” she said, “Oh, jeez, I need you, we need you, can you come? Please? Quick!”
He dropped the stylus with which he was scribbling on his desk and got up. “This a life-or-death thing?” he said, rather dryly. “I have a test tomorrow.”
“Yes!”
“Oh, well, then,” Charlie said, and immediately followed Maj up the stairs back into her space.
“Charlie, this is Niko. Oh, heck, that’s not his name, it’s Laurent.” They shook hands gravely. “And that’s Del, he’s a Net Force Explorer—”
They shook hands, too.
“Enough of the courtesies. Laurent,” Maj said, “has a problem….”
She described it in a hurry. Charlie’s eyes got wide when he started to realize what kind of thing the microps could do.
“Holy cow,” Del said. “But what can we do?”
“Fight them. Slow them down. Virtually.”
Del looked flabbergasted. Charlie, though, stood very still for a moment, then nodded. “To chase these things effectively, to interact with them at all, you would have to ‘map’ Laurent’s body details — human body details, anyway — onto whatever paradigm you were planning to use for the fighting.”