amodaresi/NoLiMa · Datasets at Hugging Face

text stringlengths 5 2.18k
"Well, aren't you dressed for success?" I asked him ironically.
He spun around and said, "I've got something new. For three of the days that you're here, I'll be on a truck with Vasquez. You fill in for me, take any calls, handle any business. Order up some movies. We'll meet up on the fourth day here and I'll answer any questions you have. If something urgent comes up, give me a call."
I felt a little out of my depth, but I wanted to demonstrate my take-charge attitude to Rhindquist, so I smiled and said, "Can-do, boss! Knock 'em dead!"
Tony came in and snorted a snide laugh at Rhindquist. Rhindquist raised an eyebrow at me, and I took the hint. "What are you smirking at, mister?" I barked, like my old Sarge. "You find something amusing about the official uniform of a representative of this organization?"
"Yes, Sean?"
"Ethan was in maintenance mode. He was switched off. He said 'Yes,' because his subroutines didn't want to be any trouble. You know that, right?"
"Oh, that foolishness again! Ethan's a good boy , is all. He remembers my birthday and Mother's Day, every year."
"Subroutines, Adele," Sean said, straining to keep an inexplicable anger out of his voice.
"Humph! Subroutines!"
"Adele, He's a walking coma. He's been switched off for so long, all you're talking to is a goddamn chip , he's not a goddamn person anymore. None of them are. My goddamn Grampa 's spent three-quarters of his goddamn life away . He's either an angry old bastard, or he's a goddamn zombie . You know that , right?"
"Sean, you're very upset," Adele said. "Why don't you have a nice lie-down, and we'll talk in the morning. I can't wait to meet your father!"
Sean stalked off to his room and tried to record some field notes while flipping around in the weird, poky corners of the motel's cable system, Japanese game-shows and Hindu religious epics. He smoked half a cigarette, drank half a beer, tried to masturbate, and finally, slept.
“Ms. Russell,” she said, nodding at me. She had a paper cup of punch in her hand. There were refreshments inside, which I’d passed on in favor of the flask in my pocket and the cocktail of narcotics I was still on.
“Agent Jones,” I answered. I didn’t know or care what she wanted. I felt detached from everything. Numb.
“I just want you to know, um...” She glanced behind her and straightened her jacket. It was very odd behavior. I watched blandly. “I want you to know, I worked with one of you before, and you don’t have to worry. Whatever holes there have been in you and your colleagues’ stories, I took care of it on our end.”
I opened my mouth, but she held up a hand to forestall me.
“I know you can’t confirm it, and that’s okay. I just didn’t want you to worry. I started taking care of everything as soon as I realized. I understand how hard it can be when you’re working alone with no resources.” She straightened and gave me a sharp nod, almost as if she wanted to salute. I felt faintly ridiculous. “If you need anything else, just let me know.”
"What did he mean about the children?"
But she shakes her head. "Thank you for breakfast, Ray. I had a good time."
"Emma-"
Does he hit you ? This is what he means to ask, what he should be asking, but even the bare thought of it makes him feel violent. But in the space between words, she slips close to him. Her small hands pull his face to hers and she kisses his lips, cool and dry and hungry.
Without another word, she's gone.
The rest of his day is spent the way most of days pass on Paraclete. Ziggy rides him for duty failures that may or may not be legitimate or even vaguely associated with his own personal fault, then tells him Nina has packed along some lasagna from last night's dinner that he can have as long as he promises to remember to get the dish back to her. He makes two retrievals of malfunctioning drones. He performs some perfunctory upgrades to the drone system control frame. Around this, he codes new search parameters into the drones' surveillance routines, uploads a dozen petaflops of gathered surveillance data for pattern searches and anomalous chemical traces from the rat network's latest security sweep, trying to skew all his available resources in a clever and anonymous enough way that the other systems vets won't notice that he's been tinkering with the rats, and on the chance that they do notice, won't suspect it's anything but a buggy command sequence and definitely won't trace it back to him.
Whiston Corp., he means. "That could be."
"You brought samples?"
"I'm afraid I couldn't show them to you. The design specs are extremely confidential, at the request of the client."
Shue raises his hands between them, an I'm not trying to pry gesture. "Hey, that's cool. Fair enough. Just sort of a hobby of mine. "
Of course, digging up clandestine negotiation details is a hobby they all seem to have in common. Corporate espionage is the currency of the young up-and-comer.
But Shue goes on, lowering his voice. "I just find it interesting that the big W is moving in on territory it already has a proprietary interest in, if you know what I mean. The Board has been pretty aggressive, it seems to me, in dealing with the New H branch as it is, at least if you pay attention to the types of signs guys like us look at. Could be a strong move to entice Whelemat back into the fold, especially since they didn't have to use their own capital investments for the grunt work. "
"Yes," Rodriguez agrees, though he has no idea what it means.
This was the man whose staff was trying to deny me interviews with mothers who'd adopted through Children of Light. And what about the Hispanic hood with the gun? Did Alex Goddard send him? If not, his appearance at Paula's building was one hell of a coincidence. So why should I trust . . .
That was when I noticed it. My lingering cold had miraculously vanished, inflamed sinuses and all. I was breathing normally, and even my chest felt cleared.
My God, I thought, what did he do? Hypnotize me? It was as though a week's healing had passed through my body.
I had an epiphany, a moment that galvanizes your resolve. I had to do a documentary about this man, to find out what he was really up to. He'd mentioned he had a place in Central America. Was that the source of his special techniques, some kind of ancient Meso-American medical practices he'd discovered?
He claimed he didn't want any publicity, but that's always just an opening move. When somebody says that, what they really mean is they don't want any bad publicity; they just want to have final say about what you produce. There're ways to handle the problem.
Marcella ordered us to assemble in the main lobby in exactly one hour to report. She beckoned Dave to follow her to the medieval art section. We could hear her mechanical voice droning away as they disappeared into the distance. ...
We hiked to a... a table in a corner where we could talk. I told him all about Zip and the cops who’d come to our apartment and tried to throw their weight around. I told him how worried I was about Wheeze. I almost slipped up and told him about what the Group had dug up on Zip’s identity and the FBI agent he worked with, but I remem- bered just in time to make it sound like research I had done myself. I like Nikko a lot, but the Group is private.
I ended up talking about Wilson, too, the way he used to take care of me when I was little and how much I had wanted to go with him when he turned eighteen. “I understand it now. He wanted to have fun and hang out with his friends. Having a little kid around . . . I get it, but at the time I was so angry. It was never the same after that. He had his life. I had the internet. By the time I moved in with Monica we didn’t have that much in common anymore.
“You got his whole life story, huh?” There was a kind of coiled violence in the way Danny spoke that sent a shiver down my spine.
“Yeah, so?” She fixed eyes with him for a moment and then looked away. “I’m going to put the kid to bed.” She hauled herself up, picked up the baby and a bottle of beer and headed for the stairs.
Tweak started talking about actions he had participated in and Danny bragged about setting cars on fire during a protest. Simon,
not to be outdone, ranted about police brutality and I threw in a speech of my own about mass surveillance. I checked my phone every now and then. I ignored the missed calls and message noti- fications and only paid attention to the time. When I’d been there for nearly two hours, I asked where the bathroom was. I needed to download the video I’d shot before the memory ran out.
I went up the stairs and paused by an open door. Marita was sitting on a bed next the baby, rubbing his back and humming,
even though the kid was totally conked out.
Checker was at my shoulder immediately. “Where?”
I didn’t know how to do any sort of fancy computer highlighting, so I traced a rough circle against the monitor with my finger, ignoring it when Checker cringed. He didn’t like people touching his screens. “It disappeared into this area almost half an hour ago and hasn’t come out.”
“Are you sure? There’s no way it could’ve—?”
I glared at him, and he shut up.
“Okay, I get it, you’re sure. Two possibilities, then: their base is in the zone, or they switched vehicles. Can you run the security footage on the border of your zone forward and—never mind, I’ll do it,” he said hastily, at my blank look. He started punching keys. “You know, you could learn to do this stuff in about three seconds if you gave half a crap.”
I didn’t answer. Checker and I drank and watched bad movies together fairly regularly when I wasn’t avoiding him. It was stupid to think I wouldn’t see him anymore if I didn’t need him for the computer junk.
Stupid.
“It’s a bit of a long shot, but we can put together a likely vehicle list crossing the boundary,” Checker said absently, his focus on the screen. “Most cars that exit within the right window will be registered to people statistically unlikely to be involved, especially as stealing one would probably put our bad guys on the police radar more quickly and conspicuously. I’m skeptical this will work, though—I’m betting it’s not a coincidence they stopped out of view of any security cameras. These guys are very good at staying hidden.”
"Good thing we're not in love, then, right?" she said, in reference to their sixth date, when they'd decided that they would hold off on any declarations of love for at least an entire year, since they were most often moved to utter the Three Words of Significance when they were besotted with e.g. post-orgasmic brain-juice or a couple of cocktails.
"Yes, counselor."
She shook her head. He knew she was an academic, not a practicing lawyer, but he loved to tease her about it, ever since she'd revealed (after third date, on the phone) that she'd spent about ten seconds in private practice after she'd worked for her congressman and before she'd joined the faculty at UCLA.
"You're out of order," she said.
"This whole damned car is out of order!" he said. "So that's the ritual. You said you wanted to meet the parents and sisters and aunts and grandmothers and cousins and uncles and nephews and in-laws the next time we all got together. This is it."
"Right," she said. "I asked for this." And she had, of course. Hadn't asked for the graveside elements, but she'd been curious to meet this big sprawling enterprise of a family that he was always nattering on about. This seemed as good an occasion as any. "So," she said. "Is this a traditional date among Your People?"
“Pleased to make your acquaintance, Withnail,” she said in his language, another useful phrase culled from the cine, though she suspected she was pronouncing it all wrong. She held out her hand to shake his. He holstered his handgun and shook her hand.
“I have to go, Withnail.” She couldn’t say this in his language, but she spoke slowly and as clearly as she could.
He shook his head again. She covered his hand on her arm with her own and gave it a squeeze.
“To save my family,” she said. “I’m on a mission for your side anyway. Let me go, Withnail.” She gave his hand another squeeze. Slowly, he released her arm.
He was very handsome, she saw now, with a good chin and sensuous lips. She’d never kissed a boy and she’d be dead in four days and a little more. Or maybe she’d be dead that afternoon, if she couldn’t get back into her own trenches.
She put her hand on the back of his neck and pulled his face to hers and gave him a dry, hard kiss on those pouting lips. It made her blood sing, and she gave him a hug, too, pressing her body to him. He kissed her back after a moment, surprised. His tongue probed at her closed lips and she pulled away, then for a crazy moment she thought of biting him and giving him a dose of zombiism to spread to his comrades in the trenches with him. But that wouldn’t be right. They were friends now.
where she was jotting notes on a big yellow pad, holding a tele- phone receiver pressed to her ear. I waited as the pen flowed across the paper. She had filled the page with orderly lines. Her handwriting was old-fashioned, all the letters linked together in a flowing line of blue ink, threads of words crossing the page,
though it was a little fragile looking, like old lace that’s stating to fall apart.
She was using lawyer language, asking questions that included lots of Latin, then writing, writing, writing. As I eavesdropped, I rinsed out my tea cup and got myself some water from the tap.
“Ridiculous!” she said, and “what arrogance.” Then very loudly,
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” At that point I almost dropped my cup, but she didn’t even look embarrassed.
“Yes,” she said. “All right. That’s perfect.” She put a period down at the end of a sentence as if she was pinning it down firmly.
“Thank you, Luisa.”
She got up from her chair, disentangled herself from the coiled telephone wire, and hung the receiver up on an old-school telephone fixed to the wall.
Fury clawed up in me, shockingly hot, clogging my head until my scalp prickled with it.
Arthur twitched back. “Not about that, Russell. Not talking about you. I swear.”
I clamped my jaw down on what I had been about to say. “What, then?” I growled through my teeth.
Arthur hesitated, his fingers pressing against the laminated pine of the tabletop. “This thing with the Lancer. Was hard on him.”
“It was hard on him?” I repeated. “Excuse me, was he shot at and locked up and also almost blown to pieces three separate times?”
“He could use a friend, ’s all I’m saying.” He made a vague gesture and headed out the door.
I turned and leaned my head against the wall. Arthur had too high expectations of me, as always. I wasn’t in any condition to be a friend to anyone. I’d never been very good at being a friend to anyone.
I’d figured the updates were just because he was curious, or keeping tabs for us, as he did. Or, hell, I hadn’t figured at all—I hadn’t even thought about it.
Fuck. I pushed off the wall and went out to the Hole.
Lexy finished dressing and went into Caroline’s room. In the gay April sunshine, that dainty room seemed almost unbearably forlorn.
She went over to the window and looked down into the street. People were passing by, and taxis, and private cars—all the ordinary, casual, cheerful daily life at which Caroline Enderby had so often looked out, like a poor enchanted princess in a tower. A wave of pity and affection rose in Lexy’s heart.
“Oh, poor Caroline!” she said to herself. “Such a dull, miserable life! I do wish—”
There was a knock at the door, and she hurried across the room to open it. The parlor maid stood there with a tray. Lexy took it from her with a pleasant “good morning,” and closed the door again. Caroline’s breakfast! There was something disturbing in the sight of that carefully prepared tray, ready for the girl who was not there.
The door opened—without a preliminary knock, this time—and Mrs. Enderby came in. She turned the key behind her, and, without a word, went over to the bed and pulled off the covers. Then she went into the adjoining bathroom and started the water running in the tub. This done, she sat down at the table and began to eat the breakfast on the tray.
And sometimes those people misunderstand the nature of a game.
Let's just leave it at that, OK?
Class ended in ten minutes, and that didn't leave me with much time to prepare. The first order of business were those pesky gait-recognition cameras. Like I said, they'd started out as face-recognition cameras, but those had been ruled unconstitutional. As far as I know, no court has yet determined whether these gait-cams are any more legal, but until they do, we're stuck with them.
"Gait" is a fancy word for the way you walk. People are pretty good at spotting gaits -- next time you're on a camping trip, check out the bobbing of the flashlight as a distant friend approaches you. Chances are you can identify him just from the movement of the light, the characteristic way it bobs up and down that tells our monkey brains that this is a person approaching us.
Gait recognition software takes pictures of your motion, tries to isolate you in the pics as a silhouette, and then tries to match the silhouette to a database to see if it knows who you are. It's a biometric identifier, like fingerprints or retina-scans, but it's got a lot more "collisions" than either of those. A biometric "collision" is when a measurement matches more than one person. Only you have your fingerprint, but you share your gait with plenty other people.
So the police were, as they say, baffled. Mr. Houseman told them a tale. He had been alarmed about the lady whom he knew as Mrs. Quelton, and he had climbed up on the balcony, hoping to see her alone; but he had met Dr. Quelton instead, and had been hurt in trying to escape from him.
Captain Grey also had a tale. He, too, had been alarmed about the lady whom he believed to be his sister. He had gone with Miss Moran to call upon her, and they had found the doctor dead, lying across the coffin.
There was an inquest, and Mr. Houseman had a very unpleasant time of it, being the last one who had seen the doctor alive; but there was no really serious suspicion against him. The post-mortem showed that the doctor had died of some unknown poison, at least half an hour after the young man had arrived at the hospital. The verdict was suicide, although the coroner’s jury had its own opinion about the mysterious dark woman who had posed as the doctor’s wife. An autopsy revealed that Mrs. Quelton had died from a natural cause—phthisis of the lungs. In short, as far as could be discovered, there was no murder at all.
really good at it. When he gets into a role, he’s totally into it, and it’s almost creepy because he’s so convincing. His face changes.
His body changes. He becomes another person. And then, at the snap of a finger, he’s himself again. It’s like possession, only it’s all under his control. Also, he can memorize pages and pages of dialogue or make stuff up on the fly. Give him a character outline and he’ll run with it, improvising a story and making it all totally believable.
He didn’t go to my school in the suburbs, but the kids at his school were just as bad. Between his clothes, his looks, and his attitude, he didn’t fit in. He didn’t like being called a faggot and getting harassed on a daily basis. For the record, he’s not gay or even bi. “Faggot” is just an all-purpose insult. The fact that he sometimes wears a skirt isn’t a statement about his orientation. He just feels like it, but boys aren’t supposed to feel like it.
Sometimes I think it’s harder being a boy than a girl because you can’t wear certain colors and have to act tough. Then I see how women are treated in the tech community and I’m not so sure. People are basically equal opportunity jerks.
"Brutal."
He wondered if he'd overstepped himself. Who cared?

"Well, aren't you dressed for success?" I asked him ironically.

He spun around and said, "I've got something new. For three of the days that you're here, I'll be on a truck with Vasquez. You fill in for me, take any calls, handle any business. Order up some movies. We'll meet up on the fourth day here and I'll answer any questions you have. If something urgent comes up, give me a call."

I felt a little out of my depth, but I wanted to demonstrate my take-charge attitude to Rhindquist, so I smiled and said, "Can-do, boss! Knock 'em dead!"

Tony came in and snorted a snide laugh at Rhindquist. Rhindquist raised an eyebrow at me, and I took the hint. "What are you smirking at, mister?" I barked, like my old Sarge. "You find something amusing about the official uniform of a representative of this organization?"

"Yes, Sean?"

"Ethan was in maintenance mode. He was switched off. He said 'Yes,' because his subroutines didn't want to be any trouble. You know that, right?"

"Oh, that foolishness again! Ethan's a good boy , is all. He remembers my birthday and Mother's Day, every year."

"Subroutines, Adele," Sean said, straining to keep an inexplicable anger out of his voice.

"Humph! Subroutines!"

"Adele, He's a walking coma. He's been switched off for so long, all you're talking to is a goddamn chip , he's not a goddamn person anymore. None of them are. My goddamn Grampa 's spent three-quarters of his goddamn life away . He's either an angry old bastard, or he's a goddamn zombie . You know that , right?"

"Sean, you're very upset," Adele said. "Why don't you have a nice lie-down, and we'll talk in the morning. I can't wait to meet your father!"

Sean stalked off to his room and tried to record some field notes while flipping around in the weird, poky corners of the motel's cable system, Japanese game-shows and Hindu religious epics. He smoked half a cigarette, drank half a beer, tried to masturbate, and finally, slept.

“Ms. Russell,” she said, nodding at me. She had a paper cup of punch in her hand. There were refreshments inside, which I’d passed on in favor of the flask in my pocket and the cocktail of narcotics I was still on.

“Agent Jones,” I answered. I didn’t know or care what she wanted. I felt detached from everything. Numb.

“I just want you to know, um...” She glanced behind her and straightened her jacket. It was very odd behavior. I watched blandly. “I want you to know, I worked with one of you before, and you don’t have to worry. Whatever holes there have been in you and your colleagues’ stories, I took care of it on our end.”

I opened my mouth, but she held up a hand to forestall me.

“I know you can’t confirm it, and that’s okay. I just didn’t want you to worry. I started taking care of everything as soon as I realized. I understand how hard it can be when you’re working alone with no resources.” She straightened and gave me a sharp nod, almost as if she wanted to salute. I felt faintly ridiculous. “If you need anything else, just let me know.”

"What did he mean about the children?"

But she shakes her head. "Thank you for breakfast, Ray. I had a good time."

"Emma-"

Does he hit you ? This is what he means to ask, what he should be asking, but even the bare thought of it makes him feel violent. But in the space between words, she slips close to him. Her small hands pull his face to hers and she kisses his lips, cool and dry and hungry.

Without another word, she's gone.

The rest of his day is spent the way most of days pass on Paraclete. Ziggy rides him for duty failures that may or may not be legitimate or even vaguely associated with his own personal fault, then tells him Nina has packed along some lasagna from last night's dinner that he can have as long as he promises to remember to get the dish back to her. He makes two retrievals of malfunctioning drones. He performs some perfunctory upgrades to the drone system control frame. Around this, he codes new search parameters into the drones' surveillance routines, uploads a dozen petaflops of gathered surveillance data for pattern searches and anomalous chemical traces from the rat network's latest security sweep, trying to skew all his available resources in a clever and anonymous enough way that the other systems vets won't notice that he's been tinkering with the rats, and on the chance that they do notice, won't suspect it's anything but a buggy command sequence and definitely won't trace it back to him.

Whiston Corp., he means. "That could be."

"You brought samples?"

"I'm afraid I couldn't show them to you. The design specs are extremely confidential, at the request of the client."

Shue raises his hands between them, an I'm not trying to pry gesture. "Hey, that's cool. Fair enough. Just sort of a hobby of mine. "

Of course, digging up clandestine negotiation details is a hobby they all seem to have in common. Corporate espionage is the currency of the young up-and-comer.

But Shue goes on, lowering his voice. "I just find it interesting that the big W is moving in on territory it already has a proprietary interest in, if you know what I mean. The Board has been pretty aggressive, it seems to me, in dealing with the New H branch as it is, at least if you pay attention to the types of signs guys like us look at. Could be a strong move to entice Whelemat back into the fold, especially since they didn't have to use their own capital investments for the grunt work. "

"Yes," Rodriguez agrees, though he has no idea what it means.

This was the man whose staff was trying to deny me interviews with mothers who'd adopted through Children of Light. And what about the Hispanic hood with the gun? Did Alex Goddard send him? If not, his appearance at Paula's building was one hell of a coincidence. So why should I trust . . .

That was when I noticed it. My lingering cold had miraculously vanished, inflamed sinuses and all. I was breathing normally, and even my chest felt cleared.

My God, I thought, what did he do? Hypnotize me? It was as though a week's healing had passed through my body.

I had an epiphany, a moment that galvanizes your resolve. I had to do a documentary about this man, to find out what he was really up to. He'd mentioned he had a place in Central America. Was that the source of his special techniques, some kind of ancient Meso-American medical practices he'd discovered?

He claimed he didn't want any publicity, but that's always just an opening move. When somebody says that, what they really mean is they don't want any bad publicity; they just want to have final say about what you produce. There're ways to handle the problem.

Marcella ordered us to assemble in the main lobby in exactly one hour to report. She beckoned Dave to follow her to the medieval art section. We could hear her mechanical voice droning away as they disappeared into the distance. ...

We hiked to a... a table in a corner where we could talk. I told him all about Zip and the cops who’d come to our apartment and tried to throw their weight around. I told him how worried I was about Wheeze. I almost slipped up and told him about what the Group had dug up on Zip’s identity and the FBI agent he worked with, but I remem- bered just in time to make it sound like research I had done myself. I like Nikko a lot, but the Group is private.

I ended up talking about Wilson, too, the way he used to take care of me when I was little and how much I had wanted to go with him when he turned eighteen. “I understand it now. He wanted to have fun and hang out with his friends. Having a little kid around . . . I get it, but at the time I was so angry. It was never the same after that. He had his life. I had the internet. By the time I moved in with Monica we didn’t have that much in common anymore.

“You got his whole life story, huh?” There was a kind of coiled violence in the way Danny spoke that sent a shiver down my spine.

“Yeah, so?” She fixed eyes with him for a moment and then looked away. “I’m going to put the kid to bed.” She hauled herself up, picked up the baby and a bottle of beer and headed for the stairs.

Tweak started talking about actions he had participated in and Danny bragged about setting cars on fire during a protest. Simon,

not to be outdone, ranted about police brutality and I threw in a speech of my own about mass surveillance. I checked my phone every now and then. I ignored the missed calls and message noti- fications and only paid attention to the time. When I’d been there for nearly two hours, I asked where the bathroom was. I needed to download the video I’d shot before the memory ran out.

I went up the stairs and paused by an open door. Marita was sitting on a bed next the baby, rubbing his back and humming,

even though the kid was totally conked out.

Checker was at my shoulder immediately. “Where?”

I didn’t know how to do any sort of fancy computer highlighting, so I traced a rough circle against the monitor with my finger, ignoring it when Checker cringed. He didn’t like people touching his screens. “It disappeared into this area almost half an hour ago and hasn’t come out.”

“Are you sure? There’s no way it could’ve—?”

I glared at him, and he shut up.

“Okay, I get it, you’re sure. Two possibilities, then: their base is in the zone, or they switched vehicles. Can you run the security footage on the border of your zone forward and—never mind, I’ll do it,” he said hastily, at my blank look. He started punching keys. “You know, you could learn to do this stuff in about three seconds if you gave half a crap.”

I didn’t answer. Checker and I drank and watched bad movies together fairly regularly when I wasn’t avoiding him. It was stupid to think I wouldn’t see him anymore if I didn’t need him for the computer junk.

Stupid.

“It’s a bit of a long shot, but we can put together a likely vehicle list crossing the boundary,” Checker said absently, his focus on the screen. “Most cars that exit within the right window will be registered to people statistically unlikely to be involved, especially as stealing one would probably put our bad guys on the police radar more quickly and conspicuously. I’m skeptical this will work, though—I’m betting it’s not a coincidence they stopped out of view of any security cameras. These guys are very good at staying hidden.”

"Good thing we're not in love, then, right?" she said, in reference to their sixth date, when they'd decided that they would hold off on any declarations of love for at least an entire year, since they were most often moved to utter the Three Words of Significance when they were besotted with e.g. post-orgasmic brain-juice or a couple of cocktails.

"Yes, counselor."

She shook her head. He knew she was an academic, not a practicing lawyer, but he loved to tease her about it, ever since she'd revealed (after third date, on the phone) that she'd spent about ten seconds in private practice after she'd worked for her congressman and before she'd joined the faculty at UCLA.

"You're out of order," she said.

"This whole damned car is out of order!" he said. "So that's the ritual. You said you wanted to meet the parents and sisters and aunts and grandmothers and cousins and uncles and nephews and in-laws the next time we all got together. This is it."

"Right," she said. "I asked for this." And she had, of course. Hadn't asked for the graveside elements, but she'd been curious to meet this big sprawling enterprise of a family that he was always nattering on about. This seemed as good an occasion as any. "So," she said. "Is this a traditional date among Your People?"

“Pleased to make your acquaintance, Withnail,” she said in his language, another useful phrase culled from the cine, though she suspected she was pronouncing it all wrong. She held out her hand to shake his. He holstered his handgun and shook her hand.

“I have to go, Withnail.” She couldn’t say this in his language, but she spoke slowly and as clearly as she could.

He shook his head again. She covered his hand on her arm with her own and gave it a squeeze.

“To save my family,” she said. “I’m on a mission for your side anyway. Let me go, Withnail.” She gave his hand another squeeze. Slowly, he released her arm.

He was very handsome, she saw now, with a good chin and sensuous lips. She’d never kissed a boy and she’d be dead in four days and a little more. Or maybe she’d be dead that afternoon, if she couldn’t get back into her own trenches.

She put her hand on the back of his neck and pulled his face to hers and gave him a dry, hard kiss on those pouting lips. It made her blood sing, and she gave him a hug, too, pressing her body to him. He kissed her back after a moment, surprised. His tongue probed at her closed lips and she pulled away, then for a crazy moment she thought of biting him and giving him a dose of zombiism to spread to his comrades in the trenches with him. But that wouldn’t be right. They were friends now.

where she was jotting notes on a big yellow pad, holding a tele- phone receiver pressed to her ear. I waited as the pen flowed across the paper. She had filled the page with orderly lines. Her handwriting was old-fashioned, all the letters linked together in a flowing line of blue ink, threads of words crossing the page,

though it was a little fragile looking, like old lace that’s stating to fall apart.

She was using lawyer language, asking questions that included lots of Latin, then writing, writing, writing. As I eavesdropped, I rinsed out my tea cup and got myself some water from the tap.

“Ridiculous!” she said, and “what arrogance.” Then very loudly,

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” At that point I almost dropped my cup, but she didn’t even look embarrassed.

“Yes,” she said. “All right. That’s perfect.” She put a period down at the end of a sentence as if she was pinning it down firmly.

“Thank you, Luisa.”

She got up from her chair, disentangled herself from the coiled telephone wire, and hung the receiver up on an old-school telephone fixed to the wall.

Fury clawed up in me, shockingly hot, clogging my head until my scalp prickled with it.

Arthur twitched back. “Not about that, Russell. Not talking about you. I swear.”

I clamped my jaw down on what I had been about to say. “What, then?” I growled through my teeth.

Arthur hesitated, his fingers pressing against the laminated pine of the tabletop. “This thing with the Lancer. Was hard on him.”

“It was hard on him?” I repeated. “Excuse me, was he shot at and locked up and also almost blown to pieces three separate times?”

“He could use a friend, ’s all I’m saying.” He made a vague gesture and headed out the door.

I turned and leaned my head against the wall. Arthur had too high expectations of me, as always. I wasn’t in any condition to be a friend to anyone. I’d never been very good at being a friend to anyone.

I’d figured the updates were just because he was curious, or keeping tabs for us, as he did. Or, hell, I hadn’t figured at all—I hadn’t even thought about it.

Fuck. I pushed off the wall and went out to the Hole.

Lexy finished dressing and went into Caroline’s room. In the gay April sunshine, that dainty room seemed almost unbearably forlorn.

She went over to the window and looked down into the street. People were passing by, and taxis, and private cars—all the ordinary, casual, cheerful daily life at which Caroline Enderby had so often looked out, like a poor enchanted princess in a tower. A wave of pity and affection rose in Lexy’s heart.

“Oh, poor Caroline!” she said to herself. “Such a dull, miserable life! I do wish—”

There was a knock at the door, and she hurried across the room to open it. The parlor maid stood there with a tray. Lexy took it from her with a pleasant “good morning,” and closed the door again. Caroline’s breakfast! There was something disturbing in the sight of that carefully prepared tray, ready for the girl who was not there.

The door opened—without a preliminary knock, this time—and Mrs. Enderby came in. She turned the key behind her, and, without a word, went over to the bed and pulled off the covers. Then she went into the adjoining bathroom and started the water running in the tub. This done, she sat down at the table and began to eat the breakfast on the tray.

And sometimes those people misunderstand the nature of a game.

Let's just leave it at that, OK?

Class ended in ten minutes, and that didn't leave me with much time to prepare. The first order of business were those pesky gait-recognition cameras. Like I said, they'd started out as face-recognition cameras, but those had been ruled unconstitutional. As far as I know, no court has yet determined whether these gait-cams are any more legal, but until they do, we're stuck with them.

"Gait" is a fancy word for the way you walk. People are pretty good at spotting gaits -- next time you're on a camping trip, check out the bobbing of the flashlight as a distant friend approaches you. Chances are you can identify him just from the movement of the light, the characteristic way it bobs up and down that tells our monkey brains that this is a person approaching us.

Gait recognition software takes pictures of your motion, tries to isolate you in the pics as a silhouette, and then tries to match the silhouette to a database to see if it knows who you are. It's a biometric identifier, like fingerprints or retina-scans, but it's got a lot more "collisions" than either of those. A biometric "collision" is when a measurement matches more than one person. Only you have your fingerprint, but you share your gait with plenty other people.

So the police were, as they say, baffled. Mr. Houseman told them a tale. He had been alarmed about the lady whom he knew as Mrs. Quelton, and he had climbed up on the balcony, hoping to see her alone; but he had met Dr. Quelton instead, and had been hurt in trying to escape from him.

Captain Grey also had a tale. He, too, had been alarmed about the lady whom he believed to be his sister. He had gone with Miss Moran to call upon her, and they had found the doctor dead, lying across the coffin.

There was an inquest, and Mr. Houseman had a very unpleasant time of it, being the last one who had seen the doctor alive; but there was no really serious suspicion against him. The post-mortem showed that the doctor had died of some unknown poison, at least half an hour after the young man had arrived at the hospital. The verdict was suicide, although the coroner’s jury had its own opinion about the mysterious dark woman who had posed as the doctor’s wife. An autopsy revealed that Mrs. Quelton had died from a natural cause—phthisis of the lungs. In short, as far as could be discovered, there was no murder at all.

really good at it. When he gets into a role, he’s totally into it, and it’s almost creepy because he’s so convincing. His face changes.

His body changes. He becomes another person. And then, at the snap of a finger, he’s himself again. It’s like possession, only it’s all under his control. Also, he can memorize pages and pages of dialogue or make stuff up on the fly. Give him a character outline and he’ll run with it, improvising a story and making it all totally believable.

He didn’t go to my school in the suburbs, but the kids at his school were just as bad. Between his clothes, his looks, and his attitude, he didn’t fit in. He didn’t like being called a faggot and getting harassed on a daily basis. For the record, he’s not gay or even bi. “Faggot” is just an all-purpose insult. The fact that he sometimes wears a skirt isn’t a statement about his orientation. He just feels like it, but boys aren’t supposed to feel like it.

Sometimes I think it’s harder being a boy than a girl because you can’t wear certain colors and have to act tough. Then I see how women are treated in the tech community and I’m not so sure. People are basically equal opportunity jerks.

"Brutal."

He wondered if he'd overstepped himself. Who cared?