"There's more. Last night my theory moved from ‘tenuous' to ‘plausible', maybe even ‘compelling'. I learned that Foxwarner has brought an advance team to San Diego."
"But that's way out at Borrego Springs, in the desert."
"How did you know? I really had to dig for that."
"My mother, she's doing 411 work for them." Oops. Come to think of it, what he had seen of Ma's work this afternoon was probably privileged.
Miri was watching him with genuine interest. "She's working with them? That's great! Knowing the connection would put us way ahead. If you could ask your mother ...?"
"I dunno." Juan leaned back and looked at the schedule his mother had posted at home. All her desert work was under a ten-day embargo. Even that much information would not have been visible to outsiders. He checked out the privilege certificates. Juan knew his mother pretty well. He could probably guess how she had encrypted the details. And maybe get some solid corroboration. He really wanted to pass this exam, but ... Juan hunched forward a little. "I'm sorry. It's under seal."
"Oh." Miri watched him speculatively. Being the first to discover a Foxwarner movie setup, a Summer Movie, would give Fairmont the inside track on story participation. It would be a sure-fire A in the exam; the size of such a win wouldn't be clear until well into the movie season, but there would be some income for at least the five years of the movie's copyright.
If this issue had come up with Bertie Todd, there'd now be intense pleadings for him to think of his future and the team and do what his Ma would certainly want him to do if she only knew, namely break into her data space. But after a moment, the girl just nodded. "That's okay, Juan. It's good to have respect."
She moved back to the boxes and began rummaging again. "Let's go with what I've already got, namely that Foxwarner is running an operation in San Diego, and some of their Cinema Fellows have been fooling around in Torrey Pines Park." She pulled out a rack of ... they looked like milk cartons, and set them on top of another box. "Emrebs," she explained opaquely. She reached deeper into the open box and retrieved a pair of massive plastic goggles. For a moment he thought this was scuba gear, but they wouldn't cover the nose or mouth. They didn't respond to info pings; he searched on their physical appearance.
"In any case," she continued, even as she pulled out two more pairs of goggles, "the background research will fit with my unlimited team's work. We're trying to scope out the movie season's big secrets. So far, we're not focusing on San Diego, but Annette reached some of the same conclusions about Foxwarner that I did. You wanna be on my unlimited, too? If this works tonight, we can combine the results."
Oh. That was really quite a generous offer. Juan didn't answer immediately. He pretended to be fully distracted by all the strange equipment. In fact, he recognized the gadgets now; there was a good match in the 2005 Jane's Sensors. But he couldn't find a user's manual. He picked up the first pair of goggles and turned it this way and that. The surface of the plastic was a passive optical lacquer, like cheap grocery wrap in reverse; instead of reflecting bright rainbow colors, the colors flowed as he turned it, always blending with the true color of the gray plastic walls behind it. It amounted to crude camo-color, pretty useless in an environment this smart. Finally, he replied, kind of incidentally, "I can't be on your unlimited team. I'm already on Bertie's. Maybe it doesn't matter. You know Annette's working with Bertie on the side."
"Oh really?" Her stare locked on him for a moment. Then, "I should have guessed; Annette is just not that bright by herself. So Bertie has been jerking all of us around."
Yeah. Juan shrugged and lowered his head. "So how do these goggles work, anyway?"
Miri seemed to stew over Annette for a few seconds more. Then she shrugged too. "Remember, this equipment is old." She held up her pair of goggles and showed him some slide controls in the headstrap. "There's even a physical ‘on' button, right here."
"Okay." Juan slipped the goggles over his head and pulled the strap tight. The headset must have weighed two or three ounces. It was an awkward lump compared to contact lenses. Watching himself from the outside, he looked fully bizarre. The whole top of his face was a bulbous, gray-brown tumor. He could see Miriam was trying not to laugh. "Okay, let's see what it can do." He pressed the "on" button.
Nothing. His enhanced view was the same as before. But when he cleared his contact lenses and looked out with his naked eyes—"It's pitch dark from inside, can't see a thing."
"Oh!" Miri sounded a little embarrassed. "Sorry. Take off your goggles for a minute. We need an emreb." She picked up one of the heavy-looking "milk cartons".
"Meaning?"
"MRE/B." She spelled the word.
"Oh." Meal Ready to Eat, with Battery.
"Yes, one of the little pluses of military life." She twisted it in the middle, and the carton split in two. "The top half is food for the Marine, and the bottom half is power for the Marine's equipment." There were letters physically stenciled on the food container: something about chicken with gravy, and dehydrated ice cream. "I tried eating one of these once." She made a face. "Fortunately, that won't be necessary tonight."
She picked up the bottom half of the emreb, and drew out a fine wire. "This is a weak point in my planning. These batteries are way stale."
"The goggles may be dead anyway." Juan's own clothes often wore out before he outgrew them. Sometimes a few launderings was enough to zap them.
"Oh, no. They built this milspec junk to be tough." Miri set down the battery pack and bent Juan's goggles into a single handful. "Watch this." She wound up like a softball pitcher and threw the goggles into the wall.
The gear smashed upwards into the wall and caromed loudly off the ceiling.
Miriam ran across the room to pick up what was left.
Col. Gu's voice wafted down the stairwell. "Hey! What are you kids doing down there?"
Miri stood up and giggled behind her hand. Suddenly she looked about ten years old. "It's okay, Alice!" She shouted back. "I just, um, dropped something."
"On the ceiling?"
"Sorry! I'll be more careful."
She walked back to Juan and handed him the goggles. "See," she said. "Hardly a scratch. Now we supply power,"—She plugged the wire from the battery into the goggles' headband. —" and you try them again."
He slid the goggles over his eyes and pressed "on". Monochrome reds wavered for a moment, and then he was looking at a strange, grainy scene. The view was not wraparound, just slightly fisheye. In it, Miri's face loomed large, peering in at him. Her skin was the color of a hot oven, and her eyes and mouth glowed bluish-white.
"This looks like thermal infrared," except that the color scheme wasn't standard.
"Yup. That's the default startup. Notice how the optics are built right into the gear? It's kind of like camping clothes: you don't have to depend on a local network. That's going to be a win when we get to Torrey Pines. Try some other sensors; you can get help by sliding the ‘on' button."
"Hey, yes!"
BAT:LOW SENSORS BAT2:LOW
PASSIVE ACTIVE
VIS AMP OK GPR NA
NIR OK SONO NA
>TIR OK XECHO NA
SNIFF NA GATED VIS NA
AUDIO NA GATED NIR NA
SIG NA