Laurent stopped stock-still and his mouth dropped open. The escort officer smiled as he looked over at her after a moment. “That’s what I thought,” she said, “the first time I saw it.”
“Which one am I taking?” Laurent said finally.
“The AA,” said the escort officer. “Come on. They’ll preboard you, and maybe you can have a look into the cockpit before they go sterile.”
He followed her. This was everything he had imagined — a brave new world, shining, modern, new. This was what he had always wanted. All he had to do now was step out into it…all by himself.
Just so, proud, but (despite the airline staff) still terribly alone, Laurent Darenko — now Niko Durant — went across the concourse and into the boarding tube, into the unknown…
…and never knew how closely the eyes whose scrutiny he had most feared were watching him still.
1
It was Friday afternoon about two-thirty in Alexandria, Virginia, and in a sunny kitchen of a rambling house near the outskirts of the city, Madeline Green sat looking out of her virtual workspace, across the kitchen table, to where her mother was building a castle. Her mother swore.
“Mom,” Maj said wearily, brushing aside the piece of e-mail she had just finished answering, “you’re going to give me bad habits.” The e-mail bobbed back again, the little half-silver-half-black sphere seeming to float toward her in the air — she had failed to hit the half of it that meant “erase.” She hit the black half now, a little harder than she had intended, and the sphere popped and vanished with a small bursting-soap-bubble sound.
“Whatever habits I give you, they won’t be as bad as this one,” her mother muttered. She was bent over what, from a distance, would have looked like some sort of small light table for an artist. It had a flat square insulated plate on the bottom and a small, very bright gooseneck lamp attached to the back of the plate.
Right now her mother was holding a square of something that could have been mistaken for red-and-white-swirled plastic close under that lamp, and trying to bend it, with little success. “Heat it up more,” Maj said.
“If I do, the colors will run,” her mother said, “and they’ve run too much already. Maj honey, do me a favor and don’t ever let Helen Maginnis talk me into another of these last-minute projects again.”
“I tried to stop you this time,” Maj said, “but you were the one who kept saying, ‘Oh, no, it’s no problem at all, of course I’ll make this big fancy centerpiece for the PTA dinner when you said you were going to do it and now you ran out of time. Again.’”
Maj’s mother growled softly.
Maj laughed at her. “This is the third time she’s done this to you, Mom. And you always say you’re going to let her get herself out of trouble the next time. You’re just a big sucker for Helen because she’s your friend.”
“Mmmf,” her mother said, and laid the piece of sugar plate back down on the heating element to resoften. “I don’t care if it does run. The heck with perfection. You’re right, honey…”
She turned back to her work, and Maj looked over her shoulder into her virtual space to see if any more e-mail was waiting. But the air behind her was empty, clear to the white stucco walls. Above them, through the high windows above the bookshelves and the brushed stainless-steel furniture, the remains of a furiously red-and-blue Mediterranean sunset were burning themselves out, speaking of considerable heat outside on the Greek beach where the idea for this virtual workspace had originated, and more such heat tomorrow. Three years ago now, it had been, since the family had been able to synchronize both schedules and finances to go to Crete and the Greek islands for a few weeks, and Maj sighed, wondering when they would be able to get there again. It wasn’t that they were poor — not with her dad working as a tenured professor at Georgetown University, and her mom pulling down a better-than-average income as a designer of custom computer systems for big corporate clients. But having jobs as good as those also meant that both her parents seemed to be busy almost all the time, and getting everyone’s vacation time into the same calendar year, let alone the same month, was a challenge. At least, with her workspace linked to the weather reports and the live Net cameras sourced in that part of the world, Maj could experience the gorgeous Greek weather vicariously, if not directly. Maybe next year we’ll go again, she thought. Yeah, and maybe the moon will fall down.
She sighed. “Work space off,” Maj said. Immediately she felt the little hiccup in the back of her head that coincided with her implant passing the “shutdown” order to the doubler in the kitchen, and from there to the Net-access computer in her dad’s workroom. The virtual “Greek villa” behind Maj vanished and left her wholly in late sunlight, sitting at the big somewhat beat-up kitchen table, watching her mother wrestling with the sugar plate. “I don’t know, Maj,” she said after a moment, “this one might be too bumpy to be a wall. Maybe I can curl it up and make a tower out of it.”
“Maybe you should just melt it down and pour it over a waffle,” Maj said, and grinned.
“Don’t tempt me….”
They both glanced up at the hum of a vehicle pulling up in the main parking place out in front of the house. But it was just the school bus bringing Maj’s little sister home from preschool. “I thought her dad was bringing her back today,” Maj’s mother said, straightening up for a moment and massaging her back.
“No, he had something to do at the university….” Maj’s father’s workload had increased somewhat after his tenure came through, so that Maj (and everyone else in the household) was getting used to his schedule not behaving itself, and sometimes messing theirs up as well. But this time of year, with summer coming on fast, fortunately there was little left of Maj’s schedule for her dad’s to interfere with. She had finished her pre-SATs and her finals and was waiting, not entirely calmly, for the results for the former. She had passed all the finals and so had little left to occupy her except the music and riding that she indulged herself in while not building elaborate virtual simulations of aircraft, poking her nose into various interesting parts of the Net, and (very quietly) pursuing the studies which she intended to use to get herself into Net Force.
Which was where her heart really was, these days. Her mother sometimes looked at Maj strangely as she realized that her daughter was no longer the crazed schoolwork fiend she had been in recent years, or rather, she was no longer studying everything that got in her way just because it did. Maj’s studies now had to be more directed, more aimed, because Net Force mattered more than most of the other things in her life, even the hobbies she loved. That fact itself sometimes caused her mom and dad concern…and Maj heartily wished that they wouldn’t waste the effort the concern was causing them. “You ought to keep your options open,” her mother would say, mildly distressed; and “It’s too soon to make up your mind what you’re going to be doing for the rest of your life, or even the next half of it. Wait until after college,” her father would say, trying to look calm, and usually failing. All Maj would do, though, was “Yes-Mom” or “Yes-Dad” them, because she knew what she wanted. She wanted to be in Net Force.