Megan fell back, staring straight up. She couldn’t turn her head, could only hear the scream of the engine, the ringing in her ears. And then could have broken right down and wept, though not with fear, of course not, with relief, at the sound of all the footsteps all around her, at the sight, just out of the corner of one eye, of the beautiful black Net Force craft with its gold stripe down the side, and the police craft landing behind it—
— and the sight of James Winters suddenly looming above her, and saying to the medical people, “She’s okay, thank God, she just took some sonic, come on, give her a hand. And as for him—”
He looked down past the narrowing cone of vision that was all Megan had left at the moment. “Here’s our bouncer,” said Winters, in a voice fierce with anger and satisfaction. “Lock him up.”
It took several days for the excitement to die down. Megan spent a couple of them in the hospital — sonics are not something you just walk away from — and a third day talking to the police and to the Net Force people who came by to see her, including Winters, and to Leif, who came down from New York.
Everyone was treating her very gently, as if she might break. For the first day, she didn’t mind it so much. The second day, it was only occasionally annoying. But by the third day, it began to get on her nerves, and she said so, forcefully, to several different people. Even Winters, finally.
“She’ll be all right,” she heard him say to the nurse outside her door as he headed off. He turned, pointed at her. “But the day you get out of here — you and him—” He pointed at Leif. “My office, ten o’clock.”
“I’ll be in New York,” Leif said hopefully.
“What, is your computer broken? Ten o’clock.”
And he was gone.
Megan sat back in the comfortable chair in the corner — they’d let her out of bed at this point — and said to Leif, “Were the Net Force people in with you this morning?”
“Yeah.”
“Did they give you any more technical detail on how they thought Mr. Simpson, or Wallace, or Duvalier”—he had had several aliases, it turned out—“was managing to fool the system into thinking he wasn’t there when he was, and vice versa?”
Leif shook his head. “I have to confess, I’m not real strong on the technical side of it. He apparently had a second implant which he had somehow taught to fake being connected to his body. Don’t ask me how you do that…they’re apparently real interested. And he had it running an ‘expert program,’ an aware-system routine.”
Leif leaned on the windowsill. “This is real old stuff. You ever hear of a program called RACTER? One of my uncles knew the guy who wrote it.”
Megan shook her head.
“The name was short for ‘Raconteur,’” Leif said. “It was a descendant of those old Turing-test programs, the ones meant to fake being human, enough to pass in conversation, anyway. RACTER was meant to convince you that you were shooting the breeze with somebody, just casually. Simpson, or whatever his name is, had done a tailored ‘aware’ program for Sarxos, one that could hold moderately good conversations with people in his persona…and get away with it. It’s no surprise it worked, I guess. You just automatically assume, when you’re in Sarxos, that whoever you’re talking to is either a real player, or generated by the game itself…and sometimes game-generated people do act up a little bit. Even Sarxos has bugs, after all. And it looks like our guy had four of these programs running, sometimes all at once. The fifth ‘self’ would be him, turning up here and there, servicing the various personas to make sure that everyone thought they were who they were supposed to be…while he went about the rest of his business: being Lateran, and getting rid of the people who he thought were getting in Lateran’s way, one by one.”
“Do they have any idea why he bounced Elblai so hard?”
Leif shook his head. “The police psychiatrists have been talking to him, but I think the general feeling is that Elblai just put too much pressure on him. He cracked. He might have been going that way for a while. Shel had been putting a lot of pressure on him…but not as much as Elblai did. It just all got too much for him. But he’d been very careful, very canny. Covering his tracks for a long time…lots more than four months, apparently.” Leif made a bemused face. “I don’t think anything the shrinks can come up with is going to help him when he comes to trial, though. Hit and run, attempted manslaughter, various burglaries and destruction of property, and in your case, attempted murder…I doubt we’ll see him in Sarxos again anytime soon. Or anywhere else.”
Leif looked at her, folding his arms and turning away from the window. “I’m just glad you’re okay,” he said.
“Yeah, well, if it weren’t for you, I might not be okay.”
“I was terrified that I was going to be too late.”
“I thought that I might be about to be late, too,” Megan said, “in the less-usual sense of the word. Look…let’s just forget it. There are more important things to worry about now.”
“Oh?”
“The day after tomorrow,” Megan said, “at ten o’clock…”
When the hour came, Megan and Leif were sitting, virtually, in James Winters’s office; but not being there physically did not make their presence any more comfortable for them.
His desk was neat. There were a couple of tidy piles of printouts laid in front of him, a couple of data-storage solids off to one side. Winters looked up from the paperwork, and his face was very cool.
“I need to talk to you two a little bit,” he said, “about responsibility.”
They both sat mute. It didn’t seem like a good time to argue the point.
“I had conversations with both of you regarding this problem,” he said. “Do you remember those conversations?”
“Uh, yes,” Megan said.
“Yes,” said Leif.
Winters looked particularly closely at Megan. “Are you sure you remember it now? Because your actions since then are such as to suggest that you had a profound incident of amnesia. I’d be really tempted to suggest that your parents take you down to the NP center at Washington U for the purpose of what my father, in the ancient days, would have called ‘having your head felt.’ If you can demonstrate some physical pathology to support the way you acted, it would make my life a whole lot easier.”
Megan’s face positively simmered with embarrassment.
“No, huh? I was afraid not. Why did you not do as I requested?” Winters said. “Granted, it wasn’t an order, you’re not under my orders…but normally, requests of this kind from a senior Net Force official to a Net Force Explorer can be considered as having some force.”
Megan looked at the floor and swallowed. “I thought the situation wasn’t as dangerous as you thought it was,” she said finally, looking up again. “I thought Leif and I could handle it.”
“The thought didn’t possibly cross your mind that you would like to really look good?”
“Uh. Yes. Yes, it did.”
“And what about you?” Winters said to Leif.
“Yes,” Leif said. “I thought we could handle it. And I thought it would be really neat to handle this ourselves, before the senior members got involved.”
“So.” Winters looked at him. “You weren’t thinking of sparing us danger, or trouble, not specifically.”
“No.”
“Time, maybe,” Megan said.
“And glory?” Winters said softly.
“A little,” said Leif.
Winters sat back. “You two are nothing if not an easy debrief. Well, I’ve had time to look over all the logs. There’s no question of your tenacity. And I have to say I smell dedication here. Got your teeth into it, didn’t you?”