"It's good to see you both again." He turned his attention to the social worker. "To what do I owe the honor of this visit?"
"We have some news." When no one was shooting at her, Fourhorses glowed. "Good news. Don't we, Katla?"
The girl nodded, focusing half her attention on Cardenas while reserving the rest for the interior of his codo. Even in the home of a federale, it was plain she still did not feel entirely safe.
"I'm going away. Leaving the Strip. I'll miss some of my friends, but everyone says I can't go back to my soche. I understand why." Her smile was still shy, her manner withdrawn. "It'll be okay. I'm used to moving around."
Escorting them inside, Cardenas gestured for them to have a seat on his couch. Minerva gratefully accepted a cold guarana, while the girl opted for a rola. Cardenas, as usual, brewed himself an iced coffee.
"You should be safe now, Katla," he told her. "Using the information you gave us, we've brought in nearly all of your father's most important associates along with a great many of the minor ones, and shut down their scattered operations. The other bad people who were after you have taken note of that. As best as we have been able to determine, it has caused them to rapidly lose interest in you. But the Department of Social Resources people and my friends at the NFP are right: just to make certain, you'd be safer and more comfortable living under a different name, in a different place."
"That's what we came to tell you." Fourhorses was clearly excited for the girl. "Genealogy managed to track down an aunt and uncle she didn't even know she had. In New England. Small town, nice environment. Everything's been checked out and rated secure. The couple has two children of their own; a boy, fifteen, and a girl, fourteen. They've agreed to welcome Katla into their family. After a year, formal adoption procedures will be initiated. I anticipate no problems. Katla will become Harmony Jean Francis."
The girl ducked her head shyly. "I always liked singing harmony, but I never had much. Now I get to be Harmony. It's pretty vacan."
"I think so, too," he agreed. Color suffused Katla's cheeks-or maybe it was hope.
He pondered a moment. "How would you like to meet an old friend of mine? Someone you can talk with safely even in your new home in New England." At Fourhorses's look of alarm, he hastened to reassure the social worker. "Don't worry. This will not compromise her new identity in any way."
"Sure." The girl eyed him curiously. "I'm game."
Rising from the couch, he directed her to follow him to the far side of the den. Seating her in the chair that faced his desk, he stood next to her.
Picking up the vorec, he activated the tunnel and instructed the molly driver to accept open commands. Then he handed the verbal input device to her. She was looking at him expectantly, more at home inside a box than in someone's apartment. Leaning down and putting his mouth close to her ear, he murmured something too low for Fourhorses to overhear. The social worker looked on uncertainly, her expression reflective of her bemusement.
Katla listened intently, made a face, but finally nodded. Bringing the vorec to her lips, she repeated to the waiting molly the command he had whispered to her.
"Enter Charliebo: dog."
The holomage that built in the tunnel was so full of life and synthesized expression that a stranger walking into the room at that moment could have been forgiven for thinking it real. It could become more authentic still, Cardenas knew, but it would not do so without provocation of a specific, specialized kind that Katla soon-to-be-Harmony would hopefully never encounter. Leaning farther forward, he spoke into the vorec.
"Charliebo, the person next to me is Ms. Harmony Francis. She's a good friend of mine. I'd like you to be her friend, too."
The extraordinarily lifelike holomage of the big German shepherd gazed solemnly back at him. Then it turned its attention to the girl, glowing tongue lolling loosely from the left side of its mouth, tail of shimmering crunch wagging briskly, regarding her out of eyes composed of incalculable accumulations of intricately compiled ocular grams.
Katla was entranced. "What can he do?"
"You'd be surprised. I was surprised. I could tell you, but I'd rather let you experiment on your own. Charliebo's very versatile.
He'll play with you, and keep you company, and even watch over you." He put a comforting, paternal hand on her shoulder. "And you can have him with you whenever you want, wherever you go. Wherever there's access to the Big Box, that's where you'll find Charliebo." He stepped back. "Why don't you two get acquainted?"
Thoroughly spellbound, she lost herself in making friends with the canine gram. Leaving her to the screen, Cardenas and Fourhorses quietly made their way back to the sitting area that faced the wide phototropic window.
The social worker was beyond impressed. "That's the most realistic animal program I've ever seen! Where did you buy it?"
"I didn't buy it. It's an outgrowth of some work I had to do a while ago, at GenDyne. Charliebo was a real dog. My dog. For a while, years ago, he was also my eyes. He died doing his job, but the essence of him got vacced and turned into an independent psychomorph. Don't ask me to explain the technology. Better box designers than I are still trying to figure it out. But organic or grammatic, he's still my dog. Now he's Katla's, too, even if he exists only as a morphological resonance haunting the deepest interstices of the Big Box."
Fourhorses struggled to understand. "You said he could be her friend. That much I understand. But what did you mean when you said he could watch over her?"
Cardenas's expression grew serious. "If the situation requires it, Charliebo can go fully tactile."
Her jaw dropped. "No private gram can go tactile! That kind of technology is restricted to the military." He said nothing; simply gazed back at her. She exhaled sharply and nodded slowly. "Okay, I'm impressed." She glanced toward the girl, seated before the tunnel at the far end of the room. "You're sure it can't hurt her?"
"Charliebo won't hurt anyone, or anything, that I've okayed. She'll be fine. And even if she never needs to call on him for help, she'll feel a lot safer knowing that he's there. It's like the imaginary gun your father put under your pillow when you were a kid for you to use against the night monsters."
"What?"
"Never mind. I've got two days off. What are you doing for dinner tonight?"
The look on her face revealed her surprise. Truth be told, he was a little stunned at the alacrity of the offer himself.
It was a month later, as he was sitting in front of the active tunnel in his office downtown, scrolling through the relevant background information on a case he and Hyaki had been assigned to investigate, when the declaration brazenly splashed itself across infovoid before him.
REVENGE FOR THE MOCK!
It startled him, and Angel Cardenas was not one to be easily startled. It sat there, glowing softly before his eyes, the letters floating in the darkness of the tunnel. His first reaction was that it was a joke, probably concocted by Hyaki or some of the boys in Records.
But a quick trace failed to identify the sender or the source, and a deeper probe quickly lost itself in the nether mists and mysteries of the Big Box. One thing he was able to determine: irregardless of who had sent it, it had not originated within the Department.
That did not preclude it being a gag perpetrated by a friend or colleague. Even so… He made a record of it and the relevant back-trail, as far as he was able to trace it. Could it have originated with one of The Mock's subordinates? Most of them were incarcerated, awaiting trial or already serving time. But there was no guarantee that the sweep that had been carried out based on the detailed information supplied by Katla Mockerkin had caught absolutely everyone.