Dudley stood beside her, smiling admiringly at the ramshackle city spread out around them. “Try rejuvenating five times, having to go back to a nine-to-five job for century after century just so you can pay half of your salary into an R and R pension fund that allows you to do exactly the same thing all over again. You might have a different job, wife, children; but for all that you’re just stuck on the same loop with no prospect of change. Once you’ve been through all that, Mellanie, even you would consider coming here to live your last life without a safety net.”
“I didn’t know you felt that way, Dudley.”
“I don’t. Or didn’t. Not during my last life, anyway. But I remember accessing a lot of files on emigration here. A couple more rejuve treatments, having to spend another fifty years fighting the dean for funding, married to another bitch like Wendy, and, yes, I could see myself doing it. There’s something very appealing about walking off into the wilderness and seeing what’s out there. The prospect of telling modern life to fuck off, and just for once build something substantial for yourself with your own two hands, revert to the hunter-gatherer state. It’s not as far away as we like to think, you know.”
“And now?”
“Now? None of us have that luxury anymore.” His face flinched. “I made sure of that, didn’t I?”
“No. You were a very minor part of what’s happened. Sorry to dent your ego, my darling, but you’re not that responsible.”
He grunted, unconvinced.
She wasn’t sure how to respond. The times when the old Dudley appeared she felt small and stupid beside him. Strange, considering this was the state she was supposed to be helping him return to.
The SI’s icon flashed emerald in her virtual vision, allowing her to postpone thinking about Dudley and his new future. “Yes?” she asked it.
“We’re only three hours from the end of the wormhole cycle, Mellanie. This would be a good time to establish our subroutine in the city net. We can verify operational authenticity.”
“All right.” She walked back into the lounge. There was a pine desk beside the door into the bedroom with a small, ancient desktop array on top. She placed both hands on the array’s first-generation i-spot, and a webbing of faint silver lines appeared on her fingers. A whole new display of icons materialized in her virtual vision, and seeker programs began to analyze the local net from inside her inserts. “Doesn’t look like there are any decent monitor programs in the nodes,” she said.
“We concur, Mellanie. Please release our subroutine.”
Her gold snakeskin virtual hands tapped out the code sequence, and the subroutine decompressed out of her inserts, flowing into the city net through her contact with the desktop array. The SI had formatted it as a simple observer system, with enough independence to advise and assist Mellanie when the wormhole was closed. She’d brought it with her in her inserts because any program that large entering Far Away through the narrow bandwidth of the Half Way relay would easily be detected by monitors. That opened the SIsubroutine to the risk of corruption, especially if the Guardians or the Starflyer were running hostile smartware in the city’s nodes.
“I am installed,” the SIsubroutine reported. “The city net has enough capacity for me to run in distributed mode within its on-line arrays.”
“We confirm that,” the SI said.
“Great,” Mellanie said. She took her hands away from the desktop array.
“See if you can find any kind of activity that might be the Guardians. All I need’s a name, or an address. Some way I can make contact with them.”
“I will begin analysis,” the SIsubroutine said. “There are a great many systems that have restricted access. Given the age of the processors I am operating in, it will take some time to circumvent their fireshields.”
“Do what you can.”
Dudley had come back into the lounge. “Who are you calling?” he asked.
“The Michelangelo office.” She told her e-butler to close the connection to the SI. “Just checking in and getting an update.”
“Okay.” His gaze crept over to the bedroom’s door. “What are we going to do next?”
“Go down to the bar, and get some information. Bars are always the best place for that. Besides, I could do with a big drink, we’ve been traveling for ages.” She yawned, stretching her arms to try to loosen the knotted shoulder muscles. “Come on, let’s go see if Far Away’s heard of a Murderous Seduction cocktail.”
The bar and restaurant at the Langford Towers were the only parts of the hotel doing any decent business. They catered to an upmarket cliental, such as it was in Armstrong City, providing a décor with decidedly Indian influences. The chef favored spiced dishes, and the in-house music system played a lot of sitar classics.
