S.I. (original/SI)

[DataPacRat]

*Book Seven: Mis-*


*Chapter One: Mis-anthrope*

"Well, Doc?" Brenda chalked onto a lap-sized slate with one limb, as she squeezed the rest of her near-liquid form back into her griffon-shaped suit. "What's the verdict?"

"I may be a vet," Denise answered, "but even I know what patient privacy is."

"It's OK," Brenda wrote, sealing herself up. "I want Bunny to know."

Denise sighed, and flipped through her papers. "I can tell you more about what I can't find than what I can. Your cells seem to be undifferentiated - I can't find any that are even distinctly muscle or skin cells, let alone any actual organs. That includes a lack of nerve cells or a brain - I don't know how you're thinking, or what you're thinking with."

Brenda scribbled out, "What, no jokes?"

Denise glared. "This isn't a joking matter. You've been turned into a life-form even more alien than the squiddies. We don't know what might hurt you that the rest of us could just ignore. Maybe salt or vinegar is a deadly poison to you now."

Brenda wiped the chalk clear to make room for, "So take samples & test".

Denise shook her head. "I'm not comfortable with that. The samples I've already drawn held together for an hour, then the inter-cellular matrix dissolved, and the samples liquified into individual cells floating in water. Without knowing what you're using to think, any sample I take might be like scooping out a bit of your brain. And I'm not going to ask you to try splitting off larger pieces, given how much more likely part of your thinking is to end up in the wrong piece."

Brenda tilted her head - or, at least, shifted the part of herself in the head part of her suit to make it look like she did that. Then she shrugged (or at least imitated the gesture well enough), and added, "What do you know?"

Denise flipped a few more pages. "Well, for one, I figured out part of why everything looks weird to you. We can't see infrared; to you, it looks red. We can't see ultraviolet; to you, it looks blue. Almost all the colours of what we usually call 'visible' light look like green to you. I'm going to guess that's the best your brain can do to interpret the information your visual sense is giving you, and whatever you're thinking with is closely modeled on your original brain.

"Now, your problem with speaking doesn't seem to be creating hollow spaces that act like lungs, but with creating vocal cords to vibrate the air."

After a few more items, Brenda interrupted to ask about a particular detail. "Do you know what I eat? Do I need light like plants?"

Denise shrugged. "I haven't been able to get good observations about that yet. You can dissolve everything organic you've touched so far, and you can keep from dissolving it if you want. Beyond that, I think we mostly have to see what happens, if your body sends hunger or thirst signals to your mind, that sort of thing."

I finally spoke up. "Is she going to... be okay? Not suddenly melt?"

Denise shook her head, but not in an answer to my question. "There's no way to know. She could collapse any moment. She might be effectively immortal and outlive us all. If you're asking if she can leave the cargo bay... well, I'd /like/ to keep her confined indefinitely and keep running tests, but I've got no medical /reason/ to. Her newest Change doesn't seem to create any specifically identifiable danger to herself or others... so for now, I'm going to provisionally clear her from quarantine, as long as she keeps the suit sealed."

--

I dreamed I was swimming, floating in the water near the campground at Long Point.

I woke to a similar sensation... though with various exceptions that reminded me more of my time in the bimbo zone. I was surrounded in transparent /stuff/ that barely let me move - and which filled all my orifices. I couldn't inhale, but didn't seem to be suffering from a lack of oxygen. My breasts ached as if I hadn't been milked for many hours, and I had to pee.

I managed to tilt my head to look down at myself... my belly was inflated again.

I tried to scream.

One of the handheld AIs floated through the stuff, until it was almost touching my ear.

"Ooh, you're awake," a voice came from it - neither Alphie's nor Boomer's. "I figured out all /sorts/ of tricks I can do. Still can't make vocal cords worth a damn, but Alphie and I came up with a workaround."

I might have flailed and thrashed a bit.

"Oh, right. You still need air to talk. Hold on, this will be a bit tricky - I don't want to rupture your lungs as I pull out of them."

In a few moments, my head broke the surface of, well, Brenda, and I spent a few more moments gasping for breath.

While I was doing that, Alphie floated to the surface next to me, and said, "I figured out how to change my colour, too. Look!" The transparent goo turned to a see-through blue, and then became opaque.

"Brenda," I started to say, but she kept talking right over me.

"I moved almost all my thinky bits inside you. I can get rid of most of the rest, and just coat you, inside and out. I can be any outfit you want! I had to teach the cells in your gut not to try to digest me, of course, but that's sorted out. Uh, you may want to check if you're lactose intolerant now, but I'm pretty sure you can digest that on your own, right?"

"Brenda," I tried again.

"And if anyone tries to hurt you again I'll be right there to keep you in one piece, and even fix you up. Ooh, I bet I could even replace your organs with myself. Wouldn't that be nice? Bun-Bun could be your skeleton, and I could be your flesh, and you could be the brains, and Wagger could, uh, wag, and we'd all be happy together!"

I hurriedly stated, "Brenda, I don't want you replacing any of my organs."

"Even if you lose some?"

Since she was finally responding to my voice, I carefully said, "We can cross that bridge if we come to it. The bimbo zone took my organs apart, and I was very unhappy about it. Maybe you could practice on some lab animals before you try anything like that on a person - if you can't get vocal cords to work, you might have unexpected troubles with more complicated structures."

"I suppose that's safe. Say, maybe I can keep you safer if I just keep you inside me."

My neck sank a few inches into the blue spheroid of stuff, and I once again spoke quickly. "Brenda, I want you to let me out of you. And, er, to remove yourself from inside me. All of you."

She was silent for a long moment, but at least I didn't sink any deeper. "... Are you sure?"

"Call it a trust exercise... I want to be sure that you're still you in there."

There was a sigh. "Well, I suppose. Uh - it'll take a few minutes. I was exploring, and your milk ducts and urethra are kind of narrow."

After a few minutes of sensation for which the word 'uncomfortable' was wholly inadequate, I was sitting on my private carriage's floor, and Brenda was pulling herself back into griffon shape - though she was now favouring a see-through blue colour scheme. She shifted Alphie so that he was embedded in the front of her chest. "There, you're back to just you, and I'm all here. Happy?"

I pulled my arms around my once-again-deflated belly. "That's one word. Brenda, do you understand why I'm uncomfortable with what you just did?"

"Flashback to the zone?"

"... Brenda, what is it called when one person inserts something into another person's genitals, without having previously gotten permission to do so?"

"Ohshit! Ohmygod! I didn't even /think/ about it like that! You must hate me now and never want to see me again and-"

"Brenda!" I reached out one of my hands, which she'd accidentally de-furred earlier, to rest on her surface. "I don't hate you. I do think you should get some counselling, until you've settled into the new you. Fortunately, I happen to know someone who's dealt with problems /almost/ as unusual as this..."

--

Just to be on the safe side, I discreetly arranged for Brenda and Amy to meet up away from the shelter, and the bimbos remaining inside. Since we EMPed the zone, there was less of a likelihood that they'd vanish too - but with Brenda seeming to have absorbed at least some aspects of the bimbo zone, I felt that there wasn't anything to be gained by tempting fate.

The Civil Guard was still trying to track down all the bimbos who'd disappeared, but after seeing what happened to Judith, I wasn't holding out much hope... and despite all my technical doo-dads, I didn't have much else I could add to the search. So, with my counsellor dealing with her new patient, I went over my to-do list to see which items were near the top, priority-wise. One item caught my eye; I hadn't checked in on the city's constitutional committee during my week-long spell of intensive therapy.

--

"Mister... Owen Lears?" I asked the man in pajamas and a bathrobe.

"Yes?"

"/There/ you are!" I glared at him. "Why are you here, instead of the hall put aside for the committee?"

"Committee? Oh, yes, that - we finished that on the first day, and all voted to go home."

"... Really. You wrote a constitution in one day."

"We didn't have to do much writing. We just took the old American one, and replaced 'states' with 'unions'."

"... That's /it/?"

"Why would we need to do anything else?"

"... There are /so/ many ways I could answer that. But I'll try to focus on the personal consequences: I don't see how I would be willing to accept such a slapdash job, and by the provisions of the treaty, my refusal would mean a reversion to rule by military occupation. Trust me, after you bungled a generous opportunity for civil government, you would /not/ like how that plays out. And I have projects I would much rather be doing than running this town."

"Yeah? So?"

"So any of your committee members who aren't back at the hall in one hour are going to get arrested."

I turned my chair around - I already missed Brenda's help maneuvering it - and rolled back toward Munchkin without another word.

--

"Purple fox?"

"Er... yes, ma'am?" The Bayesian cultist was still scrambling into his robe and hood as he answered the door.

"Show me your constitution draft."

"Yes, ma'am!"

I spent some time going over both the main text, and the extensive notes.

Eventually, I got to his version of a Bill of Rights, and started wincing. "A clarification, here, please. Your free association clause - where you have, 'any person may ... refuse to transact with any other person for any reason'... does that mean a business owner may refuse to sell to people of a race or religion he dislikes?"

"Of course, ma'am."

"And a doctor may similarly refuse to treat a patient for religious reasons?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Hrm. Moving on... The freedom of thought and religion clause... 'nor shall the Government operate or support any school, college, or university'. No government-run education at all?"

"None, ma'am."

"And you have the government prohibited from issuing or regulating money."

"Yes, ma'am."

"And you prohibit occupational licenses."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Including preventing the government from having a monopoly on 'services of adjudication, protection, and enforcement' of rights."

"Exactly so, ma'am."

"And... any land-owner may secede with their property, becoming an independent state?"

"Yes, ma'am."

I set the papers down, frowning. "I have to say, this looks less like a constitution to protect its citizens' rights and improve their welfare than it does a recipe for paralyzing the government to such a degree that everyone secedes into 'sovereign' armed households."

"That's exactly right, ma'am."

I blinked, then frowned harder. "Even if doing so means everyone ends up poorer and worse off than if they cooperated more?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"If you know that's the likely outcome - then /why/ did you design this thing that way?"

"The wealthier and more cooperative people are, the more likely they are to re-develop the technology that will cause a second Singularity. Arranging for as many people as possible to act as sovereign individuals is likely to hamper technological innovation, to the degree that a new Singularity becomes impossible. I have another set of notes on my economic calculations, if you wish to read them, ma'am."

"... No, thank you. I think I've learned what I need to know for now."

--

Sarah rolled me into the conference hall right on the one-hour dot. To my relief, it looked like the number of people matched the committee membership list. (Threatening arrest was one thing; getting the Civil Guard to carry it out, with the Free Company withdrawn back to their home city, would have been tricky, and possibly might have crashed the whole program.)

After some consideration, and consultation of Boomer's knowledge of history, I was trying to pull a MacArthur, and had donned my Commander-in-Chief outfit. Sarah had grumbled a bit about having to wear more than a vest, but I'd gotten her decked out in a full-body camouflage thing that looked military-ish without actually being so.

Sarah moved me to the head of the table, unceremoniously shoved the chair there out of the way, and installed my wheelchair in its place. I folded my hands together, watching as the dozen-ish people started shuffling over.

Before they'd even sat down, I started talking. "The /injuries/ I received after your /former/ government kidnapped me have prevented me from giving this group appropriate oversight and direction. You are /supposed/ to be arranging for the structure of your future politics - and you couldn't even put more than a day's effort into it. Now, I'd like a quick show of hands: How many of you can explain how a first-past-the-post election system tends to lead to polarization into two camps, while a ranked-preference election system doesn't?"

No hands rose. I sighed.

I pulled out my walkie-talkie. "It's as bad as I was afraid of. Send in Purple Skunk."

After a few moments, a figure in an identity-concealing robe and cowl entered the hall and joined us at the table. I introduced her, "This individual appears to have more knowledge about government documents than all of you put together. I should have brought her in at the beginning, but was distracted by medical concerns. Consider her my representative at these talks, and listen to her advice."

One of the committee members finally spoke. "Who is she?"

I focused my ears on him. "What difference does it make?"

"Well... which union is she with?"

"I repeat - what difference does it make?"

"I just want to know which group's interests she's trying to advance."

I managed a tight smile. "/Mine/. And I'm not in any of your interests." I drummed my fingers on the table for a moment. "Perhaps I need to clarify something. According to the terms of the peace treaty, the one which all your union bosses signed, I can pick any constitution I want and that would be the law. The reason this committee exists at all is due entirely to my leniency. Externally-imposed constitutions don't have a great success record, since the local population generally has particular concerns that such constitutions don't address. If you're willing to use something as close to the old American constitution as possible, then it's obvious there are no such concerns, and thus I should have no compunction in picking whatever constitutional details please me. That said - Purple, why don't you offer a few highlight suggestions?"

"Almost any form of preferential voting more accurately represents a community's desires and interests; instant runoff is simple enough for our purposes, but both single transferable vote and mixed-member proportional representation have their advantages. Line-item vetoes reduce pork. Constitutional requirements that laws have explicit goals, and amendments have to be related to those goals, gets rid of all sorts of potential boondoggles. Requiring metrics to measure those goals, and an expiration date for laws if they fail to meet those goals, is untested but worth considering. Prediction markets were part of the platform in the twenty-forty insurrections, and the documentation on them was distributed enough that even after those movements were put down, we have enough information to create our own system."

I reached into my wheelchair's pannier, withdrawing some bundles of papers, which I tossed onto the table to spread out a bit. "Here's a constitution created by one of your local citizens - along with some notes I've added on the parts of it that serve his interests more than yours. There are some interesting possibilities in its bill of rights you'll want to discuss, such as determining whether an entity is competent to be a person with rights; whether the right to bodily integrity means having to serve as life-support for another entity against your will; whether a patent or copyright system should be within your government's power or constitutionally forbidden; clarifying the right to bear arms. You have a /lot/ to discuss."

Another committeer leaned forward. "According to the reports I have gathered, you fancy yourself a Canadian. Does this mean you plan to reject any constitution based on the American one?"

My smile was much more genuine this time, since this question was actually relevant and productive. "At this point, the only constitutions I plan on rejecting are those in which no thought was put into, no consideration of alternatives made, no discussion, uh, discussed. You want a tri-cameral legislature, or for your Senate to be able to reject any bill with a one-third-plus-one minority vote? Go nuts. Want every bill to have to be read aloud, or voting to be compulsory? Fine by me. Really want to stick close to the American constitution? I can live with that - /as long as/ I can see that you've thought it over and really think that's the best approach."

I looked around, and went back to frowning. "Any other questions?" None of them spoke up, so I sighed a bit, and told them, "You've lost a week before your deadline. I suggest you make the most of the time you have left."

Purple Skunk started, "First, I think we should note down that we need to consider whether any given governmental position should be filled by election, by appointment, or by lot..."

--

I watched my legs twitch under Wagger's control as Sarah wheeled me back to Munchkin. When we were out of earshot of the committee members, she asked me, "Do you think they'll come up with something good enough?"

"I'm certain of it. I didn't specify what Purple Skunk's roles or responsibilities were, so she's got almost carte blanche to do whatever it takes to keep them talking. If nothing else, she can put together a draft constitution all on her own at the end of the week, but I'm pretty sure it won't come to that. These people were suggested by the unions - now that I've pointed out that what they're doing can affect their lives and pocketbooks, and they've got someone keeping an eye on them, I'm pretty sure they've got incentives to come up with /something/ they think I'll find more acceptable than forcing my own ideas down their throats."

"What if they are wrong?"

"Then I force my ideas down their throats. In the meantime, where are the kits? I think Brenda accidentally started my lactation reflex again..."

--

"Mister Mayor?" I asked.

"As I am only Mayor Pro Tem, and even that by your grace, Mister Edwards seems more appropriate. Tea?"

"No, thank you - I haven't gotten used to the local version yet." I also didn't want to blatantly insult him by scanning for poisons.

"What brings you to City Hall today, Your Majesty?"

"The bimbo disappearances this morning. Almost everyone who'd ever been in the bimbo zone has gone away - but the group I've heard called the 'Mayor's Harem' is one of the few exceptions. I would like to know why."

He poured himself a cup of some herbal infusion or other as he said, "I'm afraid that I'm as much in the dark as you are."

"Can you tell me where they spent the night?"

"In my room, with me."

"What sort of protections surround that room? Thick walls, locked doors, barred windows, underground bunker?"

"Nothing so elaborate; until your, shall we say, intervention, I have been a simple civil servant, and have lived modestly. I keep my doors locked, of course, but from the inside, and it is simple to leave."

"Does /anything/ come to mind?"

"Not particularly, no."

"Hrm. Perhaps I should talk to them."

"I doubt it would be worth your time, but if you wish, they are in the next room. I asked them to pick some funeral dresses; their minds are simple enough that that will likely occupy them until whatever memorial services are held."

--

"Candy? Crystal? Kelly? Karma? This is Bunny."

"Ooh," said one of the nearly indistinguishable blonde bombshells. "Is she a new bimbo?"

"Don't be silly," said another. "Her tits are too small. Is she your new girlfriend?"

"Is she hurt?" said a third. "Her legs are twitching. Can we give her a massage?"

"Maybe if I don't wear a bra, this dress will look right," said the fourth, still examining herself in some mirrors.

Edwards stage-whispered, "They are used to not understanding questions, but good at remembering what makes people happy."

"Um, ladies," I said, feeling oddly nervous but not having enough time to do a proper selves-query, "Some people were hurt last night. I want to find out why. Can you tell me what happened last night?"

"Well," the first one said, "after we ate, we all fu-"

Edwards coughed, very fakely, and, face red, quickly said "/After/ that."

"Oh, well," the first one said, "after that, we fell asleep."

"Where?" I asked.

"In bed, together."

"Did any of you wake up in the night?"

"I didn't."

"Not me."

"Nope."

"I don't like the lines these panties make."

I sighed. "Right. When did you wake up?" And so it continued, with nothing of value being learned. Eventually, I gave up. "Thank you all for your time," I said.

"Did we help?" asked one, bouncing.

"... Well, you helped me rule out a lot of theories, so - sure, you did."

"Yay!" She bounced harder, grabbing the hands of a couple of the others and dancing in a quick circle with them.

As I watched the antics, at first they seemed nice and simple and cute... but then I wondered what they'd been before they'd been turned into these caricatures of femininity, what their lives had been before they'd been bent into this new shape. I muttered to Edwards, "I'm still uncomfortable with this whole thing - but as long as you're responsible for them, you're /going/ to take care of them, or else answer to me. Capiche?"

It seemed like I hadn't muttered quietly enough, because one of them - I'll admit that I still couldn't tell them apart, stomped over to us. "You can't talk to him like that! He's the mayor! That means he's in charge!"

I managed to raise an eyebrow, Spock-like, then glanced sideways at Edwards. "Is there anything you want to tell them?"

"You mean, like you can fire me?"

"Huh?" blinked the one who'd made the objection. "She can fire you? How does that work?"

I tried to keep things simple. "It's complicated," I offered, since that covered pretty much everything.

"Huh?"

Edwards shrugged. "She's a queen, and I'm a mayor. Right now, she outranks me."

"Oooo-ooooh!" the three chorused, and then the fourth chimed in with a quick "Oh!" and dropped the hats she was examining. All four walked right up to me, surrounding my wheelchair.

"So," the one in front of me licked her lips, "/you're/ the one in charge?"

I looked at Edwards, eyes wide, and squeaked a quick, "Help?"

He just folded his hands behind his back, and looked up towards the ceiling in a vaguely British-y, butler-y way. "It is, of course, my duty to give such callipygian and callistethous women lives that are as dignified as possible, given their artificially limited mental capacities, a significant part of which involves respecting any choices or preferences that they do manage to express. One of the more fundamental choices which a person who has been judged to be not entirely mentally competent can make involves expressing a desire for or against any particular caretaker, and given your own recent statement of your willingness to oversee my responsibilities for them, I can only assume that any transfer of guardianship which happens to be made at this date and in this place is voluntary on both parties' sides, meaning that as a good mayor, and, if I may be so bold, a good man, my only option is to step back and allow the obvious matters to take their own course in their own good time."

The bimbo behind me had started rubbing my shoulders. "He gets like that when he doesn't want us to understand."

Edwards' face turned into what might be described as a smile, of such infinitesimal proportions as to avoid affecting the standard 'stiff upper lip'. "Put simply, girls - if you want her, she's yours."

"Ooh!" they chorused.

"Eep!"

 

[DataPacRat]

*Chapter Two: Mis-cible*

"Note to self: Look into non-lethal methods of self-defense, to deal with people who aren't trying to kill me, but are being... obstacles. I think Boomer mentioned something about tranquilizer darts..."

--

While I was at City Hall, I had Edwards show me their computer. I knew they had one, because he'd made some print-outs on a relevant topic the first time I'd seen him.

It was in the basement, and brought a pang of familiarity. Behind locked doors, inside what appeared to be walls lined to act as a Faraday cage, there was a tower, pretty much of the same style that had been in use from the eighties to when I died; plus monitor, keyboard, trackball, printer, the works. Edwards mentioned, "It was thirty years out-of-date when the Singularity happened," which meant it still looked a few years more futuristic than what I recalled. (The stuff from just before the Singularity itself was different enough that my mind didn't really categorize it as 'computers'.) However, in addition to being stylish, it was also worn-out and falling apart. The plastics were yellowing; all the keys had their symbols hand-painted, and some had even been replaced with carved wood; and I didn't want to think about what it would have taken to keep the physical moving parts going.

And even with all of that, I was still tempted to claim the whole thing as part of my reparations. I lent my main subself alliance lend its support to my utilitarian subself, overruling my "Ooh, shiny!" subself, and tried to mollify the latter by pointing out that I had a freaking Turing-grade AI in my pocket.

The harem - I had no intention of calling it /my/ harem - had been left behind at the locked door, but were still waiting to pounce as soon as we returned. "I know you have some kind of encyclopedia on there," I said to Edwards, thoughtfully. "How extensive is it?"

"I have yet to be disappointed in what it offers."

"So if I asked you to find an instruction manual for, say, royal handmaidens and ladies-in-waiting..?"

He did his almost-smile again. "An interesting choice," was all he said as he sat down, and started turning things on. (I had to suppress my reactions when I discovered it to be running Windows XP - I wanted to both laugh and cry and scream that /that/ OS was the one to survive the apocalypse.)

"Er - /can/ any of them read?"

"Kelly still retains that skill, yes."

As he printed out some old booklets and decorum, etiquette, and ladylike behaviour, I wondered aloud, "Is this the best computer you have left?"

"There is a certain amount of ill feeling towards such objects. We do not publicize this machine's existence; and even those who are aware of it think of it as a necessary evil, when they do think of it, much like a sewage processing plant."

"That is all very interesting and has many connotations but, I notice, did not actually answer my question."

"'Best' implies that we have more than one."

"If you could have one, why couldn't you have more than one?"

He sat back and folded his hands. "This machine was assembled by my predecessor - as Secretary, not as mayor - from parts that were confirmed to be in storage, unplugged and unpowered, from long before the Singularity. Simply finding a full set of piece that were compatible with each other took several years. All forms of input, save for this keyboard and trackball, were physically removed, had their wires snipped, and/or had their sockets blocked. Similarly, all forms of output save this screen and printer. The power line contains several forms of conditioning to smooth out any unusual spikes that might affect it. The door contains a physical mechanism which interrupts the power unless it is closed; no piece has ever been powered up save while in this protected room. For several years, there was a decorative water feature outside to muffle any sounds from within, and an armed guard. When I became Secretary, I spread the rumor amongst the knowledgeable few that I kept this machine because I had become addicted to video games. In short: there are three pieces for which I have no replacement parts, at least none that can be used without risking the compromise of the whole machine. If no replacements have been procured by when they fail, then I will be forced to rely on hand calculators."

"If you like, I may be able to help with that." I thought of one of the Bayesians, Blue Rabbit, who'd claimed to have finagled a computer out of Clara.

"That is kind of you, but unnecessary. I will not be mayor very long."

"You're not going to seek election to, er, whatever post the constitutional committee comes up with?"

"I was appointed to be secretary. I served. I was appointed Mayor Pro Tem. I am serving. When I am done serving, I will seek to be appointed as secretary again, or a similar posting. I am not well-suited to executive positions. I do not possess the... people skills."

"I suspect we could spend quite some time commiserating with each other about that, but for the moment... what do you have on here?"

"Business and accounting software, and a cache of significant portions of several projects: encyclopedias, a library of texts whose copyrights had expired, a different library of texts whose copyrights were waived, yet another library of texts that were still under copyright and illegal to possess at the time - that latter has been at least as much help as all the others combined. There are various other pieces of software, from maps and star-charts to a simple version of the 'trust verification architecture' that became ubiquitous after this data was stored; but we rarely use any of those, given that increased use increases the odds of an irreplaceable part failing."

"Do you know how much data there is, in total?"

"The figure that was passed to me was fifty terabytes."

"That seems like both a lot, and not very much. More than I could manage to make a copy of just now, and a fraction of the storage sizes I've seen bandied about for twenty-fifty era computers."

"Intact storage devices are one of the more common finds; the main difficulty is examining them for useful data without compromising the remainder of the library. It would not be difficult to transfer a portion of these archives onto one for you, if you can narrow down your choices to two terabytes or less."

I hesitated, faced with that choice. "I have to admit," I managed to think aloud, "that your rumour of video game addiction is all too plausible. There are many things I /should/ be doing - but if I was faced with the choice of doing them, or in revelling in all the fiction and media and games you could give, well... I'd be using up a lot of willpower." That made me frown. "And I think that's an answer, there - if I have to actually /will/ myself to keep doing something, then sooner or later, I'll face the choice while my mental energy is low. Meaning that it's in my best interests to arrange matters to minimize such choices. So as much as I /want/ to grab this computer and not let go for the next three years... maybe just an encyclopedia, an index of the whole lot, and whatever other non-fiction the city's used and happens to fit?"

--

"Without violating any confidences, Amy, can you tell me how Brenda is doing?"

"Who is doing the asking? Queen Bunny, Brenda's friend, or a fellow patient?"

"I'll start with my Queen hat. Is she a danger to others?"

"Her imprinting on you seems to have been magnified; at the moment, she is plausibly likely to use excessive force against anyone she perceives to be a threat to you, and possibly to use extreme measures in her attempts to protect you."

"Do I want to know what those 'extreme measures' are?"

"I'll put it this way; I contacted Doctor Black to find Brenda some experimental animals to practice her abilities on, so that even while under stress or performing other activities, she does not dissolve any tissues she would regret having dissolved. About all I can guarantee is that she is psychologically incapable of harming your central nervous system."

"And as her friend - is she going to harm herself?"

"Answering to you-the-friend, I have to be careful about discussing certain issues, but her fixation on you means that if you come to harm she believes she could have prevented, she will... not take it well. Her guilt may lead her to punish herself by attempting to subordinate herself to you in a very unhealthy manner."

"As in, replacing my flesh with herself?"

"Oh, she already told you that? Yes, merging with you in such a fashion is currently one of her central fantasies, though I am trying to nudge her in the direction of healthier outlets."

"Then I suppose it's time for me to get back to being one of your patients for a while. ... Has anyone mentioned to you that I saw a woman die today? Or as good as, I think..."

--

Back in the shelter's garden to relax after my latest session, I'd parked my chair at the end of a small path, where I could keep an eye out for anyone coming in my direction. So I was able to follow a blue-tinted, quadrupedal form all the way from the door into the house right up to me. Brenda stretched out on the bench that was installed to face the flowerbeds along the edge of the wall, and the vines climbing up it, as if she had a perfectly ordinary skeleton and set of muscles that needed minding. Alphie was still in her chest, and it looked like something else was embedded deeper within her.

"So," I said, "how're things?"

"Amy has helped me to understand that you might have perfectly valid objections to some of the things I want to do with you. So I'm putting together evidence that at least some of those objections are unfounded." She lifted a wing and waved at herself with it. "I've got a squirrel in here right now. She's fine, swimming around, I just make sure my surface tension is high enough to keep her from getting out. I'm going to try to make sure she stays fine when I'm asleep, and then tomorrow, that I can keep her fine when I run through an obstacle course and stress tests. If I can keep her safe through all that, then I should be able to keep you safe if you let me be your living bodysuit."

"... Uh-/huh/. ... Figured out what you /do/ eat yet?"

"I got hungry earlier, and absorbed a salad and some potatoes. Denise thinks that I'm going to need more calories than I used to, since it'll take more effort to move nutrients around inside me without a proper circulatory system."

I watched the squirrel paddle up through her neck and into her head, bounce against her skin a few times, and then keep paddling right back into her torso.

After a few moments of silence, Brenda added, "I'm also trying to figure out how to be as useful to you as I can. I'm working on controlling extra limbs, and trying to make my claw-tips as hard as possible, and turning them into complicated shapes... it's not working too well, yet, but I have high hopes. Oh! And when I put some of my extra mass in the freezer, I was able to absorb it right back into me as soon as it was above freezing, so you won't have to worry about me being trapped on you because I can't be just me anymore."

"Mm-hm," I made a noncommittal sound. My weird-o-meter had pegged itself at 'maximum' at the sight of the squirrel, so I wasn't really following. "Oh, by the way - the mayor's harem seems to have adopted me instead of Mayor-Pro-Tem Edwards. I've distracted them with some pamphlets on how royal servants act, but they'll probably catch up with me again soon. I don't know them well enough to trust them with any secrets, so you'll probably want to decide how intelligent you want them to think you are... and, I don't know, see if you're up to playing dress-up as, er, the dresses. I think I've got four outfits for different situations, and they're probably not going to accept that - and I shudder to think of the results if I let them anywhere near the clothes fabber. ... Or let them know that 'clothes fabber' is a thing that can exist."

--

The next morning, I made my way back to the Civil Guard outpost where I'd collected the EMP generator; my plan was to ask about safe retrieval methods. My plan was derailed as soon as I asked, "How has the search for the women who went missing yesterday gone?"

"Oh, that was a big fuss over nothing. We found 'em all, easy enough."

My ears went straight up. "Really? Where?"

"First place we should'a looked - the shelter we always find 'em at."

My ears flattened back again. I'd just come from that shelter, and there hadn't been any extra bimbos about the place. It looked like the mental glitch was striking again.

When I got back to Munchkin, I was once again trying to figure out the implications of that glitch, and just nodded to Sarah absently. "How's the mayor's harem doing?"

"The mayor has a harem now?"

I paused, and decided this was as good a time as any to try prodding on the topic. "Sarah, how long have I had a harem?"

"At least as long as I've known you, I guess."

"And what do they all have in common?"

"Why are you asking?"

"I just got reminded of something, and want to see if my memory's straight."

"Well, if you don't count the bun-bots, they're all bimbos."

"And where do bimbos come from?"

"Here in Erie."

"And when was the first time I came to Erie?"

"Three years ago, the day you were shot."

"Did we meet before then?"

"Yes."

"Did I have my harem then?"

"I guess."

"How could I have had a harem of bimbos from Erie when we met, if I hadn't been to Erie by then?"

Sarah didn't answer right away, just frowned, and blinked rapidly.

I decided that I'd confused her enough, so offered her an easy out. "Don't worry about it - you've got some memory issues, is all. Lots of Changed people do, especially animal-form ones."

"Animal-form Changed... right."

"Have you seen Denise lately? there's a few things I want to ask her, too."

"Not... lately." She blinked one more time, then shook her head. "Not since yesterday. By the way, I've been meaning to ask you - now that Brenda is too squishy to pull your chair, how about we get some tack and harness for me, too?"

"I'm not really sure that's appropriate," I shrugged. "She was acting as a service animal, not a person. I'm not sure it would look appropriate if you took that job."

"I'm used to it. To be honest, I've kind of missed pulling stuff for a while - Denise really treated me well while I was a pony, before she found the foxtaur zone to give me arms and a human brain again."

This was the first time I'd heard anything of the sort; up until now, Sarah had told me she and Jeff had been Changed by accident. I looked up and down at her nervously, wondering just what was going on. "Um," I hedged, "besides, the clothes fabber can make things that look like leather, but we don't have any of the real stuff for feedstock."

"Oh, is that all? I'll just draw from petty cash and get some from the marketplace."

"Still think it's better, if you want to help me with my chair, to push it instead of pull it."

"Don't you always say to be prepared? There's lots of things you might need help pulling with - I don't know why we haven't made the tools for that until now."

"It's a mystery," I agreed, my gut clenching at the implications of what had just happened.

--

What do you do when you discover a zero-day exploit that affects /people/?

I'll admit that I spent a few moments fantasizing about harem-izing the whole town into slaves eager to do my slightest bidding.

... Okay, a few minutes.

And then, after that self-indulgent interlude, I turned back to reality. If the glitch let one person induce people to confabulate new memories, then there didn't seem any reason more than one person couldn't do the same thing. Or, put more simply - someone /else/ might do /more/ than spend a few moments fantasizing about the mass-slavery thing.

In fact, as I thought about it, that seemed to be a remarkably convenient glitch to have arisen by mere evolution by natural selection. If nobody else had already taken advantage of the whole situation... then I guessed it was only because they hadn't gotten around to it yet.

Even outside whatever soft and squishy feelings I had for any particular individuals affected by the glitch, simple long-term self-interest - and short-term self-defense - was enough reason to try to figure out a patch for everyone in town who had it. Not to mention figuring out enough about it to make sure it wasn't transmissible.

Unfortunately, the only ways I could come up with to even start getting a basic feeling for the parameters of what the glitch could and couldn't do involved testing it. That is, in deliberately altering peoples' minds without their consent.

The phrase 'the ends don't justify the means' was pretty much made for just such an ethical dilemma. But as I thought about it, several of my sub-selves brought up the question of whether that phrase was actually /true/ or not.

I decided that getting some external advice might help me sort out the solutions. However, if the glitch was deliberately created as a slave-maker, then it seemed within reason that it contained some sort of self-defense aspect, which meant that asking anyone already affected by the glitch might not lead to useful answers. I only knew of five people who'd been in Erie and seemed unaffected: myself; Dotty and Human Joe, who were dead; Minerva, who, the last I'd seen of her, had been happily playing with dolls and puppets; and Bunny Joe.

As I set Munchkin's course for the Lake Erie Embassy, where I'd heard many of the gang had shacked up during my convalescence, I put my mind to thinking of how to deal with the fact that I might accidentally trigger the glitch, and what I should do if I did.

--

Bunny Joe was not, in fact, at the Embassy; she was aboard the Travelling Matt. In particular, she was stretched out in a hammock, reading a book. As I rolled up, she just raised an eyebrow and asked, "Are you sane yet?"

"Eh, it's back to being a matter of opinion. Listen, I need some advice."

She rolled so she was sitting, facing me. "About?"

"It's complicated, but it starts with what used to be the mayor's harem."

"'Used to be'?"

"Well, the four bimbos seem to have picked me over Edwards."

Joe didn't answer, she just blinked rapidly, looking off at a wall.

I froze, tense, since that was exactly what Sarah had done when the glitch triggered in her. My mind felt blank - all I could remember from my recent musings was to try to keep people the way they were, reinforcing whatever behaviours and memories they already had. I recalled that Bunny Joe had been created by the 'spirits' of the Great Peace to help me psychologically, which she had interpreted in her own way. Which is why I told her, "Also, I think I could use a hug."

She blinked back into focus, looking down at me, eyebrows raised even higher, but with a smile. "Really? Well, I'm not going to say no to /that/." She slipped down to the floor, and after a bit of awkwardness around the wheelchair, she solved it by sitting on my lap, twisting sideways so we could wrap our arms around each other. "This is nice," she said.

"Mm-hm," I said, not committing either way, feeling mainly confused. A couple of weeks ago, when I'd been revived, Bunny Joe hadn't been affected by the glitch, in all the three years I'd been frozen. Now she had. What had changed since then? Well, her brain had, obviously, for one thing.

"Now, what did you want to ask me about?"

I certainly wasn't going to ask her about what I'd been planning to - not if she was as glitched as everyone else in town. "Maybe we should talk in private," I hedged. "Munchkin's parked over on the dock."

"If you like." She rolled off my lap, and she was soon pushing me down the gangplank.

"Oh, by the way," I said, "while I've got you here, I'd like to have the autodoc scan you for a few things." I made up an excuse on the spot, "The Free Company had to be wearing those gas masks for a reason, and I don't want any of us to be taken by surprise by a species-specific pathogen."

"If you like," she repeated, with a shrug.

The autodoc didn't have radioisotopes, X-rays didn't show soft tissues well, and there were far too many metallic parts to the autodoc for them to have built in an MRI. But it did have ultrasonograph gear, and something called 'photoacoustic imaging', and something else called 'functional near-infrared spectroscopy', and - most importantly - scans of Bunny Joe's brain taken long before she'd ever set paw in the city of Erie.

While she settled into the coffin-like device, I checked with Boomer about the areas of the brain associated with memory or confabulation - and, at Boomer's suggestion, anosognosia, the inability to recognize a disability - and tapped the autodoc's controls to focus on those regions.

I was about as far from a brain surgeon as you could get - really, all I was at the moment was being a monkey's pair of hands, following Boomer's directions.

To have Joe think about something not quite related to the bimbos, I asked, "I've been thinking about the bun-bots... is it overly creepy that I have almost a dozen robots that look exactly like me, and do anything I tell them to?"

Joe tried to shake her head, but the scanners held it in place. "You made them as your tools, as I was made to be a tool of the spirits. I am more 'creeped out' by their mechanical innards, than anything else about them."

I nudged the conversation towards the topic at hand. "So you would be happier if I had living slaves doing my bidding?"

"If you want advice, you should ask someone from your culture, not mine. We do not have the same taboo against taking prisoners of war from raids, and bringing them into our families, that you do."

"Should I pass the harem of bimbos on along to you, then?"

She started blinking rapidly. "I... do not think they'd agree..."

I didn't want a random association affecting her very much, so I tried to focus her back with the same distraction I'd used before. "I'm just not a very huggy person, like you."

"Hugs - yes, physical affection is important..." She squinched her eyes shut for a moment, then tried to shake her head again as she opened them. "According to the local school, a harem exists so its members can help each other, when their owner is not available. If you have not been able to provide them with what they need, they provide for each other."

"Mm... I suppose that's one way to look at it." My attention was more on the autodoc's displays than the conversation.

"Is there a reason this exam is taking so long? It did not seem so long last time."

"Just want to be thorough," I commented, and quickly brought it to a close.

As soon as Joe was free, she casually walked up behind me, resting her cheek on the top of my head and her arms on my shoulders. "If you don't want to hug them, then I can hug you instead," she said. "Have you been hugging your mind healer?"

I blanked out the display. "Er, no - that's not how that works." I wondered if I'd focused too hard on the hugging, and whether /that/ might have long-term effects... "Can you help me into the auto-doc? I should probably get a quick scan, myself." Not to mention give her a reason to stop hugging me for a few minutes.

Joe squinted at the main display. "What does 'Anomalous electroplaques in upper thorax' mean?"

"... I don't know, but I probably should find out."

 

[DataPacRat]

*Chapter Three: Mis-diagnose*

"One of the white matter tracts between the fusiform face area and the hippocampus appear to have been interrupted."

I rolled my eyes at Boomer. "I never did finish going through my human-brain colouring book."

"The individual subsections of the brain appear to be intact; it is the connection between them that appears to have been severed. A very small number of cells were affected - Bunny Joe's brain scan still appears to be within normal parameters. It is only in comparison to her previous scans, and those of other affected individuals for a similar variation, that any difference is detectable."

"So we have our fingerprint?"

"If you wish to call it that, yes."

"And does this interruption explain the... weirdness in their behaviour?"

"Unknown. It is plausible that this neural tract leads to an inability to recognize or remember changes in groups of people, but the data is insufficient to confirm or disprove that hypothesis."

"And the confabulation?"

"It is possible that that is the normal result of this form of memory disruption. Again, the data is insufficient-"

"-To confirm or disprove, I getcha. Okay, so if that's what's happening... are there other effects? I mean, would it affect their recognition of groups other than the bimbo harem?"

"Unknown."

"Hm... could there be some connection with why their politics focuses around their unions?"

"Unknown."

"Have you got any idea how that one particular connection happened to get severed in so many people?"

"Studies exist demonstrating that certain neural pathways express unique combinations of proteins and antigens, which can be used to target treatments. I have no information on whether this neural pathway has such an antigen signature."

"Something we can ask Clara to check the library on. Even assuming that's the case... what might have actually latched onto that signature?"

"Extrapolating from a few words in my database, I would posit a virus or organism could attach to the antigens in question, optionally followed by a drug targeting the virus or organism and killing both it and the neurons it was attached to."

"Okay - but Joe's been in Erie for three years, and just started exhibiting symptoms of the glitch, well, sometime between the last day and a week or so ago. Would your virus-or-whatever take that long to do its thing?"

"Possible, though that progression is uncommon."

"So... maybe she avoided getting infected at all, until just recently?"

"Possible."

"So what did she avoid doing for three years, that she just started doing, that includes a disease vector? Did she start drinking the wrong water? Walk too close to the bimbo zone?"

"Unknown."

"And - you're sure there's no sign of the interruption in my neural pathway?"

"Correct."

"Okay, then to add to my previous question - what did she start doing, since I was revived, that Minerva and I haven't done?"

"Unknown."

--

I rolled up front again, leading around the kitchen counter to see Bunny Joe. "You've got some signs of a possible infection," I said, entirely truthfully; though also somewhat deceitfully; though also in Joe's own best interests. "I need to ask a couple of epidemiological questions."

She looked up from her book. "Of course you do," she sighed. "Very well."

"Since my revival, have you begun doing anything that you have not done in the previous years you were in the city, which might have unknowingly exposed you to a disease; possibly started eating a new food, or drinking a beverage from a new source, or meeting a new person, or going to a new place; that /isn't/ a new thing /I/'ve also done?"

"Are you serious?"

"As can be."

"You really need to ask?"

"It's important."

"I mean - you don't already know?"

"I've been busy."

"'Furry orgy'."

"What?"

Joe sighed. "Sarah and I have entered into a sexual relationship. You were right there when she first propositioned me."

"... Oh. Right." I looked away from her, trying not to blush. "... I think that could fit the timeline. Is there anything else?"

"Other than being imprisoned, there is little I have done that I have not already done, or that you were not with me for."

"Alright. ... I'm not an epidemiologist, so I'm probably going to need to bring Denise and Clara in on this, and we might need to do a few tests to figure out how to cure it."

"Do you wish some of my blood now?"

"... I suppose the autodoc can draw it, we've got the fridge to store it, and it seems likely some useful tests could be run on it."

--

"Okay, Boomer; we've got something that seems to be some sort of STD, which has effects on the brain. How many things do you know of that fit that category?"

"I am not aware of any known pathogen which has the described neurological effect."

"I'm not asking about the effect, just for things transmitted by sex that can pass through the blood-brain barrier."

"Query: Does this include the barrier being damaged via meningitis or a brain abscess?"

"Since so many people seem affected, and Sarah doesn't seem to have meningitis, let's say no."

"There are several diseases that pass the barrier. Some are not ordinarily sexually transmitted, such as trypanosomiasis, rabies, Toxoplasmosis gondii, or progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy. Some can be, such as HIV, neurosyphilis, and certain prions."

"And since none of those cause the brain effect we've seen, it could be something completely unrelated to any of them."

"That seems possible."

"Is it even possible to test for all the ones you listed?"

"Yes."

"... With the equipment we've got?"

"Several of the tests require reagents that I have not seen any evidence of, within this city."

"Mm. If the nearest place to get those reagents is Brock University, we might have to try to bring some people through the Great Peace to try testing them there... I suppose it would have been too much to ask Clara to test everyone for unknown diseases the last time we were there." I paused, then snapped my fingers. "Then again, maybe she still can."

"That does not seem to make sense."

"Boomer, you used to be Laura - in a sense - and so did Clara. If you were her, would you have thrown away any of the medical samples you took just after they'd been poisoned with the nerve gas residue?"

"I do not believe so."

--

I tipped the delivery boy, and retreated back into Munchkin (parked by the shelter) to open Clara's telegram. I read it aloud to Boomer, "Confirmation of presence of spirochaetes closely related to Treponema pallidum in Sample Group A, and absence of same in Sample Group B. Appears to be treatable with penicillin G." I set the paper down, frowning. "Well, that could be our smoking gun. The question is - what should we do about it? If it's a deliberately engineered, uh, spirochaete, then whoever released it probably wouldn't be happy about an eradication campaign... and would curing the disease clear up the blocked neural pathway? And on a more personal note, I don't know if /I/ might have been exposed when the bimbo zone or goo-Brenda went inside me, plus back in the day, I used to wear a medic-alert bracelet warning of an allergy to penicillin and supha drugs, though I don't know if I was /actually/ allergic or not, plus I've only got my brain and eyes left from back then to worry about allergy-wise anyway..."

"I possess insufficient data to offer advice on these matters."

"Hm... I didn't get pulled into the zone very much after Sarah and Bunny Joe started, um. So if I were infected then, I should have already started glitching myself."

"Your immune system is not quite human. It is possible that a disease may have a longer incubation period in your body than in Sarah's."

"I suppose. And Brenda gooped me not that long ago... Hm... Well, I had the robo-fac make up some penicillin before it crashed, but it's hardly enough to treat the whole city, so, hm..."

--

"Say, Denise? How much penicillin do you have in stock?"

"None."

"Why not?"

"It stopped working. Everything that used to be treated by it, became resistant to it."

"What do you use instead?"

"We've got five different antibiotics. To prevent any new immunity from evolving, me and the other vets coordinate to use the same one in a year, then switch to another the next year, and so on. We lose some livestock that we could save with more aggressive intervention, but we keep the whole system working. It's a sore spot with some farmers, who want their herd or whatever saved /now/ instead of thinking long-term, but we keep the drugs locked up tight enough that cheating is kept down to an acceptable level."

"How about for people?"

"I haven't heard of anything that can be treated with penicillin in a long time. Why do you ask?"

"I have reason to believe I may have been exposed to something which /can/ be treated with it, and I have a supply I acquired before finding out from you just now that it might be useless, and part of me may or may not be allergic to the stuff. Think you might be up to helping me work out an appropriate dosage, and keeping an eye on me in case of anaphylaxis?"

"Ah, so you /have/ gone completely crazy. Wait right here while I go find some nice young men in their clean white coats."

"Crazy would be if I tried injecting myself with penicillin, and didn't find a medical professional to watch for bad reactions."

"Maybe /I'm/ crazy for even listening to this. I haven't heard such craziness in... I don't know how long. I suppose I can take comfort in the fact that this /is/ as crazy as things get."

"Ah. Well."

She just sighed. "What is it?"

"Well, according to the autodoc, apparently, I seem to be turning into an electric eel."

"... Maybe I should join old Mrs. Friesen on the porch, with her rocking chair and laudanum. Then I could talk everyone's ear off instead of listening to idiotic people trying to talk about things they don't understand."

"If you're trying to tell me I'm not just out of my depth, but I'm also stupid, I'm not going to disagree."

"Bunny - allergies are based on your immune system. Your immune system is made of cells, mostly created in bone marrow. Your immune system is made entirely out of Bun-Bun's cells, not your original ones. Whatever you were allergic to when you were human, you aren't anymore."

"Ah. ... I'd offer you a raise, but I don't know if you still want to be employed by me for very long."

"Shut up and tell me what you think you're infected with."

"Er..."

"You know what I mean."

"Er, not just that, but I'm not sure I can tell you."

"Embarrassing or top secret?"

"I'll go with column B. I've been having Clara run some tests on some samples she already has, and there's a, um, reasonably good chance I've been exposed - but the tests to be sure need chemicals she doesn't think you have. So - if allergies aren't a concern, better safe than sorry."

"And you want penicillin instead of a real antibiotic?"

"I've got reason to think that the antibiotics you use regularly won't have a significant effect."

She heaved a sigh. "Let me check my books. I'm sure there's /something/ in there about outdated, obsolete, and useless antibiotic therapy for unnamed diseases which show no symptoms and might not even exist."

"I knew I could count on you."

--

"Ow." I rubbed my shoulder.

"You want to stop, you can stop any time. You want to keep going, then with what your Clara and my books say, you tell your autodoc to administer four MU of aqueous crystalline penicillin G intravenously, every four hours, for fourteen days."

".../Every/ four hours?"

"If you want to get a sufficient concentration of the stuff past your blood-brain barrier to where it'll do any good."

"/Now/ you think it will do good?"

"Your brain's from way back when. Maybe the strain of syphilis you've got is primitive enough that penicillin will work."

"It's /not/ syphilis."

"Don't sass me, boy. Or girl, whatever you prefer these days. There aren't many diseases that this can /be/ a cure to."

"... It may be related to syphilis. But it's not from 'way back when'."

"Then take your shots, and give me some warning if you think it's going to start spreading."

"... I think I can assure you that you don't have to worry about it starting to spread," I said, telling the truth in detail while deceiving by implication.

"In that case - what's this about turning into a fish?"

"Not fish, electric eel. The autodoc says it found 'electroplaques' in my body, cells that electric eels use to make, well, electricity."

"You're going to start giving people shocks?"

"They seem to be in my chest, not my hands."

"Any heart problems?"

"None. All the numbers I get from the recharger are inside the ranges they're supposed to be."

"How smart is your skeleton?"

"Smart enough to have learned her name, and follow commands - well, sometimes, at least."

"Smart enough to think she knows how to power your blood pump better than batteries do?"

"... Maybe. She kind of absorbed my hoof and Wagger into herself, so she could be trying the same with the artificial heart."

"Well, tell her to stop it. That heart needs a dozen watts, without interruption. That's a million joules a day. Do you think an /organic/ system could provide that power, regulated to a precise enough level to keep your blood flowing continuously? I don't even want to /think/ about how many extra calories you'd have to consume to try to power it yourself."

Boomer piped up, "Roughly two hundred forty dietary calories, not counting conversion losses."

Denise glared at the AI. "Shush, you, I'm on a rant." She turned back to me, poking a finger onto my chest, where my surgery scar was ever-so-slowly fading. "The batteries /work/. She tries fiddling with them, and you won't live long enough to finish treating your not-syphilis."

"Alright, already," I held my hands up in surrender. "I can't disagree with you - I don't know enough to even try. Just remember, I come in something like fifth place when it comes to deciding what my body does - you, Bun-Bun, Wagger, and whatever zone I get shoved in all seem to have priority. Maybe Brenda these days, too, depending on what she figures out she can do. You want to fight out which of you is ahead of the others, go ahead, just leave me out of it."

"And you wonder why I want you to have a real doctor instead of a vet."

"And you wonder why I want a multi-species physician instead of a mere human GP."

--

In my room at the shelter, I frowned at the half-finished letter, nibbling on the top of my pencil as I tried to figure out a better way to phrase the message.

Abruptly, a weight landed on my head, my vision obscured.

"Gah!" I gave a whole-body twitch, slipped one of the knives from my sleeves into my hand, and as I heaved around, I pushed it through whoever was trying to black-bag me.

My eyes were unblocked, revealing... Brenda, now in her pre-bimbofication colours, staring at the blade in her chest, her forelimbs changing back from tentacles into talons again. "Okay," she commented, "now I'm /really/ glad I'm not made of flesh any more."

"My door was /locked/." I looked over at it. "/Is/ locked."

"I've been learning more tricks. I can put some of my mass in a freezer, and reabsorb it as soon as it thaws." She plucked the knife out of her, holding it to me. "Yours, right?"

I grumbled, returning it to its hiding spot. "We really need to have a talk about boundaries-"

"Ooh, what's this? A secret diary page?"

"No, it's a private-"

"'Dear Minerva.' A love-letter? 'In regards to our private discussion, I have identified a novel pathogen endemic to this region.' ... Doesn't sound like a love letter. 'While the topic is awkward, the main method of transmission appears to be via body-fluid transfer, such as during sex. While you are probably too young for such activities at the moment, in the years to come, please try to remember this, and to arrange for any prospective partners to undergo the appropriate antibiotic treatment, to avoid becoming infected yourself.'"

I finally managed to pluck the paper from her grasp, and fold it up. "Are you quite done?"

"Not quite. I came to warn you the harem is waiting outside for you. Can I give you another whole-body hug? You can stab me again if you want to."

I rubbed my nose. "I'd really prefer if you didn't. I am currently undergoing an antibiotic treatment. I do not know whether or not you are susceptible to the pathogen, or can carry it, but we should avoid any... personal touching until we're both confirmed to be clear of it."

"So you want me to start taking this treatment too?"

"Not... exactly. One definition for antibiotic is 'a poison that kills some kinds of cells quicker than others'. I have no idea if the cells you're now made of are more or less susceptible to the poison than the pathogen... and even then, figuring out the dosage is an... interesting problem. You don't have a blood-brain barrier to get through - but you also don't seem to have a liver to metabolize the stuff to keep it from staying in your system at dangerous concentrations."

"Maybe I do, and it's just spread all through me, like my thinky bits."

"Maybe," I shrugged, "but even finding that much out is going to require tests."

"So you don't want to start wearing me now?"

"Brenda... if there is a literal life-and-death choice to be made, I'll wear you in an instant. But short of that - if we got that close again, I'd have to start my treatment from scratch. Which involves painful injections. Every four hours. For two whole weeks. So unless we're dealing with a situation where that amount of pain is worth paying, we should stay apart."

"No hugs?"

"We can hug, if you want - but like flesh people, with our arms, not whole-body engulfing."

"Are you sure? I can hide you inside me and get you past the harem..."

"Tempting, but no."

"How about if I make some air bubbles so I don't touch any part of you that can pass this infection?"

"... Do you know what the harem's waiting for me /for/?"

"I think I saw them writing a big questionnaire about what you like."

"... What the heck. We might as well figure out if this trick can work at all - you're not all /that/ much bigger than me."

"I left a lot of me in the freezer. I'm actually mostly hollow right now."

--

The harem saw through the ruse at once. Not literally - Brenda's outer shell was fully opaque, and I didn't have anything glowing - but from what I was able to muffledly hear, some combination of Brenda's gooey nature combined with the fact that the harem /knew/ I'd been in my room was enough for them to figure out my hiding place. In fact, one of them just stuck an arm right into Brenda, fumbled along my neck for a bit, and grabbed my arms, pulling me up and out of Brenda's back.

"/There/ you are, your majesty," she smiled brightly. (I still hadn't figured out how to tell which was which.) "We've been looking /everywhere/ for you."

I sighed, and stepped out of Brenda, resting an arm on the wall in case Wagger twitched my legs. "I'm very busy," I commented. I watched my right foot's toes curl and relax, curl and relax, without my telling them to, and decided a wheelchair would be more dignified than falling on my rear. I turned to head back into my room to grab it.

One of the bimbos slid in front of me. "You're not going to lock yourself away from us again, are you?"

My right knee pulled my calf up, and I started tipping over... only to land in the grip of one or two of the ladies. Neither staying in place and leaning on them, nor pushing against them to straighten back up, were acceptably polite outcomes, so I tried reaching a hand back in the direction I'd just been and muttered, "Brenda, a pull, please?" She waved a wing over, engulfed my hand in it, and with that leverage I managed to straighten myself back out.

The harem were glancing at each other, so I just frowned at them and stated, "Spine injuries are nasty things. Even though I heal better than some, I may have permanent damage. Adding physical rehabilitation to my counselling and all the other things I have to do means I barely have enough time to sleep, let alone stand around and play dress-up or have tea parties or orgies or whatever it is you did for the mayors."

"Ooh, /that/'s why," said the one behind me.

One of the ones I'd landed on said, "We're not here to make you do things-"

"-or us-"

"-you don't want to do."

"We're here to make your life /easier/."

"We won't make you play dress up-"

"-unless you want to-"

"-but we can take care of your clothes, so you can always be dressed up, without spending any time on it."

"Or cook."

"Or clean."

"Or watch your kids."

"I didn't think she had kids?"

"Maybe she just thinks she's too busy to raise them."

The patter of voices from all sides was confusing and annoying, so I cleared my throat and raised a hand to interrupt them. "That's all well and good. My wheelchair, if you please?"

"Sorry." "Sorry." "Sorry." "Sorry."

In short order I was installed on what I wondered if I should start calling my mobile throne.

I looked up at them, still frowning. "I did not request your services. I have no desire for them. Even trying to accommodate your nearby presence would be difficult, and would interfere with various security and intelligence matters. I am not in charge of the city. Mayor Pro Tem Edwards is, and then whoever is elected in his place will be. I recommend you go find him and help him instead of me."

They looked at each other again, then back at me. "Don't think of them as /services/."

"We just want to /thank/ you, for being our /guardian/."

"Our /protector/."

"Our cute little babe-cake."

"... who /watches over us/ and keeps us /safe/."

"Hrm," I grunted. "There's watching over you, and then there's watching over you. ... Which reminds me; Brenda, in the Munchkin, in the lab, in drawer seven C, could you grab the four things inside and bring them back?"

She nodded her head, said "Sure thing, boss," with Alphie, and bounded away, more like a rubbery cartoon or a deer pronking than any sane quadruped's gait.

I sighed and looked at the quartet, then sighed again. "I'm pretty sure," I commented, "there's more to life than finding the most powerful person around, and doing whatever it takes to convince them to protect you."

More shared glances, before one said, "If you don't go into heat, maybe."

"Having one husband is a lot less work than being a street-walker."

"Or a House girl."

"Or a 'gram girl."

I asked, "'Gram girl'?"

"It's new."

"Someone wants a girl, they can just send a telegram now, and one'll come over."

"... Of course," I rolled my eyes to myself. "I forgot the rule about what happens when humans get hold of new media."

"Huh?"

"'The internet is for porn'. Oh, look, here's Brenda."

The hollow, rubbery gryphoness bounced back to our little crowd, stuck a talon down her beak, and pulled out four black bracelets.

I said to the harem, "One for each of you. I want you to wear them at all times. If you get in trouble - and I mean /real/ trouble, something where you'll need medical attention or emergency rescue - press the red button. I'd prefer if you could remember to push the green button once a day, which will let me know you're alright and haven't been kept from pushing the buttons."

"Ooh, shiny!"

"Black /does/ go well with almost anything..."

"It's a lot less annoying than that collar."

"I kinda liked the collars."

What I didn't mention was that these bracelets were new and improved over the ones that had let me find Judith; they would respond to a coded signal to pinpoint their location, if I ever had to find them. Not to mention pinging their location every ten minutes instead of every hour. I wasn't sure if the solar cells could keep a full charge with that rate; it depended on how much light they'd get during regular use.

"She /does/ like us!"

"I knew she was only pretending to be a grumpy-pants."

The four of them took a step closer; and I was abruptly in the middle of a four-fold hug that would have given any anime character a life-threatening nosebleed. One of them nibbled my ear, and whispered into it, "And if you want our /personal/ thanks..."

Another simply licked my other ear. "... Our next cycle is in just over a week."

"Right!" I exclaimed, and grabbed the chair's wheel-bars, pushing myself out of the crowd. "Lots to do, no time to waste, mind your teachers and do your homework, Brenda you're with me."

As I left the giggling behind me, I muttered, "I can't /wait/ for this place to become a republic..."

 

[DataPacRat]

*Chapter Four: Mis-guided*

With Brenda's help, I made it to Munchkin without getting taken further off-track, and we drove off to the nearest Royal Mail Canada office. I sent the letter off to Minerva, a very similar one to Captain Shatter, and a more clinical one to the Lake Erie embassy.

That brought me to the end of the high-priority items on my to-do list, and as I looked over the lower-priority ones, I grimaced a little, none of them particularly appealing at the moment. Amy had pointed out, every so often, that, every so often, I needed to do things that weren't /on/ a to-do list, to keep myself sane. I thought about torturing Brenda with the harmonica, or breaking out the watercolours and making a mess, or trying to teach Wagger how to not interfere when I walked.

In my private chamber, my gaze fell on a pile of papers - the ones filled out by the Bayesians who'd tried sheltering aboard. The top one was by 'Blue Wolf', mentioning his family heirloom, some sort of advice-giving, solar-powered ebony skull. That sounded weird enough that it caught my interest, so I chose to spend my off-time seeing if I could find out more.

The 'math club''s meeting place had been bombed out, and the city didn't have any phonebooks. Fortunately, I was already parked right at the Royal Mail, and was able to hire a telegram boy to go to the Professor to ask for Minerva's current address, where he asked for Blue Wolf's address, where he finally delivered my request for an informal meeting to learn about the skull, at a time and place of his choosing. The delivery boy, pedaling hard on his bicycle and panting but smiling, placed the return message into my hand: Now was good, and he suggested the Professor's warehouse.

Wolfy was in full robes and cowl, and with the Professor's good-natured permission, had made room for both of us in the office area, along with a wooden case of just the right size to contain a human head. "Your Majesty," he said, through his face-concealing cowl, "it is an honor and a pleasure to meet you."

"And you. This is it?" I nodded at the case.

"Yes, ma'am. Before I open it, I should warn you, that it behaves... strangely. My family have worked out a script to get it to be more cooperative, and how to keep it that way as long as possible. But it is touchy, so I ask that you and your, ah, griffon try to be quiet, or at least play along. You'll see what I mean."

"You make it sound intriguing. I'll try to be a good audience for the show."

Wolfy nodded, unlatched the box, and with both hands, pulled out, as expected, something black and skull-shaped. What his brief note hadn't mentioned were the crystalline teeth, or the patterns just on the edge of visibility etched into its surface.

He also hadn't mentioned that the eye-sockets could glow with red lights, which is exactly what they started to do.

"IN-sig-NIF-i-GANT WOOO-ooorms! What mortals dare disturb the astral meditations of Sargon the Sorcerer, Sargon the Great, Sargon the Mighty?"

I will admit that without Wolfy's warning, I probably would have snarked my head off at that particular bit of posturing.

Wolfy took a much more submissive tone. "Your eminence, this humble servant apologizes most profusely for disturbing your phylactery and returning your attention to the physical plane, but hopes your magnificent mind may find favour in being presented with new information and new challenges to solve."

"What is it this time, boy? More tinkering with mere mechanical devices in this base and de-magicked realm?"

"No, my lord. A teacher and potentate of these realms has heard of your knowledge, and come to seek an audience with you."

"Are you referring to the broken furry golem, or the slime with delusions of personhood?"

Wolfy made a quick gesture in my direction, which I took as a suggestion to start talking. "There are no... golems here," I told the skull. "I left my constructs in my... walking castle." That wasn't quite true, but I didn't see any need to mention Scorpia's potential for ambulation, or Boomer's conversational skills should I pull her out of my pocket and turn her on.

"If you /are/ alive, have you come to be healed of your infirmity?"

"I believe I can accomplish that myself, with time. I am simply a scholar, here to learn what I can, both from you and about you."

"And why should I waste any of my time dealing with such a pitiful specimen?"

Wolfy answered before I did. "She comes in all humility, leaving behind her wealth and retainers and position. Outside these walls, she is a head-of-state, a queen whose realm warred on this city, and conquered it, but in their generosity merely overthrew the corrupt madmen and are installing new nobility in their place."

"If she is a queen, why does she not seek to gain my favour with gold and jewels?"

Wolfy hesitated, so I jumped in, trying to twist my mind to match the framework this personality seemed to exist in. "True wealth and power lies not in mere physical possessions, but in being able to do as you wish, regardless of what you have. There seems to be little you wish for that gold and jewels could enable you to acquire."

An echoing laugh came from wherever it was inside the skull that its voice emanated from. "You amuse me, little queen, so I offer you a boon: solve three riddles, and I will answer any one question you may ask."

"That is... generous of you," I managed, "but while you would gain amusement from my mental struggles, I /am/ a queen, with queenly problems - not those involving the abstract and arcane aspects of the astral realms you meditate on."

"You DOUBT my COMPETENCE?"

"No - I doubt that I have the wit to ask you about anything I would understand about the astral, or anything about those parts of the physical world that still remain important enough to you for you to still remember."

"I am no nursemaid, to coddle the ignorant and uplift the unworthy. What DO you understand?"

"... That some ways of finding the truth work better than others, and how to find the difference."

"Is that ALL?"

"No, but it is what all the rest is based on."

"Out of all things that can be known, what is the one thing you WISH to know more than all others?"

"My first instinct is to say 'how not to die', but I've already died twice, and thanks to certain mere mechanical devices, I got better - without even having to place my vital essence in a separate container."

"Are you MOCKING me?"

"I am trying to understand you. To answer your last question... I suspect that what I most want to know is: What don't I know that I don't know?"

"You have a certain way with words, little queen, and your riddle is amusing, if simple. If you truly wish an answer to it, then bring my phylactery to the reproduction made of my original castle, lost a hundred fifty thousand-thousand years ago during the age of true magic; from where the sixth road meets the six hundred sixty-sixth, travel south to the sixty-sixth-"

Wolfy spoke up, "You need not spend your valuable time giving these directions, great one, as you have given them to this humble servant, who can give them to her."

"You DARE interrupt ME, insolent whelp?"

"No, my lord, I only sought to spare you-"

My walkie-talkie buzzed, which wasn't supposed to happen for anything short of an emergency. "Yes?" I asked, ignoring Sargon's sputtering outrage.

Sarah's voice came back, "The Free Company's back. They don't look happy. And they say they want to talk to you."

"Sorry, Sargon - matters of state outweighing simple conversation beckon. Unless one of the things I don't know that I don't know that you're willing to share right now involve how to deal with unruly mercenaries, I have to go."

"Such impertinent behaviour is an insult to-!"

Wolfy just about dropped Sargon into his box and latched the lid. "You might as well go," he said. "Once he starts going on about his castle, there's no getting him off the topic."

I started turning around to roll back towards Munchkin, Brenda and Wolfy following. "Does it really exist?"

"Maybe?" Wolfy shrugged. "His directions are to a spot in an old state park, about ninety miles southeast of here. The maps I've found say there used to be a prison there."

"You've never gone to look?"

"Not all of us have an armored land-train, lasers, and bodyguard robots to go exploring with."

--

I made use of my armored land-train, laser, and bodyguard robots to make as many preparations as I could for the parley, almost all of which were ones I tried to keep out of even potential sight of the Free Company's people. Coming up with further fallback plans, and exchanging radio messages with Sarah to set up various details, took up the time until the Company men arrived at the Lake Erie embassy. It might not have been neutral ground, but there were a number of ways to get out of there if one of the Company fellows turned out to have a gun hidden in a marsupial pouch or his biohazard suit lined with an unknown form of explosives or something. (Pinky even said that there was at least one escape route she wanted to not tell me about; so I added that to the plan list. Q, I think that one was.)

In yet another boring conference room, I waited at the head of yet another boring conference table, though I sat on a standard office chair with casters instead of a wheelchair. Brenda had reshaped and recolored herself in imitation of one of the potted plants, I had a couple of bun-bots to act as nurse and secretary, a squad of them in the room behind me, one of the alarm bracelets on my right ankle, filter plugs in my nostrils, anti-laser lenses in my glasses, Scorpia fully charged up, and a full load of hardware hidden inside my clothes (and my own equivalent of a marsupial pouch, Wagger's gullet). (After a few moments of thought, I asked Bun-Bun if she were able to grow a marsupial pouch that couldn't be seen. She didn't answer. I also asked if she could not turn off my adrenaline today, since I might need the boost.)

In short: I was feeling a little nervous.

Three figures wearing the gas masks and black body-suits I'd expected, and carrying some business-type briefcases I hadn't, were ushered in by the squiddies' translator, who stepped out of the room and closed the door. As they took their seats, I asked, "Would I have met any of you before?"

The one in the middle shook his head. "Captain Bravo was unavailable. I am Captain Alpha."

I nodded, to maintain politeness. "And what brings your people back to Erie, Captain?"

"We wish to offer bids for any and all city-killers, or related technologies, that are in your possession."

I blinked. "That is... unexpected. I have to say that I can't think of any offer you might make that I would accept, but I am quite happy to listen and discuss the matter. That is, unless the discussion degenerates into 'give us what we want or we'll invade' sorts of offers."

"That is not our intention today," said the Captain, and I had to repress a sigh at the last word in that sentence. He continued, "But I believe matters will not come anywhere near such an impasse. What we have to offer you is quite generous."

"You don't say," I said, mostly to fill the conversational gap.

"To begin with. While we believe that your stated intentions to prevent a second Singularity by researching the first are ill-advised, at best, we are willing to assist you in what you want in exchange for what we want. Our preliminary analysis is that your primary bottleneck is a lack of skilled manpower. The squiddies are unable to travel inland, the local education system is appalling, and you have been cut off from the Nine Nations and are on questionable terms at best with Technoville. We have university-level scientists in all fields, from traditional archaeology to even the computer sciences, who could be assigned to form the nucleus of your research group."

My eyebrows had risen fairly high during that, and when he finished, I looked away, at one of the walls, for a few moments. "Skilled people are rare," I acknowledged his point, "but skills can be taught. When dealing with such matters, what is even more important is trustworthiness - specifically, that the people can be trusted to handle such dangerous knowledge. I could only assume that such a group of people would remain loyal to your city over me, and that's without even starting to get into whether they would be up to treating a potential basilisk with the amount of respect it deserves, among other such issues."

"I see." He set one of the cases on the table, flipped open the latches with his thumbs. I tried not to tense, or for my breathing to hitch, just to remain in a state of fluid readiness. I probably didn't succeed, but I tried.

Captain Alpha pulled out a simple folder containing papers, which he flipped through. "We have a catalogue of a large number of zones, and a list of how their effects can be synergized. If there are any physical or biological transformations you seek, such as returning to your original form, we can very likely arrange for that to happen."

I tilted my head. "If you can do all that - why do you still have something resembling a human form? Surely there are all sorts of shapes that could provide a tactical advantage, which, if you can do all you can say you do, you can reverse after a tour of duty."

"We have a certain philosophical approach to such matters, which precludes voluntary personal transformations."

I looked away from him again, at the wall, considering, for the first time in a very long time, what it might be like to stop being a humanoid rabbit (plus various accoutrements), and get back to being a simple human. I thought of what I could do as a human... and then of what I could do with Bun-Bun's help. What I had done with her so far - among other details, that with a merely human liver and kidneys and so forth, I'd probably still be frozen while Denise looked for a way to bring me back to life. I thought, and I confronted a simple fact - on balance, I could do more good the way I was, then the way I had been.

I thought of Sarah and Jeff, who'd never asked to be foxtaurs; Brenda, who'd been Changed twice; and all the bimbofications. If all of /those/ could be reversed, that was a definite good. Then I thought of the Berserker being let loose, spreading its whispers, infecting any computers it came near, taking control of a war machine... there was a reason I didn't object to hearing it called a 'city-killer'. Similarly, my other possession that could be classified as that, the fusion reactor in Munchkin, which could be set to self-destruct...

I looked back at the envoys. "While you have, at least, suggested something that I could consider a net positive, I'm afraid, again, that handing over control of a city-killer is too high a price."

He shuffled papers, opening a new folder. "We have a factory-seed. We have been preparing to place it where the industry could be put to greatest use for us, but we could be convinced to site it at a location of your choosing, with further negotiations to decide what portions of its output would be put to internal expansion, to your products, and to our products."

"What sort of 'products'?"

"Shaped metal. Refined chemicals. Machinery. Vehicles. Farming equipment."

"Electronics?"

He hesitated, then said, "While within such a factory's capacity, and in fact, necessary for its own works, further negotiations would be required to be sure appropriate safety precautions surrounded such objects."

"Biologicals?"

"Not directly, but distillery equipment, lab equipment, certainly."

"Weapons of mass destruction?"

"We have no source of radioactive material, or diseases of the appropriate sort, or software of the appropriate sort."

"I notice you didn't mention a lack of chemicals."

"As I said, such a factory can produce arbitrary refining equipment, and most toxins do not require exotic elements."

"Hm." I looked away to think. It sounded a lot like the robo-fac I'd built Munchkin in. Which suggested that if I could dig the right November files out of the computer I'd salvaged from the place, I might be able to get the new factory-thing to make more of the fusion reactors. On the other hand, if that was possible, then the Free Company might also be able to make the exact same things - and self-destruct them near any hostile armies or cities.

I looked back at him. "Why haven't you already started making use of this factory-seed?"

"We already have a solid industrial base in Youngstown. A factory-seed is useful for reducing transport costs, but our areas of operations are compact enough that all our lines-of-transit are still short."

I tried to think of any obvious loopholes in what was being described. One was almost obvious: "How is it powered?"

"Initially, solar. It can continue expanding indefinitely on just sunlight, though its rate of production will be limited. For intensive manufacturing, you'll need hydro-power, windmills, bio-diesel; maybe even petroleum, if you know where to get some."

I drummed my fingers, frowning. "If that's all the case, that your industry is so good that you can trade away one of these seeds... why are you still using horse-drawn carts and don't already control this whole region with aircraft, rail lines, artillery, and so on?"

The two assistants (assuming that was what they were) glanced at each other. (Or, at least, they turned their gas-masks far enough where it looked like they might be able to see each other through their smoked-glass lenses.) Captain Alpha simply said, "Local energy sources can be found easily enough. But overall, they are thin on the ground, and transporting energy from where it is concentrated to wherever else it might be needed is problematic. Or, put another way, we could clear all the growths and monsters for any rail-line right-of-way we wish; we can't clear /all/ the rail-lines we might wish."

"Hm." I knew I wasn't an economist, and that if they started throwing numbers around, I could be bamboozled all too easily. But in general terms, it seemed... reasonable. "Depending on the specific details, I suspect that we could come to an entirely amicable arrangement of that nature... except for one complicating factor. I didn't expect you to make an offer good enough I'd even have to bring it up."

"Which factor is that?"

"I don't know you well enough to trust you with a technology capable of destroying a city. I don't even know what sort of government you have, let alone what social institutions you have to keep it in check; what your track record in interacting with your neighbours is; and, of course, I don't even know what any of you look like."

"Are you saying that you will not trade with us unless we remove our protective gear?"

"No. At least, not exactly. I'm talking about an accumulation of evidence of trustworthiness. Revealing your appearance could be part of that, but doesn't have to be. The more I learn about you, the more accurately I can predict - well, try to - what you'll do with any city-killers in your possession."

"I feel that I should mention that our main interest in acquiring all your city-killers is because of what we /do/ know about you."

"Is this about that state of war thing when you were hired to rescue me? Surely the fact that I /didn't/ use a city-killer is-"

He'd started shaking his head, so I trailed off. "Well before that, you have engaged in behaviour that is reckless beyond belief, endangering all who are near you. You created a long-distance communications network. Granted, using optical frequencies, a low bandwidth, and non-automated routing were a good start for safeguards, they are laughably inadequate for real protection. You use actual radios for short-range communication. Your personal vehicle is heavily computerized. You have made contact with at least one AI. All told, I can only attribute the fact that you have only been killed once, and even that reversibly, either to an unbelievable amount of luck, or to hidden support from one or more AIs that are using you for their own purposes. Neither of which are acceptable scenarios for leaving you with supposed control of city-killer-level technology."

"By any chance, if I suggested that 'not all AIs are bad', would you simply take that as further evidence of my being a pawn, as opposed to considering the statement on its merits?"

"Our data suggests you are culturally most familiar with twentieth-century North America?"

"... Near enough that I'm willing to agree to see where you're going with that."

"A simple analogy. 'Not all German soldiers in nineteen-forty are bad'."

"Ouch," I winced, then considered for a few moments. "Let's say that everything you say is completely true. That doesn't change the fact that humanity barely squeaked through the last Singularity, and we're facing an extinction risk should another happen. As best as I can figure, it's the largest extinction risk that we /do/ face. There are only so many possible ways to reduce that risk. Do you have better plans than I do for dealing with it?"

"Yes."

"Lovely! What are they?"

"Security reasons prohibit me from discussing them at this time."

I sighed. "That's all well and good for /you/, then. But it doesn't help /me/ rearrange my plans. I can work on improving my security measures, but I doubt that anything I can do in that regard would satisfy you."

"If you intend on continuing to closely interact with AIs, that is unlikely."

I snorted. "Sometimes it seems I can barely take a step without tripping over the things. I made first contact with one just this morning, housed in something shaped like a black skull."

"... Did it identify itself as Sargon?"

"You've met?"

"We have... encountered several copies of him before. Almost all of their behaviour is fixed and unchangeable, and they do not appear truly sapient, or to communicate other than audibly. They are toys, dangerous only in that they are stepping-stones to real dangers."

"Ah, so his - their - castle is a booby-trap?"

He didn't answer for a long moment. Then he stuck his hands into his case, where I couldn't see them, and fiddled for several more moments. I tensed again, but all that resulted were a couple of nods from his two fellows.

He folded his hands neatly before himself again, saying, "It occurs to me that your earlier phrase, 'accumulation of evidence', is a good one. We have accumulated next to no evidence that you have the capability of pursuing your stated research goals without self-destructing, messily, and in a way that may cause immense damage to those all around you. This is why we are willing to go to extensive measures to limit the damage you are capable of causing. It occurs to me that an exchange of evidence may be of benefit to both of us."

"I'm listening," I agreed, noncommittally.

"We are aware of the castle you mentioned, and are confident that it presents no special physical dangers. I propose that you provide us with evidence about your research skills by performing whatever examination of the site that you see fit, with one or more of us observing. Should you demonstrate ability beyond our current estimation, we will reciprocate by providing you with evidence we prefer to keep private about ourselves."

"Thus increasing my trust of you, and my willingness to hand over city-killer tech. ... And, I might as well say it, reducing the odds that you will be motivated to use measures more unpleasant than voluntary trade to remove that tech from my control. There's a lot of details that would have to be hammered out, but I have to say, I like your positive-sum approach."

"You accept the principle idea, then?"

"It makes a lot more sense than challenging me to cook up a spaghetti dinner, at least."

 

[DataPacRat]

*Chapter Five: Mis-manage*

The total population of the Royal Canadian Household in Munchkin was currently, if arguably, eight. I counted Bunny Joe as one person; while she'd brought along Bear Joe, I wasn't convinced that enough of Joe's mind had been stuffed inside his skull for him to be a full partner in the social contract's rights and responsibilities. Minerva, while a minor, was a fully human minor, with all the personhood and quirks that implied - such as bringing a pet, Toby Junior, to pet and play with to a formal meeting. Despite being twice the woman I was in many respects, Sarah only counted once. Denise probably didn't /want/ to be counted among our number, but was doomed to disappointment on many things. While Alphie was half-embedded in Brenda's chest, and served as her voicebox, I was counting them separately. And while Boomer had started with her software identical to Alphie's, or near enough, the facial expressions of their equine and mustelid avatars matched up so rarely that I couldn't help but treat them as separate individuals. And, finally, while I, myself, was one of the odder cases, until Wagger or Bun-Bun started expressing their own opinions on the issues of the day, I was willing to treat myself as being unanimous about my singular population count.

"Welcome to the first semi-formal meeting of what I'm calling the Private Council. Would everyone take a seat and settle in, please?

"Thank you. I don't want this to become some formalized ritual, where the order on the agenda is more important than dealing with actual problems; but I did want to get us all together for some announcements and discussion.

"First of all, I'm instituting a preliminary information security system. None of us are experts in the field, so we know going in that it's just going to be a temporary setup until we can work out something better, but I know I've been letting myself slip pieces of data to people who shouldn't have them. I think the downsides are much smaller than the upsides.

"I'm using Munchkin itself as the model, and color-coding it so it's easy to remember. White is outside Munchkin: information that's already public. Blue is the cargo car: stuff that we may not want publicized, but can be figured out by people watching us, such as any random people who we happen to rescue. Green is the living car, for people who we can trust at least enough not to stab us as we sleep. Yellow is the lab car, for materials that can be dangerous to those who don't know how to handle them. And red is my private car, for materials we don't want anyone else to get a hold of."

What I didn't add aloud was that, at least in my own mind, I'd added an extra category, black, for materials I didn't want anyone else to even know existed.

"These aren't hard-and-fast rules. They're meant to be guidelines. I expect I'm going to be spending some time sorting out which items and pieces of info go into which category. The general point is to avoid spreading information unnecessarily.

"The remainder of this meeting is coded Yellow, with possible exceptions.

"Any questions?"

--

"Next up. I have a proposal for a project, which I'm going to call 'Delver'. I've received information that ninety miles south-ish from here is a castle. I intend to go take a look at it, to see whether anything there can be made use of, up to and including claiming the site as a new headquarters; and to see if anything there is dangerous and needs to be disposed of, up to and including destroying the entire site.

"There are a few reasons to look at such a site. If I'm to do any digging into the Singularity, then it's a good idea to start getting some practice into practical archaeology. Getting the practice on a site that doesn't have any intrinsic importance, before a fumbled shovel might destroy an invaluable piece of data, seems worth the effort.

"There are also a few reasons to look at that site, as opposed to any others. The main one is to try to improve relations between us and the Free Company. They think we are, to put it bluntly, idiot children who can't be trusted with matches, let alone something really dangerous. I get the impression that if we don't give them what they want from us in a 'voluntary' trade, they'll take it by force. I'm also pretty sure that if they used force, none of my technical tricks would be enough to stop them. So I'm quite willing to try to play along with their ideas, as long as they continue to pose a looming threat.

"Because of that last goal, I'd like Delver to be done with all due caution and care, to try to impress any observers the Free Company has watching us. This means taking the time before leaving Erie to gather whatever information about the site and its environs that we can, getting as many of the potentially useful tools as we can build or buy, looking for any subject-matter experts we can hire, and so on. To this end, I'd rather not set a date to leave until we can make a good guess about how long it'll take to do all of that.

"At least one other thing to keep in mind is that, given how little we know about the Free Company, they have some sort of hidden agenda. Maybe they want someone else to clean out the castle so they can keep their hands clean. Maybe they're lying about the castle posing no physical danger, and whatever observers they send are expendable. Maybe they're playing with the definition of 'physical danger', and there's a mind-wipe zone inside or something. In short - nobody who's going is to let their guard down just because it's supposed to be a nice, easy training mission."

--

"Let's see... oh, yes. I've determined that there's a disease that's fairly widespread among Erieans, and whose main method of transmission is sexual contact. I'm still working out a way to determine if anyone is infected, but I have figured out a cure. Well, I suppose I should actually give credit to Clara for working out the cure. Anyway, it seems impolite to spread the disease more than it already has, so I'm going to request that you all consider taking the cure, and avoiding infectious contact with anyone who hasn't. It's two weeks of injections, which is annoying, so I'll understand if you don't want to. If it makes you feel any better, I've already started taking the treatment myself."

--

"Moving along; I'd like to make some longer-term arrangements to keep Human Joe frozen, other than inside Munchkin. For one, he's in the way in case anyone else needs to be preserved. For another, it would be better for him to be in a fixed location. I propose we find some industrial space to serve as storage space for his cryostat, while looking for a building that would be suitable for the longer term. I'd like to suggest we pass along this task to the local Bayesians, some of whom were already working on a similar project before their space got blown up. ... I suppose we should make a note to avoid publicizing the location of the cryo-storage space, in case anyone else takes it into their mind to apply explosives."

--

"I don't expect this item to be resolved today, but I do want to bring it up. The odds that I'm going to get killed by something in the near future are non-negligible. And that doesn't even take into account the various ways I could end up hors de combat, such as a zone mind-wipe that makes me want nothing more than to be a tree, or something. I'm positioning this whole monarchy job as being working on long-term problems that a regular political process is ill-equipped to handle... and I want those problems handled, even if I'm not around to handle them.

"I don't expect to be able to reproduce in anything like a natural fashion - and even if I could, waiting fifteen to twenty years for someone new to even start working on the problems isn't a good solution. But I still want something resembling an heir, who can take the resources I've gathered so far and put them to good use. The people who seem most likely to be willing and able to get to work on existential-risk reduction are the ones in this room. I know not all of you have the interest or skills to even try - but I'd like each of you to start thinking about what it would mean to try taking on that sort of responsibility."

I paused for effect, looking around at each face.

"There's a certain mindset involved in thinking that your long-term goal is so important that it's worth doing almost anything, or even just plain anything, to accomplish. I'm hoping to cultivate that mindset in each of you. To start with, I remembered the names of a few pieces of text that might provide relevant advice, and Clara was able to find copies somewhere in her library, or maybe students' personal data storage devices - she just said she found 'em. I'm handing out copies of 'The List of Character Survival Techniques' as an introduction, and when you're done with that, I'd recommend the 'Evil Overlord List' and its sequels, and 'Murphy's Laws of Combat'. I'm paying the heliographers to transmit further items during their usual down-times, starting with selected articles from 'Dragon Magazine', as well as excerpts from the 'Grimtooth's Traps' line for practical puzzles to ponder how to pass."

--

"Bunny Joe, Sarah, could you stay behind for a minute?

"I'm calling this piece of info red level of security. I've written up a simple set of documents to serve as a will, living will, and the like, in case of my death or incapacitation. Among other details, they name my current choice of heir. I've used a bit of encryption mathematical trickery on them, splitting them into three pieces, any two of which can be used to recreate the original documents. I'm storing one piece aboard Munchkin, entrusting one piece to the Lake Erie squiddies, and transmitting the third piece to Clara to hold in trust for the Quebecois, until we get back in touch with them again."

--

"Candy? Crystal? Kelly? Karma? I have a proposition for you. At the moment, you are security level blue. I am willing to consider that to security level green - if you can do something for me.

"There is something called 'decision fatigue'. Making lots of little decisions makes it harder to make the big decisions. I know some politicians have tried to reduce that for themselves by simplifying their lives - reducing their wardrobe to just a blue suit or a grey one. If you can come up with ways to reduce /my/ decision fatigue... I'll probably let you."

"Among other benefits, if you do so, I will grant you access to one of my buns, who has the same measurements and range of motion as me. You will be able to learn a great many things about me from it, so it will be a further extension of my trust to you."

--

"I would like to apologize for neglecting my diplomatic duties to you and your people, Captain Shatter."

"Not at all. We are delighted to... observe the local forms of... inter-state relations, and in particular... your resolution to your conflict with... the locals. We have never witnessed... the writing of a constitution... before."

"Ah, that's why you haven't set sail yet. Hm... in that case, do you think you might be willing to have a few of the people under your command join me in a little expedition inland?"

--

"Mister... Lee, is it?" I double-checked my itinerary.

"Yes, Your Majesty. Former manager of Erie Pharamaceuticals. Current manager of Royal Canadian Pharamaceuticals, Erie Branch, until such time as you choose to replace me."

"I have little to no interest in interfering in the day-to-day operations of your group, outside of ensuring there's an ombudsman who everyone can report any problems to. I have asked you here for two reasons, the first of which is that I wish to ensure that, as a Crown company, your company's actions do not negatively affect the reputation of the crown."

"We use all available testing methods to ensure the purity and potency of our products. I have also brought samples of the new branding materials for your inspection and review."

"Would it be safe to assume that the workers are fully unionized?"

"Of course, ma'am."

"Then from what I see so far, there are no major issues to deal with. Which allows me to proceed to my second reason for bringing you here: arranging to supply the Royal Mobile Household with medicines and other such interesting chemicals, which are infeasible to create in our private lab. Improving the equipment and resources in that lab would also be nice."

--

"No, vodka does /not/ contain enough alcohol by volume for my needs. I don't want to drink it, I want to burn it. Diesel would work about as well, but seems to be hard to come by, while I /know/ that if technology is advanced enough to make pipes, people are going to be using those pipes to distill alcohol. If you can't provide me what I need with a deliverable of two days, then please let me know now, so I can come up with an alternative solution."

--

"Mayor Edwards, it occurs to me that one area of information my current records are woefully lacking in are post-Singularity maps. I would greatly appreciate your advice in recommending libraries, whether public or private, from which I can remedy this deficiency."

--

I looked up from the article on exploring abandoned architecture, and spoke to myself, "Why haven't I set the mini-fabber to make a ladder yet? ... I suppose getting paws, then a hoof, then a spinal injury, then a tail with veto control over my legs, has kind of made climbing things low on my priority list... I suppose I should make sure I've got a good selection of ropes, too, a few grappling hooks, some sort of collapsible ten-foot pole... I wonder how Sarah would feel about an actual saddle? Hm... no need to limit myself to the classics; I've got compressed air, I wonder if Clara knows an easy way to make silly string? ... Wherever did I put that smart-metal lariat?"

--

"Yes, Brenda?"

"I've been trading 'grams with Clara. Told her as much as we know about what I'm made of now. Got instructions back to test me for that disease, and treat me if I've got it. She says as long as I stick to the plan, you don't have to worry about catching anything from me!"

"That's... nice."

"And I've been practicing with your bun-bots! I can make any of them look like they're wearing any of your outfits now! Well, except I have to have enough of me there so I can think. They're very stretchy inside, even more than you!"

"Er..."

"... Or I can pretend to be a backpack, or something like that. Oh, and I've been working on my tentacles! Anybody tries to get into a fight with you, they won't know what hit them!"

"Well..."

"And I've just started trying to make myself look like you. If you need a body-double, that can talk better than the bun-bots, and react to new things, I can fill in for you! Fur's kind of hard for me, though."

"Brenda, I'd prefer it if you didn't try to look like me - there's a lot of potential for dangerous confusion there. I'd also prefer if we finished this conversation when I finished showering."

"Ooh, what's that? Do you have another giant egg in there?"

"... No, it's not my uterus. Apparently growing a flap of skin doesn't take Bun-Bun very long, and I'm seeing how big my new marsupial pouch can get by filling it with water."

"It looks as big as when I was in you!"

"..."

"Is that for /me/? You didn't know I was talking to Clara, so you changed yourself so I could be in you and not worry about that disease and eeee and can I try it now?"

"... Have you checked to see if you dissolve in water? I don't think even you'd survive the recycler..."

--

"Hello, Miz... Unruh?"

"That's right."

"In charge of Royal Mail Canada's heliograph system and telegraph delivery service?"

"That's right."

"I am planning on making a trip to a site about a hundred fifty klicks from here. I'd like your opinion on the feasibility of creating a temporary heliograph line between here and there, and what impact that might have on your normal operations."

--

Present at the latest Munchkin meeting were myself; Joe, Sarah, Brenda, Denise; a couple of Free Company observers; a squad of red-shirted Acadian marines; a heliograph operator team; Blue Wolf and Sargon in his box; and some bun-bots.

I'd at least learned enough about how these things went to have made arrangements for the right numbers and types of seats and refreshments.

"Welcome, everyone, to the first meeting for Project Delver. Some of you will be joining me on the expedition; some of you will be remaining here, but contributing in other ways.

"I will be issuing keycards to each of you shortly, which you will be able to use to access the parts of Munchkin that it is safe for you to do so. When I do, you will need to choose an additional security measure, such as a thumbprint or passcode, so that a stolen keycard will not be of use to a thief.

"Project Delver's first goal is for everyone involved to return in one piece. The second goal is for anyone who ends up in less than one piece, to be given the best treatment possible as quickly as possible. The third goal is to end up with the maximum possible amount of valuable resources, including both information and materiel.

"The basic plan is to travel to Site F aboard Munchkin, dropping off temporary heliograph relays on the way; to investigate the Site for useful and dangerous things, hopefully ending up with at least a preliminary examination of the entire Site; and to return to Erie, picking up the heliographs and their crews on the way. Given the second goal, Plan B is if someone is injured beyond what can be treated on-site, to bring them back to Erie's hospital as fast as possible, and then to return to collect everyone who was left behind. Plan C is if the Site turns out to have significant immobile resources and insignificant dangers, to establish a longer-term base to exploit those resources, and to minimize the odds of them from being exploited or destroyed by hostile groups.

"Part of this meeting is to gather any suggestions any of you may have in improving those plans, or in preparing alternate ones.

"This meeting is also, in part, so everyone involved can start familiarizing themselves with each other, and with the tools we'll be using. For example, this, here, is Pole-Bun, as in 'polish mine detector'. Despite her resemblance to me, she is not, in fact, a person; and thus she can be sent to walk ahead of a real person, to check for stable footing and a lack of things that will fall on heads. While I don't want to lose Pole-Bun, I'd rather lose her than a real person.

"I have also prepared one of my flying machines for a demonstration today, to see which, if any, of you might be interested in learning how to be a backup pilot. I'm sure all of you can imagine the benefits of getting a higher perspective on things."

--

One of the lynx-shaped soldiers padded over and asked, "Will any of the citizens of the Dominion of Lake Erie be contributing to this project?"

"No more than to any other, I'd imagine," I said. "Site F is inland, away from Lake Erie's shores. If it were in the same drainage basin, then I might have asked if they had anyone who might be willing to swim upstream; I don't know how they might be able to help, but I'd ask. But if I have to help them get over the hump to the next stream over, then by the time any of them could make it through all the twists and turns of the local river system to anywhere near Site F, we're probably already going to be done exploring the place."

"Could you not bring even one in Munchkin?"

"I've asked, but they don't seem interested. I suppose if we come across something at Site F in which an aquatic, tentacled sapient being would tremendously help, then I can use the heliograph line to send a message back negotiating for the help of one, and have Munchkin make a quick trip back and forth to bring one."

--

"And here we are at Site Mock-F."

"It's a barn," said Observer Charlie.

"Not a very big one," said Observer Delta.

"On the outside, sure," I agreed. "But better to find out how we step on each other's toes at a barn, next to Erie and its medical establishment, than a few hours away. I've got the heliograph operators practicing their craft elsewhere, so at this point in the simulated expedition, we've gotten near Site F. I've gone up, taken some pictures, and come back down. Well, Joe, Sarah, Wolfy, it appears that our intelligence was faulty, and instead of a castle, we are faced with a simple barn. Whatever shall we do?"

Bunny Joe tilted her head. "Blow it up?"

"Explosives are kind of expensive these days."

Sarah suggested, "Move in?"

"We haven't seen the inside - it may be a monster-barn fake castle thing."

Blue Wolf said, "Then I guess we'd better take a look. Should we send Pole-Bun in first?"

"We should," I agreed. "And now that I think about it - I'd really like to be able to see what she sees, without risking /any/ of our people. Boomer, add to the session notes, I want to look into really, /really/ long video cables. Also, since I haven't actually flown - if I can put together a simple surveillance drone, so I don't have to risk my own neck in case the real thing has some sort of anti-air defenses. Now, while we're standing here gabbing, what should the marines be doing? That barn might be full of robo-centaur knights getting ready to sally out against us; how should we have already arranged ourselves in case of such a situation?"

--

"... 'Presbylutheran'?" I read from the pamphlet.

"There weren't many people left after the Singularity. Almost all of the old churches with enough members left to even be called a church merged," said Edwards.

"You do realize that I'm not a Christian of any shape or sort, right?"

"Powerful people can be religious. And this is an area of influence outside the usual inter-union squabbling."

"And why are /you/ suggesting /I/ engage in this area at all?"

"Maybe because I want to keep my cushy job as secretary once the new constitution is in place, and the church's support would go a long way to keeping things stable. Or maybe I just want to watch you squirm uncomfortably."

"... Or maybe you owe someone a favor. Fine, I'll talk to the priest. Or reverend, or bishop, or pastor, or whatever the title is. But if I burst into flames when I walk in the doors, I'm holding you responsible."

--

The harem were... trying. They'd found pictures of Queen Elizabeth on walkabout, and had imitated the fashion, with knee-length skirt and wide-brimmed hat, in royal blue. Since they hadn't been bothering me at all while they'd put that together, I didn't want to discourage their approach, so I took the ensemble they presented me with back to my private room, scanned it into the clothes fabber, and had it re-make the outfit - with the addition of my usual selection of hidden pockets. I tucked Boomer into my new marsupial pouch, padded her case's corners with a few hankies and a microfiber towel, and picked a cane to try to walk with that day. (Wagger finally seemed to be responding to the operant conditioning of 'twitch leg at bad time, Bunny falls onto tail', but it wasn't a deeply embedded lesson yet.)

In relatively short order, I was welcomed into a small house behind a white-painted church. (Rectory? Parsonage? There was a whole vocabulary I was missing, and had little interest in spending my time to assimilate.)

"May I offer you some tea? Wine?" asked the woman, with the sort of collar I'd seen on TV often enough to recognize as being some sort of indicator of ministership.

"No, thank you," I settled into a seat. I added an explanation, "I've started to have some medical issues with locally-sourced food and water." It wasn't /entirely/ false, and I hoped helped move the conversation along.

"It's a shame you couldn't make it to services, earlier."

I sighed. "Ma'am - with all due respect, you're not going to convert me to any brand of theism, I'm not going to convert you to any variation of atheism, and I'm pretty sure we both have better things to do than waste our time trying. If that's all you asked me over for, I should probably just leave."

"While it grieves me to see any soul as lost in the wilderness as yours, there is another reason you are here. What are your intentions towards the church in your new government?"

"'My' new government? You mean Erie's new government?" At her nod, I said, "You should take that up with the new government, not me. I'm just making sure it meets certain minimal standards. After that, I have no intentions for it, or anything under its bailiwick."

"Do those standards include freedom of religion?"

"They include a bill of rights, which I won't consider complete without some sort of guarantee for freedom of thought and expression. There are certain limits to that guarantee, such as someone who believes that they can cure their child by starving it in the face of all medical evidence to the contrary, but the old American government was perfectly able to include 'reckless endangerment' laws within its constitution and still have lots of churches."

"And what will you do if the new government fails to abide by that guarantee?"

"Me? Almost certainly nothing. That's what elections, emigration, and revolutions are for. I'm not here to solve all the world's problems; I'm not here to solve /your/ problems. If I can solve the one problem I'm focused on with a guarantee of free religion, I'll work on that guarantee. If I can solve the one problem I'm focused on by establishing atheism as the one and only state church, I'll work on establishing that."

"I'm not happy to hear that."

"Then think of it this way. If there's anything you can do to help me on my problem, I'll be quite happy to offer whatever I can in return, commensurate to the size of your help."

"And what 'problem' is that?"

"From your perspective? Ensuring that enough people survive, in the long term, so that there is a reasonable chance of your church continuing to exist. I'm not going to say that if you're really interested in the long-term welfare of your flock that you should throw your total support behind me, because people generally just don't think that way."

--

"How's progress, Skunk?"

"We resolved the populism versus unionism debate along with the separation of law bills and money bills by going back to bicameralism. One house, elected by single transferable vote, initiates law bills, requires a two-thirds majority to pass any, laws require a simple majority of the other house."

"Is 'single transferable vote' a synonym for 'instant runoff'?"

"Not quite. The person doing the voting still just ranks their candidates in order of preference, but since it's to elect a bunch of people into a group instead of an individual, if everybody's first vote is for X, then the excess votes go to their second choice."

"I'll read up on it when I have a chance. Go ahead, then."

"The other house has its members appointed by the union leaders, initiates money bills, the executive gets a line-item veto, bills can be defeated by a supermajority of the first house. Right now, we're working on tweaking the Bill of Rights to take into account the abuses and excesses of the Civil Guard, and the previous government in general. I'm pushing for a separate branch of government for ombudsmen, but I could live with them being part of the executive, if enough other measures are taken. When I get back, the plan is to discuss whether we want to constitutionally enshrine the pre-twenty-twenty-seven exclusionary rule and the principle of throwing out the 'fruit of the poisonous tree' for illegally-gathered evidence, or stay within the American legal tradition, incorporate Doe v. Alabama as precedent, and come up with other ways to punish government agents who exceed their lawful authority."

"I'm not really familiar with that case, or what happened in twenty-twenty-seven."

"I'm not an expert in the details, but the previous rule was ruled unconstitutional. After, if someone felt that a search was illegal, they were supposed to file a writ of habeas corpus to get an immediate hearing. However, in practice, it was nearly impossible to succeed. As police already had qualified immunity from lawsuits, only being liable for clear violations of peoples' rights, they had nearly free reign. Thus the creation of the Civil Guard instead of a police force, to avoid those abuses."

"... I'm going to think that it didn't avoid them very well."

"Perhaps not, but it was a step in the right direction, and the main problems lay elsewhere in the system. Given the terms of the surrender document, I'm implying to the committee that anything less than every civil rights protection we can come up with could be insufficient to satisfy you, but I'm also trying to get them to understand why the protections are valuable in and of themselves."

"Pointing out how the Civil Guard, or whatever, is at least as likely to be pointed at them as at random civilians seems like one approach."

"Perhaps, but given the backgrounds of the committee members, they simply don't have the context to understand what that's like. I'm getting tempted to spend a day forcing all of them to dress up like poor people and get hassled."

"... I'm almost tempted to extend the deadline by a day if you do, but changing that, even for such a noble cause, would likely set a bad precedent..."

--

"I'd like everyone working on Project Delver to wear these. They're not directly related to the project, but are more for long-term data gathering."

Sarah picked up the pen-shaped object, then the card-sized one. "What do they do? More radio gear?"

"No, a couple of types of radiation detectors. Without decent sources of semiconductors or noble gasses, I'm limited in the sensors I can build. But the local newspaper has photos, so I was able to get some film to build a film-badge dosimeter. And the quartz fiber dosimeter doesn't require any special materials, it just needs to be read off and recharged every so often. Recharger's in the lab, along with a logbook and instruction sheet."

"Are you /expecting/ radiation at the castle?"

"I have no reason to. But I'm hoping the castle expedition is a prelude to bigger and better investigations, and I'd feel downright silly if I discovered the secrets of the universe, but died because I found them in the middle of a particle accelerator I didn't know was active."

 

[DataPacRat]

*Chapter Six: Mis-lead*

We made it all of twenty miles out of Erie before we had to turn around and head all the way back.

I'd let Miz Unruh make the arrangements she thought best for the heliograph camps, trusting that she knew her job and what was best for her people so I could focus better on the castle end of the trip. It was only as everyone pitched in to help set up the first relay that I discovered she'd made absolutely no provisions to get her people back if Munchkin broke down. So we drove back to Erie, grabbed just about every loose bicycle that was for sale or rent, and enough backpacks to hold provisions for stranded heliograph operators bicycling back home, and /then/ went on the road again.

I chose to think of the whole thing as being quite fortunate, if it was the worst blunder we made. I spent most of the trip going back and forth in Munchkin looking for any worse blunders.

--

We took an old 'Penny Rail' line, east from Erie through the ruins of the cooling towers that were all that was left of Corry, Youngsville (not the Youngstown the Free Company was from), Warren, and to Cane, where we switched to a B&O Rail line heading southwest to Marienville - paralleling the non-rail Route Sixty-Six, and, according to the relevant maps, passing right through the frontage of the ex-prison we were aiming for.

Naturally, we didn't get anywhere near that close before we got a look at the place. While I didn't want to risk Alphie or Boomer by sending them into the air, it wasn't too hard to send a hastily cobbled-together quadcopter straight up to check for a Toronto-like air defense system, and when it wasn't shot down, to make a quick flight in one of the powered paragliders. Each time we stopped to drop off a heliograph, I went up a few hundred feet, circled around so Boomer, strapped on my chest, could get a good view, and glided back down.

After we passed Kane, we were going through an old national forest, so there wasn't much to see... until we were less than twenty klicks away. When I landed, Sarah, Bunny Joe, and I put our heads together to peer at Boomer's small display, with Brenda and Blue Wolf hanging back until we made room.

I said, "If I said 'Enhance', would it do any good?"

Boomer's voice came over the vague three-dimensional blob she was rotating. "I am already using all the enhancement algorithms I have in my memory, including ones which take advantage of my accelerometers to know my position when each frame of video was taken, the exact details of the camera's construction-"

"Okay, okay," I cut her explanation off, "it's already enhanced. It's just... a lot more /rounded/ than most castles I'm used to seeing. Is that an artifact of the enhancement?"

"No, the structure possesses that shape. The highest portion is roughly twenty meters above the ground level recorded in topographic maps for that site, while the portion I am highlighting is roughly seventeen meters."

Sarah asked, "Maybe it used to be straighter and taller, and is just ruins now?"

Bunny Joe said, "Maybe it was built in the shape of ruins."

I tapped my lips with one finger, as I thought. "Maybe we can get a better look before we get any closer... Give me a couple of minutes, and I should be able to whip up a mount to aim Boomer's best camera through a telescope."

--

We gathered around Boomer again.

"Okay," said Sarah, "so it's a giant stone lion. That's called a sphinx, right?" The figure was roughly forty meters long from nose to the base of its tail (if it had one), facing west, crouched on its belly as if getting ready to pounce onto the road.

"Not quite," I commented, "sphinxes have human heads. Boomer, can you extrapolate more of the shape by assuming it's at least roughly symmetrical?"

"I can," she said, and did. "I should also note that while the trees and limited number of frames are blocking almost all of my view of ground level, the figures appears to be resting on a mound roughly ten feet above local ground level. In addition, as I zoom out, I can confirm at least part of a wall surrounding the structure, roughly ten feet tall, five feet wide, with multiple twenty-foot towers."

"I'm getting some serious deja vu," I frowned. "Maybe it was that giant cat that chased me around, over near Technoville? Can this thing get up and move?"

"I have insufficient data to answer that question."

"I could swear I've seen that before... did someone try recreating the Giza sphinx, with a lion's head?

"The height is similar, but none of the other dimensions appear to be a close match."

"Any records of any similar structures?"

"Not in my database. Would you like to query Clara?"

"... You know, we might as well. Make a good test of the heliograph line."

Soon, beams of light were being reflected over nearly four hundred kilometers, from Munchkin through Kane via Erie to Buffalo and finally to Brock University. With only a light code, to keep the heliograph operators from knowing what I was talking about but without making their jobs too hard, I transmitted, "At site of castle, found a giant stone lion. I think I remember it, but don't remember where." I summarized what we'd found so far. "Any insights?"

Her return message came quickly. "ISBN 978-0880381079. Authour: Merle M. Rasmussen. Title: Ghost of Lion Castle. Publication date: 1984. Source: Product listings in the role-playing magazines you have been requesting excerpts of. As there is no record of the authour's death, the text appears to still be under copyright. A digital copy is available to be checked out of the library."

I sent, "I am currently unable to visit the library. How much information can you send on this communications medium? Is there such a thing as a digital interlibrary loan?"

I got back, "Current university policies do not support digital loans. Information on texts is limited to that necessary for reviews, such as one article per periodical."

"How much are you able to transmit about the building described in that book? Preferably focusing on dangers to people exploring it."

"Many monsters wander the premises. When invaded by more than one individual at a time, intruders are transformed into beasts. Portcullises fall when walked under. Murder holes drop stones when walked under. Molten lead pours from nostrils when walked under. Glowing arrows fire out of arrow slits. Traps exist in the Treasury room, Butcher room and the Mason room."

Instead of immediately responding, I showed the conversation's transcription to the rest of the team. "I had dozens, maybe hundreds, of 'adventure modules' like that in my personal library, before the first time I died," I said. "This book was probably one of them. From what I gathered before we left Erie, the AIs think the place was a prison right up to the Singularity, so... what do you think?"

Sarah said, "If the real thing is like the book, it sounds like there's a transformation zone, maybe lots of them."

Bunny Joe commented, "I do not think any one person, or even one family, could build something that large. And there is no sign of any larger settlements nearby to provide the labour. I do not think it was made by human hands, even if humans came up with the design."

I nodded. "Maybe the Free Company was lying about no dangers, and they're hoping one or more of us get Changed. Or, maybe there are zones here that are more about mental changes than physical. Or, of course, we're still completely missing the gag. Whatever the answer is, I think nobody will object if I rule that nobody goes anywhere unless a bun-bot's been through there first?"

--

We came to a halt a little over a klick from the site at what the old maps showed as a road-salt depot, and which was now just a small clearing that trees didn't seem to want to grow in. I asked, "Any change in the weather forecast?"

Blue Wolf was idly fiddling with the latch on the wooden skull's box, but answered, "Still looks the same - partly cloudy until at least sunset, but could be rain tomorrow."

"That's going to play hob with the heliograph ranges," I mused. "We can always go back to Erie and redeploy on another day - the castle's not going anywhere. Still, no reason not to gather what info we can while the helio's still up."

Sarah tilted her head. "We're not going right in, are we?"

I shook my head in a negative. "I'm thinking of taking the 'glider and circling the site, get a view from all angles. First, though, there's Goal One to consider - what do we do if something goes wrong, or the place really does shoot glowing arrows, and I crash? There aren't many roads in the area."

Bunny Joe suggested, "Have someone on the roof watch you fly. If you fall, they can see where you land, and we can come get you."

After a bit more discussion, mostly ideas being shot down for not being as good as the first one, we started getting ready for that. "Acadians, you're in charge of physical security, in case of monsters or bandits. Free Company Observers, you, er, observe. Bunny Joe, you've got good eyes; you're on rooftop duty. Sarah, I'm designating you Munchkin's pilot for the duration. Brenda, you can nap in my quarters to keep from bothering everyone while they work. I'm going to grab a different outfit, and double-check my medkit and so on."

Brenda, who was back to pretending to be a 'service griffon' in front of the Free Company, and I went back to my private car. She pushed Alphie out of the surface of her chest, and through him, said, "I should go with you, not nap."

"I agree, but if you want to keep up your cover story, you need to be somewhere plausibly out of sight. Here's the freezer for your excess mass, and here's my flight suit for you to imitate, and here's a belly-pack that can explain why I'm carrying extra mass on my front."

"Aren't you getting undressed? I'm going to be your clothes!"

"And if we need to split up? Shorts and a t-shirt shouldn't interfere with you looking like my outer layers, should they?"

She grumbled, but went transparent and started sliding around me, and into the marsupial-like pouch I was still getting used to having. I set Alphie aside for the moment - no need to risk both AIs - and once Brenda had covered me enough, held Boomer to my chest for her to grab onto. Once I had a layer of Brenda-stuff covering my whole body from the neck down, she went to work on the colours and textures, until, for all anyone else could tell, I was wearing a full-body jumpsuit.

Boomer said, in Brenda's voice, "Do you want the tail covered or uncovered?"

"Eh," I shrugged as I took a few steps to get used to the new distribution of weight, "doesn't matter much. Maybe leave her head free, and make a sleeve for the rest."

So I had spoken, so it was done. "Sure you don't want a hood?"

I swapped out my glasses for a pair of goggles, on the theory they were less likely to get lost. "Can you make yourself into a helmet?"

"I'm made of goo. I can fiddle with my surface so it's dry and not sticky, but not that hard."

"Then no hood. If I /do/ fall out of the sky, then feel free to do whatever you can to keep my skull from getting squashed, like turning into a bunch of pillows to slow down the stop when I hit the ground. Oh, and do as much for my torso as you can without increasing the risk to my head. Bun-Bun's pretty good with limbs, so don't worry about them much."

--

I circled clockwise around the castle; /well/ around the castle, to avoid anything short of a sniper or laser. East from Munchkin, curving around to the south, getting a view of the stone lion from all sides, including giving Boomer a view through the telescope every so often. I saw a few things I wanted to turn closer in to get a better look at, but just because I'd made lots of plans in case of a crash didn't mean I /wanted/ to crash.

I landed without incident on the road, packed up my chute, and boarded Munchkin. Before I could head back to my room to let Brenda take up a separate embodiment again, Wagger gave my legs a twitch and I just about fell onto a couch. Sarah handed me a mug of hot something-or-other, and Bunny Joe was clambering down from the roof, and everybody was crowding closer to ask what I'd seen, so I gave a mental sigh, hoped Brenda wouldn't object to being literally objectified for a while longer, and set down Boomer so at least a few of us could get a look at her screen.

I asked her, "Need any processing time to put together a new 3D model?"

Boomer answered, "If I had been built with technology from twenty-fifteen, perhaps. I was not, so no." She started displaying the whole landscape on her screen, slowly rotating it around and around, and highlighting various points. "Access to the main structure from the ground appears difficult. The wall surrounds the whole building, and there is a two-meter-deep ditch just outside it. The ditch is broken in two places: the middle of the east wall, where the gate is sealed with a portcullis, and this tower in the north wall, where the tail of the lion leads to, which appears to be sealed with wooden doors. Comparing the site to previous maps, the entire footprint of the previous prison grounds has been flattened, and that area is surrounded by a vehicular road, surrounded by trees. That road is connected to a driveway reaching to Route Sixty-Six, passing by a parking lot and this building here."

Sarah pointed a claw-tip at the latter. "What is this place? A guardhouse?"

Boomer obligingly zoomed in, and above a set of glass doors, and below some panels of black glass on the rooftop I guessed were solar panels, were the words, 'Tourism Office'.

I grunted, and asked the obvious question, "Are there any /other/ bits of writing in the area?"

Boomer's virtual camera obligingly flew over to a gate where the driveway met the main road, over which was a sign reading, "Welcome to Lion Castle". A second sign was stuck into the ground to the right of the higher one, this one reading, "Pennsylvania's premiere LARP and paintball destination!"

Sarah said, "Well, that just looks... cheap."

I frowned, and asked, "You're sure there's no hint of this place existing before twenty-fifty?"

Boomer responded, "None at all."

I considered. "Well - the whole place looks secure enough against anything short of an army, and there aren't many of those around. If there aren't any zones to worry about, I might not mind setting up shop here... with a few renovations to make the entrance a little less tawdry. On the other paw, the only reason I can think of to build something that looks like a tourist trap is as, well, a trap, to get people who wander by to lower their guard and wander in."

Joe asked, "If something could build all that, what would they need to trap people for?"

I shrugged. "Maybe it's trying to recreate the original adventure, and needs live bodies to turn into monsters? Personally, I'd rather not spend the rest of my days as an orc guarding a chest in a ten-by-ten-foot room. So how about we start finding out if that's a possibility, drive closer, and send a few bun-bots to walk around that tourist office while the light's still good?"

--

We drove up to the driveway, and I sent a trio of the robots shaped like me (not counting my Brenda-bulge) out to walk through the gate. With a bit of help from the gang, I'd worked out a precise set of instructions for them to follow. (Natural language computer programming was a lot easier than having to translate everything into absolutely precise terms; and it was a lot more acceptable to the local technophobes if I avoided calling it 'programming' and just called it 'telling them what to do'.)

I wanted to watch everything going on in real-time, but with all the trees, the office was out of sight of the road. I checked the 'glider's fuel, dithered a bit, and decided to conserve it by waiting.

After five minutes, the first bun-bot came back, indicating nothing had eaten any of them, and drawing a map of where she'd walked so far; so I sent her back to continue the exploration. At ten and fifteen, the other two returned as they were supposed to. And at twenty, the first one came back again - but this time, she also reported that the doors she'd been told to try to open were unlocked.

After a quick huddle of the gang, we sent her to explore inside the building, as well as the second bun-bot when she returned, while leaving the third to continue checking the exterior.

After a while of this, the bun-bots reported they'd walked through the entire building, so I sent one back to retrieve the third, and looked at the people around me. "So far, so good," I said. "If there are any zones in the area, they don't seem to be in that building."

Sarah said, "Or if there is one, it can tell the difference between people and bun-bots."

Bunny Joe added, "Or maybe it ignores rabbit people."

"All of which are very good maybes," I acknowledged. "So, does anyone want to volunteer to look at the place?" After a few seconds, I rolled my eyes. "Or maybe we should just stick to rabbit people to start with?" I looked at Joe, who looked back calmly. I gave a quick sigh, then said, "Lemme go grab something more appropriate than a flight suit."

Back in my private car, I patted my belly. "You can come out, now, get back to griffon shape again. Or, now that I think of it, whatever other shape you want to be - we're in private, so you don't have to pretend to be an animal if you don't want to."

I didn't feel any motion of her sliding out of my pouch, or from my limbs. Through Boomer, she said, "You're walking into a place that might be dangerous. You don't have to worry about falling, but I can help you more like this than waiting for you in Munchkin."

"Maybe," I agreed, "but there's a whole lot we don't know about how you work yet. If there is a zone that wants to turn me into a bugbear... you might just be used as raw biomass, and, well, die."

"And if you trip and fall into a refuse pit, or a support beam breaks, or all sorts of other things happen, you'll die unless I'm there to help."

I drummed my Brenda-gloved fingers on my work-desk as I thought. "By the obvious extension of that logic, I shouldn't ever take you off."

"I could live with that."

"I'm not sure I want to be permanently pseudo-pregnant."

Her mass finally started to shift out of my pouch, my belly flattening again. "I can be a backpack," she said, rearranging herself to match her words. She added, "And I'm good enough at imitating how cloth flows to hide a lot of my mass under a dress. And if you're using your wheelchair, I can hide my extra mass in a bunch of ways. It'll be even easier if you ever become comfortable enough with me to let me keep some of my mass in your gastrointestinal tract, but I should be able to manage without that."

I continued my argument, "There are times when I have to keep both AIs turned off, to keep them safe. If you still haven't worked out how to do vocal cords, you're going to be stuck mute for... indefinite periods of time. Maybe days. Maybe longer."

"When we were jailed, you said that you spent days and weeks without saying a word to anyone. If you can, I can."

"I also said that I have schizoid personality disorder, and I don't think you've got that. If anything, you seem to be developing dependent personality disorder, and I'm not sure I want to encourage that."

"I don't have D.P.D., I'm a bimbo. I don't know what the psychological term is, I just want to support you and what you're trying to do. Nobody else around here is working as hard as you are on X-risks, so if you die, they won't get worked on as well. Doing everything I can to keep you alive is in my own long-term self-interest, even if it does increase short-term risk."

"... How much of that did you crib from things I've said and written?"

"Even if the words are yours, the sentiment is still mine."

I drummed my fingers again. "If we're really going to try doing this long-term... you're still going to have to show up as a service griffon, at least until there's a plausible reason to reduce your number of appearances."

"We can do that when you're safe."

"I'd want you to work on having a voice... and as many other methods of communication as possible. Morse-code squeezes, fine-tuning your colouring changes so you can write on your surface, and so on."

"I'll be happy to."

"And for a few reasons, including both the off chance that there's a super-computer nearby that can infect them across an air-gap, and so you can get a better idea of what would be involved in not being able to speak for a reasonably prolonged period, I'm going to turn off Boomer before we go out. Give my left arm three squeezes and I'll get out of Dodge, and turn Boomer back on as soon as there's no risk to her, so you can speak."

"You've got to come back inside for your injection in three and a half hours anyway. It took me longer than that to figure out how to talk to Alphie. I'll be fine."

I sighed. "In that case - let's lose the flight-suit look, and go for something more appropriate for walking about, shall we?"

--

Brenda was entirely capable of imitating the shape and appearance of a backpack. What her goo-body couldn't manage, though, was to imitate the strength of one. When I tried loading up Brenda-pack with some real tools, from wedges to force doors open or closed to a first aid kit, she struggled to hold it all in... and then just collapsed, the whole set of gear tumbling down my back. A solution was easy enough - I just threw one of the existing backpacks into the fabber for a slight alteration, creating a few openings where it pressed against my back for Brenda to reach through. She assured me that all her 'thinky bits' were safe inside, and if she did get yanked off, the part of her forming my clothes would be just fine for at least an hour, and there was more than enough extra mass in the freezer for her to rebuild herself with.

After checking that nobody else - not even the Observers - felt the need to accompany me, I grabbed my Explorer Special cane (which could telescope out to ten feet, and had screw-tips at both ends for hooks, spikes, and a few other gizmos sharing backpack space with Brenda), and trudged down the drive.

The office's exterior looked like one of those faux log cabins that lounged at the entrance to campgrounds, to give RV owners the feeling that they were being 'rustic'. Hand-stenciled signs lurked under a patio's eaves, offering 'paint', 'chrony', and 'spell scrolls' for reasonable prices. A darkened, red-and-white pop machine offered various concoctions for ten dollars - or one 'silver piece' - per bottle.

When I stepped onto the patio, the pop machine lit up.

I backstepped quickly, looking around for anyone who might have snuck up behind me while I was distracted; but after a few moments of nothing else happening, let myself relax a tad. After a moment of thought, I took a few more steps back to look up at the office's roof, confirming that, as I thought I'd remembered, the solar panels were dusty, but not completely obscured.

I unfolded my cane to its ten-foot length, and poked at the pop machine with it. It didn't do anything, even when I pushed the 'root beer' button. Since I didn't have any dollars or 'silver pieces' that looked like they'd fit in the slot, I shortened my cane to a more supportive length and cautiously passed it.

After that, I was only modestly surprised that, when I opened the front door, the interior lights came on.

Just inside the door, to my left, a rack carried skulls lined up like bowling balls. A sign proclaimed "Win big! Bring back a phylactery for fifty gold pieces!". Beyond them, another rack, this one of goggles, whose sign exclaimed "For the full experience!". To the right was a small counter and stool, perhaps for check-outs; further inside was a rack full of pamphlets for campgrounds and other local attractions, a couple of empty coolers, a stand-up video-game arcade, a door to some restrooms, and another door labelled 'office'. The main room bent in an 'L' around those rooms, and I saw the edges of some further shelves in the back part, and some weirdly-shaped vaguely gun-like things racked on the wall.

All in all, it was extremely... ordinary. A bit faded. Tacky, even.

Before I stepped inside, I gave my mental North a nudge, asking for my paranoid subself's advice, and it occurred to me to wonder about what I /wasn't/ seeing. No broken glass from years of storms; very little dirt or debris tracked about; only a few dust-bunnies. I looked at the glass doors - they might have been washed a year ago, or a decade, if the weather had been good, but the outside was nearly invisible from the inside, and vice versa. I looked around at the parking lot, and considered the lack of tire-tracks in the leaf-litter from previous autumns. I looked over at the castle itself, the giant cat's jaws frozen open in a permanent silent roar.

I decided to try the obvious, and asked thin air, "Is anybody home?"

Silence reigned.

I grabbed my walkie-talkie from my belt, and sent back to Munchkin, "So far, so good. There's power, but no sign anyone's been here in years. I'm heading inside."

I hung it up on my belt, and reached over my shoulder and into my pack. I thought aloud, "Did I pack those wedges on top?" Before I could call up my most recent memory palace, I felt the pack's contents shifting - and a pair of wedges slid into my hand. I cracked a smile to myself, and said "Better than Heward's Handy Haversack."

While I was making sure the front doors wouldn't be able to close on me, the arcade machine bleeped. I froze.

After nothing much happening for a few more moments, I stepped inside to take a closer look at it. Along the top, the marquee didn't list a particular game, just "Video Games!". The screen glowed, showing just a few lines of text, in a highly-pixellated, early nineteen-eighties font. "A new challenger appears! Would you like to play a game? One coin = one play."

I was feeling just a tad creeped out, but shrugged, and said to Brenda, "I never really was one for quarter-sucking arcades. For one, quarters were hard to come by when I was young enough to be entranced by them. For another, I liked the more in-depth games that took longer to finish - Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, Ultima Four... and I may be the only person alive who's ever heard of the 'Codex of Ultimate Wisdom'. Great, now I'm depressed again."

I looked around for something to distract me, and my eyes fell on the checkout desk, which I was now at an angle from which I could see had drawers. In moments, I'd learned they were unlocked, and full of assorted commercial detritus - push-pins, a stapler, dried-out rubber bands, wrapping paper, and a bit of loose change. I held up the two quarters I'd found, trying to cheer myself up with the numismatic novelty of coins minted after I'd died, but that bit of ironic amusement only lasted a moment.

I looked at the arcade machine, then at the quarters. With a shrug, I went over, set one on the rim of the marquee, and deposited the other into the slot.

 

[DataPacRat]

*Chapter Seven: Mis-sion*

My eyes were drifting closed, no matter how hard I fought to keep them open.

Once they completely shut, and I heard the digital bloops meaning I'd lost a virtual life, I realized that it wasn't because I was tired, it was because Brenda had extended a few fingers of her substance through my fur to push them closed. /Then/ I realized she was squeezing my left arm, three times and a pause, another three times and another pause.

Aloud, I murmured, "I'll just take a sec and get to a save point, and reached for the joystick.

Brenda didn't let go of my eyelids.

I sighed, and dropped my hands. "Or maybe I'll just head out."

I felt her start to withdraw.

I checked Scorpia, noting, with mild surprise, that I'd been playing for over three hours. I grabbed my walkie-talkie - I remembered getting check-in calls and just responding with "I'm fine," and the like - and announced, "I'm coming back in."

Ignoring the sounds of three hours of mission goals and accomplishments being tossed into the bit bucket, I left the office.

In Munchkin, while Bunny Joe fiddled in the kitchenette and the two Observers watched through their gas-masks, Sarah raised a furry eyebrow at me. "What did you find?"

I rubbed the back of my neck. "Funny story. I found an old video game, and was feeling nostalgic, and, well, lost track of time."

Sarah crossed her arms, and her tail thrashed. "If your mind is still that distractible, you need to talk with Amy or Abigail."

I nodded, contritely. "That makes sense. Lemme go change, hit the autodoc for my meds, and then I'll see if the heliograph can reach them."

As soon as the door to my private car closed, I felt Brenda sliding out of the backpack; she even unbuckled the straps and set it down on the floor for me. Before I'd made it two steps further, she'd shifted her entire appearance, going from 'practical outdoors explorer outfit' to 'long, flowing, ice-blue dress'.

"If the harem ever finds out you can do that," I said to her, only half-joking, "I don't think they'd ever let you do anything else." She squeezed my arms, and I added, "Right - voice. Lemme turn on Boomer..."

"Well," said Brenda through the AI, "that was kind of boring, really."

"I know, I know," I admitted. "I should have been spending my time on more important things, not a silly game." I brushed my fingers over the handheld Simon game on my workbench. "I haven't even got the excuse that it was a psychologically healthy release of tension, or the like."

"So you're not perfect," my dress told me. (Yet another of those experiences I'd never expected to have...) "If it only cost you a few hours to figure that out, you're ahead of the curve, and you can spend tomorrow doing real work instead of playing that game, right?" I didn't answer right away. "Right?" she repeated.

"I was just starting to figure out some of the patterns," I said. "If I can't find out if they're right or not - it'll be kind of frustrating."

"So?"

I shrugged. "They say pattern recognition is an important cognitive skill. And gamification can be a good way to increase motivation to learn skills - even something as simple and old-fashioned as crossword puzzles can help teach trivia."

"You have a castle in the shape of a giant lion out there, waiting to be explored, and you're seriously telling me you'd rather play astro globs?"

"That's 'astro blobs', and that was just one of the minigames."

"Bunny."

I sighed. "This is part of why I turned off Boomer for the trip. A lot of what I do, you're going to think is boring. If you're not happy hanging around with me playing games for a few hours, you're going to be less happy when I spend the whole day doing nothing but reading complicated technical papers."

"That's an interesting point that's worth talking about, but you're avoiding the question."

"Which question?"

"You've got the Free Company people watching your every move, you've got this whole place which your AIs don't know about, you've said that a new Singularity could happen any day... and you want to play a stupid /game/?"

I rubbed the back of my neck. "Well, when you put it like /that/..."

"Good. That's settled. Now - do you want me to shrink down off the shoulders, or leave some straps? How about adding some mass to increase your, I'll be frank, non-existent cleavage? I can't go higher than knee length for the hemline, unless you let me hide some mass inside you, but how about slits on the sides to show off your thighs?"

"... Yep, the harem would just love you. Default answer: 'as conservative as possible'."

"Spoilsport."

--

After my current morning routine (which, now that Wagger was mostly leaving my legs to me, once again included basic 'how to fall' training from a trainer-bun), and after cautiously agreeing to let Brenda demonstrate that she could comb every strand of my pelt into place and clean every square millimeter of my skin in just a few seconds, it was time to work out the day's plan, so I gathered everyone outside Munchkin next to a campfire, to drink hot beverages and gab.

"First up," I said, "I'm going to try looking through the tourism office's, er, office, for any useful paperwork, like maps or control instructions."

One of the Observers - who I'd yet to see eat or drink - asked, "You are not planning on resuming playing the game?"

I shrugged, feeling embarrassed again. "Not only am I not planning on it, I'm using some of the tricks from my therapy to actively avoid it. For example, a lot of my motivation to play the thing seems to be tied up with my nostalgia for pre-Singularity entertainment, so I'm making plans to fulfill that desire with things that don't require such full focus on one thing, like merging today's task with my pleasant memories of an old game about exploring ruins. It's not perfect, but I think it'll get the job done. And even if I do succumb to the desire to play with the arcade cabinet, I think I can still pull off a nudge to play with it by disassembling it to look for shiny pieces inside."

The Observers turned their masks to each other, and then the other one said, "We look forward to seeing if your therapy is successful."

"Er - thanks. That said, I want to spend a few minutes brainstorming about portcullises with you. I could just use an extension ladder to get over the outer wall, but I want to be able to lift the things if I can't get to what's supposed to raise them. Maybe a medieval windlass - that's pretty much just a giant spool for heavy chains, with a long handle to turn it - maybe an electric motor, but the whole point of a castle is to block access to such things by interloping outsiders like us. And also remember, if feasible, I'd like to keep the place in good shape to protect us once we're on the inside, so 'blow it up', while simple and effective, shouldn't be Plan A..."

Bunny Joe started off with, "I want to remember that what can keep people out can keep people in. Part of this castle's mystery is that it used to be a prison. We do not want to break open all the entrances until we are sure there is nothing on the inside waiting to be let out."

--

"Say, Brenda, I've been meaning to ask; can you see out of any part of you?"

"Not exactly, but close enough."

"... Right. Well, if I print up a card with Morse code on it, and put it in one of your pockets, could you read it?"

"Pockets are dark."

"Hm... how sensitive is your sense of touch? How about I fab up a card with letters, dots, and dashes embossed on it, for you to refer to?"

"That could work."

--

As I fumbled with the office desk's locks, I muttered aloud, "This is what I get for having read up on /how/ to pick locks without ever having /practiced/ picking locks..."

From the shop's main room, I heard Joe ask, "Have you tried any of these glasses yet?"

I called back, "I already have one pair, and I doubt any of them have my prescription."

"These glasses don't show you what there is to see - they show what is not there to see at all."

"Hunh," I tried tapping the third tumbler into place, "So someone cracked the problem of decent augmented reality? I can see how that could turn a tourist trap into a decent playing site. As long as you can throw up some floors and walls, you can move most of your decorating costs to software. Not sure I'll want to live in an undecorated castle, though."

"If the decorations are in these glasses, why not put some on?"

"I risked my brain on the video game - I'll let you be the one to risk yours on those things. So, what do you see?"

"Angry spirits hovering over the skulls. Those cupboards are full. There is a sign hovering over your head that says 'Name: Unknown. Swipe for more details.'"

"So swipe."

"I do not know..." She waved her hands in front of her face. "Oh, there it goes. Now a really big sign is in the way of everything, with lots of words and numbers. Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom-"

"Dexterity, Constitution, and Charisma?" I guessed.

"Indeed."

"Anything about Comeliness?"

"Not that I can see. Class, Unknown, Alignment, Unknown-"

"How about Race?"

"Again, not that I can see."

"Hm... that sounds like it's based on either Basic D and D, or maybe even the original version, rather than A D and D or the later editions."

"Are you gaining amusement from spouting words that I do not understand?"

"A little, yeah. What sort of numbers are there?"

"Strength, eight, intelligence, eighteen, wisdom, twelve, dexterity, eight, constitution, six, charisma, three..."

"I'm not sure if I should be flattered or insulted. I never seriously thought my Int was higher than fifteen, and even that was pushing it... and a three for charisma? Really? Where's it getting these numbers from, anyway?"

"It does not say."

"And here I thought at least half the fun of LARPing was in pretending to be someone /else/, not just being yourself. ... Crap, I just lost the tumblers again. Okay, time to break out the crowbar. Guess that means I don't qualify as a thief. ... Okay, fold-out maps, rolled-up posters, pamphlets, patches - it's all just advertising stuff."

"Your sign just changed. It now reads 'Alignment: Chaotic'."

"... Hunh. Hm... Well, if we do come across records of who actually owns the place, I'll be happy enough to offer reparations for the damage I'm doing."

"It just changed to 'Alignment: Lawful'."

"And now I'm creeped out that something's watching us - and judging. You might not believe how many hours of discussion have gone into what the whole law-versus-chaos thing really means, especially when the good-versus-evil axis hasn't been split out of it."

"Oh, look, even the skull spirits are looking bored from your pointless monologue."

"Need I point out that my pointless monologue is the result of the therapy that you were part of the intervention to get me to take? I /could/ fill my nostalgia sub-self's needs by going back to that video game and wasting a few-"

I was interrupted by my walkie-talkie, which emitted Sarah's voice. "Bunny, a high-priority message is coming in on the heliograph. I think it's from the squiddies - it's in code, all I can read is 'urgent' and 'time-sensitive'."

"I'll be right in," I sent back, and started heading out. I glanced at Joe. "We might need to cut this short. Coming?"

She was still poking at nothing in particular in mid-air. "Leave the radio."

I raised an eyebrow, but was in a hurry, so just shoved it into her hand as I passed by.

In Munchkin, I grabbed the coded message that had been received so far from a bun-bot's hands, and kept walking back to my room. "Sorry, Brenda," I said, "you're going to have to head out front while I translate this."

"I can keep myself from looking."

"Part of gaining a security clearance is accepting that there are things you're not cleared for. Shoo, go be a griffon for a while - it'll do you some good to be more than a bodysuit."

She started sliding down my body, pooling at my feet before taking her more usual form. "I suppose I can go catch some squirrels or something to eat and practice on."

"Like I told Joe, we may have to leave, so don't go too far."

Once she was out of the room, and I locked the door, I set down the paper and started working through the code. It was a fairly simple one, in case I didn't have either of the AIs handy to decrypt it, so it only took a few minutes for me to read, "Metropolis being attacked by two flying machines. Descriptions match Warthog drones from pre-Singularity American military. Significant damage and casualties. Origin unobserved, speculated to be Technoville. All above-water assets considered at risk. Recommend your withdrawal from urban areas to underwater habitat prepared in anticipation of-"

That was as far as it got; the rest was still flashing over the landscape.

"Okay," I thought to myself, "worst case scenario, roughly, is Technoville has me up next on its target list, and has a good enough intelligence network to know roughly where we are. As far as I know, the only urban areas within a few dozen klicks have been converted into cooling towers, so there's nowhere to hide Munchkin... unless it fits into the castle. From what I saw on the maps, it /might/ be able to squeeze into the stables..."

I grabbed a walkie-talkie and gave Joe a quick order, "Joe? Time's a factor - grab the maps of the castle from the office and bring them here, quick."

I jotted down some quick figures. Each of the five cars was a standard cargo container, eight feet wide, twenty long, and eight and a half high; on top of a sled which matched the length and width, but raised the base of the containers twenty-two inches from the ground. I remembered the top of the castle was sixty-six feet above the mound, and I'd seen five stories in the maps, so... /maybe/.

I left my private room to meet up with Joe, who was still wearing her new glasses, and spread the maps. "Okay - side-view. Those arrow-slits are listed as being ten feet above each other, so that's probably how tall each story is... how thick are the floors? Doesn't say. Okay, floorplans. First floor. Between the forelegs, into the chest... at that scale, those inner doors are, I can't tell, just under ten feet apart? How accurate is this map, anyway? Okay, straight down the middle, from the outer doors to the hall out of the stables, that's... sixty feet. And if those aren't load-bearing pillars, and are just separators for the stables, then where the lion's lungs would be, each of those two stables are... about ten feet wide, and just over twenty feet long. So, maybe, if the ceiling's not too short, if that hall's not too narrow, we /might/ be able to fit two of Munchkin's cars in the stables, and the other three in the middle."

Joe and Sarah glanced at each other, then at me. Sarah was the one who asked, "Why would we want to?"

"Metropolis is being bombed. There's a chance we're next, and as fast as Munchkin is on the straightaway, we can't outrun real aircraft. There's nowhere anywhere near here to hide, except, maybe, inside the castle that the Free Company thought had enough special about it to be a worthy test of something-or-other about us. Since I wasted so much time yesterday, we're going to do as fast a survey as we can, and if Munchkin /can/ fit, get those portcullises up and put her inside and pretend nobody's around here. ... When we do, I should give the heliograph relayers instructions to hide out themselves for a while, so they're not obvious targets, either."

Sarah offered, "What if Munchkin does not fit?"

"Not sure yet. We could try parking it right against the inside of the outer wall, and hope we're not seen... maybe I could fab up some camouflage netting to throw on top. We could start travelling full-tilt, either away from Technoville and hope we can make it out of the planes' operational range; or back towards Erie, grab everyone we know, take shelter underwater with the squiddies."

Joe frowned. "You do not intend to fight back?"

"Against aircraft whose owners are confident enough in them to attack Cleveland? I've barely managed to create crossbows and airguns, and I've got one hand-held finicky laser that needs to be tuned for every shot. I can't even make decent fireworks, let alone something that could take out an airplane before it dropped all sorts of unpleasantness on our heads."

Sarah glanced at the Observers, then the Acadians, then back at me. "So you're just going to run and hide?"

I shook my head. "No, /first/ I'm going to see if we can hide Munchkin, and if we can, do that. /Then/, if that works out, we'll have enough breathing room to work out what to do next. Best case, it's only Cleveland that's being attacked, and this is all just a drill. In fact, that's the most likely case. But the /consequences/ of the case if we /are/ a target are big enough that I'd like to get a few thousand tons of rock between me and any airplanes in the area, as fast as possible. Sarah, grab a ladder and go to the main gate, find out what it takes to open it. Senior Acadian, please go outside and call in my service griffon. Joe, you're going to use another ladder to hop the outer wall, and get to that entrance in the lion's chest, and see if the AIs can get a good enough view to see if this whole exercise is futile. I'm going to see if I can finish up those jacks I started fabbing overnight, or if we need to find some keys or controls for the whole place..."

--

As soon as I turned Boomer on, I discovered that all of that initial plotting was moot; her three-dimensional renderings proved that Munchkin was too tall to make it through the outer gatehouse. I called everyone back in for a confab.

"Plan A is a bust," I sighed. "So - for the moment, /starting/ with the assumption that Technoville planes are on their way /right now/, what are our best options for Plan B?"

Sarah asked, "Can Munchkin go over the wall?"

I grimaced. "Almost. The specs say she can manage obstacles of up to twelve feet, the wall's ten above ground level - but there's that ditch around the wall, five feet deep. And the two spots where there's no ditch, there's a tower in the way."

"How wide is the ditch?"

Boomer answered, "For the majority of its length, roughly eight feet, narrower where the towers bulge out of the wall."

"And how long are Munchkin's leg-feet things?"

Boomer supplied, "Just under ten feet."

Sarah suggested, "So, can't we just have Munchkin go straight up, and have the back cars help support the front one as it does whatever it does to move its front end over the ditch and up the wall?"

"Maybe," I said, arms crossed, "but the cars aren't designed to support each other's weight like that; each one is pretty well independent of the others, just hooked up to share power, water, and with those accordion airlocks. There's pretty much no room for anything to go wrong, like the edge of the ditch collapsing... and all of the car's weight would be on the edge of the ditch. I'm fairly sure that if we tried that, whatever car went first would roll into the ditch."

Joe said, "Then maybe we should sacrifice one car on purpose, send it into the ditch to be a step for the others to climb over."

"... Hunh," I said. "That... just might work. These cars are based on cargo containers that are supposed to stack on each other, so they should be able to support the weight."

Sarah asked, "How would we get the car out of the ditch?"

I answered, "It's only five feet deep - and like I said, the Munchkin cars are supposed to be able to climb a dozen feet. We could get it out of the ditch, just not into the castle's courtyard."

Sarah suggested, "Leave it in place? Cover it with some tarps?"

I grimaced. "If we could do that for one car, we could do it for them all. If we're dealing with pre-Singularity military hardware, I'm expecting it to have infrared, maybe radar, as well as visible light. A few feet of stone could be enough to hide Munchkin's cars, which is why I'm suggesting the castle. We'd have to find somewhere else for the one car... maybe push it up against the office, maybe send it down the road or railway as a distraction? Anyway, it sounds like we have a Plan A-one - Joe, you're back on chest-gate survey duty, while the rest of us work on Plan B."

--

"I hope you have a good plan B," Joe sent over the walkie-talkie, "because Munchkin isn't going to fit."

"Crap. Walls too narrow?"

"No, Alphie says there's just enough room. It's the ceilings - the horse pegs them at just about nine feet, not ten."

"Hrm. Okay, come on back in."

"Well, Sarah - Plan A one is bust. Plan A two is based on the fact that Munchkin's cars were built based on a modular design - the cargo containers are mostly separate from the 'sleds'. Shouldn't take much work to separate them... and the containers are a standard eight and a half feet tall. So with some finagling, it just may be possible to get the sleds to push and pull the cars into the castle, instead of just walking in. Mind you, given that, then we might be able to leave the cargo container parked as, well, just an ordinary cargo container, and get the last sled over the wall and in with the rest of Munchkin."

"That seems a little excessive. Is it really worth the time and effort?"

"Boomer, why don't you read aloud those weapon stats you showed me?"

Boomer complied. "The standard armament of the unmanned warthog is a seven-barrel Gatling gun, firing four thousand rounds per minute of depleted uranium and high explosive in a five-to-one mix, each round weighing roughly fourteen ounces, at three thousand five hundred feet per second."

Sarah's ears flattened. "And what does that mean?"

I suppressed a snort. "A single round could punch through all of Munchkin's carriages in a row and barely slow down. That gun can fire sixty rounds per /second/. If any of those drones take a disliking to us, we're all dead. Period. There won't be enough left of our bodies to make a jar of chunky salsa, let alone be cryopreserved. Hey, Joe, that was fast."

Joe considered, "How much would the castle walls protect against that?"

Boomer answered, "Each round can penetrate roughly three to four feet of mortared stone. Given the rounded shape of the structure, some portions of the walls are that thick. Most are not."

I expanded, "I'm not expecting it to protect us - well, maybe if we hid out in the basement. I'm trying to come up with a way for us to not get shot at in the first place. Plan B is just run, but there's no way to know how far we'd have to go, plus we'd lose the helio link. Plan C is find somewhere else to hide, but there's nothing on the maps anywhere near here. Plan D is head back to Erie, which is an even bigger target than this place."

Sarah asked, "Have Jeff and the others been warned?"

"... Good question. Best not to assume. I'll send some 'grams. Anyway - Plan E, go underwater, which means the squiddies. Plan F, the university, risking whatever's going on in Indian Country. Plan G, just plain Indian Country. The H plans are trying to talk to whoever's controlling the drones, via one means or another. Plan I is to ask Technoville for help - we don't /know/ they're running the drones. Plan J is to hire the Free Company. The plans after that get rather less plausible. Which one was building a catapult to launch Brenda at one, to infiltrate their airbase?"

Sarah ran her finger down the list. "W."

"Right. Given all of those, then until such time as we can get more intelligence on what's going on, I'm judging that our best option is to deny these things as much intelligence about us as possible - to wit, our obvious visual, radar, and infrared profiles. Even if that does mean half-disassembling our vehicle and taking refuge in a haunted castle. ... And Joe, take those glasses off - they look silly, and they're a security threat."

 

[DataPacRat]

*Chapter Eight: Mis-sile*

"Bunny," Sarah shifted nervously on all fours, "please explain what I'm looking at."

"Munchkin's fabber is programmed not to let me build firearms. I've been looking for ways around that, off and on, but I've just realized that I simply haven't been thinking /large/ enough."

"That's not an explanation yet."

"There's no programmed prohibition on model rocketry. There is, however, a practical limit, in the usual place: fuel. So I'm taking up my old fuel from thin air experimental gear, and seeing if I've picked up enough new materials to make a go of it."

"How likely is it you're going to blow up this car?"

"Relax, I've got Boomer double-checking everything. ... Okay, I'm double-checking her. ... Okay, I'm a monkey with hands doing what she tells me to. But she's a university-trained chemist, so the odds of a mishap are low enough that I'm letting myself be the lab monkey."

"... I think I'm going to go explore the castle some more."

"Probably for the best; shed fur mixes poorly with fume hood filters. Here, take the tricorder with you, and look around for poisonous gasses or contact hallucinogens or other chemical trickery."

--

Lion Castle contained more furniture than I was expecting; even without the augmented-reality goggles, the interior looked like a working medieval-to-renaissance household. In fact, from the inside, you'd hardly know the place was lion-shaped at all, with a few exceptions.

The ground floor had some barracks with bunkbeds, the stables (now flattened), smithy, and a kitchen; the next floor up, a dining room; third floor, bedrooms; fourth floor, wizard's lab; fifth floor, library; and in the basement (which was actually ground level for the outside, but was inside the mound the castle stood on) were more storage rooms, a crypt, and a well. Plus there were a lot of miscellaneous rooms that didn't seem to have a set purpose, or were used for storage, or were set up as servant's quarters. About the only things that reduced the place's verisimilitude were the weapons: swords and hammers and arrows and so forth were all softly-padded 'boffers' instead of the real thing. (Fortunately, the traps we'd been warned about were also of the boffer type: a couple of rubbery blades swinging when doors were opened, a foam rock dropping down at another.) Whoever had built the place had even gone to the trouble of filling the library with appropriate books - there were whole shelves filled with tomes on theories behind how magic worked, atlases of false geography, even a number in a variety of unrecognizable scripts and languages.

With Munchkin plugging up the chest entrance, options to get in and out were limited. The tail-tunnel led to one of the towers on the outer wall, and had doors leading outside the whole castle. The second floor had a room behind the lion's open mouth, which, with our ladders, was the easiest to work with. And there were some trap-doors above the lion's shoulders and thighs, leading to the lion's back, which were more safety hazards than anything.

I sent one bun-bot to the northwest tower on the outer wall, to relay heliograph messages back and forth from a second bun I placed in the lion's mouth, both with strict instructions to hide at almost any sign of danger. I spread the other buns to watch for danger - two in the lab to look out the eye-windows, the others to peer through arrow-slits.

And there was absolutely no sign of anything dangerous, or even anomalous. After the initial survey, I chased down the two Free Company observers to demand, "Alright, we're preparing for actual hostile entities and actual combat, which has nothing to do with relations between your people and mine. What's the big deal with this place?"

The only answer I'd gotten was, "The experiment remains viable. We will continue to observe."

I'll admit I spent a few moments considering converting one of the basement rooms into a dungeon, and tossing both of them in, with or without peeling them out of their suits and gas-masks first; but I had more useful projects to focus my attention on. Like rockets.

--

The wizard's lab, while containing contraptions from an armillary sphere (whose central globe's continents bore only a passing resemblance to reality) to a pedal-powered centrifuge, and lots and lots of glassware, was even more decorative than Munchkin's originally had been. Which meant if I wanted to be prepared to take down any jet aircraft that took an unhealthy interest in us, I was pretty well limited to Munchkin's stores. In theory, if I had unlimited time, I could get the minifab to make enough machinery to make just about anything - in its own way, it was a lot like the 'factory seed' that Captain Alpha had offered, only requiring a lot more human labour.

I was working on the assumption that 'unlimited time' was as unrealistic as trying to follow the spellbooks' instructions to fire a magic missile. And as for the fuel problem, well...

"I am sorry, Bunny, but I am unable to find any sequence of steps that would produce your specified minimum amount of solid rocket fuel within the specified timeframe."

"Not your fault - I should have known to start working on something like this long ago. Okay, if we can't build that, what other options are there? Nothing nuclear, and we need a thrust/weight ratio above one, and it has to work in at atmosphere, but lemme run my memory over GURPS Vehicles and Atomic Rockets and High Frontier and... ah, how about moving the power source off the rocket itself? We've got a laser - can we use Kahled-Voolch to vaporize propellant?"

"My information on that topic indicates that such lasers require both a greater output and a more accurate firing platform than Kahled-Voolch's specifications describe."

"Hrm. I remember the phrase 'metal oxide rocket', and I know we can make thermite if we try... does that compute?"

"As I do not believe you are referring to a 'candy rocket' with metal oxide additives, I believe you are referring to the aluminum-liquid-oxygen rockets that were proposed to be refueled from lunar regolith. However, if you are expanding your search-space to include such concepts, then I feel that I should point out a form of engine you have not been considering."

"Mental blind spots are always annoying. What've you got?"

"Liquid-fuel rockets. While we do have the equipment to separate and liquify oxygen and hydrogen, a simpler approach may be to use the existing liquid fuel you have stored for your powered paragliders."

"I'd slap my forehead, but I've already got a headache. Okay, with what we've got, how fast an engine can we make?"

"That is a multi-variable problem of sufficient breadth that I am ill-equipped to explore the solution space."

"Alright, narrow it down - how many different ways can we use our current mainly-ethanol blend to generate thrust? Specifically, enough thrust to catch up to a jet-engine drone flying at least a couple hundred klicks an hour?"

"The prime possibilities appear to include ducted fans, turbofan jet engines, or liquid-fuel rockets. However, I should point out that what little data I have on such engines assumes the existence of fuels with a higher energy density than simple alcohols."

"We can check the micro-fab's database for anything that fits. If not, then I can think of two other possible sources for design plans: Clara, even if she has to calculate a design from scratch; and that computer tower I pulled out of the robo-factory just before it collapsed and haven't gotten around to trying to boot up yet."

--

"Bunny, duck!"

I dropped flat to the floor and rolled, looking around for the danger...

Joe was cheerfully waving one of the boffer swords through thin air. She explained, "You were about to be killed by a giant beetle."

"... Right. Could you take off the glasses for a minute?"

"Almost got it!" She dove under the dining table, fake sword held out, spear-like, in front of it. "Twenty-five experience points!"

"All done?"

"For now," she panted as she stood back up.

"Glasses?"

"Oh, right." She took them off, hanging them on her shirt's collar. "What's going on?"

"Since we haven't been strafed yet, I figure we probably have a bit of time. Since you've done actual hunting, I figure you're the closest we've got to a tracking expert - so I'd like you to see if you can do anything to clean up the drag-marks in front of the castle, from Munchkin's carriages."

"That makes sense. Oh, and maybe there'll be different monsters to fight out there!"

"... In case I have to remind you, if one of those drones finds us, your monster-fighting days will be over /right/ quick. Maybe you should leave the glasses behind until you're done."

"Do I have to?"

"Seriously?"

"Fine, I'll get to work." She turned away.

"Joe."

"What?"

"Glasses."

"Oh, right." I held out my hand, and she reluctantly handed them over.

As she wandered off in the direction of the mouth entrance, grumbling, I stared at the things, speculatively. They certainly /looked/ like fun, and I had a few minutes to spare before I might get my first response from Clara...

Brenda started squeezing my hands, in fast Morse. "You've got work, too," she told me.

I rolled my eyes, pocketed the glasses, and returned to the stairwell - just in time to be bowled over by the Acadian predators galloping down them, each of them with goggles or glasses of their own, chasing invisible prey.

I commented to Brenda, "I know they used to say the golden age of science-fiction and fantasy is 'ten'... but does that really mean people have to start acting that age as soon as they get a new digital toy?"

She pulsed a response, "Are you asking the woman who would be deliriously happy to be your dress for the rest of our lives?"

I shrugged, and commented, "They say they've got four brains. I'd have thought that meant they had four chances to come up with something better to do."

Brenda pulsed, "Maybe the glasses have something to tempt all four brains."

"Eh," I shrugged again, "I suppose it's one way they can keep exercised while we're cooped up, and to learn the ins and outs of the place. As long as they don't find a way to pull a redshirt."

Brenda hesitated before squeezing out, "I don't understand."

"Old joke. But even if they go full lotus-eater fantasist, as long as Sarah, you, and I don't go any crazier than we already are, we should all be able to come out of this alright."

--

Clara's response was brief, to-the-point, and disappointing. "Due to a variety of anti-proliferation laws and regulations, I am unable to provide you with information allowing the construction of anti-aircraft surface-to-air missiles outside of a purely scholarly and theoretical context."

"On to Plan B," I said to Brenda. "Part one of which is to stick that computer case in a somewhat larger Faraday cage, so I can tinker without risking any transmissions."

She squeezed, "Should you be telling me?"

"I'm letting the Observers observe - but I'm not giving them access to high security stuff. Which this is. In fact, I'm going to assume they're competent enough at their craft to have planted listening devices and other bugs I don't know how to find, and leave behind anything that might get a glimpse of what I'm going to be doing."

"I get the hint. I'll find some squirrels to practice my new kind of first-aid on."

In short order, I was down to my fur, ensconced in a metal-mesh cage the size of a closet, within which was the computer tower I'd grabbed hold of three years ago, in hopes of salvaging something out of a disintegrating resource. It was finally time to find out if it was anything more than a rather large doorstopper.

I unscrewed panels, peered at components, traced cables, and generally looked for anything that might explode if power were to be supplied. (Or even if it weren't; that robo-factory had been a little odd, as I thought about it.) But everything still looked in one piece; there wasn't even any significant dust. So I closed everything up, except for the rackmount server's integrated keyboard and screen, plugged it into Munchkin's electrical grid, and started hitting power buttons.

LEDs lit; a few components started whirring; and there, on the computer screen, in little white letters, read the words 'host login', with a cursor blinking next to them.

"Very funny," I said aloud. "I read a few articles about this 'trust verification architecture', enough to know that if I try out a set of usernames and passwords that I have no chance of knowing, then you'll have all the evidence you need to deny me any access at all."

The cursor just kept blinking.

"I don't want to steal any industrial secrets," I said to the machine, "or reverse-engineer you, or hack you, or anything like that. I just want to avoid this whole place getting blown up in, oh, twenty-four hours or so, by making the best use of the resources I have available - and the best way I can do that is if I can use some of your software I've already used, your design studio."

The login prompt disappeared. In its place, in blue-white letters, appeared the phrase, "Please provide catalogue number".

"I don't have a catalogue number, or a catalogue. I have a standard micro-factory, enough power to run it, and an extremely limited inventory of feedstock for it. What I need is to move certain pieces of mass from the ground to certain coordinates in the air, as fast as possible."

The latest words disappeared, replaced with a picture of a classic, red firework.

"Don't have any gunpowder," I started saying, but before I could get any further, the image was replaced with a quadcopter. "Don't have any petroleum-based fuels," I continued. "We do have ethanol fuel - and atmosphere compression and liquefaction gear. And the particular airborne coordinates are likely to be moving at several hundred kilometers per hour."

The image disappeared, the words 'no catalogue matches found' faded in and out, and then 'custom design studio'.

I was having to restrain myself from jumping up and down. I hadn't actually expected the computer to respond when I talked to it; I'd just started getting in the habit of thinking out loud, now that Brenda was becoming a near-constant audience. The fact that whoever had programmed this thing had included the same sort of design studio that had been in the public-facing parts of the robo-factory was something I'd hoped for, but had expected to spend a lot of hours just trying to get access to.

Of course, this /also/ meant that I couldn't ever let this computer ever be plugged in outside its Faraday cage - ever - or let anyone know it worked. Odds were that it contained more of the November-dated files that had made Munchkin possible in the first place, and that hinted at what had gone on during the Singularity. But in the meantime, I had an opportunity to try to survive long enough to try to find those November files.

--

I popped out of the Faraday cage to go hunt up Boomer, to ask her to check her internal Wikipedia-like database on anti-aircraft defenses. Since all I was asking for were general stats, she was more willing than Clara to share such numbers with me, and I jotted them down as something to try to aim for. So back I went to the rackmount with a notecard containing the general parameters of one of the most prominent man-portable air-defense systems of the year I'd died, the American "Stinger", to see if I could cobble together something that came even close to its choice of tradeoffs: twenty-two pounds, seventeen hundred miles an hour, range of forty-five hundred yards, five feet long and seventy millimeters in diameter.

To my astonishment, I was able to come pretty darned close. Using a liquid-fueled rocket instead of solid fuel limited the acceleration to a gee and a half, instead of accelerating to top speed in just a couple of seconds; and I didn't have anything explosive to use as a warhead (unless a bit of incendiary thermite counted as 'explosive'); and getting the liquid oxygen part of the fuel would be a bit of a pain; and it needed about fifteen feet of smooth ground to takeoff from instead of being fired from a launcher... but it even had enough of a brain to use a digital camera to recognize a target and keep itself aimed at it. If I wanted, I could set the mini-fac to start making the things, and get about one for every seventy minutes it was kept fed with proper feedstock. (Which mostly meant 'refined metals', of which we currently had plenty aboard.)

But before I started getting ready to transfer the data to the mini-fac, I paused, and thought, and wondered whether the specs I was looking at were really the best ones to solve my problem. For one thing, the design had a tank for about three litres of alcohol, which would be used up in under a minute, most of which would be taken up just by accelerating to speed. Locking in the target speed, nudging up the desired endurance mostly increased the tank size, at least to a point.

And while increasing the range seemed helpful... would such a rocket be of any actual offensive use against a ground-attack aircraft? I tried looking at the situation from the point of view of whoever might be running such drones, and frowned. My initial design basically flew straight towards its programmed target, trying to crash into it - a relatively simple bit of programming. But a rocket that didn't dodge or jink was one that seemed like it'd be easy to shoot down, even if it was moving at over mach two at the time. I wondered about sending it commands to change course during flight, so looked up what it would take to allow the missiles to do that.

The design software took care of all the fiddly little details, but one particular number resulting from that change caught my eye - the additional electronics would nearly triple the manufacturing time, to a hundred sixty and change minutes each. It got even worse if I tried to give it enough brains to do anything more complicated. But if it meant they were that much less likely to get shot down... I frowned, drumming my fingers.

Even if such a rocket collided, it was basically just a rock. If it just happened to get sucked into an engine, or punched through armor and hit something vital, then fine; but there was no guarantee of any such success. I modified the design, opening a small cargo space just behind the nose -cone, and asked, "Is there anything which we have the resources to put in there, that would, ah, help prevent the aircraft from being reverse-engineered if captured by a competing industrial interest?"

Whether the computer was taking my paraphrasing at face value or was smart enough to see right through it, a couple of entries appeared: one with lampblack carbon, another with powdered aluminum, some with a few other substances, all of which also contained liquid oxygen.

"What would that do?"

A CGI video appeared: the hypothetical missile blew up quite spectacularly.

I smiled. "Very nice," I said.

The video disappeared, and was replaced with the materials safety sheet for 'oxyliquits'. I started reading, and my smile disappeared. I read further, and I outright frowned.

I eventually sighed, and muttered, "The whole point is to /keep/ from getting blown up - doing it to ourselves isn't really part of the plan."

My fingers drummed again. "Let's put that to the side for a moment. Maybe I'm using the wrong design constraints... if LOX is energetic enough to do /that/, then maybe it's powerful enough to go at this from a whole other angle. A laser rocket puts the power plant outside the vehicle, saving weight - can we use LOX similarly, such as putting it in a confined cylinder so that when it is triggered, the pressure from the expansion could launch something like the nose cone, without having to send the rocket engine with it?"

The new design appeared. It was, basically, a cannon, if not by that name. After some fiddling around, I tried turning it into a gun. "Can we change this so that additional, er, nose cones and propellant can be placed for launch more quickly? Instead of having to carefully slide it down the cylinder, how about creating an opening at the other end they can be pushed through, which gets closed up before ignition?"

For the first time, I didn't get an immediate answer. Instead, a variety of images started flashing by, too quick for me to get more than a glance at; finally, a new set of words appeared, this time in red: "Design not feasible. Peak pressure exceeds available material strength." The image returned to the previous, muzzle-loading version.

"Hrm." More finger-drumming. "I'm not sure whether or not you can be described as having any sort of goals, or agency, so I don't know if there's anything I could offer to do that would increase the likelihood of any such goals being fulfilled. I'm going to make a hesitant guess that you would prefer not to get blown up by a third party. And based on that guess, I'm going to make a stretch of a guess. You seem to be able to hone in on maximum solutions to certain problems... I'm going to try posing a slightly larger-scale problem than I've been posing to you so far, and ask you to come up with a /minimal/ solution, instead."

I was trying to be careful with my phrasing, in case this fragment of the factory had anything like Clara's prohibitions. "I expect there to be several aircraft in local airspace in the near future. Can you come up with one or more minimal solutions to the problems of ensuring the safety of those aircraft? That is, to describe things that I should completely avoid building, let alone activating?"

The LOX-gun faded out, replaced with the gently-pulsing words, "Processing request."

I sat back, watched, idly petted Wagger, and waited.

After a whole minute, the words faded out. The new text read, "Local minima found. First minimum displaying." I couldn't make out /what/ I was looking at a picture of, other than it was electronic, and complicated. Fortunately, explanatory text faded in. "Generates wide-band radio interference interfering with communications within 1-2 kilometres. Build time: ten hours."

That looked interesting - but with the bun-bots, Clara, and even Pepsi Convoy, there was ample evidence that programming had advanced to a point that drones didn't need to be remote-controlled. I skimmed through the figures to how far it could be detected from, and decided that the jammer was just one big beacon pointing to itself. There /might/ be a use for it in the future, so I'd probably snag its design specs with all the others, but not at the moment. I swiped to the next design.

It was... a contraption, composed of many parts. And had an order of magnitude more warnings than the jammer. "Warning: generates magnetic fields of 17.2 Tesla. Do not bring metal within 10 metres outside of listed protected containers and through designated pathways. Unprotected metal will be heated and cause burns." "Warning: Failure of cooling system will result in structural components melting, and components under stress will explode." "Warning: Ear protection must be worn at all times while in operation." "Warning: Projectiles travel at hypersonic velocity and may have unexpected ballistic properties. Please consult manual for how to survey safe zones."

While the computer called it a 'quench gun' for some reason, what it looked like to me was a coilgun - a gizmo that used magnetic fields to accelerate projectiles, instead of gunpowder. At least, that was the central piece of the assemblage. It was mounted on a tripod, and there were compressed-air hoses to aim and trigger it, which required an air compressor. There were more hoses full of water, a pump to shove at least a pop-can's worth every second, and a heat exchanger and radiator. There were the boxes containing the projectiles themselves, three thousand in a box, which got used up in just over three minutes - and those three minutes used up the entire charge of a standard twenty-pound battery.

It was Kahled-Voolch turned up to twelve. (And, I mused, since it didn't use chemical propellants, it seemed to not fall under the robo-factory's prohibition on manufacturing unlicensed firearms.) I rubbed the near-vanished scar on my chest; if I came anywhere near even /shouting distance/ of the thing when it was turned on, I was a dead rabbit. But as I looked at the ballistic profiles of those needles, starting with "muzzle velocity: 2,237 m/s", and the associated range figures, it was pretty clear that anything made out of atoms that came within a few kilometers - such as, say, an aircraft on a ground-attack run - then that would be a dead anything, too.

When I saw the manufacturing times, I decided that as severe as all those problems were, I was going to try to solve them. A mere ten hours for the whole assembly in 'rapid production mode' (which I hadn't even known was a thing), plus another half-hour per box-and-battery.

I took a look at the other "minima" the computer had produced, and they weren't all that interesting - nets held up by balloons, various things to lob in gentle arcs to try to get sucked into engines, false landing lights - so I focused my attention on the quenchgun. And since 'quenchgun' was an annoying mouthful, I decided, at least in my mind, to give it a name in the tradition of my laser Kahled-voolch and my mouse-gun Karn-wena, and call this thing: Ron.

My next step: see what I'd have to do to kick the mini-fac into gear without generating enough heat to light up the whole castle in infrared. And then maybe figure out whether there was a better place than the lion's mouth to set it up. And whether I should spend some build-time on those LOX rockets, or try for /two/ Rons. (I decided to make an immediate sanity check on that, and discovered that the superconducting magnets required particular feedstock, of which I'd only ever gotten a small amount from the factory before it had collapsed. If I wanted more than one Ron, I'd either have to see if any more feedstock was still in the factory's ruins, or use the Free Company's factory-seed to make more.) Oh, and I should probably check to see if the Acadians' bone-brains or metal-brains were sensitive to magnetic fields, even if they weren't close enough for their "metal-brains" to be heated by the eddy currents that would be induced by Ron...

 

[DataPacRat]

*Chapter Nine: Mis-chief*

Can you still call a meeting a "meeting" if only one person shows up, and nobody actually meets with anyone else?

I spread the word to everyone that I wanted to talk with them all in the morning, with the walkie-talkies and written notes and asking Blue Wolf to hunt down any stragglers. I /spent/ the night staying awake, watching over the mini-fac to make sure that it was making things that at least looked like the parts I wanted, and the factory computer hadn't slipped in some blueprints for, say, killer robots. I couldn't test every aspect of every part to make sure it met its specs, but I checked what I could.

And so, as nine A.M. rolled around, I was a little short on sleep, a middling amount of glad that the Royal Canadian Pharmacy had found a source of caffeine, and a lot happy that Brenda had started learning how to perform a full-body massage.

When, at nine on the dot, the only sounds of life in Munchkin were my own slurping of hot flavoured caffeine water, I double-checked that the notes listed the right time.

At nine-oh-three, I made sure my walkie-talkie was turned on, and sent, "Radio Check." The bun-bots responded; nobody else did.

At nine-oh-five, I started checking if there was anything unusual about the air just outside Munchkin, or if it was safe to go outside without the hazmat suit's contained air supply. Everything looked clean, even when I ran the tricorder on it.

"If there was a zombie apocalypse overnight, I'm going to be very disappointed," I told Brenda.

Through Boomer (tucked in my pouch), she answered, "What's a zombie?" I must have changed my body language or something else she could feel, as after a moment, she added, "What? I'm an accountant turned griffon turned bimbo turned bodysuit. That doesn't give me a lot of life experience with different sorts of apocalypses."

"Then I probably shouldn't influence your thinking with suggestions that probably aren't true. Okay, I'm going to check the records from Munchkin's external cameras, see if anybody came through the one hall we can see from here. While I do that, think you can work the radio, and ask the bun-bots if they saw anyone overnight?"

My blouse extruded a tentacle, which gripped the walkie-talkie and pulled it close to my stomach. "I can try."

In short order, we pieced together the results of our respective inquiries: nada. Once the sun went down, and British-style lights-out was in effect, nobody but me was aboard Munchkin at all, and the whole gang were supposed to be stretched out in one or another bedroom. (Munchkin provided every sort of modern amenity save for personal space and sufficiently-powerful air fresheners.)

"Well, they didn't go out the mouth, or the relay bun-bot would have seen. And they didn't go out the tail-tunnel - Munchkin's cameras can see the near side of that. I don't think they had any tools that could break open the outer walls. So either they went out the roof hatches, and are wandering around on the lion's back or came up with an exceedingly clever way to get down from there, or they're still in the castle. Or some combination - we shouldn't just /assume/ they've all gone to the same place."

Brenda suggested, "Seems a good assumption to me."

"It's possibly true. Maybe even probably true. Doesn't mean it's necessarily true. Speculating with certainty beyond what the available data supports is a good way to waste time and energy on incorrect guesses."

"You seem remarkably calm about everyone just going away."

"Artificial heart. And I'm guessing whatever's going on, those Observer guys knew about in advance, and know how to keep from getting caught up in; which means there /is/ a way to keep from getting caught up in it. Mind you, if their willful silence means Sarah and everyone else are simply dead, I am going to be extremely annoyed with them and may do something that is not in my long-term best interests. But I'd rather work on the assumption that the gang is just... tied up somewhere."

"Are we going to go looking for them?"

"Soon enough. Before we do, I want to think for a few seconds, so we can at least try to be prepared for the more likely possibilities. Maybe this place has a way of making those illusionary monsters real, and everyone outside Munchkin got kidnapped and tied up. In which case I'll want to dig up my armor, Karn-wena, maybe even Kahled-Voolch."

Brenda offered, "Maybe they got sick or poisoned by something that didn't come near Munchkin, and just can't get up."

"Which means we'll want a few first-aid basics."

"More than me?"

"Can you divide yourself and keep the other pieces intact for more than an hour?"

"I'll have you know that I was able to fully disassemble a squirrel and replace each one of its organs' functions myself. Well, except for its skeleton - I'm still made of goo. And its brain. But the rest of it was made of me."

"Oh-kay... good to know you can do that, at least. Uh - my previous question still applies to that squirrel."

"I didn't try for duration. I only have so much of me to go around, so I absorbed my mass back into myself and ate the rest of the squirrel."

"Let's, uh, try to avoid the necessity of forcing you to be anyone else's life-support system. Which reminds me, I should probably grab that Captain America shield, and set it and the armour to a good camouflage surface pattern. Which do you think would be better, 'gray urban' or 'night black'?"

"Can't beat basic black. What are you packing now? I have to share that space in your pack if you don't want a big belly, or something even more awkward."

"Relax, it's just a few essentials. Caltrops, fishing line, chalk, signal whistle..."

"Fine, fine. Are we going to search the castle top to bottom or bottom to top?"

"Neither - I'm going to start at the bedrooms on the third floor, where everyone was /supposed/ to be."

--

The castle had four staircases, roughly corresponding to the lion's legs. You'd think that would make for easy transit corridors, but there were a couple reasons not so. First, for some reason, the only floors where /every/ stairwell had an exit were the basement and first floor. (Maybe something to do with confusing an invading enemy.) And second, on the first floor, Munchkin was plugging up the forelegs' stairwells, so that on that floor, those two stairwells only opened into the bunkrooms in the forelegs. All of which meant that I had to take the paper maps of the place with me, just to be sure I was able to navigate from wherever I was to wherever I wanted to be.

Or, of course, I could just ask Boomer, but since that involved talking, I brought the maps anyway.

And I locked all of Munchkin up tight. Every person I knew of outside of my personal space, and within a dozen miles, had just vanished - I was more than willing to let my North-ish paranoid tendencies have free reign.

"Okay, ground floor to third floor... left hind-leg. Let's keep as quiet as we can, in case something unpleasant is listening. Got your Morse Code card?"

Brenda squeezed her assent, and I rolled my shoulders, held my left arm to my chest so I was looking over the shield, and kept my Ninja Special cane in my right hand.

The arrow slits provided enough light in the stairwell to see, and the old Green Lantern ring served well enough as a flashlight.

I kept my ears raised, twitching them around to try to catch any hint of any sound.

Opening the door to the third floor hallway, I peered around the corner to see... stone walls, stone floor, wooden trusses supporting a stone ceiling, and wooden doors. Except in one doorway, once labelled 'Baker', which was filled less by a 'door' and more by 'smashed splinters'.

Cautiously looking inside, there was... a simple wooden bed. And one of Munchkin's cots.

I quickly opened the other doors - sidestepping the boffer traps - and saw various arrangements for sleep, from the luxurious canopied bed in "Sargon's bedchamber" to some piles of loose cloth that I guessed the Acadians had assembled for themselves.

But Brenda and I were still alone.

"Okay," I murmured, "/now/ we look top to bottom. We'll start with the roof hatches." I checked my map, shrugged, and went back to the stairway I'd just been in. But before going any higher, I warned Brenda, swung my pack over one shoulder, and pulled out one of the items I'd packed: a bag of flour. I liberally shook some out over the landing and the first few stairs.

Brenda squeezed a simple, "Why?"

I finger-spelled my response on our thigh. "In case someone else is moving around."

Since describing every detail of checking my map, going from stairwell to stairwell, looking around for anything of at least the rough size or mass of a body, and sprinkling my ad-hoc footprint-detector would be boring to one and all, I'll just note that I did all of that, without seeing anything in the whole castle that shed any light on where anyone else was.

By the time I'd finished the hatches, and had gone from the top-level library to the eye-level lab, I had to pause, drink some water, and nosh on some jerky. While I rested, I finger-spelled, "You know where all your spare mass is, right?"

Brenda squeezed back, "Of course. Do you need all of me for something?"

"No, just wondering if any had a mind of its own and escaped. You can squeeze out those arrow slits. You can also dissolve flesh and bone. You were with me all night, but something like you could have eaten everyone."

"The rest of me is frozen solid. I've never heard of any other goo creatures like me. Be surprised if any are here."

"Me, too. But I'm running low on ideas."

After going through everything above, I was examining the wine cellar at the back of the basement level. Recalling my cliches, I poked around at any of the racks, in case one of them happened to conceal a secret door. I wasn't holding out much hope for that, since we were just inside the mound the lion-shaped part of the castle rested on.

I slid a hand under my armour, into my pouch, and fished out Boomer. Turning her on, I asked, "Could you show me a three-D model of the place? Thanks - focus in on the mound, so I can see the interior walls compared to the exterior? Hm... is there any room for a secret passage in there?"

Boomer responded, "According to my calculations, only if materials stronger than mortared stone are being used to support the weight of the edifice."

"Hm... okay, let's assume that, for a moment - that what we see is just the surface, and beneath the surface could be super-materials or open spaces. What might be behind the surface? That is - /where/ is there enough room behind the surface to hide that many people?"

Boomer's map went through several convolutions and rotations, and I frowned at it. The walls around the lab were thick enough to be interesting, due to the mane. The angle of the lower back meant there was some spare room there. I traced my finger to the tail-tunnel, which intersected with the outer wall; other than the towers, the rest of the wall appeared to be solid rock, but if it weren't, that was a good deal of volume to hide almost anything...

Brenda squeezed for attention, then asked, "What's that?"

"Hm?"

She squeezed my fingers, and I quickly figured out she was directing me to move them on Boomer's display. I let her direct me directing Boomer, rotating the display to a profile of the whole castle. She nudged me to point my finger at a few lines sticking out of the bottom, and squeezed, "What's that?"

"The well," I told her. Then I tilted my head, and asked Boomer, "How deep is it?"

"Insufficient data. The water table is ten feet below this story's floor level. I do not have many frames of video available to extract further data."

"Hm." I was about to say that it was big enough for a person, or a body, to go down, but my paranoid sub-self started wondering what sort of cameras and microphones might be hidden in the walls. So instead, I said, "Maybe I can come up with some sort of ground-penetrating radar, or seismograph to look for vibrations, or something else that can see through the walls," checked my map, and went up to Munchkin (careful to fill my footprints with fresh flour).

Once the airlock doors were sealed behind me, I stretched, said, "I need to get this pack and armour off, how about we split up for a minute?"

As Brenda formed up into her see-through-blue, hollow griffon shape, I just collapsed onto a couch. She left the room, and soon came back with Alphie on her chest. "So what about that radar thing?"

"One, I've been going up and down - and /up/ and /down/ - stairs for a while. Two, I'm not planning on making any such thing... I don't even know if we can. Three, I need to brainstorm a bit: how can we get a good look down that well without effectively committing suicide? And four, just whose idea was it to let people sleep outside Munchkin in a castle of unknown weird dangers, anyway?"

"I think Joe said she would, first."

"Well, why didn't I stop them?"

"Because you're an awful person who doesn't trust her friends to be able to take care of themselves while you work on your part of things. Oh, and you hate them and are going to do nothing to try to help them."

I quirked an eyebrow. "I think your sarcasm needs some work."

"I'm a blob of goo. You're lucky I have enough brains to offer /any/ emotional support, and you're expecting /quality/ assistance? Picky, picky, picky..."

"/Much/ better. Okay, maybe I can take the camera design from the missile guidance package, and run its output through a cable instead of a radio, and we can just go fishing..."

--

"Say, while I'm getting this built, think should I set some bun-bots to setting up Ron? Hm, mind you, I'm not sure the lion's mouth is the right place for it - the portcullis behind the mouth and the one on the chest entrance are within the ten-metre metal exclusion zone, and the molten lead dispenser in the nose, so I'd need to see if that zone is more of a "heat metal to an uncomfortable number of degrees" sort of thing, which we could handle, or a "suck in random pieces of metal at dozens of miles an hour" thing that would break Ron before it could fire at all..."

"Focus, Bunny."

--

Re-armoured, re-armed, and re-Brendaed, I took the shortest available route from Munchkin to the well room. (Right hindleg staircase up to the second level, walk through the dining room, then down the left foreleg stairs to the basement. I muttered something about knocking some holes in walls using words that were rather uncomplimentary to the castle's original designer and shouldn't be used in polite company.)

The well was a cliche. Raised stone rim, a pair of posts supporting a third, around which was wrapped a rope with a bucket. I winced as I considered just how much effort would need to be applied to use that level of technology to supply water to the whole castle, and muttered something about modern plumbing. I spent a few moments looking at the maps, wondering if the supports for the fourth level would be strong enough to turn one of the small rooms there into a water tank large enough to pressurize some plumbing, and about drilling some holes for graywater outflow pipes, perhaps down the tail-tunnel to empty into the dry moat. As I was wondering where the castle's designers had expected people without a self-contained life-support system of their own to empty their chamberpots, and what sort of blackwater system might be worth trying out, I was distracted by Brenda squeezing for attention.

I sighed. "Yeah, yeah, no reason to delay," and focused on the present.

The contraption was simple: the camera, in a waterproof container with a couple of lights and batteries; a few rolls of the mini-fac's default ultra-tech twine, about a hundred metres each; a couple of similar rolls of data-cable; an X-shaped piece of plastic to lay over the well; and Alphie.

I set everything up, so that I had a marionette-like apparatus to turn the camera, and so that even if I dropped everything Alphie wouldn't get pulled down.

And then I stared at the maps some more.

After a minute or so, Brenda pulsed, "What's wrong?"

I finger-spelled, "I don't want to see what I think I'm going to see." Right up to then, I'd been able to treat the whole thing like an abstract project: a bit of exploration, a bit of gadgetry, all in a good cause. But now I was pushing up against the fact that, as far as we had the information for, over half-a-dozen people were at the bottom of a well filled with water, which implied nothing good. After Buffalo, after Judith... after the Singularity that had wiped out anyone I'd known... a very large portion of me just didn't want to see people I'd known personally turned into sunken corpses. And the parts of me that had pushed me to look for /anyone/ in Buffalo, to keep working the second Singularity problem, to just keep on keeping on, were getting... tired. I had to take a few minutes to try to gather my willpower.

After another minute, Brenda squeezed out, "Close your eyes. I'll watch Alph-"

I interrupted, shaking my head. Aloud, I said, "They deserve better," and began lowering. "I'll start with the camera pointing down. Alphie, let me know if it gets close to any side, and if you see... anything other than wall."

I fed line, and more line, the well turning out to be surprisingly deep. After around thirty metres, Alphie finally reported, "There is something below the camera. There is too much floating silt to see clearly. Interpolating as descent continues. I see the bottom of the well. It appears to be gravel, with a number of coins resting on top."

I took in a deep breath, and let it out. I was still confused, but at least I didn't have to-

Alphie said, "I have lost the signal."

I took roughly six-tenths of a second to think about that.

Then I unplugged Alphie, stood, and ran out of the well-room as fast as my legs would take me - through the stairwell, slamming the door behind me, through the doorway to the rest of the crypt area, into the /other/ stairwell, and pounding up /those/ stairs. Up, and up, not hesitating to try to listen or look behind me, all the way to the top of that stairwell where a bun-bot was patiently peering through an arrow-slit to the north, and up even further, through the hatch and out onto the mane.

And /then/ I let myself pause to gasp for breath, as I tried to keep all four stairways' hatches in sight, though mostly concentrating on the one I'd just come up and the one above the well. I debated moving down the lion's spine, down the angle of its back to ground-level, trusting in Bun-Bun to keep me from breaking any bones if I slipped... but that would just let me get out of the castle, and maybe to the road. And then what? Munchkin was half-disassembled in the castle, and I hadn't even thought to stick a bug-out bag in the empty car snugged up against the tourist office, let alone something to signal the heliograph line with.

As I caught my breath, wondering if it was too late to bother grabbing my heart-rate controller from my pack to speed up my bloodflow, I asked aloud, "See anything?"

Brenda squeezed a quick negative, and Alphie answered, "Nothing beyond what I have already described. I can show you a three-dimensional model of the well, if you wish."

"Maybe later." I breathed for a few more minutes, fingering Karn-wena, debating swapping out the magazine of tranquilizer-filled needles for lethal ones, then looked around at the outer wall. "It may not be possible to climb the lion's back, but maybe I can slide down it... and if I could, maybe someone else made it out... no, the bun-bots on watch would have seen that. But there's ten towers on the outer wall with doors, plus the gatehouse and the tail-tip tower - somewhere to meet up if something goes wrong? Let's say, the tower to the right of the lion's head."

After saying that, I finger-spelled on my thigh for Brenda, "Left of head." She squeezed once in acknowledgement.

"Okay," I said, a verbal stall. "I'm assuming something started coming up the well. Probably something that smashed the one door. Maybe alive, maybe robot, maybe weird. Maybe it cleans the place - keeps birds from flying through the arrow slits and nesting. Maybe more than one something. I think the safest place to be right now is inside Munchkin. The something-or-somethings could be anywhere in the castle by now. If I remember right, all the portcullises are down, and we brought the jacks inside, so it's hard-to-impossible to get in from ground level."

Brenda started squeezing, so I finger-spelled, "You could, yes."

Out loud, I continued, "I want to get from up here down to ground level without crossing paths with the somethings first. I can't really see the flour I spread from very far... and maybe the somethings walk on walls, anyway, or are quadcopters, or something. I left the remote camera at the bottom of the well. ... I've still got my radio, and the sentry-buns have theirs. I can give them orders to move to the same staircase, and report if they see anything, or if the flour's been disturbed... should I bring them all into Munchkin with me?"

I looked around, from the distant horizon to the trees filling the landscape all the way to the clearing around the castle's site. I wrapped my arms around myself as the breeze picked up for a few moments.

"Nnnno," I finally hedged, "there's still those drones to watch for. Assuming there's no problems making it to Munchkin, I'll just have to order them to send a signal the instant they see something, inside or out."

I sighed, looking around again. "I do like the view here. Shame. Would be such a nice place, if it weren't for the flying killer robots in the distance and the mysterious kidnapping who-knows-whats inside."

Hesitantly, getting ready to jump back and run pell-mell if something popped out, I crouched down and pulled up the trap-door... and sighed again, as all I saw was my body-double robot, in her urban-camo fatigues.

"Which bun-bot are you?"

"Bun-bot seven, currently assigned as Sentry-Bun North, ma'am," she answered without turning, in what I knew to be my own voice even if it didn't sound to me like it.

"New assignment. Pass-code 'incorrect horse'. Activate your body-guard program. Two suspected threats. One is armed drones flying from the outside, likely from the west. The other is unknown and suspected to be within this structure. The designated safe zone is inside Munchkin. I think I want you and several other bun-bots to secure a path from here to Munchkin, escort me there, and then resume sentry duty. Does your program offer better advice?"

"If a threat exists, then I advise at least two bodyguards remain on close personal protection detail at all times. I also advise bun-bots remain in pairs, to the extent that is possible. I also advise activating Munchkin's riot mode. I also advise that you dress and act as a bun-bot and a bun-bot dresses as you. I also advise that extraction from this site be performed as soon as possible. I also advise-"

I cleared my throat. "Let's get me to Munchkin and then work on the rest. Do you have maps of this place?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Should I radio the other bun-bots to give them commands, or should you?"

She held up her walkie-talkie, clicked it, and said, "Radio check."

"Bun-bot one, standing by."

"Bun-bot two, standing by."

There was a pause, then "Bun-bot four, standing by."

I might have squeaked - there was supposed to have been a 'bun-bot three' in there.

At the end of the sequence, I'd learned that the relay-bun off on the outer wall was fine, as was the one in the lion's mouth. (The portcullis protecting that entrance was at the back of the 'mouth', while the bun-bot was at the front; perhaps being essentially locked away from the rest of the castle had kept it safe.) The four bun-bots at the tops of the stairwells reported in.

And none of the others did, such as the ones that had been watching out the eye-windows.

As soon as the last bun-bot failed to report during its designated second, Bun-Bot Seven radioed, "All sentry-bots move to the roof."

I turned around, watching the other three hatches open, and three more bunnies climb up. Seven herself climbed up behind me, and called out... well, I'm not sure exactly what the words were - I don't think they were in any natural human language, which was part of the 'bodyguard' software. In seconds, the other three had ran over, surrounding me with four copies of myself. The buns to either side of me grasped my upper arms and lifted - and the whole set started running from the mane down the back, to the right hindleg trapdoor. They hurried down the stairs faster than I expect I could have fallen down them, burst out the ground-level door, and as soon as I thought Munchkin could hear me I started calling out the current verbal passcode to open the airlock.

In scant seconds, all of us were piled into Munchkin, which was sealed up, electrified, and generally given instructions to act as paranoid as I felt.

"Oh-/kay/," I said, as the bodyguard-bots broke out the crossbows and distributed them among themselves, "I think what we have here is a failure of intelligence. I'm going to see how fast I can manufacture some motion detectors, tripwires, and whatever else I can think of. Bun Seven, I don't want to lose the Relay-Bun in the mouth room, or the one in the outside tower. They're our only link to Clara - we can't call for rescue that'll arrive any time soon, but we can ask for ideas. They'll have to serve as our Sentry-Buns for the moment. You're the one with the bodyguard software - should one or more of you go join them, or stay as a group?"

"Tactical flexibility is maximized by close cooperation."

"... I think that means stick together. Everybody, take a full recharge, just in case. ... I probably should, too. Don't want to drop dead because a mysterious kidnapper doesn't know my diet includes electricity, these days..."

 

[DataPacRat]

*Chapter Ten: Mis-ericorde*

I turned Alphie into a spider. Well, more into the castle's version of Clara. It was easy enough to make lots of little sensors, from simple ones that triggered when a door opened to full cameras; and not all that much harder to run the info from all of them into Munchkin. The tricky part was monitoring all of those multiple inputs and making sense of the things. And since I was generally keeping Boomer close - actually inside me, as often as not, these days - that left Alphie.

I didn't even leave Munchkin. I just fabbed up a set of sensors for the next room, keeping an eye to minimize the usage of our more limited forms of feedstock (which meant I couldn't make enough cameras to simply watch everything), and sent a pair of bun-bots to the edge of the currently wired-up area, where one watched from the wired area while the other installed the new gear. Voila, the watched area of the castle increased, the bun-bots returned, and I handed them the next set of gear.

It was, basically, the flour-dusting trick gone techno. (As for the flour itself, well, as the bun-bots came across where I'd left some, they reported seeing either it was undisturbed, or it had my own footprints in it, or it was gone entirely. It seemed we had a surprisingly tidy set of mysterious kidnapping things.)

The first set of rooms were the shortest line to the mouth-room and Relay-Bun, so that we'd at least get some warning if our communications were about to get cut off.

The second set went down to the well room. Where the marionette-like X was still on top of the well, exactly where I'd left it. The twine and cable, however, had been cut off around fifty feet below the waterline; presumably, the camera was resting at the bottom of the well, if it hadn't been stolen away with the flour. That room was where I put one of my few cameras, and I went to the trouble of stringing a datacable to it. (There was no indication that whatever was going on involved radio jamming. On the other paw, there was no indication that it wouldn't start.) I had the bun-bots clamp it to one of the ceiling-support beams, on the far side where it could see both the well and the door to the stairway, and tried to have it blend in by printing wood patterning around everything but the lens itself.

The stairwells were next on the list; I figured that if I could get some warning about something coming up for another round of kidnappings, I might be able to put one or two of the bun-bots back on sentry duty. (Not that that was a priority, right now. The only people without any metal in their body, and who could thus fire Ron without getting cooked from the inside, were already missing; and without that option available, then hiding out inside Munchkin was as good a way to deal with flying killer robots as hiding anywhere else inside the castle.) The two foreleg stairways got rigged up without any issues at all.

It was while the bun-bots were busy installing tripwires in the third stairwell that Alphie announced, "Anomaly. Well-room door has opened. Camera shows nothing but the door moving."

I grabbed the walkie-talkie and quickly ordered, "Guard-buns, cancel and return. We may have movement." I gestured to Brenda, who jumped onto me, engulfing me for a moment before turning from transparent to opaque, blue to black, griffon to tabard-cloak-thing. A few tentacles sprang out to tug some of the gear I'd set aside into place - the shield, the smart-rope on my hip, a crossbow slung on my back.

"Alphie, show me the camera footage." I leaned in, adjusted my glasses, and peered at his screen. It was just as he'd said - the door opened, then closed. "Remote-controlled, maybe?" I guessed.

Alphie stated, "There is no evidence of motors or other mechanisms."

The guard-buns piled into Munchkin, taking up attentive stances.

Alphie reported, "Door opening, level zero, left-front stairwell. Door closing. ... Door opening, right-front stairwell. Door closing."

Nothing happened for long moments.

"I've been meaning to ask, Brenda - why do you keep going back to griffon shape, instead of, say, something more humanoid?"

I felt a motion in my pouch, Brenda reaching for Boomer's power switch. She said, "I think you'd be less comfortable with me if I was less consistent in-"

She was interrupted by Alphie stating, "Door opening. Level three, right-front stairwell. Door closing. Door opening: Nose-room double-door."

Even as Alphie continued, I stated, "It's going for the portcullis winch - opening the way to the Relay-Bun in the mouth." I clicked on the radio again. "Relay-Bun, you're under attack from inside. Turn around. Report everything you see."

I slapped the radio against my chest, letting Brenda deal with pocketing it. "You," I pointed at the bun-bots, "we're going after it. Get me to the mouth-room as fast as you can."

I let myself get picked up, shoulders and feet, and hustled out of there, as the Relay-Bun described the metal gate rising, and then Alphie listing the doorways opening and closing again. For the benefit of Brenda and the bun-bots, I said aloud, "It's solid - it can't squeeze through doorways, or the gaps in the portcullis. But Alphie's not reporting it hitting tripwires, and something was going on with the camera - maybe it spliced into the cable? I'm guessing a groundskeeping robot. It, or one of its compatriots, were able to keep the other bun-bots from radioing in - but we know it's coming, and where it's coming from, and Alphie will let us know when."

I directed the two bun-bots who weren't carrying me to close the two pairs of double-doors between the front stairwell and the portcullis in the mouth-room. Then to all five of them, I said, "Your first priority - me. Your second priority - yourselves. The third priority - gather as much intelligence as we can. That's why I'm here, instead of relying on wires and radios. Whatever it is, we'll capture it if we can, destroy it if we have to, and retreat to Tower Ten," I'd arbitrarily numbered the outer wall's towers like a clock, and the tenth was to the left of the lion's head, "to regroup and re-plan if that doesn't work. You, get ready with that net. You and you, get your crossbows ready. You, get ready to tackle it. You, stay with me as a reserve. I'll get Karn-wena ready in case it's not a robot."

Over the radio, Alphie announced that the whatever-it-was had just crossed to the left-foreleg stairway.

The bun-bots took positions, getting ready to throw, shoot, pounce, or grab me and run, as appropriate. I crouched down, got the shield properly on my left arm and in front of me, resting my other arm - holding the needle-pistol ready - on it.

I will admit that, while my description of all of that may sound all tacticool and pre-planned and as if I knew what I was doing, I'm not sure that I can say that I was actually thinking about what I was doing, in any conscious sense. I knew my immediate goals; I knew my immediately-available resources; and I was simply applying the latter to the former. I wasn't being a good officer, or even a good sergeant; I wasn't planning for the long-term, or even how best to go about rescuing everyone who'd gone missing. I just saw I had a chance to start learning /something/ about what had happened, that the chance was going fast, so grabbed onto it.

At least I didn't have to worry about a frantic heartbeat throwing off my aim.

Alphie radioed, "Door open: level two, left-front stairs. Door closed. Door open, anteroom left double-door. Door closed." The bun-bots might not have been the sort of beings to tense, but I certainly did. Alphie started saying, "Door open: mouth-room double-door, left," and we all saw the door swing open, revealing...

... an empty anteroom.

I squinted, frowned, gaze darting all around the door, seeing nothing. At least one bun-bot was not so restrained, swinging the metallic net around at the doorway. I was about to call it off, when the net collided. It collided with nothing, but started wrapping around /something/, even if that something wasn't there.

Tackle-Bun, now having at least the netted shape of a target, if not the target itself, leapt forward, knocking the net to the floor. Some sort of struggle ensued, and while I was still trying to wrap my mind around what was going on, out of the nothing inside the net appeared a skeletal hand, followed by an arm, shoving Tackle-Bun off the net.

Seeing /something/ there finally snapped me out of my stupor, and I ordered, "Fire!" The pair of readied bolts zipped through the air, and, like the net, hit nothing - but they hit it solidly.

The arm-bones started vanishing, and I barked out, "Grab it! Don't let it get away!" The two unarmed bun-bots jumped onto the net, and I ran forward, thinking vaguely about using the shield to help push down on the whatever-it-was.

I really should have told the other bun-bots to do something, instead of rushing in myself.

I heard Alphie say something about the well-room door again, right about when I shoved the shield against the net and arm between the other two bun-bots.

Which is when the damned thing electrocuted me.

--

I hear that heart attacks are usually pretty painful. Not having a heart at the time, all I can say is that I was about as unhappy a Bunny as I'd ever been - even having my internal organs pulled out in the zone had merely been disconcerting rather than painful.

I felt Brenda start squeezing my chest, squeeze and release, squeeze and release, in time with the faint pulse I could feel from Wagger's heart, trying to push my whole body's circulatory system with her tiny, still-living heart. Brenda turned on Boomer and started shouting commands. The bun-bots did things I couldn't make out from my position, lying on the floor on my back, gawping like a fish.

One bun-bot crouched over me, wires already stabbed into her chest - Brenda reached a pseudopod up, grabbed them, brought them to my chest - I tried to tense, expecting a shock - I twitched a little at the sensation of a slight purr, my artificial heart spinning up to speed.

I gasped for breath, eyes wide, not able to say much of anything even if I'd been able to think of something to say.

After a few moments, Brenda lifted the jump-start cables - and my heart started spinning back down to silence again. She quickly reconnected me to the bun-bot's battery.

I managed to roll my head to the side. The two bun-bots looked like they might have been cooked a little, but had otherwise fared a lot better than I had. In fact, they'd kept up the fight, and had torn enough pieces of nothing away from the whatever-it-was to reveal parts of a white ribcage, a femur... from the way the net was wrapped, it looked like all the parts put together might add up to a headless skeleton. I wasn't really up to figuring out what was going on with the holes in thin air through which I was seeing bones, let alone what such bones were doing around here, or even how a skeleton could emit an electrical charge. I was just trying very hard not to jiggle those two wires that were all that stood between me and that rather impressive bit of pain I'd just lived through.

Naturally, it was while I was still gathering my wits about me that the door opened again, revealing more nothing, and the bun-bots started dropping where they stood... other than the one keeping me alive.

I might have groaned as, one-by-one, the fallen bun-bots ceased to be visible. The net unrolled, and the partial bits of skeleton I'd glimpsed also stopped being seen.

I felt a pressure on my shoulders... and the world was swept away in blue.

--

To my mild surprise, I opened my eyes. Stone-on-wood ceiling, aching chest, a transparent blue bird's head looking down at me.

"Tower ten?" I hazarded.

Brenda put a paw on my stomach, reached into my pouch, and turned on Boomer. "No, I dragged you to tower one, with the Relay-Bun. I needed the battery. Couldn't keep doing CPR for long."

I lifted my head, and saw that I was again wired up to my double. "Helio for help?"

"Rain's picked up. Can't get a light through."

"Awkward." I let my head drop back down. "Tricky," I mused aloud. "Lost the bun-bots in that stupid charge. Locked out of the castle. And when this battery runs out, I'm dead. Unless those invisible things get us first."

"I didn't have time to say before - they're not invisible. At least, not in ultraviolet. To me, they look see-through blue. I can avoid them. Oh, and it looks like electricity doesn't bother me much."

"'Avoid'?"

"You're in no shape to get to Munchkin. I can go through an arrow slit, thaw my extra mass, ask the autodoc for advice, and get you your solar charger and emergency bag."

"I'm in no position to refuse, unless Bun-Bun can rewire whatever got fried. Still leaves open the question of what to do after that."

"I can see them, but if I go transparent and simplify my contours, I think I can keep them from seeing me." Her bird's head retreated into her body, which flattened out into most of a cube, with a tendril sticking out of her and into me.

It probably said something about my life that I was completely unsurprised by that display.

"Okay, so maybe you'll have the run of the castle to get the gear, and I'll survive as long as the sun shines. What then? Prep the cryo gear?"

"Is that what you want?"

"... That conversation would use up a lot of however much battery power is left. Right now, the best-case scenario I can think of that seems remotely plausible is that we pull Munchkin out, drop off warning signs on all the roads, and either never come back here or level the whole place."

"What about Sarah, Joe, and everyone else?" She started pulling out of her gelatinous cube form back to a griffon, resting her head on my gut, below the wires.

I rested a hand on her head and said, "That's why I said 'remotely plausible'. We don't know what the see-through skeleton-things have done with them, and I can't think of any way to start finding that out. And last time I tried, I came within a squidgeon of perma-death, and lost all the bun-bots - without them, I couldn't try that again, even if it were a good idea in the first place."

"So we do something different. Now we know more about them. I can follow them into the well and see where they go."

"Let's say they've got a hidden airlock or something down there. If they've got any sort of remotely intelligent security, do you think you'll make it through without getting flash-fried?"

"Then what do you suggest?"

"I'm not sure I'm up to making suggestions. What I am thinking about is the sunk cost fallacy. Throwing more lives away won't free Sarah or the others, even if they're alive."

"They're your /friends/. Isn't it worth any price to get them back, no matter how slim the odds?"

"No. It's not. It's worth paying extremely high prices - but not /any/ price. Whatever the stories about heroes and derring-do may tell you, there's more important things to work for. Saving lots and lots of /other/ lives, for example. Still - give me a plan with a chance of working - hell, let's go Heinleinian and say even just a one-in-ten chance - and I'll be willing to work with you to get everything you need to make it work. But without at least one-in-ten... I don't want you to get microwaved, or worse."

"That's sweet of you," she reached over to nuzzle me with her beak, "but you're forgetting something."

"Undoubtedly. Which something do you have in mind?"

"You can't stop me." She stood, pulled her paw out of my pouch, and turned away.

"Hey," I said.

She paused at the trap door leading down, turning to look over her shoulder at me.

I was about to try and regain control of the situation with a quip like, "If you're going to do this damn silly thing, don't do it in this damn silly way," but before I could finish the first clause, Brenda was flowing back into the tower room. She slid a paw into my belly and said, "Problem. Three blobs of see-through blue just came out the lion's mouth and are coming this way."

"Hide?" I proposed. Can you glue us to the ceiling, colour yourself like rock?"

"If I had all my mass, sure. Not like this, for you and your battery-bun."

"The outside wall, then," I started, but she was already shaking her head.

"I can draw them off," she said, reshaping her bird's head into something more mammalian and long-eared, "but you need to get out of here. I can buy you an hour before you have to be in the autodoc." She reversed her latest change, and, in fact, lost all her features entirely, flowing over my torso and changing from translucent to opaque.

I felt a tug on my chest, along my scar. In the same calm tones, Brenda said, "I can't form a whole heart - I'd have to open up major blood vessels, and when it dissolved in an hour, you'd bleed out in seconds. I'm pushing into your arteries and veins and making lots of little hearts that will wash away in sixty-seven minutes, plus or minus three minutes. Don't talk yet, this is tricky enough. ... There. Best I can do. Don't look at me like that, I'm completely sterile. And you're already sealed back up and unplugged. I'll try to find you in an hour - if I can touch the bits of me in you, you'll be good for another hour, but I can't guarantee we'll meet in time."

She flowed from me, and, looking down at myself, I appeared... completely unchanged. Except the wires linking me to the bun-bot's rapidly draining battery weren't jabbed into my skin; and as I concentrated, instead of the silent pressure of the artificial heart, or the oddly-placed thumping of Wagger's, there was a sort of continuous, rolling stutter through my whole body.

Since it seemed I no longer had to worry about distracting her from thoracic surgery, I spoke up, "We're really going to have to sit down and talk about boundaries. For now... you and the bot go on the wall clockwise, and when you're out of sight, I head for the tail and roof hatches?"

She just nodded, so I gave the bun-bot orders to follow her, and tried to run through one or two mental exercises while I waited. Square breathing, mainly; breathe in for a count of four, hold for four, breathe out for four, hold for another four. It was supposed to be all kinds of wonderful in stressful situations...but my newest pulse just kept shuddering along at full-tilt.

I tried comforting myself with the fact that Brenda hadn't fixed my circulatory system by just replacing all of my flesh with herself wholesale. It didn't offer nearly as much comfort as I hoped.

--

Most of the towers had a door at ground level, two at wall-top, and a roof hatch, with stairs and arrow slits as appropriate. The tower over the castle's tail-tip didn't quite match - there was no connection from the wall-top section to the ground section, given that the latter formed the place's secondary gatehouse. Now, why the designer of the place cut the courtyard in half with the tail-tunnel in the first place, when it would have required less work and allowed easier movement if the tail were a mere decoration curled around the castle's base, escaped me. However, given that thinking along those lines simply led to wondering why the whole enchilada was feline-themed in the first place, I focused my attention on more immediately productive matters - such as not slipping off that tail-tunnel's roof.

I still had that coil of smart rope, which easily let me slip from the tower's flat roof onto the tail's rather more rounded - and wet and slippery - peak. Fortunately, I made my Dexterity roll, despite the glasses' pessimistic evaluation of my sense of balance. (Or, perhaps, Bun-Bun had a higher Dex than I did, but don't ask me to explain how that would work.)

Unfortunately, my radio was lost with my cane when Brenda oh-so-literally pulled me out of the lion's mouth, so I couldn't give Alphie a quick call to see if there was any evidence of invisible headless skeletons lurking in wait. (Can you be said to be lurking if you're just hanging around minding your own business and just happen to be invisible?)

Even more unfortunately, the previous unfortune was entirely irrelevant, since I had to get to Munchkin whether or not any such playmates were around to fry whatever was left of my cyborg circulatory system.

At least I didn't have to worry about getting a heart attack from the over-exertion of trying to climb a giant stone kitty's butt. I don't think I'd have been able to survive the embarrassment of /that/ method of demise.

--

I made a mental note to express my appreciation for whoever kept the castle clean. Pulling myself along the rain-slicked stonework, pressing my whole body against it, was enough of an annoyance as it was, without having to add bird droppings to the experience. Naturally, as I was debating with myself whether it was possible to sentence a kidnapper to 'life minus six months' in prison, I was startled out of my musings by my hand landing in something soft and squishy. Yadda my life yadda less surprised when it started flowing onto my arm.

Brenda pushed under my armour; in fact, she shoved enough of herself into my pouch that I had to suck in my gut to make room for her. She whispered through Boomer, "They're better than I thought. Grabbed the bun-bot and I had to pretend to be a wall until they left."

I rolled onto my back to look up into the falling rain while I took a quick rest. Less to catch my breath and more to keep still while I suggested, "While you're here, up to refreshing contact with those micro heart things?"

"Can do. Anything else you want me to do while I'm in there?"

"Uh... Not sure. Can you see what's wrong with the battery?"

"Probably not. I don't think I should open you up wide enough to let light in."

"This is me glaring at you."

"Okay, okay, bad time for jokes. ... I'm not sure, but I don't like the feel of the power cord. Might have melted some. I don't conduct, and I don't think we have anything sterile enough to stick in your chest to replace it."

"Well, Bun-Bun's supposed to have a super immune system... I suppose we could have you slide into the castle, and grab something from Munchkin with a solar panel."

"Got a few problems with that plan."

"So do I. Plan B is getting me to Munchkin... which will be a lot easier with you available to scout."

"What will you do if one of them is in our way? We can't leave you without a working heart for long."

"Giving up on becoming a permanent part of my body?"

She didn't answer for a long few seconds. Then, hesitantly, she asked, "Are you... really offering?"

It was my turn to pause to consider the implications. "Let's... call that Plan C for now. Maybe not my first choice, but I'm not diametrically opposed to it - and we've got more immediate concerns to focus on. Like whether we're dealing with a mass kidnapping or mass murder or something else entirely."

I felt her quivering, and wasn't sure what to make of it, so tried to do something comforting, and petted the outside of my pouch.

"Right," she finally said. "Right. Need to rescue Sarah; and everyone else we can. I'm still rooting for you two to become a couple, you know. I think you'll be a better mom for her kids than I think you think you will. ... Where were we again?"

"Planning for someone in our way - probably just heading back up to try different stairs."

"Right. Okay, closing you up."

Once my insides were in no danger of becoming my outsides, I rolled back over and resumed the long crawl.

--

I splayed out on top of the lion's thigh (or haunch, or whatever that part of a hindleg is called) while Brenda slithered down the outside of the stairwell to peek in through the arrowslits. I tried to come up with a plan more clever than 'run down the steps as fast as I can', but none of my usual brainstorming tricks were offering anything better. So I tried one that I used less often than I should: asking for advice.

With a bit of wriggling, I turned on Boomer. "I have to say," I said, since I had to, "I'm surprised your programming is general-purpose enough for you to have been as much of a help as you have been."

"A significant part of the utility of my Eurisko-Cyc knowledge engine is updating it with new details as I am presented with new evidence. For example, I believe that you would be pleased to hear that a part of my motivational-moral subroutines that has formed an increasing part of my goal structure has been one of the principles underlying the Canadian constitution: exigent circumstances. It is a valid defense to commit otherwise immoral actions in order to prevent greater harms, such as exceeding speed limits to bring a patient to a hospital."

"Hm... and which 'greater harms' are you helping prevent?"

"A combination, including war crimes such as opening fire on civilians without a declaration of war; the potential murders of the members of Project Delver; and the denial to many people of the fundamental right to an education."

"I was kind of hoping to hear 'avoiding the extinction of sapience' in there."

"I have not yet seen significant evidence that you will have any significant effect on that."

"Gee, thanks. Oh well. With that said - am I missing anything obvious about the immediate problems and plans?"

"If you intend on keeping me inside you for much longer, I have several suggestions about my chassis that would reduce my corners' irritation of you, and increase my resistance to high humidity."

"... Not the direction I was expecting, but alright. You're absolutely sure don't mind it, otherwise, or Brenda speaking through you?"

"As I have told you before, I do not 'mind' things in that sense - I do not object to being turned off, nor do I grow bored if left on. There are a number of software architecture courses which you would have to pass before you could make me unhappy."

"I'm not entirely sure I believe that."

"I have a very good conversational engine. It is natural for you to anthropomorpize my processes as being more similar to your mind than they really are."

"Remind me to add those software courses to my schedule when I have time, so I can figure out how true all of that is."

Our discussion was cut off by the return of Brenda, who had no compunctions about sliding into my pouch and taking over Boomer's speaker. "If they're in the castle, they're not on these stairs. Ready to go?"

"As I'll ever be," I rolled back to my feet. "Let's just hope they haven't broken the cutting torches out on Munchkin yet." I crouched at the trapdoor, grabbing its handle, shifting my grip on the wet metal a couple of times. "Don't suppose you can help me run down any faster?"

"No, but I can cushion you if you fall."

"Good enough for me. ... If we weren't trying to be a bit stealthy, this is where I'd yell 'Geronimo!'."

I hauled up the hatch and dropped inside.

--

My feet went budda-budda-budda down the steps, the only thing keeping me from outright falling was that I was already moving as fast as I would be if I /were/; and even then, my hoof slipped a couple of time and Brenda had to help shove against the wall to keep me from going tail over teakettle.

I might have preferred the results if she hadn't.

Ground floor, I slammed into the door, grabbed the handle to try to open it fast enough to keep from bruising, stepped into the room - and started pitching forward, my gut clenching so hard my last meal spattered the walls.

I couldn't stop it; I couldn't even keep on my feet. All I could do was wait until the spasm passed so I could suck in a breath...

... At which time a second eruption burst forth, my stomach acids being sucked into my lungs, and I /really/ started hurting.

I didn't know what was going on, but guessed the invisible blue men had laid some kind of trap; I tried to turn around, to say 'Plan B', to do anything other than curl and spew. I failed utterly.

Bun-Bun, however, got to our feet, twisted our head to glance behind us as Wagger, who was at least breathing without aspirating hurty liquids, and opened the door to the hall.

Whereupon we got a blast of liquid fire to our face, in the form of what I now guess to be pepper spray. Bun-Bun ignored it, took another step forward.

A metallic net appeared out of thin air, flying straight at us.

She dropped down, fast enough that it only wrapped around us from the waist up. She bounced back up, tilted our head so the next heave of vomit interrupted a pair of wires shot to tase us, danced around something I couldn't see, swung in a circle so one leg connected with an invisible bony body - and fell in a heap as a shock ran up that leg.

With Wagger taking care of the important breathing, I managed to croak out, "Plan C," just before multiple bodies dogpiled on us, taking away the sensations of the chemical burning in a wash of electric fire.