The Intruder (15 page)

And you can use me too,
he thought.

"If that's the very least," Jeremy said, "why don't you tell me what the very most is."

*
             
*
             
*

MacKenzie lounged in her favorite chair in the lobby of her dorm, finishing up the homework for her noon lab and wondering, for the thousandth time, where Hanna had been for the last week. She did her best to cover for Hanna's absence from classes, but she was getting to the end of her options. She sighed, finished the last line of computer code and was interrupted by a message from her implant.

Forty three incoming messages from Hanna.

MacKenzie usually had her mail system send all messages into her inbox. She didn't want to be bothered with a mail notice while she was in the middle of a deep, theoretical computer question -- which was most of the time -- but ever since Hanna had disappeared she reset her mail parameters to put a priority on any message from Hanna, or any that mentioned her name.

Forty three?
MacKenzie wondered, and before she had a chance to read any of them she saw Hanna herself stumbling in the front door to the dorm.

"Hanna," MacKenzie said as she saw her friend come in the L Street entrance. "Where have you been? I've been looking for you for a week. Everybody's been worried sick."

Hanna shook her head and looked at MacKenzie unsteadily. "A week?" Her eye wandered as she checked her calendar. Her face, already showing signs of severe stress and fatigue, grew pale, and MacKenzie quickly put out her arms to hold her in case she swooned.

"Here, sit down," MacKenzie said, lowering her into a couch in the dorm lobby. A crowd was starting to gather and MacKenzie resented the intrusion. She picked someone she vaguely knew and sent her for a glass of water, and then tried to get the rest of the onlookers to find something else to do. Hanna just closed her eyes and rested her head on MacKenzie's shoulder. "I don't know where I've been," she said, "but I feel horrible."

MacKenzie knew Hanna was going to need her for a while, so she attached her homework to a message to her professor and explained that she would have to miss class today. She let Hanna rest for a minute, made her drink the glass of water and then took her up to her room to sleep.

*
             
*
             
*

"Have you seen Jeremy?" Hanna asked as soon as they were in the privacy of her room. She sat on the bed and tried to give MacKenzie her full attention, but her head nodded and her eyelids drooped. MacKenzie gently pushed her down onto her pillow.

"No," she said. "I haven't heard a word, and I've checked all the mental institutions I can find, just in case that doctor woman got her way. He's just gone. Maybe he's had enough of Society and went back to the Community."

That was a thought Hanna hadn't considered. It would have been a natural way for him to escape, returning to his own people. The doctor couldn't get him there even if she tried. Still, Hanna hoped he was around, somewhere.

"But what about you?" MacKenzie asked. "Where have you been?"

"I don't know." Hanna shook her head. "I have a few, faint images, but it's like snatches of a dream you can't remember." She shook her head wearily, but MacKenzie told her not to worry about it.

"You rest," she said. "We'll worry about that tomorrow. Right now, you need to sleep. But I might be able to get some clues if you give me access to your mail headers. At least I might be able to figure out what zone you were in, and that sort of thing."

Hanna mustered up enough energy to adjust her security protocols so that MacKenzie could do her wizardry, and then she fell asleep.

*
             
*
             
*

Late that afternoon, MacKenzie was still working on Hanna's mail, trying to get a clue where she had been. Because implants had a limited communications range, the network had relay stations all over the country, spaced about a half a mile apart, to manage traffic. Each station had a unique code, and as signals passed from one relay into the main, high-capacity lines, the code from each station was embedded in hidden headers. If you knew about such things, as MacKenzie did, you could read those headers and trace the path of incoming messages.

It was the headers that allowed the mail routines to screen incoming mail, but clever programmers could get around that. Once MacKenzie went to a summer retreat in
Colorado Springs
and met a guy who just wouldn't leave her alone. He kept sending her mail, asking her personal questions, even telling her about his life and his dreams. She set her mail filters to screen for his name and automatically delete anything he sent, but he got around that quickly enough by using other user names, or sending from public terminals. But when MacKenzie found out about the hidden codes in the headers, she simply blocked out the state of
Colorado
and never heard from him again.

As Hanna slept the afternoon away, MacKenzie ran every analysis she could think of on Hanna's messages from the last three days. She had sent several from the hospital that made it into hole traffic, but for a week after that everything she sent was queued up in her out box. Wherever she had been, she had no contact with the hole at all. There were only a few places where blackouts occurred naturally, and none of them were close by. But it was an easy enough thing to contrive by jamming the radio signals. 

Hanna's mail routines had automatically tried to re-send the queued messages every ten minutes. They continued to be rejected until just before she came into the dorm. That was why MacKenzie received a flood of messages from Hanna just before she saw her. Apparently, she had been kept in a communications blackout until just before she came into the dorm.

Having done everything she could with Hanna's mail log, she started reading the 42 messages she had just received. Fortunately, Hanna had kept her wits about her during her confinement. She mailed updates on her situation periodically. Those messages could have been erased from her implant outbox if her captors had had the right equipment, but apparently they hadn't, and MacKenzie was able to read the journal of her ordeal from the messages. It would have been fascinating reading except that it had happened to her best friend.

Chapter 10

More relentless questioning. I wish I could send you something more substantive, MacKenzie, but I've been sitting in this chair in this same room forever. I eat here, I sleep here. Fortunately they let me go to the bathroom and stretch my legs a little, but it's just me, the room, and the interrogator's voice. They keep asking about Jeremy, and of course I tell them nothing, but I'm afraid they'll use drugs on me before too long.

That's it for now.

That was the 42nd and last message, but it had been sent three days before MacKenzie received it. The 41 previous messages detailed Hanna's experiences from the moment she got into the car with the security officers, whom she later suspected of being phonies. They had taken her only a little way before one of the guards covered her face with a smelly handkerchief that knocked her out. When she awoke she was tied to a chair in a dark room, completely alone. In the 40 remaining messages, Hanna detailed the same, monotonous, endless questioning about Jeremy: who was he, what did he know, what had he said about Dr. Berry, what had he said about the images he claimed to see, why did he see them, did anyone else see them -- and on and on it went for hour after hour and day after day.

At first, Hanna was full of questions and complaints about her treatment, but after she decided that her questioner was a machine, she tried not to reply any more. She found that as the questioning wore on, she occasionally found herself responding. She didn't answer the questions, but she was talking back, arguing, complaining and protesting her innocence. As soon as she was aware that she had started speaking again she would be silent, compose another message to MacKenzie and resolve to keep her mouth shut, but it was only a matter of time before she found herself arguing with the questioner again.

After what seemed like an eternity of questions she fell asleep in her chair. When she awoke she found herself untied and in a different room: one with bathroom facilities and a very meager serving of vegetables and rice. She was ravenously hungry and ate the bland food quickly, then used the facilities. As soon as she was done she heard a hissing noise, became disoriented and passed out. She awoke in the same chair, listening to the same questions, going through the same mental torture.

And so it went until the final message. They probably did resort to drugs, MacKenzie assumed, and that explained why Hanna hadn't sent any more messages, and why she looked so terrible when they finally let her go. MacKenzie had to assume that Hanna's captors knew everything about those things Jeremy had been seeing -- or at least they knew everything Hanna could tell them.

MacKenzie turned her attention from her implant screen and looked around the darkened bedroom. Hanna was sleeping peacefully in her bed, and MacKenzie's own head started to nod.

She was the perfect computer student. As long as she had a project to keep her busy, she could stay awake and remain productive for days. But as soon as the job was done, she crashed, recuperating for the next marathon session. It was
midnight
now. She knew she wasn't going to last much longer now that there was nothing else to do, so she slid her chair next to Hanna's bed and tried to cover herself with the corner of Hanna's blanket, then fell asleep.

*
             
*
             
*

Hanna's alarm went off at
7:30
.

"Shut up!" she yelled. It was a programmable alarm clock, and she could have programmed anything she wanted as an off switch, but her previous attempts at gentler commands never seemed to work. It was too easy to say "off," or, "good morning" and roll right back over on the pillow. Yelling "shut up" at the decibel level she had programmed into the off switch helped to wake her.

MacKenzie slept through the alarm and the yell. Hanna headed for the shower, suddenly realized that she had been wearing the same clothes for a week, tossed them into the launderer, then retrieved a new outfit from her dresser. Three minutes later, clean and dressed, she tried to shake MacKenzie awake. After a Herculean effort of shaking, tickling and prodding, MacKenzie woke up enough to mumble "coffee" and went back to sleep. Hanna remembered that MacKenzie's alarm clock didn't make a sound -- it was set to brew a strong cup of Jamaican coffee at
8:00
. It was the smell that woke her up. Usually, it was a nice arrangement. The only problem was when she spent a few days in the computer lab; then she had a nasty mess to clean up when she came back to her room and found a few days worth of coffee spilled all over the machine. The cleaning robots would take care of the carpet and the furniture, but the appliance itself would have to be scrubbed by a microbot. They were expensive, and the university didn't provide them. Hanna thought she might buy one for a Christmas present.

Hanna looked down at her friend, slumped over in the chair, only half covered with the corner of the blanket. She realized how much MacKenzie had been through in the last several days. She bent over and kissed her on the cheek and then went down the hall to the food concession to get a cup of coffee. When the smell reached MacKenzie, she took a sip, rolled off the bed and stumbled toward the shower. Hanna set the cup of coffee on the narrow ledge where the launderer stuck out from the wall and sat in the room's only chair. She had a lot of back-logged mail to go through and she wanted to see if there was anything from Jeremy.

MacKenzie stepped out of the shower and went for her coffee before she even touched her clothes -- such was the power of her addiction. A few minutes later they both ran a brush through their hair and set off for McDonald's. Except for a few necessary grunts, neither of them spoke until they were out the front door and into a beautiful spring morning.

"So what did you find out?" Hanna asked as soon as they left the building, as if she had been eagerly waiting to be out of the dorm before she spoke.

MacKenzie wasn't sure how to answer. She had two concerns. On the one hand, she wanted to figure out what was going on so they could find Jeremy and help him if they could. On the other hand, she wanted to help Hanna restore her memory of the last few days, and she wasn't sure about the best way to do that.

"I didn't find out much that is useful, actually," she said, clearly disappointed in herself. She was used to working miracles. "Have you started to remember anything from your experience?"

Hanna slowed down, as if walking fast and deep memory work didn't fit together, and shook her head. "The last thing I can remember," she said deliberately, "is watching that dog tear off after Jeremy." She turned and looked up at MacKenzie. "Did he get away?"

"Are you starved?" MacKenzie asked. "Do you mind if we try something before we go to eat?"

It wasn't like MacKenzie to be evasive, or to postpone breakfast, so Hanna figured she was up to something. She shrugged and MacKenzie pulled her somewhat bewildered friend off in a different direction. She took Hanna to the park where they had their long talk with Jeremy a week earlier. MacKenzie walked to the place they were standing when the police dog started running after Jeremy, and she asked Hanna to visualize the whole scene in her mind. Hanna closed her eyes and thought for minute, then opened her eyes and looked around, imagining the sound of the officer whistling at the dog, and then seeing the dog take off after Jeremy. Suddenly she put her hands to her mouth.