Velvet Dogma About 3300 wds (16 page)

"Rebecca?"
 
Andy stood poised on the ladder outside her CONEX. "Can I talk to you?"
 

"I'm not ready to talk about it yet," she said.

"I'd rather not wait."

"I'm really not ready to talk about it, Andy. I need some more time."
 
The only thing worse than having to talk about something she didn't want to talk about, was being forced to talk about it. If Andy knew what was good for him, if he had any sense at all, he'd shimmy down the ladder and high-tail it to the other side of the city.

He seemed about to leave, then changed his mind. He stepped off the ladder and into her CONEX. His mass immediately shrunk the ten-by-ten foot square room to the point where she couldn't ignore the fact that he was there. Even when she didn't look at him, she could feel him.

"Maybe if I explain," he began, his hands shoved in his back pockets.

She didn't let him continue. She'd been holding things inside, prepared to deal with them, but wanting to relax a bit more first. He clearly didn't want her to relax, so he would get what he deserved.

"No. You better let me explain, Andy. You really made me angry, angrier than I'd been in twenty years."

He opened his mouth to say something, but she stood, pointed at her chest and began to rant. "I am not some school girl to be coddled. I don't know who you thought you were dealing with, but I am a grown woman, my own person and perfectly capable of making informed decisions. But to make informed decisions, I need to be informed. If you keep information from me, then informed I am not."
 
Every time she said
you
she pointed at him, every time she said
I
, she thumped herself in the chest.

"I am so damned angry with you right now. Just because you have a few extra ounces between your legs doesn't mean that you can order me around and make decisions about what I can know and not know."

"But things were happening," he finally managed to say. "Things were dangerous."

"So what! If there's danger, inform me. Give me the specifics. Don't let me walk into something that I'm not prepared to handle."

"You handled the D-pens pretty well."

"What, we're depending on luck now? Wouldn't it be more reasonable to depend on preparation? You knew everything we'd encounter in there, but didn't give me any warning."

"You're being unreasonable."

Words she hated beyond measure. "That's your opinion. Right now, I don't like your opinion. This is the bottom line. If you don't begin respecting me, then I might as well walk up to the first policeman I see, stick out my hand and say
Hello. My name is Rebecca Mines. I think if you'll check you'll see that I'm wanted by God, the police and the boy scouts
. I'm sure I'd make his day."

"But I
do
respect you."

She shook her head. "Maybe in word, but not in deed."

"But I—"

"If you respected me, we wouldn't be having this conversation. Respect means that you let me make my own decisions about myself. Jesus, but you are the same as the Global Allocation System."

His jaw dropped. "What? How can you say that?"

"You decide what I should do with my body. How about if I decide? Huh? How about if you let me decide whether I want to live or die."

He shook his head. She'd passed him and shifted into fifth gear, leaving him somewhere back where he was trying to defend his actions.

"You don't seem to understand what I'm saying about respect," she continued. "Try this. If I decide to walk into the street and get hit by a car, then I expect you to let me do it. Who are you to stop me? Who are you to pretend to know what's best for me? Maybe I have a plan. Maybe I know the driver and am absolutely certain he'll miss me. To not allow me to do what I want to is to disrespect me. I am an adult. I am my own person. Respect that."

His face scrunched into a look of disbelief. "But you might get hurt! You might die!"

"Then let me," she said simply.

"But what if I want you around?"

She'd found a calmness within her. She'd done her shouting. Now he needed to understand. "That's a nice sentiment, Andy, but it's a selfish one."

"Selfish?"
 
He spread is arms to show his incredulity. "How can caring for you be selfish?"

"What if I decide to become be a Day Eater? It's my choice."

Andy shook his head. "To be a Day Eater isn't why I brought you here. I brought you here to save you."

"And I've discovered a people who are more deserving of respect than any I know. For this I thank you."

He stared at her. "Do you really want to be a Day Eater?"

She shook her head and sat back down. "No. But thanks for asking. That is the kind of respect I was looking for."

He opened his mouth a few times, but nothing came out. Finally, he managed an apology. "Damn, Bec. I've screwed this all up. David and I had plans to tell you about all of this, but when he died, the plans got scrambled."

"What's Velvet Dogma?"

Andy sighed. He let his arms fall to his sides as he stepped over to the bed and sat down. "Velvet Dogma is the reason for everything, Bec. It's why I'm here. It's why you're here."
 
He added, "And it's why you're so pissed at me."

"So what is it? It seems like everyone knows about it. Panchet knew. The gravBoarders knew. Maria knew, which means that the Day Eaters also know, or at least their council does."

"Velvet Dogma is you," he told her. "Or rather the program you created back before you went to prison. Do you remember Becka-309?"

She hadn't thought about the specifics of that program in ages. Even the name showed its history. She hadn't been called Becka since college. But she did remember. Becka-309 was the reason she'd been arrested. She'd been a leader of the chaos hacker phenomenon. Utilizing Bit-Torrent technologies, she'd been able to create a set of programs that could attack a server from multiple locations, remove minute pieces of inconsequential information and place them in open servers throughout the world available to be repieced together by anyone with Bit-torrent shareware. When the United States government discovered that their defense contractors' servers were indefensible to this new form of attack, they tracked her down, arrested her, and threw her in prison under the Patriot Act. Her one big try at protest and it had failed miserably, which was one reason the Day Eaters impressed her so.

"Yeah. I remember."

"Then you also remember that they couldn't find the program."

"Yeah. But they didn't need it. They were still able to convict and sentence me without the actual program. They had a smoking gun from my ISP trail, but no actual bullets. So much for
habeas corpus
."

"But the program continued working anyway."

"It should have."
 
She shrugged. "I'd programmed it to be self replicating and self-sustaining. Bit-Torrent technology helped me immensely, but that's probably an obsolete technology by now."

"Not at all. PODs work on Bit Torrent. Almost everything does. It's more convenient to have information stored in small amounts in many places, than all of it in one place. Do you remember how the Internet used to lag?"

"Oh do I. That damned hourglass would spin and spin and spin, I'd swear I could feel my hair turning gray."

"No lag now. Bit Torrent solved that."
 
He paused. "But back to Becka-309. It took a few years, but David found it."

"He did not."

"He did. You would have been so proud of him. He'd become quite the programmer. He didn't have your flair, but he was the most tenacious man I'd ever known."

"He really found it?"

"Oh did he. And when he found it, he discovered that all the time he'd been looking for it, the program had been in continuous operation."

"What are you saying?"

"I'm saying that Becka-309 did as you told it. The damn thing went out, gathered secrets, and is just waiting to be recalled."
 
He looked her in the eye. "All it needs is for you to tell us the retrieval protocol and we can save the world."
 
He moved towards her and got down on one knee. He put his hands on her thighs. "Do you remember why you launched the program in the first place?"

"I wanted the world to have the secrets laid bare. I wanted the people to know what their governments were doing."

"Do you still want to do that?"

"Can we?"

"Sure we can. You won't believe what we've done."

R
ebecca stood on the roof of Maria's CONEX stack staring across the city of Day Eaters. With no sun or moon and only the tsunami wall as her horizon, she couldn't tell what time of day it was. The city was lit in the same subdued glow created by interior lights and bonfires that she'd first seen upon entering. No weather. No sunrise or sunset. Yet through the cycle of life, she knew it was night.

She'd left Andy in bed as she slipped away in search of fresh air and a place to think. As she'd climbed, she'd seen Maria asleep in the fourth CONEX of the stack. The fifth stack was used as a library. Although it was inviting to peruse actual paper books, Rebecca felt the need to look inward, and for that she needed to be alone.

So here she stood, looking out upon the City of the Day Eaters, and she was pleased.
 

Her thighs still buzzed from their passions. Her mind was spinning with Velvet Dogma. Was it just hours ago that she'd been in fear for her life, afraid that behind every street corner, every curious smile, every closed door were the assassins who'd tried to get her once, and who had probably killed her brother? And now, in this city of lepers she had found peace.

Andy
. She didn't know how it had happened. One moment he was explaining to her Velvet Dogma, and the next she was pushing him down, kissing him along his strong jaw, nuzzling the hollow beneath his ear and tasting his sweat. He tried to push her away at first, but she'd leapt atop him, holding him down with both her hands. She felt powerful, stronger than she'd ever felt before. Was it Becka-309? Velvet Dogma? Or a pure unadulterated lust that had gone untapped for nearly twenty years? She didn't care. Within seconds much of the fabric that had been wound around her body had fluttered to the floor. She'd felt her body flush. Her skin tightened around her nipples in anticipation of Andy's hands. When they'd touched her, it was like an electric shock. She'd ripped his shirt in her haste to remove it. Beneath his shirt his chest was not the sallow chest of a computer geek, but well-muscled like an athlete's. She'd lost herself for long moments, her hands following the hot contours over and over.

When he'd entered her she'd felt on fire. Even thinking about it now sent a flush to her face. She brought her hand up and laughed huskily. He'd felt like a red hot piston turning her into a machine. Through it all her heart and mind soared, straining to leave her body and chase the waves of pleasure that radiated from them.

And finally, when they'd lain spent and satiated, he was the first to fall asleep, leaving her breathless and wanting more. Rebecca had thought of waking him, but she wanted the chance to think through what she'd done.

So here she was.

Her baby brother had been busy while she'd been away. He'd become a first class hacker, working on his own projects with
fringers
like Panchet and someone called the Ack Ack Deacon. She hadn't asked about this deacon character when Andy had brought him up. She'd make sure to ask next time.

Always in the background, David's pet project had been to try and find Becka-309. When he did, he'd formed a loosely organized collective of far-flung hackers to help him shepherd the program home. But what they'd discovered was that no longer was it the simple worm Rebecca had created so long ago. Becka-309 had grown by such proportions that it required more server space to contain than any other known program. Even now, a special databank was being created in what had been known as Mammoth Cave, before it had been purchased by the Velvet Dogma Corporation. So as Andy said, everything was in place for download. All he needed were the protocols, known only to Rebecca.

Rebecca wondered if she'd have learned so much if her brother had he been alive. Somehow he'd always kept to himself, reserving suggestions until the perfect time, unwilling to be seen as presumptuous or insulting. She'd sometimes felt as if he'd seen her more as a mother than a sister. After all, when their parents had died and they were sent to live with their grandma, Rebecca was the one to whom David had looked to for guidance.

His birthday was also the anniversary of their parents' death. She hadn't known what to buy him, thinking that maybe the best thing would be to ignore the day and treat it as any other one. But in the end she'd decided that no kid should go without a birthday gift. With only twenty bucks in her pocket and a second hand store to buy from, she'd left an hour later with a gift-wrapped picture.

All the way home she'd wondered what she was thinking.
Tacky
.

Trailer trash.