Velvet Dogma About 3300 wds (8 page)

He closed the door after her and plodded down the stairs. A dusty sofa sat against one wall, surrounded by an architecture of boxes. He plopped down and rested his board across his legs, holding it like a child would a favorite toy.

She found a box to sit on near the sofa. Blood still thrummed in her ears. Her eyes flicked from motion to motion, super-attenuated by the high-speed chase. "What's your name?"

His bright eyes almost glowed in the gloom. "Pony."

"Thanks for your help out there, Pony."

"P. Rao profiled help. You're Velvet Dogma. Altruism."

"What?"

"Pony's too wired to speak clearly," Andy's said from behind her. "He's on his downward spiral and needs to rest before he gets another hit."

Rebecca turned and stood. Seeing Andy brought a rush to her heart. She wanted to reach out and pull him to her, but something held her back. What was it? Was it because he knew so much about the boarders? She turned back to Pony. Drugs gave him the edge. Drugs and a direct connection between his muscular system and the board—the nexus of the connection on the calf.

"Come upstairs, Bec. You gotta be exhausted."
 
When she didn't move, Andy's smile slipped. "This is one of their safe houses. We're allowed to use it for a few hours. We just can't connect to the ID."
 
He pointed at Pony. "Same for Pony and Scoundrel. They've been with us, so they can't connect until we leave."

"Why is that?"

"Because the police never should have found us. Certainly not through them. Until Panchet figures it out, we're staying put and unconnected."
 
He started up the stairs. "Are you coming?"

A
fter cleaning off the grime of the chase in bathroom —Rebecca spent the first four minutes trying to figure out the faucet—they met in the rather Spartan kitchen. Andy was helping himself to a bowl of oranges. She sat next to him at the table. He placed a sweating glass of water in front of her, which she immediately downed. When she finished, he replaced it with another. She sipped this one. Temporarily sated, she asked one of the questions that had been bothering her. "What's your relationship with the boarders?"

"Relationship?"
 
He grinned humorlessly. "Strange that you would use that word."

"What word would you prefer?"

"What's going on, Bec? Why the sudden change? Have I done something?"

She paused for a long moment. "Coming out of prison was like waking from a coma. I'm brand new to this world. So much has happened, I've yet to even figure out what it all means to me. But you are too easy."

"Too easy?"

"Sure. Too easy to figure out. You meet me at my brothers at the exact moment I get there after twenty years. You snatch his miniVid so you can give it to Panchet, or P. Rao, or whoever he is. You're always one step ahead of whoever is chasing me. And there's that— why
am
I being chased? Kumi says it's because of my organs, but that doesn't explain the police. Maybe they're after
you
."

"But I can explain—"

"You'll get your chance."
 
She frowned before continuing. "Then you have this relationship —sorry but I don't know what other word to use—with the boarders, who besides saving my life appear to be no more than hyped-up gangbangers with a death wish."

"They're much more than that," he protested.

"I'm sure they are."
 
Rebecca paused again as she tried to work out the emotions that were boiling within her. "But what I'm not sure about is what
you
are, or what you want with me."
 
She stopped at that point, her emotions about ready to explode from her. She'd be damned if she'd allow him to see how scared, lonely and out of her element she really felt.

"Panchet, me and David were old friends," he began. "We went to UC Davis together. We worked on a lot of the same projects. We had the same ideals. Like you, Bec, we thought the ID, what has become of the World Wide Web, should be extra-territorial and not subject to any one society's regulations. David and I went one direction, Panchet went another. But the ideas merged in ideology, if not application."

"The boarders?
 
You said they're more than mere gangbangers. Why do they follow him?"

"Because he's their deity."

"Because he has no legs?"

"No. Because he chose to have no legs. Panchet represents the ultimate in choice. He could walk if he wanted to, hell, I wouldn't be surprised if he had a pair of electronic legs in a closet that worked better than yours or mine. No, Panchet prefers the hover life. He chose it, and by doing so earned the respect of the board gangs."

"Is that it?"

"Oh yeah. I almost forgot. He was responsible for unifying the Cheng-Li Gauge Theory with the Irwin-Jones Twin Spin Theory."

She raised an eyebrow.

He clarified. "Panchet invented gravBoard technology."

"Then why is he working in the back of a porn shop? Why isn't he rich beyond all reason?"
"Because he was working for Lasing Industries at the time of his discovery and they took all the credit. Product of work and all that."

"Ahh, one of those."

"Yeah, one of those."

"But how does that explain your 'merged' ideologies?" she asked, her fingers making the double-quote sign as she said
merged
.

He leaned forward and placed both elbows on the table. He used his hands to accentuate his points. "You see the gravBoarders as gangbangers, going from place to place, guarding their turf or whatever. They wear colors, so they must have turf, right?"

She raised an eyebrow.

"Wrong."
 
He grinned excitedly. "You're in a special position to understand who and what they are. Once you understand, you'll get a kick out of it."
 
He waited to see if she was going to interrupt, then continued when she had nothing to say. "Let's think in terms of 2020 technology so that you can understand the implications. When you were caught chaos hacking your sniffer worm into the Pentagon, it was because the powers that be were able to track you back to your home computer through IP addresses. Right?"

"As good a summary as I've heard."

"The servers you routed through were stationary, some in basements, some in business offices and some cryogenically stored in server facilities. No matter where they were, no matter what layers of security they had, there was one thing they all had in common. They didn't
move
."

"Yeah."

"So tell me, Rebecca, what would be the benefit of having one of the servers in that chain move constantly?"

"Well, in order to trace a transmission, they'd have to do it prior to the server's IP address changing. Unless there was a pattern of change, once changed —once the server moved—it would render the sender invisible."

"Exactly."

She shook her head. "But I don't see how that relates to the gravBoarders."

He grinned madly. "Rebecca. The gravBoarders
are
the servers."

She looked long and hard at him, trying to make sense of what he said. If each gravBoarder represented a server, and information was passed through the server, by constantly moving about and accessing WIFI transponders placed at strategic locations throughout the city, the sender would be rendered invisible as their ID address changed and changed and rechanged. By increasing the number of gravBoard servers, the invisibility of the sender increased exponentially. She chuckled to herself. If she'd had that back in the '20s, she never would have been arrested. "And Panchet choreographs this?"

"Ah. You understand that magnitude. Yes, he choreographs it. So far the system has remained undetectable. But with the policemen today came the idea that we'd been burned."

"By one of the boarders?"

"Never. Either you caused it, or some extremely sophisticated surveillance."

She was about to say that she didn't do it, but then she was no longer aware of her own body. Could she have informed the police and didn't know it? "Maybe we were followed to Panchet's. Did anyone check?"

"That's being checked out now."

"What about cameras? If someone knew where to look, they could track us down much faster."
 
She snapped her fingers. "They did know where to look. They followed the transponder on the collar, then reached the area."

Andy didn't look like he bought it. "I don't know. They showed up right beside us. Much too coincidental for my book."

"Do you think they cooperated with the Black Hearts? They can still track me through my organs, right?"

"Yeah. There's a scrambler in the safe house, but out on the street there are certain transponders that track and process the information for the levy owners."

"Then that's my bet. In fact, if the Black Hearts didn't want to act in public, what better way to get to us than through the authorities?"

"We're still not one-hundred percent sure the network isn't compromised."

Rebecca grinned evilly. "Then feed them information. Make it hard, but put out that we're at a different location. Then if someone shows, you can guarantee the net's been blown."

"Panchet's doing that right now."

"Oh."
 
She sat back.

"Give him a few more hours to be sure, then we can go."
 
Andy nodded at the couches that lined each wall of the house. "I don't know about you, but I'm exhausted and could use a few hours shut-eye."

Rebecca agreed, then chose a green couch with an Old World paisley pattern, the fabric worn smooth from thousands of uses. As soon as she lay on it, her body began to shut down. She was past the point of exhaustion. Her eyes slammed shut. The last thing she remembered before she was dragged off to a dreamland free of Black Hearts and gravBoarders was that Andy hadn't answered all of her questions.

T
he fearsome chaos of the day soured her dreams. Half of her sleep she ran from the police and the Black Hearts, always on the verge of death, desperation fueling her flight. Psychedelic gravBoarders swarmed her like man-sized mosquitoes. Music blared from everyone's eyes, the discordant orchestration numbing her thoughts.

Finally she'd found a safe place inside the hotel room where she'd first met Kumi. But now dogs played poker around the table. Her brother spoke from the mouth of a bulldog. "Come on, Sis. Join us."

"Is a dog eat dog world," Panchet Rao said from the mouth of a Collie.

"Dogma I am God. Dogma I am God," chanted Kumi. Her piggish Pekinese face covered with lipstick and makeup as if she were human.

The bulldog growled as a man walked out of the bathroom with a needle. "Watch out, Sis. Here they come."

The pain of the needle woke her from one dream to the next. A pair of inVid zombies hauled her from her cell down a series of long corridors the cognitive part of her recognized as San Berdoo Max. They marched her to a sterile white room. Her escorts halted at the door, turned and faced outwards, drool lacing from their lips. She plodded numbly toward a line the color of dried blood that had been marked on the otherwise colorless floor. She stopped just shy of the line, looked up at an immense blank monitor that took up one wall, and waited.

She'd ceased wondering what the officials wanted of her long ago. She'd been here countless times. Sometimes they'd laud comments of goodwill upon her. Other times they'd browbeat her for accidental missteps that should have been ignored. But in a place where rule prevailed, any sign of disorder, even the most minuscule indication of chaos, must be removed.

Finally the screen blurred as the pale blue background was replaced with the face of Andy. His handsome features seemed twisted. His lip curled into a sneer. His eyes were arctic.

"Criminal Servant Rebecca Mines," he said. "You are hereby released from the San Bernardino Maximum Security Prison at Crestline after serving the majority-term of a twenty-year sentence for crimes against what was then known as the United States of America. After approved release by the Medical Evaluation Prospectors, you will be assigned an indentured representative who will assist you in societal reintroduction. Failure to abide to the articles of your parole will result in activation of autonomic inhibitors and the subsequent levying of organic functions to the Pacific Autonomous Resource Allocation Syndicate per Section 17 of the Singapore Autonomic Transfer Treaty of 2037. Do you understand everything that I have said to you, CrimServ Mines? Do you have any questions?"

Rebecca awoke to find Andy sitting on the couch rubbing her shoulder. She jerked away from him, but settled herself as the dream strands dissolved to reality. Her mouth tasted like a pit. Her muscles ached. She propped herself up on her elbows. "How long was I out?"

"Six hours."

"Jesus. It feels like six days."
 
And it did. Her body ached like she'd been through a Triathalon. Or worse, a five round ear-biter with Mike Tyson. Everything she'd done, even walking, had been more than her body had been prepared to do after spending half a lifetime in a fifteen by fifteen foot cell. She sat up and groaned. Her calves were balls of steel-filled agony. The torture of her lower back hurt only half as bad as her upper back. If she were a home for sale, she'd need a thirty day overhaul.