Wired (28 page)

I came to, sweating and wincing on my hands and knees with lumpy bits of gravel pressing into my kneecaps. Next to me, Kitty sat on the pavement struggling to get her sweatshirt off.
The heat
, I thought.
She's not used to the heat
.

I looked around and it wasn't at all what I'd expected. We were sitting on the pavement of what appeared to be an inner-city playground. It had clearly been neglected for a number of years, all faded lines and divots, but someone had taped off the ground with the lines of a basketball court. The pole supporting the hoop was tilted at an unplayable angle, and from it hung a dirty net.

I guess I should have been panicking, but for some crazy reason I felt a sense of relief. Relief at the empty space around me, relief at the silence. Even if it was the sort of weighty silence one normally referred to as the calm before the storm.

I looked up. We were surrounded by a spiderweb of freeways and transit tracks that spiraled above and around the city. I could see blurs of color shift and
stall and accelerate, tram cars or whatever moving along the tracks. I was again reminded of Mason's deejay metaphor: how the crossing of wires on a case was like a club deejay scratching a record. Back, forward, hold, forward, hold, back . . . And yet, for all my experience, the sounds were nothing more to me than dull static.

Kitty and I looked at each other, her eyes huge, dominating her pale face. She hadn't believed me. She stood up, wobbling a little, and headed for a water fountain.

An electronic gong sounded from different places around and above us; people poured out of the neighboring buildings, and the usual hustle and bustle of city life crowded out the quiet. I stood and peered through the hurricane fence surrounding the playground. The men and women wore a mishmash of formal businesswear and leather catsuits; from what I could tell, it seemed that cars on street level got only one lane—probably for emergencies. Pedestrians and bicyclists on a variety of traditional and mechanized rides took the rest of the space.

No, this was not a homogeneous group of people, but one thing struck me that they had in common: their obliviousness toward the people around them. They all worked their cell phones and handhelds. They were jostling and bumping one another shoulder to shoulder, but each was in his or her own individual world.

“Hey, Rox,” Kitty hissed.

“What?”

“I thought we were doing pretend, but this isn't pretend.” She hovered over the water fountain, using it to support her weight as she bent at the waist.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“No.”

She gasped for air, and I recalled how winded the first reality splices had made me. But that didn't seem to be the whole of it. Kitty's tan seemed to have faded a couple shades, and I realized that believing in the possibilities of swapping jokes with algae scum, natural healing from brewer's yeast, and intergalactic space travel were substantially different from the reality of leaping into the future.

“All this time, you still thought I was joking,” I said. I knew, but was a little annoyed. “Didn't you think it seemed rather bizarre? And elaborate, all of my explanations?”

“You've never dated anyone who's taken you to a
Star Trek
convention, have you?”

I was overcome by a memory of one of her dates. “Point. The thing is, I've been completely serious about it all. And you must have realized I was completely serious. But you didn't believe me?”

“Yeah.”

“And you played along anyway.”

“That's what friends are for.” She said it matter-of-factly, standing upright, staring wide-eyed at the sky with her hands on her hips.

“Well, now you see I'm not crazy. Are you okay with it?” I asked kind of lamely.

She turned to me, and I could see the barely contained hysteria written all over her face. “Am I
okay
with this? Am I
okay
with it? Are you joking? I realize that I'm a go-with-the-flow, up-for-any-adventure, fairly Zen kind of person—”

“Now, don't get angry, Kitty.”

“I'm not angry! Do I seem angry? Because I'm not angry. I'm just totally freaked the hell out!” She closed her eyes and took another deep breath, and I think what she murmured was, “Inner peace, inner calm . . .”

“Kitty?” I asked, tentatively reaching my hand out to her shoulder.

She stuck her index finger up in the air, and I retreated and let her have a few more moments. Then her eyes popped open. “It can't always be about tomorrow. Sometimes it's about right fucking now. And tomorrow is today. This is now.”

I don't think I'd ever admired her more than I did at that moment. “When this is over, my friend, I am so going to owe you.”

She joined me at the fence and managed a weak smile. “I'll take you up on that.”

“Do you want to sit down? Do you need something to drink?”

Kitty raised an eyebrow. “
Drink
-drink? Do we even have the correct currency? And for all we know, ten bucks isn't even a penny in this age.”

“I've got a credit card on me,” I said flippantly. But I hadn't really thought of money. I hadn't thought of a lot of things.

“Is it illegal to exist in a place you're not supposed to exist? I wonder if they'll be able to tell where we came from. Or what we've done to get here.” She suddenly perked up. “Maybe we'll be celebrities.”

“Celebrities or felons,” I muttered.

“Looks like the mandarin collar's a big fashion do,” Kitty said, observing several passersby. I stared
at the people—our people—and noted how all looked oddly formal.

“What year is this?” Kitty asked. She looked around, probably for a newsstand, but there wasn't anything of the sort. Everyone likely had a gadget in their pocket that fed them the news twenty-four hours a day. I doubted newspapers even existed anymore.

“So, what now?”

I swallowed, working hard on not revealing to Kitty that I hadn't a clue. I stuck my hand in my bag and rummaged around for the manila folder, wanting to be sure I still had the one remaining source of this code that was ruling my life and the version of life I would end up living.

“No!”

Kitty squealed in horror as I shook the envelope upside down and yelled once more at the top of my lungs.

“Is there a problem?” she asked timidly.

I looked up at her. “I don't believe in coincidences.”

“I know,” she said.

“It's gone. It's gone, and I don't believe in coincidences.”

“What's gone?”

“The code for the smartie.”

She looked at me blankly.

“The Zapper! The Zapper code is gone!”

Kitty just looked at me helplessly. “I'm sorry.”

“It was in this envelope. . . . Hey!” I examined the envelope a little more closely. It was the envelope I'd received at the agency. The same damn empty envelope with the same roughly opened top. “Well, what do you know.”

“Not a whole lot,” Kitty muttered. “Would this be an inappropriate moment to ask you if you have a plan?”

I lifted my head. “A plan? Absolutely I have a plan. We're going to the agency.” I shook the envelope in the air. “We'll see if they know who L. Roxanne Zaborovksy is this time!”

I looked at the city bustling around me. Ahead, I saw it: the tip of a spire. The ferry building. The ferry building not far from where the Bay Bridge used to be. I couldn't see much behind and among the sky-clogging freeway system and the dense collection of skyscrapers, but I saw the tip of that spire between a set of buildings. And since the ferry building marked the east end of Market Street, the location—the
original
location—of my employment agency, I swiveled around and marked that general area in my mind.

The odd diagonal of Market Street, oft maligned because of the near impossibility of turning left off certain stretches, was a blessing to me now. “We have assessed,” I said to Kitty. “And now we proceed.”

I started toward the spire, retracing my steps to the location of the agency.

“Um, not that I'm doubting you or anything,” Kitty said, “but how do you know where to . . . proceed?”

I recalled Mason once describing to me how a three-dimensional desk from a different point of view was just a flat rectangle. Leonardo had warned me of being buried in an archeological layer of reality. I had a mishmash of memories in my head, some from the past, some never to be, but if I had my geometry right, I had our destination right.

“Trust me.”

Fifteen minutes later, Kitty and I stood outside the agency doors, staring at a sign that read,
THE MERRICK AGENCY: FREELANCE WIRE CROSSING
. I burst into peals of what probably qualified as maniacal laughter. The building was the same. My humor didn't come from the surreal comedy of the name; it was that I'd been working for
him
. On the wire where I'd been doing freelance work from my room, I'd somehow been getting my assignments in the present from Mason's agency in the future. I guess on the wire where I was working in an office building, I'd been doing government work. I'd been fated to write this software. I wondered when I'd first become Mason's case. Clearly before I'd become his employee.

“Let's not go in just yet,” I muttered. I wasn't sure what I wanted to ask. I didn't have all the puzzle pieces.

Kitty leaned against the wall and watched people go by. I could hear little gasps and squeals burst forth every time she saw something unusual, but I was busy trying to work out Mason. He must have been keeping tabs on every project assigned to me, watching, waiting, hoping to be there before Leonardo when the one project everyone was waiting for came to pass.

Yeah, he and Leo must have been eyeing each other, fingers twitching, ready to pounce for years. Leo came off the mark first, playing offense, Mason followed, and the case with me on the wire as the Major blew wide open one fateful day at two o'clock in the morning.

But now I was in control of my own fate. Things were different, anything was possible, and I knew that Mason would be a villain in my world only if I let Leonardo Kaysar make him one. “Let's go.”

“Okay,” Kitty said, starting to walk away. I grabbed her by the back of her jacket and wheeled her around. “Let's go
in
.” I marched her through the doors of the agency.

We approached a receptionist wearing an outfit that reminded me of something more appropriate for a cruise ship purser. Kitty was probably fascinated by the duds, but I was more excited about the fact that the man was sitting in what had to be the most ergo of ergonomic chairs I'd ever seen. It was made of a clear, flexible rubber, and I wondered how many decades it would take for the thing to be invented, because I definitely wanted one.

“May I help—Oh, my God!” The receptionist leaped from his chair, ran around to us, and engulfed me in a huge bear hug. He finally pulled away. “Hello, Rox. I should tell everyone you're here. Mason didn't tell us; I suppose he had a surprise in mind.”

Hey, Rox. Hey
, Rox?
Not “L. Roxanne Zaborovsky, I presume?” Or even, “Who the hell are you?” He knows exactly who I am
.

“We're here to see Mason Merrick,” Kitty said cheerfully. Then her eyes bugged out. “Ohmigod, look at that crazy tape dispenser!”

I watched the slow arch of the receptionist's eyebrow.

“Kitty,” I said with measured politeness. “Why don't you go outside and get some air? I'll be out in a minute.”

She narrowed her eyes at me but walked back out the door. I nodded at the receptionist. “Nice to, er, see you too. Is Mason around?”

“Unless he slipped in, I don't think he's even on this layer.” The clerk pressed a button on his earpiece and said, “Dial Mason Merrick.” After a moment he looked up. “I'm sorry; he's not answering. Do you want to just wait in his office?”

Well, that was easy
. “That would be great.”

He pressed a button and released the lock on a nearby door. As I passed through the waiting area, I compared the space to what I remembered from the agency layout before. The room wasn't configured in exactly the same way, but the basic shape of the place where Leonardo had first intercepted me was the same.

A couple of women in ridiculously short skirts and formal suit jackets with mandarin collars came out of a second white and unmarked door, holding it open for me. From the corner of my eye, I saw them do double takes, pause, then decide not to stop me.
Everyone knows who I am . . . and they seem . . . pleased to see me
. It was odd.

Behind the door was a hall with glass siding through which I could see banks and banks of people with headsets and microphones and monitors with lists of names and world locations, like a kind of airport arrival-and-departure scheme. It reminded me of traffic control crossed with public television pledge week. The names and locations on the monitors looked exactly like the listings Mason had shown me on his reader. Green, red, and gray dots blinked and pulsed, disappeared and reappeared in constant motion.
The hubbub on the agency floor was similar to the chaos of a stock exchange floor as runners with headsets moved through the area.

This is who Mason talks to with his reader. It's what he's always checking. Leonardo has something similar. Who does he talk to?
They were tracking cases and wires, giving statuses, alerting users to potential moves.

For me, Mason had played the role of technology company employer; to someone else, he was probably something else.

I wandered down the corridor, checking the names on doors until I reached the very end.
Wouldn't you know it, a corner office
. I tapped lightly on the door. When nobody answered, I went in. It made me smile, being in Mason's office. I could definitely feel him here. Sports paraphernalia was in the bookcase, a pair of basketball sneakers hanging by the laces off a hook in the wall. It felt impossibly familiar. I sat down in his desk chair and my heart just about stopped.