By the time they got to the base, David was feeling better.
Okay, he had a pounding headache, felt like he’d been worked over by a boxer, and really just wanted to call it a night.
But I do feel better.
Maybe Mari had been right about deciding to hit the sparky gadget with an iron rod.
“Why don’t you look at Mari first,” David asked as they came walking into the sickbay.
They’d never been there before, and David wondered how many people were supposed to work here if they had four medical beds. Four beds surrounded by a lot of stuff.
O12 was prowling around, and Mari wasn’t even paying much attention to it. That was worrisome. Mari really hated spiders or anything that reminded her of spiders. She could watch a horror flick with ease, but the giant spider in Lord of the Rings?
Nope, Mari had her hands over her eyes for the entire scene.
“Why don’t you get on the bed,” Antonio said, his voice curt. “Then, I can get Mari on hers.”
“We’re… not going to have to take our clothes off, right?” Mari asked.
Wait? What—
“No.” Antonio shook his head. “Cutting edge sensors, which will work through your clothes, when you lay down.”
David nodded and sat on the edge of the bed before laying down. Mari did the same.
“Oh God,” she said. “I am never fighting a junk monster again.”
“You weren’t supposed to fight it the first time,” Antonio replied, no humor in his voice. “That had to be a high-level zone. You’re supposed to call us, not handle it yourselves!”
“But it was—ouch!” David started as a robot arm extended and touched his shoulder. It pulled back, a small needle retracting into its housing.
“Okay, hold still, both of you,” Antonio said. He looked up. “Good news… right. No fractures, concussions, or severe aetheric damage. Just a slight cut to Mari’s shoulder. You got lucky. Now, what were you saying?”
“It wasn’t high level,” David said. “When we were walking in there, it was…”
“Threeish,” Mari said. “Then when we got closer, we found that breach sealer, only…” she twitched as Antonio sprayed her shoulder with some liquid bandage.
David looked over at Mari. “It wasn’t. It was something else. The aether levels just shot up, and the breach got bigger and then that… thing showed up. The storage units didn’t do anything—they just blew up.”
“They don’t have infinite potential,” Antonio said. “You were trying to drain Niagara Falls with a bucket.”
“Okay, so what was that gadget, and why do we have something that makes breaches, and why didn’t you tell us about it?” Mari sat up in her bed, glaring at Antonio. “I mean, usually, you are supposed to give a mysterious warning about the thing that opens a breach to the world of angry junkbots!”
“Because it wasn’t ours,” Wilma said as she came into the room. “How are they, Antonio.”
“God protects fools, children, and the United States, and since they count as all three…” Antonio shrugged. “Bruising, nothing worse.”
“Thank God.” Wilma seemed to sag for a moment, like Mom did after a bad shift, but then she was back to her normal self.
They were frightened about us. David shook his head. That somehow made it worse. “Okay, if it wasn’t yours, then who made it?”
“And if you didn’t shoot that thing, then who did?” Mari asked.
Antonio looked over at Wilma, and she shrugged. “They’re kind of in it now.”
“Yeah. We are going to get yelled at, you know that, right?” Antonio asked.
“Sure, then we can point out that the reason we needed interns was nobody could be spared to help us,” Wilma replied, an edge in her voice. “Okay, here’s the thing, remember back when I said we were founded to help seal these breaches?”
“Yeah?” David frowned. What did this have to do with people trying to open breaches?
“Well our relationship with the government wasn’t exactly as cut and dried as I said…”
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Oh God. We’re not just in a conspiracy, we’re in one of those rogue conspiracies like… Oh God, we really are PIBS! Mari still felt all the aches and pains from getting tossed around by the giant monster, but she didn’t let any of that distract her from what Wilma was saying.
“Wait a minute, you mean all this stuff—you’re crooks?” David asked, his eyes wide.
“No!” Wilma said. “Not crooks but… It’s complex. Okay, we set off the project bomb, Ming Blade on June 19th. That’s when all the chaos hit, and we didn’t get everything cleared up until late July. What happened in August?”
Mari frowned. “I… I dunno.” She really didn’t remember what had happened then. It wasn’t like history was her favorite subject.
“So, any good sci-fi or horror films?” Antonio asked.
“Sure, Dark Star, Earthquake, oh, Phase IV, that was a goo—” Mari stared at Antonio. “Why are you asking that?”
Antonio was grinning. “No reason. Just amazed at what some people choose to focus on.”
“Anyway,” Wilma said, glaring at Antonio. “Back to the subject at hand…”
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Mari heard a snort of repressed laughter. She turned and suddenly David was staring at O12, the robot looking back up at him.
“So, the important thing that happened, other than the breach, was that President Nixon resigns in August, and the entire United States government situation can be described as ‘fucked’.” When Ford got the report, he realized what he was sitting on. It was an armed nuke, and half the advisers were looking at endless energy and us being able to tell the Middle East to take a long walk off a short pier. Fortunately, good sense ruled the day—the problem was, would you trust Congress, or later presidents with that?”
Mari thought about her civics class. Okay, I don’t know about stuff that happened before I was born, but yeah, that is actually a good point.
“Right, so what happened?” David asked.
“Executive orders, so very many executive orders. Then money was created to fund a new off the books organization. Us. We were set up to control and seal any future breach events until the after-effects of the test were brought under control.”
“Wait. Money was created?” Mari asked. “How do you do that?”
“Why, you’d be surprised how much money is just floating around. Let’s just say that there were a couple of boondoggle projects that were just fronts to put money into our budget. Today we get most of it from skimming off some companies that we’ve founded. After that, we pretty much broke off from the U.S. government, with executive orders covering us. I think Carter knew but after that… I don’t actually think many people actually working in the government remember us.”
“So… You’re a rogue government agency…but not rogue-rogue, because that was the plan?” Mari asked. “Are you certain you didn’t sell this script to Hollywood?”
“If I had, I wouldn’t have given them that memory wipe gadget. If we have to suffer, so can they,” Wilma said.
“Okay, fine,” David interrupted. He looked at Wilma and frowned. “Then why is someone trying to open the breaches? And why did they fire a rocket to save us?”
“Global Warming,” Antonio said. “Or go with oil shortages, wars in the Middle East, the fact that there are places in the developing world without power…” He sighed. “I can…” he rummaged into his pockets and pulled out a storage unit. “Look, if you convert it right, a full storage unit, small enough for me to hold, can provide about 100 megawatt-hours. A megawatt is enough to run about 300 homes—so this here could power 300 homes for over three days.”
“And a full breach, presuming it didn’t blow up and kill everyone, could probably be set up to pull down oh, maybe two, three, thousand megawatts.” Wilma sighed. “So, around the 1980s, we start getting people asking: why are we trying to close this? They wanted to work on it, make it safe so that we weren’t having to choose between having lights and air conditioning and having a safe environment, or having to send people to die to keep dictators who were lucky enough to be born on top of the oil spigot in power.”
Mari glanced at David, and he wasn’t smiling. Current events spent a lot of time talking about the Middle East and the environment.
“But…” Antonio shook his head. “The other side of the problem is we still don’t know the tipping point. Most of this is trial and error,” he waved the storage unit around, “and if they’re wrong, if we’re off, we could see aetheric levels shoot up all over the world, at once and then…”
“Monsters from the Id,” Mari said. That sounded a lot cooler when it was just something an actor said.
“Right,” Wilma said. “I… Okay, I have to admit I wish that we could do what they want, because “forget gas, here’s an endless power supply” would solve so many problems. At least it would if we knew for certain it was safe. But the only thing we know is the higher the aether level, the bigger the chance of things going wrong, and the bigger and more long-lasting the breach, the bigger the chance things will go wrong all at once.”
“A one in a hundred chance,” Mari murmured.
“What?” Antonio asked.
Mari shook her head. “Sorry, it was something Dad told me. If you have a one in a hundred chance of say, making a 100 dollars, and a one in a hundred chance of losing 10 dollars, why not try it?”
“I remember that,” David said. “But if you have a one in a hundred chance of making 10,000 dollars, but…”
“But a one in a hundred chance that someone comes in and shoots your family… maybe it’s not worth it.” Mari nodded. “Yeah. It makes more sense now.”
“But why did they save us? If they did, and how did they know that there would be a junk monster.”
“Genius Loci,” Wilma said. “Some places absorb the nature of their… purpose. I bet they were trying to see if they could get a genius loci, you stumbled into it, and then they had to take it out before it killed you.” Wilma shrugged. “They’re not… bad people. Just way too certain that things will play out like they want them too.”
Mari frowned. She knew that. Every kid at school who thought that they could get away with something if only everything else went right…
And it never does. That’s why there were always people at Saturday School. Only blowing up the planet is a little more of a problem than Saturday School…
“Now,” Wilma said. “You two are taking a break tomorrow. Antonio and I are going to drive you to your homes, and you’re going to go to sleep. You are not!” She suddenly pointed at Mari. “Going to try and find out anything about the Other Firm. You are not going to see if you can find any experiments because if you’d been five feet closer to that AE, it’s likely you’d be hurt a lot worse.” Then her finger turned, and she was pointing it at David. “Am I understood?”
Mari nodded. Wilma sounded a lot… more serious than usual.
“Yes,” David said. “We’ll do that.”
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David lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. Wilma had driven them home in David’s car, dropping Mari off first, and then leaving David at his house, with Antonio picking her up.
Mom was at work, another late shift, and David didn’t mind. He ached, and if Mom noticed that, she wouldn’t let him brush it off.
The phone rang, and David grabbed it.
“So. Secret conspiracies,” Mari said.
“Yeah.”
“Didn’t have that on the application. I mean, we knew that they were secret, but we thought this was part of a government program.”
“Well, it is…” David paused. “Sort of? I mean, it’s not like they’re disobeying the government.”
“Duh, because the government doesn’t know!” Mari sounded aggrieved. “Do you know how well that works on Mom and Dad? It’s not wrong because you didn’t know?”
“Not well?”
“Kado tried it. That’s why he got two weeks instead of a week and a half.”
“Do you want to quit?” David asked. “They’d let us.”
“No. I… No,” Mari said. Her voice got softer. “But remember those units we had. Environmental refugees and all those horrible pictures of people—kids who had died?”
“Yeah.”
“So are they… wrong to want to try to figure out how to use this?”
“I…” David fell silent. “I don’t know. They know a lot more than we do.”
“Sure.” David heard Mari moving around on the other side of the phone. “Put your video on.” David touched the phone, and moments later, he was looking at Mari. She was wearing her pink nightgown, the one with cat heads all over it. Behind her, he could see the wall of her room, with her current selection of movie posters looking down on Mari.
“Good,” Mari said. “But I was thinking… I mean, adults are always coming up with reasons why we can’t.” She paused. “Remember the film festival I wanted to show in eighth grade?”
David winced. He’d been a freshman in high school, but he’d heard about it. He’d heard about it a lot.
“It was all, ‘oh, parents may not like it’ and ‘well, that wouldn’t work,’ but nobody ever really wanted to try to make it work.” Mari flopped over on her back, the image swinging around wildly until she had it staring down at her face. “They just didn’t want to put in the effort.”
“You think Wilma and Antonio aren’t putting in the effort?”
“I…No, I mean, yes, but what if they’re not looking at the situation right?”
David frowned. “Mari, imagine that junk thing or the Man With the Bags appearing at the hospital or in the middle of Kado’s class.” He saw Mari wince.
“Point. I don’t know… Maybe we should just keep working, but…” Mari growled. “There’s supposed to be a mad scientist to save the day!”
“Unless it’s one of your movies where the mad scientist kills everyone.” David pointed out.
“Yeah, that’s—” Mari glanced up. “I think Mom’s up, and I’m supposed to be asleep. Mall tomorrow?”
“Sure, we’re off.”
“Good—night, bye!” The screen went dark before David could say anything.
Mari has some points. Points that needed thinking about. He yawned. But I’m supposed to be asleep… For that matter, David was tired, and he still ached. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath… and was almost instantly asleep.