Chapter 2

I smoothed down the dress I was wearing. It was navy, with long sleeves, a modest hemline right at my knees, and a v-neck. I had on flats because I'd never worn heels in my life. As usual I wasn't wearing any make-up, but I was freshly scrubbed and I had had my hair styled a bit. I was ready for whatever happened.

Mother had condescended to dress up a little in a black pantsuit with a violet blouse, and let it go at that. As we walked down the street I tried to remember the last time I'd seen her in a dress. It struck me that I never had, not even in pictures of her as a little girl. She seemed a little weirded out that I'd worn one. I think it went against everything she'd ever taught me. But she'd told me to make my own choices, and though she clamped her lips tight, she didn't say a thing.

Mr. Saunders met us in the lobby and turned us over to his assistant, a woman in a sharply tailored pantsuit that showed some of her feminine curves without going overboard about it. She had on a no-nonsense look that I could tell mother approved of. She gave us a quick tour of the facilities: offices, a lab, and a large number of rooms with the VR hoods that I was so familiar with. We viewed the action in one of the areas of the Construct: a bunch of square-rigged sailboats putting into a harbor. There were people waving as the crew worked the lines and sails.

"It looks slightly cartoonish," mother said.

"It does when we observe it from this perspective," our guide said. "But the people involved put flesh and blood on what they're experiencing."

"When I'm in the Construct I can't tell the difference between it and the real world," I said. "What they're not showing us is that you can smell and taste, too."

"Taste?" Mother looked at me curiously.

"We have a lunch period where we eat," I said. "I understand it was cribbed from some gourmet restaurant program."

Our guide nodded. "We have a program that we've been working on for several years," she said. "You experience dining at Michelin 3-star and 4-star restaurants. We adapted an early version of it for each of the high schools."

"I don't think you'd get any nutrition from that sort of thing," Mother said.

"It's the ultimate in weight-loss," I said. "You get all of the smells, the tastes, even the textures, but none of the calories. There's a reason I'm so hungry when I get home."

Mother nodded. "And the same thing about P.E.?"

"That's why I wanted that gym membership."

She looked at me sharply. "You know how I feel about that. We'll get an exercise bike or something."

I just smiled. Every now and then I forgot about her obsession about not leaving a trace of her passage through this world. This was just one more manifestation of it.

We finished the tour, and our guide wound us back through the offices and cubicles to the bank of elevators. "Your meeting starts in 30 minutes," she said. "It's on the 15th floor. Turn left when you get out of the elevator."

We didn't have to worry about finding it. Cynthia was waiting for us. She'd worn a dark red skirt and pink blouse combo, and on her it looked great. Her hair was straight in the Construct, but here it was curly.

"What's with the hair?" I asked after we'd hugged.

"My mother likes it with a perm." She shrugged. "After this year I'll keep it straight. I prefer it that way." She held me at arm's length. "A dress? I didn't think you even owned one."

"I thought that I'd wear one just this once."

"Yeah, and this is, what, the third time in your life?"

"Something like that. So, where's the meeting room?"

"Down the hall and to the left. We've got a great view of the city and mountains. How was your trip?"

"Pretty good. I thought we'd see you at the hotel."

"My folks decided to come down on Friday. We did some sight-seeing Saturday and Sunday. My mom's with me this morning. After lunch, though, she and Dad are going to take my sisters to the zoo. I'll be stuck here doing whatever it is we're supposed to do."

"Learning what we can do and can't do," I said, "and some of the protocols we're supposed to use when we're mucking around in the code. At least that's what I was told."

"Whatever. C'mon, let's go meet the others."

"Who's here?"

"Alex and his dad, and Irene. She brought her daughter, and we're going to finally meet her at lunch."

"Finally! All right, lead on!"

Alex and Irene both looked exactly the way they did in the Construct. I confess I didn't quite look the way I did in school, and I could see it in their eyes.

One of the things they tell girls during Orientation is that you can change your appearance in small ways. Curly hair can be straightened, and so on. I'd gone for a few cosmetic changes: my boobs were a little bigger and I was an inch taller. I had slightly wider hips and a curve to my tush that I didn't have on the Outside. At Claiborne I looked like the computer projected I'd look when I was 19. That can be important to a girl who is trying to be a grown-up even when she's just turned 16.

Irene smiled when I gave Alex a quick hug. It took me a moment to realize why: I'd arched my back and smoothed down the dress over my tummy, showing off my body. She had told me that this was an almost unconscious habit with girls. I hadn't believed her until I began looking for these subtle clues. She was absolutely right: if a girl was going to enter a room filled only with woman, the shoulders would go forward slightly to de-emphasize the bust, and she'd check her hair. If there was going to be even one guy in there, even some the girl knew was gay, the shoulders came back and the boobs got shoved forward. It happened in every situation I saw. I even saw it with foreign born girls. It was a habit programmed into our genes: we automatically tried to catch the eye of any guy around.

Feeling a little flustered—we knew each other well enough that we could pick up the slight clues we gave each other—I went looking for my seat. There were nametags (first name only) on the table, and I settled in. When I saw Cynthia sit I realized that I was supposed to smooth the dress over my bottom beforehand. I had just never learned those little things a girl was supposed to do in a skirt or dress.

"How's your daughter?" Cynthia asked Irene after everyone had had a seat.

"Growing like a weed," Irene said with a sigh. "She starts kindergarten next week. She made a lot of friends at daycare, and she's excited that all of them will be together."

"Irene had a baby when she was 14," I told my mother. "She's 19 now, and went back to school to get her diploma and get a leg up in college."

"I guess Claiborne makes sense for her," Mother replied. "You're only in it for a few hours every day."

"That was important to her when she applied. She can get an entire day's worth of classes in, but still have time to care for her daughter."

"It's too bad she can't take her daughter with her when she's in that thing."

"It doesn't work that way," I said. "And I think there's a lower age limit."

"Twelve," Cynthia said. "By law they can't take someone who's younger than 12 into the Construct."

"Stupid law," Mother said.

"It might be," I replied, "but it's still the law, and the authorities monitor that sort of thing very closely. Children at that age are too pliable, and they don't want artificialities influencing their upbringing."

She nodded. "All right, then, on that basis I guess that law makes sense." That was about the highest praise she gave any action the government undertook. "Who's the boy at the end of the table?"

"That's Alex," I said in a low voice. "He took me to the dance."

"Ah. Do you like him?"

"Mother!"

"Just asking, dear. A mother worries about such things."

There were so many things I could tell her about Alex, but the programming of the Construct made sure I couldn't. He gave great head. I couldn't prove that he'd studied how to turn a girl inside out with his tongue, or that he could make her scream as he wiggled it inside her, but every girl he'd ever lapped agreed that he was one of the best in school. And the rest of him was no slouch, either.

You end up comparing notes about the boys. It's a girl thing I guess. Jared had a bigger dick, longer and thicker, but Alex knew how to use his. The first time we'd done it he'd practically turned my insides into mush. And his body was nice and solid, just right for holding on to. Every girl agreed that once you got going you ended up drawing your legs up to get him even deeper. And he had a way of sucking your nips while he was putting it to you that really set you off.

"I like him," I said as all these thoughts rushed through my head. "I wouldn't have gone to the dance with him if I didn't."

"Good. You have to be careful around boys. They only want one thing, you know."

I did know, but I bit back my retort. Of course boys only wanted one thing. I only wanted one thing too, and Claiborne gave me a chance to get it, but safely. But a girl was supposed to want something else, usually a nest of some kind. That was one of the other things I'd learned in school.

Mr. Saunders chose that moment to come in. "Our other person is running a little late," he said. "The hotel didn't give them the wake-up call like they were supposed to. So in the meantime, let's review what we're doing today."

The next 20 minutes must have been dreadfully dull for the parents. We discussed the high points of the programs that made up the Construct. If Alex, Irene and I hadn't already been immersed in it, we would have been overwhelmed by what sounded like techno-babble. As it was, Mr. Saunders got pretty technical pretty fast.

He was primarily interested in making sure we understood the security aspects. They weren't going to let us deal with the actual source code, but rather a cloned section that was being set up just for us. We'd get to practice with it, run things in a 'fast forward' mode, and see the effects of our changes. Only when we were satisfied with what we were doing would we put together a Change Proposal. It would be tested by the regular systems programmers, and after they had tested the daylights out of it would it be implemented.

"Unintended consequences," I told Mother after Mr. Saunders got called out of the room. "Anything as complex as the Construct has a lot of interactions. The classic case that they told us about in school was when someone wanted to change the flowers in a flowerbed. It had a lot of side effects that they didn't realize, and odd things began to crop up here and there."

"Such as?"

"The bees that pollinated the flowers changed their patterns, which led to different flavored honey being available, one that people didn't buy as much. That led the grocer in that town to buy less of the honey, which meant he had money to spend elsewhere. It sort of snowballed from there. So any change has to be looked at very carefully."

"Sounds like you might not want to make any change at all."

"That's true, but once in a while you find a change that you feel has to be made."

"Such as?"

We'd talked about this just before school had ended. It'd been Irene's idea that we have a list of things we wanted changed that would be innocuous to our parents, but that we could get 'passionate' about. It'd taken a while to come up with that list. After all, we didn't want to shock them with our real list of changes.

"We have a list, but two come to mind. First, the tile color in the Girl's Restroom is this absolutely awful shade of pink. We asked the girls around school, and if we could, we'd change it to a more neutral color. So far a light green seems to be the favorite."

"That seems fairly minor."

"And safe. That's a good one to try because we can learn all of the interactions."

"What's the other?"

"This one is a little bigger. Do we really need P.E.? We're not really exercising, it's all in our heads." We all knew this wasn't going to happen. There were several state laws that said high school students had to have a P.E. class. It didn't do our bodies any good, but it was the law. None of us wanted to give up the group showers, though. It was anonymous sex of the best kind, a group of giggling, laughing kids screwing and sucking away at random. None of us counted it as 'sex' like we did the breaks between classes.

"Hmm, I see your point. Making your mind think you've been exercising is a far cry from actually doing it. And we don't want kids getting fat. There are a lot of reasons kids need to exercise."

"Anyway," I said, "those are the top two on our list." I didn't add that the one thing Cynthia and Irene really wanted to change was the mass orgy on the last day of school. Cynthia didn't like being treated as a piece of flesh with a mouth, boobs and a vagina. Irene liked more control in her choice of partners, and in that mess it was just one boy after another, and it was almost impossible to stop things.

I'd liked it. For a brief time I could just lie back and let things happen. I didn't have to worry about pleasing anyone but me. And there were plenty of boys around to take care of my needs. But I'd also seen the point the other two made: we had no choice. We walked out of class, and bang, we were in the middle of things. At least in the gym shower you could always walk away.

Mother nodded, and then got up to look at the Denver skyline. The mountains made it seem much better than what we had in Beaverton. People from the rest of the US get caught up in the views in Denver, not realizing that between the Coastal Range and the Cascades (and Mt. Hood) we have a lot of mountains around us. And while the mountains around Denver are nearly 14,000 feet high, the city is at 5,000 feet. That's what makes Mt. Hood so prominent. We're nearly at sea level, and the peak is 12,000 feet high. Very dramatic.

I heard Mr. Saunders talking to someone in the hall. He pushed the door open, and Jared walked in. I felt a little happiness bubble; Cynthia had claimed him, and I'd agreed not to take her away from him. But I liked him, a lot, and was happy he was here in the flesh.

A man was right on his heels, and I heard Mother mutter, "Oh shit!"

"Janice," the man said. "I didn't expect to find you here."

Mother nodded, her face stiff. "Ted. I..."

"This has to be an accident," Jared's dad said. "There's no way either of us could have planned this."

"You two know each other?" Mr. Saunders asked.

"We were married at one time," Mother said. "We ... parted ... right after Shannon's birth. This is ... I didn't think that..."

"This is awkward," Mr. Saunders said. "Do you need time alone, or something? Perhaps a word or two in private?"

"I think anything we were going to say to each other got said a long time ago," Jared's father said. "However, we're here because of the children. I don't anticipate any problems as long as we keep that in mind."

Mother surprised me and nodded, her face stiff. "I agree. My first thought was to pull Shannon out of this, but she had no knowledge, no way of telling, and she's talked of nothing but this project for weeks."

I stared at Jared as he sat just down the table from me. My God, I thought. I've been doing it with my brother!

I could see the little resemblances, the hair, the facial features, even some of the mannerisms. I hadn't added them up until that moment. But now that I saw Jared's dad, I knew that we were related.

Mr. Saunders said something about how glad he was that we were finally in a position to talk face-to-face. He recapped what he'd covered in about two minutes, and went on about what the Construct wanted from us.

I didn't pay it much mind. Mother had agreed in principle, and though she might be Froot Loops crazy, she honored her agreements. I had no doubt I'd get an employment contract and work on this project. Instead I remembered incidents at school:

Jared's face only inches from mine as we had sex, and the look as he came. The feeling of him pushing me to my limits, and then a little beyond. The feeling of his juices pouring down my chin and dripping on my boobs. His taste, not just of his come, but of his skin. His odor, a combination of sweat and male excitement.

I forced myself to put that aside and pay attention.

" ... remuneration consistent with trainees coming from our classes, which will include health benefits. They will be assigned directly to our Special Projects Team, with their first assignment being maintenance and updates to Claiborne High. We feel they will find this to be a challenging project that will stretch their abilities. The company will benefit because currently only a small handful of people understand what is going on with Claiborne's base programs."

"Isn't that dangerous?" Jared's dad asked. "It sounds as if nobody's been paying attention to the place."

"We have three people who have," Mr. Saunders said. "But it's a very complex set of nested programs that were created by a brilliant programmer who kludged large parts of the code. Our system maintenance techs approach any change in Claiborne with a lot of caution and trepidation."