Chapter 28

We landed very gently. It was as though our quiet, safe arrival back in the future was in some way an apology for our recent trauma. It represented everything right with the machine, all that was familiar (at least to Solomon), and all that we hoped our lives would eventually become. I hoped it wasn’t a total lie.

Solomon and I sat there for a while, thankful to be alive.

The lab in Olympic City had obviously been compromised when the SF had landed their TDM practically in our laps. We had to assume the SF had sent a message to their headquarters before jumping back out as they chased us. We were sure the rest of the Revos had followed procedures and left the lab as soon as possible. Unfortunately, as they couldn’t leave the city, we knew they were still in Olympic City. We just hoped they made it to one of the ‘safe houses’ before the bad guys sent in the storm troopers. If so, their odds of being caught would be virtually nil. As soon as the lab was vacated, the entire place would be ‘scrubbed down’ by chemicals and other systems, removing all fingerprints, DNA carriers, and other evidence of who had occupied the special rooms below the Eros Club. We both wanted to contact them to make sure it had all worked as planned, but we were still working on bringing ourselves back to normal.

This time it was Solomon who finally broke the silence.

“Well, that was a rather unusual experience,” he said mildly.

“Oh, not at all,” I protested. “In some ways, it’s not much different from where ‘legitimate’ businessmen work hard at cutting the throats of competitors, including myself, in order to squeeze another million or two profit out of a particularly dicey deal.”

“I know you’re joking, but that’s really stretching to compare that experience with some business transaction.”

“Maybe in your society, where there’s really no competition. In my time, I would have preferred some of those guys had literally carried guns and been honest about their intentions rather than totally ruining someone for the sake of their own profit.”

“Okay, I admit it,” he conceded. “From what I’ve read and seen in the movies of your era, I have to say that pretty well describes what really happened. But now we have our own, more physically frightening dangers. Shall we try to make a few strides in preventing having to go through all that again?”

“Sounds good to me. What did you have in mind?”

“The first thing we need to do is leave this location for someplace safer. I don’t believe the Security Force will still have equipment tracking us, but we have to presume they might.”

“That’s a reasonable assumption. Where do you think we should go?”

“New York.”

“What! You think that’s a ‘safer’ location than here?”

“Probably.”

“But, next to Tokyo, that’s got to be the second strongest bastion of the Zaibatsu. You’re extremely well known there. After this, do you think you can travel back and forth here like you’re used to? And what about the others; how do you get them there? It just seems to me that could be asking for trouble.”

“Those are all good points, but also part of the reasons I think New York is the place to go. Actually, I forgot something. The very first thing we have to do, of course, is contact the others and make sure they’re safe. If so, I’ll make arrangements to have them all transferred to New York. Naturally, I’ll check with a few people I know at the Institute who would be aware of whether or not I was under some suspicion. But, as you point out, I’m not only well known in New York, but expected to be there. If anything at all seems to be amiss, however, I won’t go back. After all, things are far enough advanced now I believe we can cut ourselves off from the mainstream and go totally underground, if necessary.”

“You don’t think they’ll suspect you after what happened in Tokyo?”

“I don’t know. There’s a really good chance they won’t have a clear idea who I was – unless, of course, Aimee Keiko Saito reported me. After all, we didn’t trip any recognition plates, which is the absolute giveaway. Although they’ve got my voice recorded, it was pretty well distorted, and they’ll certainly spend many days, probably weeks trying to match it up with criminals, let alone people at my Level.”

“Somehow, I got the feeling that she wouldn’t do that,” I assured him. “But wasn’t your ID programmed into that recognition plate?”

“Only locally. And, when you smashed the plate, you destroyed the local programming.”

“Okay, so that’s you. If everything’s cool, you continue life as usual. If there’s any hint of suspicion by the SF, you go underground. But what about the rest of the Revos?”

“As to the rest, Teknos and Wafer have become so attached to my supposed research program they won’t be missed by others. After all, I’m their direct supervisor, and I’m certainly not going to report them as missing from work. If everything is still safe at the Institute, I can easily have Katherine assigned there to help with the acquisition signal. That would make public the direction we’ve secretly accomplished in perfecting part of the TDM, but I think we’re too far ahead of them for that information to significantly help their project.”

“So you think being in New York will be safer for them than Auckland or Paris?”

“If the Zaibatsu directly suspect them, it probably won’t matter much where they are. They couldn’t try to make an escape from the city without triggering a recognition plate. At least in New York they’ll have a chance to make it to the TDM. If we can escape, they’ll most likely go with us.” Solomon rubbed his forehead. “To tell you the truth, I’m just hoping the SF hasn’t actually pegged any of us. If they have, we’re in deep trouble. If they haven’t, this is just a way to get them one small step farther away from our usual locations, and possibly in a better position to escape in an emergency. And there’s something more.”

“What’s that?”

“We’re running out of time. It’s less than three weeks until we get to ‘zero day’. After that, I don’t think it will matter much where we are. The Zaibatsu will have the means to track down our various labs in a very systematic way. And if we use the TDM at all, it will register on their monitoring equipment like an 8.5 earthquake on the Richter scale. So we really don’t have a lot of choice. We take the risk here, or else in a place where we probably have a lower probability of success in developing this virus you envision. I know what my preference is. How about you?”

I thought about it for a while. In the first place, everything he’d said was of course very logical and as cautious as he could make it. In the second place, he knew his society and all of the probabilities much better than I did. In the last place, it was really his decision as the leader of the Revos, and who the hell was I to tell him he was wrong? If Solomon thought this was the wisest thing for the rest of the group, then it was undoubtedly the best thing for me as well.

“Okay,” I agreed. “As you say, let’s do it.”

A few days later, I was having a conversation with Katherine about a delivery system that might negate us having to get into the MS building. Even though the chances of success seemed totally remote, I was feeling very happy. I still couldn’t figure it out, but just being in the same room with her made me feel like a puppy with a full dish in front of me and a warm lap waiting after my meal. Not hers, of course, but nothing was perfect.

She had been sympathetic to me after our narrow escape. Okay, to the both of us, but at least I was included in her tender feelings. But she still seemed distant. She had cooed and clucked over the both of us when we had explained why we were so frazzled on our return from Tokyo, and had actually touched me several times in a way I thought (hoped) might be just a tiny bit personal. That had faded after the few intervening days, but her tone still sounded a lot more friendly. Perhaps she was starting to accept me as a comrade in their great movement.

She had been showing me how the equipment worked that generated and controlled the signal, and now started shutting it all down. Because I could understand so little of what went on technically, I have to admit I shrugged off most of what they all told me about the various technologies.

“It looks pretty hopeless,” she concluded after I explained to her about not being able to get one iota of information about the MS building on our trip. “I have no idea what kind of route to plan, and it seems the materials in the building are pretty tough to penetrate for even the most powerful signal. I guess we’re going to have to go back to Plan A,” she said, meaning trying to insert the bug from a remote computer.

I could finally understand both the difficulties and dangers of that idea. “Well, don’t feel too badly,” I consoled her. “Wafer and I are going nowhere with trying to develop the virus, so we’ll probably never have anything that needs a delivery system.”

“Oh, thank you,” she said sarcastically. “That makes me feel sooo much better.”

Women. I had never really had much to do with them, and freely admitted I didn’t know anything at all about them. One thing I had learned, however, was that whatever approach I chose to take would be wrong. It was probably better not to even try, but then they would accuse you of not wanting to communicate with them. Wasn’t there an old saying about that? I wisely decided to take a safer tack.

“It doesn’t make me feel that great either, okay? I mean, neither of us are computer programming whizzes, but I thought we’d be able to make more progress by this time. It’s a lot more complicated than it sounds.”

“Really? Please explain to me what’s so difficult about creating a bug.”

“Creating a bug? Yes, in a sense, that’s exactly it!” I asserted, just coming to that exact epiphany myself. “In a way, it’s almost like playing God.”

“Oh, great. So now you’re a god.”

“No, I’m not a god,” I said patiently, not responding to the bait. “In fact, I’m not even a computer programmer. I’m only an economist. As to playing God, it’s very similar to having a concept, and then bringing that total concept to life out of just an idea. And I’m not competent to do that with a computer program. So it’s just not happening.”

“So what you’re saying is that you’re just not competent?”

I gave a deep sigh, more in exasperation than resignation. Was this woman really worth the effort in having these arguments? Okay, so maybe she was.

“In that limited context, maybe you’re right. I know what I’d like to achieve in the way of a computer virus, but not how to get there. And I don’t blame Wafer, either. He’s a great self-made computer hacker, but that doesn’t also make him a programmer. So, here we are, two people skilled in certain ways that don’t quite meet in the middle, trying to create a product that neither one of us is trained for or even has the talent for. We’re still making the effort, but I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to claim success in our goal.”

“Which is just another way of apologizing for the fact that you’re not competent, right?”

She said it very snidely, but I sensed some other layer of depth, perhaps even intent, behind that cruel comment. I took a deep breath, and tried to find a way to respond that would not be too angry. I wanted to appeal to her more tender side I had recently been able to witness, and even to some extent enjoy at a personal level. My chances were probably just this side of surviving a nuclear explosion. But then, what did I really have to lose?

“Well, at least it means no one has to attempt a suicide mission. If I can’t honestly say I’ve got the solution, then I’m not going to advocate we send anyone out there to try to deliver a totally useless product.”

That seemed to stop her attack on me dead in its tracks. At the least, it greatly sucked the venom out of her tone of voice.

“Yes, there is that,” she agreed seriously. “Unfortunately, it also means we’re not any closer to achieving our final objective.”

“Well,” I said carefully, “the way I understood it, you hadn’t intended to instigate the revolution. I mean, your objective was to do all of these ‘public information’ things to make the population totally aware of what was really happening in your society. Then you were going to just sort of let things take their natural course after the majority decided they were fed up with the way they were being oppressed. Am I right?”

“Well, yes, sort of,” she agreed uncomfortably. “We certainly want the majority of Citizens to make their desires known at essentially the same time, so that the revolution can be as strong and as bloodless as possible. But we’ve never been so naïve as to think that some sort of catalyst would not be needed to help create that perfect moment. According to what Teknos and Wafer have learned about the history of revolution, almost no popular uprising ever really occurred without some singular event causing the people to take significant action.”

“Yeah, that makes sense,” I nodded as though hearing a unique and brilliant thought. “So why doesn’t Solomon just step into that role?”

“What?”

“Why doesn’t he act as the catalyst? I mean, it seems to me as though you folks believe you already have the majority of the population behind you. And he certainly seems popular enough to be the kind of person to inspire that kind of mass uprising.”

“Oh, he’s certainly well-known and respected by most of the people in the world,” Katherine agreed vigorously, “but I don’t know if he would be ‘popular’ enough in the sense that you mean, that is, to create that kind of following.”

“Well, he certainly seems popular enough with some of the ladies I’ve met in this society to inspire that kind of devotion,” I said, thinking I was being really clever.

“And what exactly do you mean by that?” she demanded vehemently, blushing furiously as she spoke.

When Solomon told me the story of his first meeting with Katherine, he had as usual been too modest to supply any of the personal details. In fact, although he had alluded to the fact that he was somewhat well known throughout the world, he had also never explained any of the reasons or details of that, either. So, there I went again, walking through a minefield without even being aware I had entered an old war zone. What’s worse, I was once again talking at cross purposes with a woman whose good opinion I desperately wanted to cultivate, yet in serious danger of spraying plant poison on her rose garden. It was only much later that I learned the complete facts of that meeting, and shuddered to think of how close I had come to a personal disaster.

“I mean the lady we met in Tokyo seemed extremely infatuated with Solomon’s public image,” I said teasingly. “Sure, I’m aware of the fact they knew each other pretty well in their childhood. But she was also very knowledgeable of his recent accomplishments, and much more impressed with his reputation than shared kiddy confidences would have seemed to warrant.”